U.S. History 1866-1965

This postcard, which just went up on eBay last night for $8, could serve as the whole textbook for a pretty good class at Western ...

Happy Chandler Plays the Populist Card

The April 26, 1971 issue of Sports Illustrated featured an article by Happy Chandler and John Underwood, in which Chandler commented on his career as the Commissioner of Baseball.  At one point he tells the following story to explain his negative press coverage:

This happened at a banquet in my honor in Newark, N.J.  I spoke of my beloved Kentucky, the good fishing, the barefoot days at school, my career as a minor league ballplayer and as an umpire in the old Blue Grass League and of my family and my home.  Then, on an impulse, I said I would wind up the dinner with a song.  I have always loved to sing, and I have sung on the campaign trails, often accompanied by the beautiful soprano, Mrs. Mildred Chandler.  My choice that night was My Old Kentucky Home.

Can you see the effect of that on the assembled New York writers that night in 1945 -- the Red Smiths and Arthur Daleys and Dan Parkers, that sharp-eyed group?  It was immediately evident that I was a Southern country fellow, and New York writers look down their noses at Southern country fellows.  New York writers know, of course, that milk comes from wagons and that anything west of the Alleghenies is Indian territory and that only a clown would sing at his inauguration.  Can you imagine Judge Landis doing such a thing?

They never let me forget it.  They called me "Sappy" and "Playboy," and when I said I loved baseball they saw fit to ridicule that, too, and when I had to chasten some of their heroes, people like {Dan} Webb and Leo Durocher, they never failed to take their side.  But I don't embarrass easily.  If you are sober and diligent and forthright, there is no reason to be embarrassed.  The record will show that the reflection was on them.  And I know -- now -- that they just didn't understand country boys.

Two further observations here.  First, in 1971, Happy Chandler was 73 years old.  That year, he ran for governor as an independent.  But Chandler only received 4.24 percent of the votes, and Wendell Ford rolled to a 6-point victory over Thomas Emberton.  By 1971, Chandler was too socially conservative for Democrats and too hostile to Big Business for Republicans.  And so that particular version of populism faded from the American scene.

Second, Happy Chandler was Commissioner of Baseball from 1945 to 1951.  Six years after he was pushed out, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants announced that they were leaving for the West Coast.  Lots of sportswriters in New York bemoaned this event.  Of course they didn't have a Commissioner who was willing to take on the owners and fight for the fans, and so nothing was done to stop the move.  And lots of Dodger and Giant fans never got over it.  But at least the reporters in Brooklyn and Manhattan didn't have to put up with a Commissioner who sang.

The NFL in the 21st Century

Between 2001 and 2022, the NFL played 22 different seasons of football -- as many as it played, say, from 1971 to 1992.  What are the best games of the 21st century?  Pro Football Reference picked the NFL's top 100 games in history last year, and here are their picks for the top 10 games in this century, along with where they ranked in the overall top 100:

5.  Super Bowl XLII:  New York Giants 17, New England 14 (Feb. 3, 2008)

8.  Super Bowl XLIX:  New England 28, Seattle 24 (Feb. 1, 2015)

9.  Super Bowl LI:  New England 34, Atlanta 28 (OT) (Feb. 5, 2017)

12.  Super Bowl XLIII:  Pittsburgh 27, Arizona 23 (Feb. 1, 2009)

14.  Super Bowl LII:  Philadelphia 41, New England 33 (Feb. 4, 2018)

15.  2001 AFC Divisional Playoffs:  New England 16, Oakland 13 (Jan. 19, 2002)

20.  Super Bowl XXXVI:  New England 20, St. Louis Rams 17 (Feb. 3, 2002)

21.  2006 AFC Championship:  Indianapolis 38, New England 34 (Jan. 21, 2007)

24.  2017 NFC Divisional Playoffs:  Minnesota 29, New Orleans 24 (Jan. 14, 2018)

30.  Super Bowl XLVII:  Baltimore 34, San Francisco 31 (Feb. 3, 2013)

This list came out last year, so it didn't include the 2021-22 playoffs.  I would certainly put last year's Kansas City/Buffalo game on the list -- I thought it was the best game I'd seen since the Chargers/Dolphins playoff game back on January 2, 1982.  They had that Chargers/Dolphins game as number 4, on their list, but above the Super Bowl where the Giants ended New England's perfect season.  I would fit the Kansas City/Buffalo game in between those two.  In other words, for me it was the best game of the 21st Century.  There were a lot of good playoff games last year, but I think that's the only one that would make the top ten.

I think that from now on, I'm going to try to think of sports more in 21st century terms.  There's so much nostalgia in the sports world now that we aren't giving enough credit to what's happening in front of us.

Bill Russell and the Mount Rushmore of American Sports

Joe Posnanski has posted an item talking about whether Bill Russell belongs on the Mount Rushmore of American sports.  To me, if you really want to do a Mount Rushmore of sports, you should start with the original Mount Rushmore, which features the two greatest Presidents from the Founding Era (Washington and Jefferson), then the President who held the country together through its greatest crisis (Lincoln), and then a recent (at the time Mount Rushmore was built) President who showed America still had the stuff of greatness (Teddy Roosevelt).  If you try to find parallels for those four men in the history of American sports, I think your best choice would be this:

Jim Thorpe

Babe Ruth

Jackie Robinson

Michael Jordan

100 Years Ago Today

The first radio station in Kentucky -- WHAS in Louisville -- went on the air on July 18, 1922.  The call letters were randomly assigned by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and WHAS has kept them to this day.  The station was originally owned by the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.

The Kentucky Derby was broadcast on the radio for the first time on May 16, 1925.

The next year -- on April 24, 1926 -- Cawood Ledford was born.

Hamilton: An American Musical

When I was five years old, my parents took me to Nashville to see a performance of 1776.  I grew up listening to soundtracks for shows like South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Carousel, and Oklahoma.  And I have great memories of school trips to see Annie and Evita in St. Louis.  So I have a deep and profound respect for Broadway and the American tradition of musical theater.  But I never actually attended a show on Broadway until last week, when I went to see Hamilton:  An American Musical, the new masterpiece by Lin-Manuel Miranda.  I've had a long wait, but it was worthwhile -- Hamilton is a fantastic piece of work, and in my opinion it is the best musical since West Side Story.

The story of Hamilton is now very well-known, but it is so interesting to be worth repeating again.  Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 35-year-old wunderkind behind the show, grew up as the child of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York.  Drawing upon his background, he started to work on In the Heights, a show set in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Washington Heights, while he was still in college at Wesleyan.  In the Heights hit Broadway in 2008 -- when Miranda was only 28 -- and won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score, as well as a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.  Miranda himself was nominated for a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical, and was left with a big case of What Do You Do After Your First Effort Was Such a Success?

Many artists, such as Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell, answered that question by simply retiring from the scene, never trying to measure up to the success of their opening effort.  But Miranda just kept working, doing everything from writing Spanish language dialogue for a revival of West Side Story to acting on House and Sesame Street.  Meanwhile, he had developed a Very Big Idea.  While on vacation, he had grabbed a big biography to read.  The biography turned out to be Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, and Miranda was enthralled.

Everyone (well, almost everyone), knows that Hamilton is the guy on the 10-dollar bill, and a lot of people know that he was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr in 1804 -- while Burr was Vice President of the United States.  But reading Chernow's biography, Miranda found the story of an immigrant who came to this country from the Caribbean as a teenager, and who spent the rest of his 49 years in a manic effort to achieve fame.  Hamilton was a protege of George Washington, but he fought with almost all of the other founders, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Hamilton was a war hero who also invented the U.S. banking system, laid the groundwork for our manufacturing base and our big military, and wrote most of the Federalist Papers.  He also married a rich woman, ran up a lot of debt, fathered eight children (one of whom was killed in a duel), and was caught paying blackmail to the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair.

This rich collection of potential material gave Miranda a vast canvas on which to work, but Miranda thought he also had a key to help him bring the material to life.  Born in 1980, Miranda is grounded in both traditional Broadway theater and hip-hop, and he saw the urban and ruthlessly intense Hamilton as a spiritual ancestor to the "Get Rich or Die Trying" spirit found in much hip-hop music.  In a literal stroke of genius -- Miranda, did, in fact, win a McArthur Genius award last last year -- Miranda decided that hip-hop represented the best way to tell Hamilton's story.

On paper, a hip-hop musical about the Founders seems somewhat odd, but in Miranda's hands it worked perfectly.  The fast pace and crowded lyrics of hip-hop music allowed Miranda to cram an enormous amount of material into the usual length of a Broadway show.  Furthermore, by establishing Hamilton as a proudly urban character, the hip-hop framework allowed Miranda to tell the story of the Revolution from the perspective of New York -- a perspective that differs quite significantly from the usual Massachusetts or Virginia-based framework.  Finally, since it would be absurd for Miranda to do a hip-hop show with an otherwise all-white cast, the music encouraged a multiracial cast.  In fact, all of the major roles in Hamilton -- with the exception of King George III -- are played by African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American actors.  This is no mere game of political correctness or affirmative action -- the show is perfectly cast, and each of the major players has developed their own following among Hamilton's cult-like fan base.  But by casting Chris Jackson, Daveed Diggs, and Leslie Odom, Jr. -- three African-American actors -- as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr, respectively, Miranda invites us to see that the Founders were not simply dead white guys, but political geniuses whose thought continues to dominate so much of our lives.

The basic idea of Hamilton -- a hip-hop musical about the Founding of America with a multiracial cast -- explains a great deal of why it is so important.  Miranda is doing the same thing here that Leonard Bernstein did in West Side Story or Andrew Lloyd Webber did in Jesus Christ Superstar -- using musical breakthroughs to tell a story in ways that were not otherwise possible.  He has literally expanded the boundaries of the Broadway show, and new artists will spend decades exploring the new ground he has opened.

But lots of bad shows are based on really good ideas.  Fortunately, Miranda had both the talent and determination to bring this idea to fruition.  The soundtrack for Hamilton contains no less than 46 different tracks, each of which is vivid, original, and clever.  Many of the songs use hip-hop in one form or another, but Miranda shows himself a master of many types of music.  Hamilton's rich wife and her glamorous sisters are introduced in a number that sounds like a hit by Destiny's Child.  King George III comments sardonically on the action in a number -- "You'll Be Back" -- that sounds like 1960's British pop.  In fact, almost every branch of American music shows up at one point or another -- during the Battle of Yorktown, for example, one can hear traditional fiddle music being played over a beat box.  Miranda's lyrics include references to rap songs, The Pirates of Penzance, and South Pacific.

As you can imagine, it is a very dense show, and obsessive fans will most enjoy the glorious soundtrack recording.  Miranda grew up listening to soundtracks himself, and Hamilton is perfect for the young fan (or even the middle-aged fan) who wants to listen to the songs over and over, piecing together the complicated plot and noting how the happier songs in the beginning of the show lay the groundwork for the darker developments of the second act.  (Aaron Burr, who narrates the show, tells us in the opening number that he will kill Hamilton, and everything -- both musically and lyrically -- leads up to that fatal showdown.)

But Miranda is not just a fan -- he's a performer.  So Hamilton is truly best appreciated on stage, where you can see the cast tear through song after song for almost three hours.  There is no overture, no curtain between songs, and no spoken dialogue -- the cast sings and dances through one number after another with no break other than intermission.  By the time I got there, Miranda and everyone else in the cast were already famous as being part of a legendary Broadway show.  (The review in the New York Times started off by saying, "Yes, it's really that good.")  And yet they sang, acted, and danced with incredible fervor, as if they were doing the show for the first time.  In many ways, I was reminded of those legendary concerts Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band used to do back in the day.  You knew you were seeing something extraordinary, and you wondered that they could do this sort of thing night after night.

There's a lot more to be said about Hamilton.  It has helped me to understand why folks in Kentucky loved Thomas Jefferson so much, why John Adams isn't as big a deal as David McCullough would have you believe, and why George Washington is the greatest President America will ever have.  However, perhaps the most important thing to take away is that almost nothing is never truly lost.  Growing up in the 1980's, perhaps nothing seemed less relevant to modern American life than the Broadway theater.  Even today, it can often seen like an old tradition kept up by the locals to take money from tourists.  But in the hands of a master, it can still do things that almost no other art form can do.  And my guess is that Hamilton will inspire many masters to come.

Alben Barkley Remembers

Another excerpt from Alben Barkley's 1954 autobiography, That Reminds Me:

"To me, however, Lowe's store is memorable as my boyhood source of what we used to call 'crawly sugar.'  'Crawly sugar' was thick brown sugar, and we called it that, not because it was infested with any form of animal life, but because, when you placed a cup of it in a plate, it would seem to move and shift around as if it were alive.  This 'crawly sugar' came in huge hogsheads, big enough for a large boy to get into.  Mr. Lowe knew the weakness of us youngsters for sweets, and he also knew that we country boys got precious little of such treats.  So when a hogshead had been emptied and rolled out behind his store, he would let us climb into it and scoop out with our Barlow knives whatever crumbs of sugar we could find between the cracks.  It was a great treat when Old Man Lowe would roll out the sugar barrel." (p. 32)

I Googled the phrase "crawly sugar," but only picked up references to things like "creepy crawly sugar cookies" that you could serve at Hallowe'en.  On the other hand, I did find this video.

Alben Barkley Remembers

Another excerpt from Barkley's 1954 autobiography:

Most of my early boyhood memories go back to Lowes, a crossroads community settled in 1837 by Levi Lowe and his wife, Mourning Ann Cook Lowe.  They were emigrating westward from Virginia, and on the way their second son was born.  They stopped at Lowes because they found a good spring there -- in all the 117 years of Lowes's history the spring has never been known to run dry -- and the town has been there ever since.

In its early days Lowes had a flavor all its own.  There was not much doing in the way of amusement, so the people used to have fairs on an old fairground located three miles northeast of town on what is now known as the Kansas neighborhood.  One of the primitive "amusements" of which I have heard -- this was long before my time -- was the custom known as "goose-pulling."  Two long poles were set into the ground, and a goose with a greased neck was strung between them.  The men of the community would mount their horses and ride at full speed toward the goose, attempting as they passed under it to pull off its head.  The goose, for as long as it survived, loudly and understandably made known its objections to the whole procedure.  A price was awarded to the man who finally pulled off the goose's head:  the goose, now long beyond caring, was usually the prize.  This rather barbarous custom, however, was entirely out of character in Lowes, which was a community of hard-working, churchgoing people, and it has long since been outlawed, along with the betting on horse races and other forms of wagering which used to take place at the old fairground.  The fairground has gone too.

Alben Barkley Remembers

Here is an excerpt from That Reminds Me, the autobiography of Alben W. Barkley, who was Senate Majority Leader during the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and who served as Vice President under Harry Truman.  This book was published in 1954:

I was born on the farm of my grandfather, Alben Graham Barkley, in Graves County, Kentucky, near a little place now called Wheel, located between the larger communities of Lowes and Fancy Farm . . . .

The community of Wheel was named after an influential farmer of the same name, who founded a semi-secret agricultural organization known as the Wheelers.  This society was pledged to work for the interests of farmers, who in those days had no parity programs and little else to aid their economic situation.  My father was an active member, and I can recall how he used to talk enthusiastically of plans discussed at the meetings of the Wheelers.  Eventually the population of the community dwindled so that Wheel lost even its rural post office.  It now is served by the nearby larger and prosperous town of Fancy Farm.  The unusual name of the latter community, by the way, was derived from the well-kept country place of an early settler, John Peebles.  A post-office inspector had stopped at the Peebles place in 1845, while investigating whether a post office was needed in the growing settlement, and he was so impressed with its trim, neat appearance that he proposed the name of "Fancy Farm" for the new post office.

I Loved This Speech

Benjamin Franklin Was Smarter than You Think

Here's an epitaph that Franklin composed for himself when he was only 22 years old:

The Body of B. Franklin,

Printer;

Like the Cover of an old Book,

Its Contents torn out,

And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more,

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and Amended

By the Author.

Texas A & M v. Alabama

There are many things about the American South that non-Southerners find difficult to understand, but perhaps one of the most difficult has to do with the attitude of Southerners toward authority.  Let us take, as an example, two men who were made into icons by white Southerners after the Civil War.  On the one hand, you have Robert E. Lee, a man famous for his dignity and personal integrity, someone with such personal discipline that he made it through West Point without a single demerit.  On the other hand, you have James Ewell Brown ("Jeb") Stuart, the eccentric cavalryman who went through war wearing a red-lined gray cape, yellow sash, and cocked hat with ostrich plume.  While Lee was working out plans in his tent, Stuart was off leading his men on wild rides which sometimes took them all the way around the Northern Army.

Now obviously these men represent very different images of authority.  For white Southerners, Lee symbolized the Perfect General, an older man of wisdom and honor, whose orders were to be followed without question.  Every time you see an SEC football coach with his honor guard of State Troopers, you are seeing shades of the old Lee-Worship.  And from General Bob Neyland to Bobby Dodd to Bear Bryant, Southerners have loved their strict football coaches.

On the other hand, Stuart is the clever rebel, the trickster, the man who thumbs his nose at rules and norms -- and, because of sheer talent and ability -- can get away with it (at least for awhile).  And the South has worked this icon into its culture as well -- from Burt Reynolds outwitting the police in his Trans Am to Kenny Stabler using a fake fumble to beat the San Diego Chargers.  Many of the South's legendary gridiron heroes -- Stabler, Bobby Layne, Joe Namath -- fit into this category.

Now how can the same culture love both Generals and rebels?  How can the same fans cheer for Bear Bryant and Kenny Stabler?  (You can't imagine this sort of inconsistency in the Midwest; it's impossible to imagine Kenny Stabler playing for Woody Hayes, or Alan Iverson getting along with Bobby Knight.)  And yet to Southerners this is not strange at all -- both the Stern Coach and the Rebel Player are icons in our society.

Personally, I don't think there's as much inconsistency here as some folks may think.  It seems to me that Southerners, more than most other Americans, are obsessed with the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority.  And they tend to judge legitimacy not merely by process, but by results.  If you want them to respect you, it's not enough to win the election or get the post through a fair process; you have to do a good job.

These days, Nick Saban has become an almost perfect symbol of legitimate authority, at least to Alabama fans.  In the last four years, his teams have won three national championships.  They play hard-hitting, straightforward football, with no odd uniforms or trash-talking.  The rest of the country may see Saban as cold, or relentless, or shifty, or boring, but to most SEC fans -- even the ones who hate him -- he's what a college football coach is supposed to be.

On the other hand, the NCAA and the national press are almost-perfect symbols of illegitimate authority, at least to most SEC fans.  Of course we have to make sure that everyone is playing under the same set of rules -- but to SEC fans, that's exactly what the NCAA and the press doesn't do.  To most Southerners, what is so maddening about these institutions is the inconsistency and favoritism that they appear to show.  You could never convince SEC fans that ESPN favorites like Duke or Notre Dame will be held to the same standards as Tennessee or Mississippi State.  And so my guess is that almost no one in the South was genuinely troubled by the countless allegations made by ESPN and other national media outlets over the summer against Johnny Manziel.  To most of us, the NCAA and the press are just a pack of Buford T. Justices, and we don't mind seeing Manziel subvert their authority.

So while it would be easy to build up today's contest as a battle between Saban's robots and A & M's outlaws, I think that would be a mistake.  My guess that almost every A & M fan would be happy to have Saban coaching the Aggies, and almost every Tide fan would be happy to have Johnny Football throwing passes for Alabama.  Furthermore, A & M and Alabama aren't really close enough for the two fan bases to get on top of each other in the way you need for true, deep down hatred.  And besides, each teams fans had a great time last year -- A & M beat Alabama, but Alabama won the National Championship.

At the same time, SEC fans can't help but be excited to see whether Saban's defense has finally figured out how to stop Manziel, or whether Johnny Football (has there ever been a better nickname?) can pull off the upset one more time.

Here is how each team has done since the beginning of last season (home teams listed first):

ALABAMA (2012 SEC Champs and National Champs):
09/01/2012:  Alabama 41 - 14 Michigan (Arlington, Tex.) 
09/08/2012:  Alabama 35 - 0 W. Kentucky
09/15/2012:  Arkansas 0 - 52 Alabama
09/22/2012:  Alabama 40 - 7 Florida Atlantic
09/29/2012:  Alabama 33 -14 Mississippi
10/13/2012:  Missouri 10 - 42 Alabama
10/20/2012:  Tennessee 13 - 44 Alabama
10/27/2012:  Alabama 38 - 7 Mississippi St.
11/03/2012:  Louisiana St. 17 - 21 Alabama
11/10/2012:  Alabama 24 - 29 Texas A & M
11/17/2012:  Alabama 49 - 0 W. Carolina
11/24/2012:  Alabama 49 - 0 Auburn
12/01/2012:  Alabama 32 - 28 Georgia (Atlanta) (SEC Championship)
01/07/2013:  Alabama 41 - 14 Notre Dame (Miami) (National Championship)

08/31/2013:  Alabama 35 - 10 Virginia Tech (Atlanta)

TEXAS A & M (2012 Cotton Bowl Champs):
09/08/2012:  Texas A & M 17 - 20 Florida
09/15/2012:  So. Methodist 3 - 48 Texas A & M
09/22/2012:  Texas A & M 70 - 14 S. Carolina St.
09/29/2012:  Texas A & M 58 - 10 Arkansas
10/06/2012:  Mississippi 27 - 30 Texas A & M
10/13/2012:  Louisiana Tech 57 - 59 Texas A & M
10/20/2012:  Texas A & M 19 - 24 Louisiana St.
10/27/2012:  Auburn 21 - 63 Texas A & M
11/03/2012:  Mississippi St. 13 - 38 Texas A & M
11/10/2012:  Alabama 24 - 29 Texas A & M
11/17/2012:  Texas A & M 47 - 28 Sam Houston St.
11/24/2012:  Texas A & M 59 - 29 Missouri
01/04/2012:  Texas A & M 41 - 13 Oklahoma (Arlington, Tex.) (Cotton Bowl)

08/31/2012:  Texas A & M 52 - 31 Rice
09/07/2012:  Texas A & M 65 - 28 Sam Houston St.

Alabama is favored by 9 points, and the over-under is 64.  That would work out to an Alabama victory by a score of something like 37-27.

Any further thoughts will go into the comments.

Lincoln the Uncompromiser

Kudos to Adam Gopnik for this good piece in The New Yorker about the new Lincoln movie.  We are often told that Lincoln is a great man, and that compromise is a great virtue, and therefore it is easy to conclude that Lincoln must have liked compromise.  And you can put together a story of Lincoln that makes it appear that he was open to compromise.  As Gopnik rightfully points out, however, that's not the primary strain in Lincoln's character.  Yes, Lincoln was a founder of the Midwest, and like many in the Midwest, Lincoln loved to be fair -- he loved the idea that everyone should play by the rules.  But also like many in the Midwest, Lincoln believed in punishing those who, in his opinion, had violated the rules.

For almost 100 years, Americans had been dancing around the possibility of what horrors might take place if the North tried to end slavery in the South.  Even after the war began, many in the North recoiled at what was happening.  (I think this explains, in part, why McClellan fought the war with such little enthusiasm.)  It was Lincoln (and his fellow Midwesterners, Grant and Sherman) who saw, more clearly than everyone else, that to preserve the Union and end slavery would require hundreds of thousands of deaths.  And it was Lincoln, and his Midwestern generals, who showed a willingness to kill, and kill, and kill, on an enormous scale.  It all worked, and we're all better for it.  But it wasn't done in the spirit of compromise.

This doesn't mean that compromise is always wrong, or that fighting for principle is always right.  We live in a fallen world, and statesmen have to make difficult -- and often tragic -- decisions, often with little guidance from the past.  We would all be better served by a political culture that took those facts more seriously.

Happy Leap Day!

And a shout out to Nashville's own Dinah Shore, who was born on February 29, 1916.

Robert Penn Warren Remembers Guthrie

The best writer from Kentucky and the best writer from Vanderbilt University are the same person. Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905, and grew up in Guthrie, Kentucky. In 1979, he returned to Todd County for ceremonies honoring Jefferson Davis, whose citizenship had been restored. He wrote an article for The New Yorker about this experience called "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back," and in that article, he had this to say about his hometown:

{Guthrie} was, except in geography, anything but an old Southern town. The autochthonous little settlements in the region had been gradually absorbed when a Louisville & Nashville Railroad crossing started a small-scale realtor's dream: ground measured out and the map of a hypothetical town flung down on a pretty countryside of woodlots and woods, streams, ponds, pastures, and fields of corn or tobacco, with old farmsteads, some handsome, some with modest charm, and also -- it should be, in candor, noted -- a number of tumbledown shacks of tenantry, black and white.

By and large, Guthrie was a railroad town, without a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history. No, it did have one fleeting brush with history. On September 24, 1904, Felix Grundy Ewing, of Glenraven, Tennessee, called a meeting at the Guthrie fairgrounds and race track to organize the Dark Tobacco Protective Association, later the Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Some five to six thousand growers responded, who with kin and on-lookers numbered, it was said in my childhood, some twenty-five thousand people. (I have an old photograph of the scene: buggies hub to hub, horsemen so packed together that legs were crushed between mounts -- as far as eye, or camera, could see.) The growers were being driven to desperation by a price-fixing conspiracy among the big companies. The association was in the right, but it developed, unofficially, a violent wing, the Night Riders, which, in its most adventurous exploit, in the middle of the night, with military precision, took the neighboring "big" town of Hopkinsville, cut all wires, occupied the railroad-telegraph office and the telephone office, and systematically dynamited all the warehouses of the companies. Before and after this, whippings, barn burnings, and killings were a commonplace, for violence in a "good" cause had led to mere violence. Then came martial law. One of my earliest recollections is of being held up in my father's arms to watch the National Guard set up an encampment in Guthrie, down by the railroad station. Peace was restored. And the courts, after the jog of violence, finally acted to break up the conspiracy to fix prices.
Warren's first novel, published in 1939, was entitled Night Rider.

Joe Paterno, 1926-2012

Like most middle-aged college football fans, I have spent my entire life watching Joe Paterno's Penn State teams. He coached his first game at Happy Valley on September 17, 1966 when I was about six months old (Penn State beat Maryland 15-7), and he coached his last game on October 29, 2011 -- 45 years later (Penn State beat Illinois 10-7). Even though I was never a Penn State fan, and never had a particular interest in Penn State, I probably watched over 100 games coached by Paterno. I heard all the stories about his life, his commitment to academics, his relationships with his players, his close-knit family, and so on and so on. College football is a community of its own, and ever since I can remember, Paterno was one of the biggest stars in that community.

For the first 20 years or so of his career at Penn State, Paterno may have been the best college football coach in America. His teams went undefeated in 1968, 1969, 1973, and 1986. They won the AP national championship in 1982 and 1986, and finished in the top 5 in 1968, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1977, 1978, 1981, and 1985. Between 1966 and 1986, Penn State went 12-5-1 in Bowl Games, and two of those losses were to teams that won the national championship. As an SEC fan, I knew Paterno's teams to play hard-hitting, mistake-free, clean but boring football. Penn State's upset Fiesta Bowl victory over Jimmy Johnson and a loaded Miami of Florida team to win the 1986 championship was one of the greatest coaching performances I ever saw.

But the media was never just interested in Paterno as a football coach. He came into college football at a time when the game had largely died out in the Northeast, when more people were questioning why colleges even played big-time football, and at a time of great cultural and political upheaval. Paterno was perfectly suited for this time period. He was intelligent and well-spoken; he said (and apparently did) all the right things with respect to academics and building character; and yet his teams were just as good on the field as the Oklahoma's, Nebraska's and Alabama's. For decades, whenever a national columnist wanted to take shots at schools that cheated, or fan bases who cared only about winning, or coaches engaged in corruption, Joe Paterno was the shining example held up to the rest of us.

And so, even though his teams weren't quite as good after 1986, a lot of people were very happy to know that "Joe Pa" was still on the sidelines. By this point, ironically, the man who began his career during one of the most tumultuous and controversial periods in American history had become a symbol of a happier, more innocent time. Penn State was no longer the power it had once been -- somewhere along the way Paterno lost the edge that separates the absolute greatest coaches from those in the second tier -- but his teams still wore those classic uniforms, the fans still poured into Happy Valley, and Penn State still won a lot of games. As late as 2005, Penn State went 11-1, won the Orange Bowl, and finished number 3 in the country. In 2008, they won the Big 10 and went to the Rose Bowl. In his last ten seasons -- including the first nine games of this year, before he was let go -- Paterno's teams went 82-40, which is very respectable.

Of course, I could remember when Penn State had been dominant -- not merely respectable -- and it was always odd to my Southern populist mind that Penn State had turned its once-mighty football program into a monument to one man. I come from Kentucky, where Adolph Rupp was forced out the door after the 1971-72 season, and I had not been surprised when an outraged Florida State fan base shoved out the same Bobby Bowden who had built their program almost from scratch. There is a ruthlessness in the Southern character -- as well as a mistrust of authority -- that encourages fans to rise up in rebellion against even a nobel and charming coach who no longer delivers the results. Just ask Tubby Smith.

But Pennsylvanians in general, and Penn State fans in particular, are apparently much more sentimental and loyal. They didn't judge Joe on wins and losses; instead, they treated him like a beloved king who symbolized both their great past and their noble character. Sure they might lose to Ohio State (who, as it turned out, was cheating), and they might no longer be able to compete with the all-powerful SEC teams for national titles, but there would be time to deal with that later. For now, their attitude seemed to be, they were giving back to Joe Pa for all that he had given to them.

As for Joe, he still had a lot to play for. He had finally outlasted Bobby Bowden to become the winningest D-1 coach in history, and this year he was trying to surpass Eddie Robinson's 408 career victories. In the very last game he ever coached, he surpassed Robinson to run his record to 409-136-3. My guess is he will hold that record for a very long time.

But then it all ended in tears. I have very little knowledge of, and not a great deal of interest in, the scandal that ended Paterno's career. What I find fascinating is that his problems all resulted from the same sentimentality and loyalty from which he had benefited so much. If he had been forced out ten years ago by a more ruthless fan base, his reputation today would be spotless. If he hadn't been built up as such a moral hero by so many national writers, the criticism he has received in recent months would be a lot less bitter and vindictive.

It is all very, very sad -- and somewhat misleading. We are all born into the middle of history, we all die before we can see how it really turns out, and then future generations study our lives in an attempt to deal with issues we cannot foresee. All we can ask is that they try to look at our lives as a whole, that they try to look at things from our perspective, and that they try to give us the benefit of the doubt.

I hope that happens for Joe Paterno. From 1966 until November 2011, Paterno probably received more acclaim -- and less criticism -- than almost any other figure in American public life, and it may not be possible for his reputation ever to return to the incredible heights it once reached. But I hope and believe he will be remembered more for what he did in the first 80 years of his life than for any scandals that arose in the last few.

Washington to Fix the MLK Memorial

I am very happy that the Interior Department is going to fix a terrible, out-of-context quote on the Martin Luther King Memorial. Good for them.

Without getting into too much detail -- you can find that in the linked article -- the controversy grew out of one of King's greatest speeches, a 1968 sermon entitled "The Drum Major Instinct." Since Monday is Martin Luther King Day, this would be a good weekend to read (or hear) that sermon. You can find it here.

Dakota Meyer, the Medal of Honor, and the Press

Not everything was simpler in the past, but I think war stories probably were. Men went off to war, they came back and told what happened, and -- for the most part -- that was it. If you weren't there, you were in no question to judge.

But these days, we ask a lot more questions. So when Dakota Meyer, a Marine from Green County, Kentucky, won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan, it was probably inevitable that he would have to deal with stories like this one, claiming that his actions were exaggerated. Given that even this article acknowledges Meyer is a worthy recipient of the nation's highest honor, it's hard to see exactly what this article was designed to accomplish -- other than to start rumors that will follow Meyer for the rest of his life. I agree with the Bowling Green Daily News that Meyer remains a hero, and that the whole controversy is "a shame."

Fifty Years Ago in Ole Miss

Interesting piece from Sports Illustrated's issue for November 13, 1961:

"I would give anything," wrote Jimmie Robertson, editor of the University of Mississippi's campus newspaper last week, "if there was some chance of Ole Miss and Michigan State playing each other in a bowl game. However, the archaic thinking which prevails in our capital city makes this impossible." Robertson's anger and frustration came from the weekly football ratings, which listed Michigan State as No. 1 in the nation and Ole Miss as No. 2. Robertson thinks that his team is the best, but no one will ever know -- Ole Miss refuses to meet any teams with Negro players. Thus, it cannot play Michigan State, Iowa or any school that does not engage in the same sort of hominy-grits thinking.

"That this sort of attitude still prevails in some southern centers of culture is hardly news. What is worth noting, however, is that student bodies of southern universities do not necessarily go along with the arteriosclerotic thinking of their faculty bosses. At the University of Texas recently, a campus-wide poll showed that the students were against such lily-white clauses 5 to 3. We somehow feel Jimmie Robertson is not alone at Ole Miss and that a poll there would show similar results. Meanwhile, let the panjandrums of Mississippi take their consolation from this one fact: only in a liberal, tolerant democracy could a school like Ole Miss be rated as high as No. 2 in anything."

Eleven years later, Ole Miss had its first African-American football player.

This Will Make Number 1 Son Happy

The Old Guard continued to protect the Tomb of the Unknown Solider even during Hurricane Irene.