The Spanish conquest hit the population of the Americas like a nuclear war

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Between 80% and 90% of the population of the western Hemisphere was dead within a century and a half of the arrival of Columbus, and nearly all of this was due to disease. A pre-1492 population of 100 million is a very high end estimate, a more realistic number is 40-50 million (or even 30-40 million), Reduce which ever estimate you prefer by 80-90%. There’s your death toll. Vast stretches of the New World were nearly depopulated and there were places with 100% mortality. The diseases spread at a stunning speed so that the Spanish were unaware of just how much mortality there had been because in many places they arrived several decades after the local population had been destroyed by smallpox, influenza, etc. By the time the English arrived in 1607 arrived there were far fewer Indians left to oppose them which allowed them to settle with far less resistance than they would have met a century and a half earlier. Much like California was well before the Spanish arrived, the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States had been very thickly populated. Disease struck well before Europeans arrived on either coast. Complex trade networks between tribes in pre-Colombian America assured that viruses brought with the conquistadores spread across both continents with stunning rapidity and virulence. In a population completely without immunities to any old world diseases–there had been no contact between residents of the western Hemisphere and residents of the eastern hemisphere for perhaps twenty thousand years–the mortality rate was astronomical. We have no way now of imagining what this was like. Indeed, the only peoples that do are uncontacted Amazonian tribes who die off rapidly after contact is made with the outside world. Each time that happens it is a microcosm of what happened in the Americans in that first hundred years after Columbus. (Interestingly, the same pattern of disease transmission devastated indigenous Australia as viruses followed the songlines between tribes.)

But what was bad for the Indians was a boon for the English. Germs had done all the dirty work for them. And it continued doing so. Indigenous populations were developing immunities and mortality rates declined, but even the most minor European malady–a mild flu, for instance–could lead to a pandemic with mass fatalities. The forests and fields were empty. Where they would have once met three or four million locals in powerful federated tribes, now they dealt with a tenacious tenth of that. Without old world diseases, Europeans would no more dominate the new world than they did in their colonies in Africa and India, with small white populations surrounded by a sea of the indigenes. That is because the Asians and Africans did not die from European born diseases. Indeed as often as not, the diseases began there. Neither Africa or Asia experienced a major drop in population from European colonization. Even the ravages of slave raids in the 17th and 18th century did not impact the population to a degree even remotely like the demographic devastation that struck the Americans from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego after the arrival of Columbus. The depopulation of the western hemisphere in the 16th century was unique. Horribly unique.*

The Spanish conquest hit the population of the Americas like a thermo-nuclear war. The loss of 80-90% of the population was a reasonable estimate of the cost of a U.S. or Soviet attack in the 60’s. The Spanish, via the germs that came with them, inflicted upon the Americas by far the worst human catastrophe in the history of the world. After the various plagues had done their work, settlement by English, French and Dutch was easy and profitable. Every European colonist brought with them the potential to unleash a devastating disease upon the local natives simply by sneezing or coughing. Tribes along the eastern seaboard began melting away as pathogens sapped them through sickness and death. Even as the centuries passed and immunities developed among the survivors, an Englishman’s common cold could lay low a native American, not necessarily killing him, but making him very sick. You have to wonder just how chronically ill indigenous Americans were in those first couple centuries. Remember these were people who suffered little from contagious diseases before Columbus. Suddenly they were sick all the time.

Everywhere the Europeans went, pathogens followed. French traders, trappers and monks like Cartier and Marquette inadvertently devastated entire populations around the Great Lakes region as they explored the interior of the continent by canoe, populations that had been spared some of the effects of the diseases brought a century earlier by the Spanish conquest. The French were more interested in trading with and converting the heathens than in colonizing, and the plagues they inadvertently unleashed devastated both their clientele and flocks. (Outside of Quebec and New Orleans, the French did very little in the way of settlements, which eventually cost them their stake in North America and sealed the fate of the American Indians.) There was no escape from invading microbes anywhere in the western hemisphere. Isolated villages in the Canadian arctic were devastated as late as a century ago, and in 1919 the Spanish flu inflicted nearly 100% fatalities in some Alaskan Inuit settlements. As I mentioned above, even today uncontacted tribes in the Amazon can suffer 90% mortality from illness when making contact with the outside world. And those people might be remnants of the estimated seven million people who once lived across the Amazon in large, complex societies. As modern investigative techniques–especially satellite photography–open up the Amazon to archeologists, evidence of large scale agriculture, irrigation, roads and urban areas that contained thousands of people are revealed. But that is all that remains of them. They have completely vanished. Pathogens would have come in from the Andes, where nine of every ten Incans died, or come in from the Atlantic coast. A few dozen conquistadores canoeing down the Amazon in search of gold might have killed hundreds of thousands of people simply by coughing. But we have no way of knowing for sure. All we know is that they were there in 1491, and gone a century later. Those small tribes of a few hundred or less who live deep in the jungle and attack helicopters with poison arrows may be all that survives of Amazonian civilization, like the handful of characters in a post-apocalyptic novel.

There are a number of excellent Wikipedia articles on the effects of the Spanish conquest on the population of the Americas. A side effect of this was the African slave trade. The Spanish purchased huge numbers of slaves brought over by the Portuguese from present day Angola to do the work that the Indian populations were too ill and dead or dying to perform. They began doing this in the mid 1500’s. Mexico City was built in part by African labor. The mass deaths in the New World were not part of the plan, something commonly misunderstood today. The Spaniards sought not only land and gold and glory, they sought subjects. The locals were suppose to supply the labor and taxes and farm production required by the Spanish empire but they died too soon. The difference had to be made up for with immigration from Spain. Hence Mexico is very much Spanish now, genetically, the Spanish men marrying the healthy indigenous women–and reducing the supply of mates for the indigenous men. The indigenous genetic component of the population just crashed, in particular the male genetic side. By the middle of the 17th century the population of central Mexico, once home to millions, was down to a few hundred thousand. That is a mortality and population reduction that is higher, much higher, than the death toll of the Black Plague (though in the Mediterranean littoral there were a few locales where the bubonic plague killed 90% of the population). And when the Spanish began exploring the gulf coast of North America, they came across empty settlements and scattered bones. The Plains Indian cultures we think of as having been there forever in the American Midwest were actually in large part the remnants of a much larger and more urbanized Mississippi Valley civilization. Our own Indian wars, like that of Mexico, were merely mopping up (it’s forgotten, by the way, that the Mexican government was engaged in a much bloodier war with the Apache for much longer than the US government. Mexico had inherited Spain’s Indian policy and it could be quite brutal.) The tribes in the New World fought like hell and inflicted far more casualties than they took, but their populations, devastated by disease, were  small and eventually they were doomed to lose.

They simply could not muster the numbers needed to battle the Europeans. Perhaps two thousand warriors (among them some of my wife’s ancestors) defeated Custer at the Little Big Horn. But a British army was annihilated by ten thousand Ashanti in Ghana in 1823, another by thirty thousand Afghans in 1842, and yet another by twenty thousand Zulus in 1879. One hundred and twenty thousand Ethiopians routed the Italians in 1896. One hundred and twenty Sioux warriors were routed at Wounded Knee in 1890. Geronimo led an army of twenty four (24) men. There simply were not enough Indians to resist. In most parts of the Americas, the remaining locals were simply overwhelmed by immigrants. Pestilence had taken so many of them that there were not enough to hold their lands. The empty space seemed to beg for European immigrants. Without invasive diseases, though, the Americas might well today be as Native American as Africa is African.**

The initial waves of plague and pestilence had just been the beginning, of course. The survivors of those then faced centuries of wars and massacres and murder. There were long marches into exile. They were deprived of their living, their land, their language, even their families. The fact that there remain 566 federally recognized tribes within the United States (and another 600 in Canada) is a tribute to their extraordinary tenacity. In Mexico there are now nearly 16 million indigenous people, probably about as many as there were when Cortes landed. In two states–Quintana Roo and Oaxaca–they are in the majority. In Peru, which suffered a population loss exceeding even Mexico (well over 90%) by 1620, the population is now over a third indigenous and nearly half mestizo. Bolivia is over half full blooded indigene (including their president). Nearly half of Guatemala is indigenous. It’s taken five hundred years but indigenous populations are beginning to reach the numbers there were in 1491. But not everywhere. In Brazil there are 700,000 Indians, or about 15% of their 1491 population. But that’s up from 2% of a hundred years ago. And there are places in the Caribbean where there are no Indians left at all. There were at least a hundred thousand Taino on Hispaniola 1891, maybe considerably more. Spanish diseases and brutality reduced that population considerably. Then in 1518 smallpox killed 90% of those who remained. In 1548 a census found 500 surviving. The culture was extinct not long afterward. Today the Taino exist only as DNA.

The story of the Taino is a worst case scenario, clearly, but not the only one. History is replete with examples of people of all creeds and colors finishing off peoples of other creeds or colors in various ways. But rarely do a hundred thousand (or more) people disappear completely in a half century. Yet the Taino were gone. Only those of Spanish fathers survived, and a mestizo would not identify with the tribe of his mother. There was nothing to gain there, not in those times. So those Indians that do survive in the Americas are to be marveled at. At their stubbornness, their independence, their pride, their hardiness, their luck. They survived the greatest human disaster in the history of the world. War, massacres, brutality, slavery and exploitation certainly took their toll, but rarely are those enough to eliminate entire populations. Certainly not, under more normal considerations, a population a large as the Taino. But pathogens unleashed on a population with absolutely no natural immunities whatsoever? Remember how contagious disease and immune systems battle continuously to one up each other. They are finely tuned to each other’s weaknesses. And remember too how the diseases of Eurasia and Africa had been developing for fifty or a hundred thousand years since the ancestors of the American Indians had gone their separate ways in their trek through central Asia, across Siberia, over the Bering Sea land bridge and into America. In that time there had been no immunological defenses developed against any old world diseases at all. None. Zero. The Indians has absolutely nothing between the pathogens the Spaniards (and those who came later) and their internal organs. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. There has never been such a perfect killing arrangement before. These Indians were so vulnerable that a head cold could kill them. And something far, far worse, like smallpox, developed absolutely appalling symptoms. Everything developed extreme symptoms. Viruses developed to overcome tough immunological barriers engaged in appalling symptomatic overkill, which is why nine out of ten died. It took the development of H-Bombs before mankind devised something more destructive than unintentionally releasing pathogens on populations with no immunities at all. If you stop a minute here to think about that, the true horror will sink in.***

My wife and in-laws are all tribal (Sioux and Oneida). In fact my wife and her siblings are the first in her family line not born on a reservation. She is descended from the very few survivors of the waves of disease that swept her ancestors three centuries ago. She never gets sick. Not even colds. She has the most extraordinary immune system. Apparently that is why her ancestors survived when nearly everyone around them died.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if nine out of every ten people you knew was suddenly dead. It’s a lot like what happened to European Jewry, actually, who died at a similar rate between 1941 and 1945 (e.g., 3,000,000 out of 3,300,000 Polish Jews were killed). And what could have happened to all of us had nuclear war happened. I wonder, but I can never quite imagine it. Think of one hundred people you know–relatives, family, neighbors, coworkers. Write their names down on a list. Then pick out ten of them at random. Delete the rest. Those ten are the survivors. The other ninety are dead. Now reassemble your world using those ten survivors. Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. But every Indigenous American alive today is descended from one of those ten.

Notes:

* Unique on so grand a scale, anyway. For a smaller, but illustrative, example of mass mortality on a population with zero immunities, there is the British colony at Freetown in present day Sierra Leone. Established in 1792 as a base of operations for its anti-slave trade blockade, it was unfortunately deep in the African fever belt, with malaria and yellow fever and a number of other mosquito-borne diseases being not only endemic but pandemic. British efforts to maintain a garrison, officials, clergy and colonists in Freetown were met with a mortality rate that approached 90%. The first two governors died of malaria, and the third, terrified, deserted his post and fled back to England. Only continuous infusions of soldiers, sailors, assigned officials and extraordinarily brave clergymen kept the place going, most of them dying within weeks or months after arrival. One can only imagine had the English shipped a few thousand Irish refugees from the Potato Famine off to Freetown in the 1840’s. Eight or nine of every ten could easily have been dead with a year, a rate much like that of 16the century central Mexico, though perhaps even more complete as the diseases killing them would not be spreading from person to person as with smallpox among the Aztec but from the clouds of omnipresent mosquitos. Things were little better for the slaves freed from vessels the English patrols seized. Released in Freetown (hence the name) and unable to return home due to the thriving slave trade still in the interior of Africa, the freedmen died at a rate not as high as the English but high enough. The freedmen mortality rate would depend on where they had been seized by slavers. Those from the tropics would already have a degree of immunity to tropical diseases and would survive at a higher rate than those from further south. But the invention of quinine in the mid-nineteenth century brought the mortality rate from malaria, at least, down close to zero. (Yellow fever, more dangerous but never as pandemic as malaria, had to wait till the turn of the century for a vaccine. Some of the rarer fevers in Sierra Leone, like chikungunya, still have no vaccines.) Rarely considered in discussions of colonialism, there are vast stretches of the tropics that were opened up to colonization and exploitation by peoples of more nothern climes (Europeans, Americans, Japanese) only with the use of quinine. The Japanese failure to stock it in sufficient quantities helped them to lose their own tropical colonial empire in the 1940’s. Upwards of 90% of the Japanese soldiers left dead on New Guinea, Borneo and Guadalcanal died from untreated malaria. Indeed, the U.S. had no greater ally in those World War II jungle campaigns than the anopheles mosquito. A tale remarkably similar to that in the very next footnote, in fact.

** In one of the more brutal ironies of the colonial wars, in 1804 a French army devastated by yellow fever was annihilated by a larger army of freed slaves in Haiti. Yellow fever had been recently introduced into Haiti from Africa, coming no doubt in a slave ship. The slaves had some resistance to it, the French didn’t. The French colonialists were conquered by their own slaves and invasive disease in the same way that the Spaniards and smallpox had conquered the original Taino inhabitants of the island. Even the mortality rate–over 90%–was the same. Massacres took the rest. Both Taino and French disappeared from Haiti entirely. History has its little jokes.

*** Europeans got syphilis in return. The Spaniards, who’d race around the New World mounting everything that moved, picked up the syphilis virus. After those long frustrating sea voyages home, they immediately began their favorite activity again. You can follow the spread of the disease from Spanish ports and thence across Europe. Big cities became hotbeds of clap infection. The symptoms were ghastly, things fell off, noses eaten away, madness, death. In particular in its early years–again, the lack of immunities–it had the most grotesque effects. Not that anyone stopped infecting one another. You think it would have impeded desire but Europe just grew all the wilder. I suppose if there was any justice in these times, this was it.

Drawn and quartered

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(July, 2013)

News item:

Soccer fanaticism in Brazil reached dangerously high levels when a mob attacked and murdered a referee following an argument with a player. Their argument turned into a fist fight and the referee fatally stabbed the player with a knife he had been carrying throughout the match. The spectators then rushed onto the field and proceeded to tie up, beat, and stone the referee to death, after which they quartered his body and put the severed head on a stake and stuck it in the middle of the field.

A suspect has been arrested. 

Medieval English kings didn’t mess around. You messed with them, they made a mess out of you. High treason wasn’t something let off lightly. The drawing and quartering began with the guilty part trussed up, tied to a board and dragged by a horse through the streets to the place of execution. Sometimes a priest followed, chastising, or a crowd would join in with stones and whips. Once at the gallows the traitor would be hanged till not quite dead, then revived. His genitalia would be lopped off and the entrails removed slowly through an incision in the gut, after which they were burned so he could watch. Then the victim was beheaded, and his heart cut out and also burned. The quartering was an anticlimactic chopping the headless corpse into four pieces, The pieces and the head were then parboiled, put on stakes and displayed in various places around the city as proof that treason does not pay. That would have been the birds’ favorite part. The people were most fond of the disemboweling, apparently, as that is when the victim would howl most vividly.

This didn’t happen often. High treason was a relative rarity, and even when it did, the guilty were often spared the supreme penalty. Simple beheadings were a sign of royal favor. The king liked you, even if you tried to kill him. You had to be some kind of real bastard to be drawn and quartered.

Even then, however, the full sentence could not always be carried out. As often as not, the crowd was cheated when the victim died before decapitation. I think Guy Fawkes managed to leap from the gallows and break his neck. Some one else managed to spit in the Royal Disemboweler’s face who then decapitated him in a fit of piqué. You can imagine the crowd’s disappointment.

Drawing and quartering was not purely part of the English legal tradition. In fact, I imagine a survey of legal systems all over the world would find examples, both judicial and extra-judicial. I know that as far back as twenty-three centuries ago the Chinese meted it out to especially deserving characters. Being practical, the Chinese would dispense with the preliminaries and go straight to the quartering. The limbs were each attached to a chariot or ox cart. I imagine the latter was slower. This is how my hero, Lao Ai, met his end. He was sundered into four parts in one messy moment, and then his grandparents, parents, uncles (and their spouses), siblings (and their spouses), grandchildren and children were all executed by some means or another. Zu zhu, they called it, “family execution”. We know of it as the nine familial exterminations, or execution to the ninth degree. Basically the idea being to annihilate the guilty party’s entire extended family. The fact that his blood aunts were excused is a fluke of Chinese patrilineal kinship. When a woman married she becomes a member of her husband’s family. Which came in handy when a no good nephew managed to get himself convicted of high treason.

Had the ancient Chinese been hip to mitochondrial DNA the aunts would never have been passed up. No matter how thorough your zu zhu, wiping out scores of people for the behavior of one rotten apple, some of that apple’s genes were carried on through those aunts. The family survived, genetically anyway, and the joke was on the emperor. Perhaps some of Lao Ai’s characteristics are hanging about even today.

Actually the simple dismemberment by quarters was refined by one legendary reformer in the third century B.C. He codified into law a five pointed judicial dismemberment that had a horse (or ox) for each limb, plus one for the head. It was so effective it was used on him when  he ran afoul of the bureaucracy and the emperor had him executed. His family was done away with as well, out to the ninth degree. If his mother had any sisters, though, some genes slipped by unnoticed. Who knows what they developed into later. Maybe another troublemaker. We can only hope.

In medieval England, however, there was no such extended familycide coded into law. It might have happened on occasion, but to ninth degree? Unlikely. I can’t see how it would have been managed. Unlike China, where the offspring tended to stay near the family village, in England primogeniture meant that the younger sons had to go far afield to make their fortune. Some might try looting some foreign land, but most would marry daughters who could cough up a hefty dowry. A crazy quilt of family relationships resulted, the nobility all related to each other somehow. Try executing someone to the ninth degree and you could have half of Europe wanting revenge. Best to just draw and quarter the traitor and leave the extended family out of it.

But then our poor Brazilian referee wasn’t somebody, he was just another nobody. Just some kid with a knife refereeing a futbol game. He orders some guy off the field for some egregious foul, the guy says he ain’t going. An argument ensues, then a tussle, out comes the knife, down goes the player. The knife victim’s family and friends pour onto the field, grab the referee, and apparently tie him to a stake, stone him to death, machete and chop off his limbs, then his head, which they mount on the stake as a triumph, I imagine, and a warning to others with knives and perhaps to referees in general. Barbaric but effective. On the other hand, they forfeited the game. Xangô can be cruel, but just.

Pile of Bones

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Just picked up The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, and this one, by the French veteran Benjamin Peret, really struck me with its casual, almost savage tone, and the marching sing song cadence. There was no idealism left at all by this point, nothing but fighting for fighting’s sake. All the romanticism of La Belle Époque is just gone, gone forever. We still haven’t gotten it back.

Here goes:

‘Little Song of the Maimed’

Lend me your arm
 To replace my leg
 The rats ate it for me
 At Verdun
 At Verdun
 I ate a lot of rats
 But they didn’t give me back my leg
 And that’s why I was given the Croix de Guerre
 And a wooden leg
And a wooden leg

Not sure when Peret wrote this, that Penguin book is short on that kind of information. Kind of drives me nuts. Anyway, though I don’t know when he wrote it, it has the feeling of after the war. All that pre-war ornate language is gone. People liked to write before the war, huge long wordy things full of detail and conversation. After the war everything is sinew and bone, a skeleton, a few words throwing long shadows. “Little Song of the Maimed” is like that, spare and long shadowed. Besides, Peret himself never received the Croix de Guerre (the French Medal of Honor). And Peret was never actually at Verdun. He spent most of the war on the Salonica front, which was messy enough it its own right. He kept both legs too. But he nearly died from dysentery.

Afterward they sent him to the Lorraine. I doubt there was much fighting though, not in Lorraine. The plains to the north faced all the concentrated violence. High explosives. Gas shells by the millions. Wilfred Owen wrote about them. Dulce et decorum est, he wrote, pro patria mori. He ought to know, too, because he did.

Peret used both his legs again when he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Funny, that. A war had left him writing terse, crippled, bitter verse and here he was going to war again. I guess he was still a romantic in a way. War has its own romance, they say, so manly and dark and scary and flare-lit. They glow like stars, like little suns, those flares, and everything comes into view and you freeze, they say. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Become part of the scenery. Tracer bullets sweep the ground in an arc and you pray.

Or maybe it’s Revolution. Peret was a revolutionary, or professed to be. Revolutions bask in romance and glory and the people’s noble cause. Or so they say. I wouldn’t know. I’m not military material, the neurologists told me, and no revolutions ever came my way. Doomed causes are also romantic. Maybe Peret liked a doomed cause. In fact Spain offered all three, war, revolution and utter futility. You can imagine a poet getting caught up in it all. Just forgetting all about the rats and wooden legs and joining up. The rifle in his hands probably felt right, natural, like he’d missed it all along. He’d get a bead on a fascist, pull the trigger and there’d be one less Fascist. Ideology trumps pacifism every time. Whatever. Peret lived.

He lived through the next war too. That’s three wars. I wonder if he thought about Indochina, or Algeria. Wars, revolutions, and doomed causes. Ils ne passeront pas. It worked at Verdun. At Dien Bien Phu not so well. In Algeria they tortured, slaughtered and then betrayed their own kind. The pied noir took revenge, blowing up metros and whatnot and people. So much futility. Maybe Peret was too old to get involved. Or too busy writing. He wrote a lot then. An angry man.

Maybe by then he thought a lot about the rats. Maybe it all came back in tearful memories. The rats, the legs, the dead. The gassed.

I went looking for the ‘Little Song of the Maimed’ on the web, though why I can’t remember. There was a poetry website that ran the poem, all ten lines of it, and then added a couple score lines of notes. They explained the poem. It was quite literal. Where I read lend me your arm as give me a hand, the notes writer pictured it asking for an arm to literally replace the eaten leg. The engineering was not explained. I snickered. But to be honest, that’s where I found out the marching cadence bit, I was thinking it was like a child’s song, Alouette, gentille alouette. Alouette, je te plumerai. Tells you what I know about French songs. But you can hear the marching in it this poem, the rhythm of men keeping in step, or trying to, like you can hear Americans singing Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous, Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous. You didn’t have to know her long. To find the reason men went wrong, Inky-dinky-parlez-vous…. It’s a filthy song, full of fucks (the verb) and whacking all night. Back then the “off” wasn’t needed. One just whacked. Whacked plenty apparently. I had no idea whacking went back that far, three generations back in my case, probably four in yours. Grandparents don’t whack. Anyway, the Americans sang it all the way up to the trenches where they were shushed by snipers and machine guns. Flares lit the night and everything threw long shadows. No one moved. Not sure what they sang coming back. Maybe not a thing. Maybe they trod back in silence. Did they march back? When does an army stop marching?

But who can march with a wooden leg? the reviewer pointed out. He thought the whole idea just ridiculous. Apparently that was the meaning of the poem. I kind of thought the reviewer missed something in the poem. Like everything. But it wasn’t my website, it was whoever’s. Let him say what he wants. Even swap a leg for an arm.

On another site a commenter says the rats are symbolized the desperation for food during World War 1. He went on to say that the leg is a reference to the human soul. And innocence. He left it at that. Food, lost soul, innocence. Someone else said it’s about losing – and trying everywhichway (sic–but I like it) to get it back…but in the end, nothing can substitute for what you had, before you lost it, and you are left with rat fur between your teeth, and wooden arms for legs. Other people said other things too, but it’s hard to top rat fur between your teeth and wooden arms for legs.

I think the rats were just rats. The wooden leg a wooden leg. And the war was a brand new maw of Baal, devouring whole civilizations like they were nothing.

Nothing.

That got florid there, that whole maw of Baal thing. I apologize. I read Salome once. Actually twice. Within a year or two. I can’t remember why. Flaubert, incidentally, was epileptic. That’s a non-sequitur to everyone but me, so never mind. But he was. And civilizations did up and disappear in that war. Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire and my own personal favorite, Austria-Hungary. My Dad’s side came from there, before the war opened. They were German. In Slovenia. I doubt there are any of them left there now. The war also bled French and British empires white. As was the kingdom of Italy. None survived the next war intact. Austria-Hungary ceased to be entirely. The war busted up countries, brought forth famine, revolution and a plague and left collective European civilization on the verge of implosion.

Jazz filled the void. Jazz and movies and cars and flappers and sex like you can’t believe. The Americans had so much money, they threw it at everything. They played hot trumpet and threw money at everything. The Depression was a decade away. After that it all went to hell and Nazis filled the void. Nazis. Go figure. I can’t. No matter how many times I read the why’s, I am still bewildered. Mussolini was a joke. Europe was full of little jokes, from Romanian Iron Shirts to Moseley. Wacky little fascist jokes, strutting and wearing shiny uniforms and killing people here and there. But the Third Reich wasn’t funny. Stalin was even less funny. But that was all in the future. We’re in the twenties here. The shell shocked twenties. Europe a hollowed out wreck and Americans throwing money at everything. The jazz was sure great, though. And all the sex. No matter how awful it was outside inside there was always somebody blowing a hot trumpet and kids getting laid. This was the pre-code days in Hollywood, the Weimar days in Berlin, and Paris was Paris and London was, well, London.

It’s so nice now, Europe. Less rats. More legs (some very attractive legs, in fact). And the war? What war? People don’t eat rats anymore. The raise them. Fancy ones. Men in tattoos and women with black finger nails with rats on their bosoms, affectionate, sweet. The people coo, the rats nuzzle. All is perfect. A little weird, maybe, but perfect.

Meanwhile at Verdun the rain comes down on the cemeteries, tended, marble, hushed. Under the big monument is a pile of bones, thousands and thousands of bones. No one has a clue whose bones they are, or what bone goes with another. It’s just a big pile of bones. That’s where that leg would be. A little gnawed on maybe, but it’s there.

A lady in a chiffon dress reading Thucydides

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(c. 2007)

I’m sitting adjacent to an immense stack of books I’ve gotten cheap from the History Book Club and Scientific American Book Club. I take each along to work as I read them. I am literally — now there’s a pun — the only one carrying a book. Over the past year, out of the  hundreds and hundreds of fellow employees I’ve seen, I saw less than ten with a book in their hand. Ten. People don’t really read books anymore. They read things online — webzines, news sites, blogs, TMZ. Facebook. A little of this, a little of that. A million opening paragraphs, a little less beyond. A rare piece it is that finds readers in the last paragraph. Must be a big story, something juicy, or maybe one helluva writer. But books, no. Too much time, too much depth, too many words. We live in a different time. Hence those ten employees with a book in their hand. Ten out of a thousand. One per cent.

But there was one I remember. A gorgeous thing, a stunning little Mediterranean number. Raven hair, olive complexion, black eyes. All that wrapped in chiffon, a billowing white chiffon dress that spilled over the arm rests of the chair she sat in, a big stuffed chair in the lobby of the floor I worked on. She was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen, and she was deep into a hardback volume of Thucydides. Seriously. It was not a spectre, not an epileptic’s vision. It was a genuine pretty lady reading one of my favorite books ever. Oh to be twenty or thirty years younger at that moment. Oh to be young and brave enough to sit along side her and have the nerve to bring up Pericles or Cleon or the Revolt of Mytilene. The Plague of Athens and the Siege of Syracuse. The meaning of it all.

But no. You reading the History of the Peloponnesian War? I asked, lamely. She looked up, surprised. Such big black eyes, a tinge of worry. Yes, she said, I am. That’s one of my favorite books, I said. Oh, she said. She didn’t believe me. Thought I was trying to pick her up. Never trust a man old enough to be your father who’s read Thucydides, her mother had warned, they’re the worst kind. I wasn’t trying to pick her up, not at all. I was just surprised — astonished, really — to find a beautiful young girl lost in ancient history. I’d first read that book at about her age myself. The Penguin edition, paperback. I still have it. I immersed myself into it in the autumn of 1977. I was twenty. I remember coming to a scene late in the book where the Athenians, fresh on the beach, set out patrols to reconnoiter, see what was out there. It was all so modern, the way they thought. I realized, suddenly, that they were so much like us. These men weren’t myths, legends, or simple. They weren’t ridiculous Italian muscle men or philosophers with perfect Oxford accents. They were Greeks doing things the way we would do them now as described by a contemporary historian who was one of them. The technology didn’t matter. Though twenty-five centuries old, they came to life, those Athenians on that beach. Later they were all killed, or drowned, or died of pestilence. The survivors were sold into slavery. I felt sorry for them, for each of them. I lived on the Santa Barbara coastal plain then, a perfect Mediterranean climate on a perfectly Mediterranean lay of land. The sea shone the same blue under the same sun, and vineyards stitched along up the hills between groves of carefully tended fruit trees. It took very little imagination to picture the Athenians and Spartans around me, distant columns coming, fleets of triremes sailing off. I’d sit outside on the balcony and read of ancient campaigns in the same sort of light that fell on men back then. It was magical.

I wanted to tell this girl that. Tell her how that book changed my life, let me see people then as people now, or the other way around. I wanted to, but she was far too beautiful and far too young, that lady in the chiffon dress reading Thucydides. I had an elevator to catch. Enjoy the book, I said, and kept walking. I will, she said, looking relieved I wasn’t stopping. She settled back into the chair, crossed her beautiful legs, and slipped back into her book. The elevator doors shut before me, and she was gone.

Hubris

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(2009)

“For Americans who do not compare their big, homegrown war enough with those on other continents, this can be instructive. After showing Ken Burns’ film series on the Civil War to a class of German undergraduates, I was once confronted by a student who wanted to know “why are there so many moon rises and sun sets in this film, and why do you Americans always think that everything that happens to you is the biggest thing in history? Do Americans understand the scale of bloodshed and social destruction of the Thirty Years’ War?” To which I could only reply, “No, most have never heard of it.”

David Blight, “America’s Armageddon Revisited” Slate (2009)

You have to feel for the German kid. I’ve been reading a great deal of pre-Great War European history lately (indeed, just finished the Vertigo Years last nite) and I must say that in those precious times between the French Revolution and 1914 Europeans too knew that everything that had ever happened to them was the greatest thing in history. It was certainly up there. It was Europe’s time, and when it’s your time in world history then everything you do is the greatest thing ever. But to paraphrase Gibbon, they done fucked up. And then everything falls into perspective from the ruins of empire. You look around the colossal ruins, see what you had, what you could have had, wipe away a tear and sigh. It all falls into place. Hell, the Thirty Years War wasn’t even a “good war”. It was just a huge awful endless slaughtering destructive mess for no good reason whatsoever. It ruined Germany, gutted it, stripped it bare. And for what? But then the Germans haven’t had a lot of good wars since they stopped the Turks. Wars had a bad tendency to work themselves across central Europe laying waste the land. And the Germans sure splattered a lot of Europe in bad wars. Three generations of European kids since then have to deal with that. And that their own grandfathers, great grandfathers back through their great great great great great grandfathers from one end of Europe to the other had taken the civilization of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and fought war after ghastly war, slaughtering and butchering and torturing and destroying. Spaniards and Russians, Swedes and Italians, and almost everyone between, they all pitched in at one time or another. The Germans, in the middle, took it for centuries. Then in 1914 they decided it was their turn. Three decades later it was all over but the cleaning up.  Muscovy ruled one half, the Americans propped up the other. Empires frittered away to scattered islands. To think that fifty years earlier Europe ruled the world.

And then you go and show their progeny Ken Burn’s Civil War. They sigh. You Americans are so dumb. Can’t you see we did all that before, over and over. Can’t you see we failed? Had to fail? Can’t you starry eyed, moonstruck, smiling with the dawn Yanks get it through your head that you are as doomed as we were?

Well, no we can’t. Hell, even I can only accept that notion as an abstraction. When I watch The Civil War I too see the moonlit battlefields, the dawns of Juneteenth mornings, Abe Lincoln as a homespun Marcus Aurelius. It’s just innate. We can’t help ourselves. But we all know, us bookish types, that those world weary European kids are right, and we’ll be there someday sooner or later, looking at the world over the sad remains of American civilization. Some Chinese professor will be showing the 18 part epic poem of the Taiping Rebellion to a college class in far away Michigan and an outraged kid will splutter that you Chinese always think everything that happens to you is the most important thing ever. He’d say more, too, but his Mandarin fails him.

Know Nothings

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Know Nothing flag, mid-1850's.

Know Nothing flag, mid-1850’s.

Native-American didn’t always mean American Indian. That definition took hold in the 1970’s*. Back in the 19th century, at least until the Civil War, it meant native-born American, and American meant White, English, Protestant and especially not Irish. In fact, many people in the 1850’s hated the Irish flooding into American ports after the Potato Famine of the 1840’s, hated them so much they formed a political party, the Native American Party. It was a secret, at first–secret societies were all the rage back then–and if asked a member was supposed to say I know nothing. Hence the common name. (Seriously, that explains the name, as stupid as that sounds.) Later it called itself the American Party, but it wasn’t around long enough for that name to stick. To this day we know them as Know Nothings. Only the Anti-Masonic Party of a generation earlier (they really hated Freemasons) had an odder appellation for a major American political party.

If the Know Nothing movement’s Native American Party had been a secret it was a badly kept one, because for a couple years their party made a meteoric impact. It went from nothing to the most dynamic new force in American politics, and then disappeared in a flash. The Know Nothings’ congressional delegation grew from zero seats in 1852 to 56 seats (out of 233) in the House in 1854**. They also landed 5 senators (out of 62) in 1856. The party was especially strong in areas with large Irish populations, particularly Massachusetts. Boston’s political battles were often pitched fights between Know-Nothings and Irish immigrants. There was worse violence elsewhere. On an election day in Louisville in 1855 a Know Nothing mob descended on polling stations in the Irish and German wards. Twenty-two died. In New Orleans vigilante groups occupied polling stations to repress (they called it monitoring) the Democratic immigrant vote and ensure a Know Nothing victory. Things grew even worse on election day in Baltimore where Know Nothings and Democrats fought with fists, guns, and then artillery. (How the sides got hold of cannon I have no idea.) The Know Nothing slate won in a landslide after massive voter fraud. Catholics were targeted as well. In Bath, Maine the Catholic church was burned to the ground by a Know Nothing mob, and in a nearby town Know Nothings tarred and feathered the parish priest. In a time when armed mobs were increasingly part of the national political culture, local Know Nothing leadership had no qualms about unleashing them on the Irish and Germans (but especially the Irish). It was a popular tactic. Party membership skyrocketed from 50K to one million members in a few months over the summer of 1854. As with the explosion in Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1920’s, the sudden nation-wide popularity of George Wallace in 1968 (and until he was shot, in 1972), and Donald Trump now, every once in a while millions of Americans decide that millions of other Americans aren’t American enough to be real Americans.

Of course, the Know Nothings certainly benefited in the mid-1850’s from the simultaneous implosion of the Whig Party. Forgotten now, the Whigs were the dominant American political party for a stretch there. Founded in 1833, four Whig presidents occupied the White House from 1841-1953 (two of their presidents died in office). Then, torn apart by the slavery issue, they suddenly dissolved in 1854, leaving a lot of politicians with no place to go. Many jumped to the Know Nothing party, now that it had adopted the more palatable name of American Party (though everyone still called them Know Nothings). Even one of the more nothing Whig presidents, Millard Fillmore, ran again as a Know Nothing. Oddly enough he was neither a nativist nor a Know Nothing, didn’t support any of the tenets of the Know Nothing platform, wasn’t even at the Know Nothing convention, and no one bothered to tell him he was being nominated. He ran anyway, though, coming in third with nearly 25% of the total votes, the highest percentage any third party candidate has ever received in an American presidential election. Thereafter the party faded as quickly as it arrived. It had only had the one issue, really: immigration. The Know Nothings didn’t like the Irish and they didn’t like Catholics. They didn’t like German Catholics either. In states chock full of Catholics, however, like Louisiana and Maryland, they recruited native born Catholics but didn’t like immigrant Catholics. (In fact, Maryland was the only state Millard Fillmore carried in 1856, presumably with a lot of native born Catholic votes.) In San Francisco they didn’t like Chinese. In Maine, where Know Nothings were very popular, they probably didn’t like the French Canadians. In Texas the local Know Nothings no doubt couldn’t stand Mexicans. If there were any immigrants from anywhere attending a Catholic church, the Know Nothings no doubt hated them. But by the end of the 1850’s more people hated slavery (or, in the South, they hated Abolitionists) than hated Irish or Catholics, and most of the party’s northern members defected to the new Republican Party which wasn’t nativist at all. Southern Know Nothings joined the fleeting Constitutional Union Party (which sought to preserve slavery without secession). The Know Nothings were back down to zero seats in the House by 1860, and none of its five senators remained in the Senate. It was a miserable end.

What had happened, of course, was that the Republican Party had filled that vacuum left by the sudden disintegration of the Whig Party. The impending crisis over slavery (especially free state outrage over the appalling Dred Scott decision in 1857) and the inevitability of the American Civil War had pushed nativism to the background again. The Know Nothing’s obsession over Catholics and immigrants seemed ridiculous in comparison. Slavery was overwhelmingly the pre-eminent issue of the day, indeed it split the Know Nothings themselves (as it has the Whigs) and once war broke out everyone was called to the colors, native born or not. 150,000 Irishmen served in the Union Army (along with several Irish born generals), and indeed the Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac was one of the war’s most renowned units, always in the thick of combat, taking tremendous losses. (It included the Fighting 69th regiment***, who, come World War One, were for Irish Americans what the 369th–Harlem’s Hellfighters–were for African Americans.) You can’t tell an Irishman who’d lost and arm or a leg defending the Union that he should go back to Ireland. You couldn’t tell a German Catholic veteran to go back home either. Civil rights are often earned in combat, and the Civil War squelched nativism in the North for years. Later in the 19th century and into the 1920’s Republicans attracted the nativists (though the Democrats held onto them in the South where Republicans reached out to black voters). Irishmen again became targets****. Once southern Democrats turned Republican after 1980 the modern nativists are pretty much Republican (and Republican-voting independents) again, though we’ll see what Trump does this year. He’s the wild card. He could go independent and revive what had begun as the Know-Nothing party over a century and a half ago. He’s certainly riding that wave high. You could slip lines from a Know Nothing speech from 1854 into Trump’s teleprompter and you probably would never tell the difference, as long as you changed “Irishmen” to “Mexicans”. He probably couldn’t tell the difference, either.

It seems this Nativist (as they used to call it) streak explodes on the scene periodically and then disappears just as quickly. You could go back through American history and list the various movements and trends and politicians who took advantage of the opportunity presented by angry people, from the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 (which targeted French and Irish) to Donald Trump targeting Hispanics today. That anger really roils the waters for a while, though. We’re seeing them boil now. If history is any guide, it’ll pass.

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