LOOSE ENDS: 6.22.26

As always, readers have continued the conversation about PINK topics, American history and current events.

FRONTIER WOMEN (5.24) prompted a New Yorker to alert me to a retrospective of twenty-eight “westerns” produced over 65 years by Universal Studios. Incorporated in 1912, it focused on rural and small-town audiences. Its first feature film and the earliest extant western was Straight Shooting, a silent film released in 1917. There are good guys and bad guys, homesteaders and cattlemen, a saloon and a showdown.

Over time, “cowboy” movies became more complex, with ordinary men or hired guns becoming heroes. These movies demonstrate the endurance of the frontier myth and the conflict it represented, between freedom and social order, symbolized by men and women. A review in the NYTimes quotes Clint Eastwood saying jazz and westerns are the only truly Americana art forms. (And the blues and Broadway musicals?)

MARGARET CHASE SMITH & JOSEPH McCARTHY (6.1) came up because Senator Smith’s unbroken attendance and voting record, of 3,000 votes in thirteen years, has been broken again by one of her successors, Republican Senator Susan Collins. She is in a tough re-election fight for her fourth term in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On June 7, she became the first Senator in history to reach 10,000 consecutive votes. Her actual voting record has not been as gutsy or independent as Smith’s. She recently said she did not “regret” her vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh but was “disappointed” that he voted to overthrow Roe, having promised her privately he would not.

The reader from Chattanooga whose elementary school class had been at the Supreme Court for the Brown decision also attended McCarthy hearings. The occasion was arranged by her Congressman father. In a letter thanking him, her teacher called it “the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced.”

I’ve subsequently learned that the occasion of Joseph McCarthy’s first false claim, that there were 205 Communists in the State Department, was a Lincoln birthday celebration, hosted by the Wheeling, WV, Republican Women’s Club in February 1950. Dismissed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson as the “the rambling, ill-prepared results of his slovenly, lazy and undisciplined habits,” McCarthy’s lies turned an undistinguished Senator into a threat to democracy.

Until his confrontation with Joseph Welsh, the legendary attorney, during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. A reader in Connecticut told me that every week in his Substack, Robert Reich, professor and former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, identifies someone worthy of his Joseph N. Welsh Award for Courage in the Face of Tyranny.

A reader in California wrote that he “would think of OSCAR & JESSIE DEPRIEST (6.12) every time I pass out a copy of the Constitution.” Today Black representation in Congress and the voting rights of all Americans have been challenged. President Trump signed an executive order forcing the US Postal Service to rewrite the rules for mail-in ballots. If a state refuses to turn over voter information, the administration will stop mail-in ballots in that state. There was an earlier executive order that required states to create a list of voters eligible to participate in federal elections, giving each voter a unique barcode. The USPS would refuse to deliver to anyone not on the list.

Many lawsuits have been initiated but people can comment on the Federal Register until July 2. Here’s the link with more information and the email address, PCFederalRegister@usps.gov; use the subject line “Ballot Line.”

MEANWHILE, IN THE NEWS: Signage at National Parks remains at the center of lawsuits. Federal judges have blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signage about slavery at Independence Park in Philadelphia. In another action, the NPS has ordered removal of “corrosive ideology” from the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston. A single visitor complaint that a quotation about women’s suffrage was “woke feminist ideology” prompted what an Interior Department spokeswoman called a “routine exhibit refresh.” As a result, NPS intends to take down panels addressing anti-war protests, slavery and immigration. The suffrage quotation will remain.

Opal Lee, a retired teacher from Texas, the “grandmother of JUNETEENTH,” campaigned for decades to make it a federal holiday. She succeeded in June 2021, when she was 94. Congress passed and President Biden signed legislation marking the date in 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger announced the emancipation of 250,000 enslaved Texans. Opal Lee deserves her own PINK. Next June.

June 1 was the centennial of MARILYN MONROE’s birthday. Consider this note a trailer for another future PINK. Norma Jeane Mortenson survived poverty, a mentally ill mother, an absent father, twelve foster families and sexual abuse. Before she became a sex symbol and serious actress, she married at sixteen, worked as a “Rosie” during World War II, posed as a pin-up and was named Artichoke Queen of Castroville, California. Everybody knows her movies, her famous marriages, her tragic death at 36. Her birthday was celebrated globally by look-alike contests and two new biographies. Marilyn and Her Books, by Gail Crowther, inventories Monroe’s personal library of 400 books that she read and cherished. Her shelves included Ibsen, Joyce, McCullers, Sandburg, Sartre, Shakespeare, Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, Tolstoy and Whitman, as well as books about cooking, gardening, pets, politics, psychology and religion. She embodied a lifelong learner attempting to define herself.

FOREVER MARILYN (2011), by Seward Johnson, one of five 26-foot-high, painted, stainless steel sculptures depicting a scene from the 1965 comedy, Seven Year Itch.

ENDNOTES

Only one reader found my typo, Kamal instead of Kamala. Speaking of misspellings (remember chestnut instead of Mary Chesnut?), the American Chestnut Restoration Foundation (TACF) has made progress combatting the blight that wiped out the American chestnut tree, developing a protective virus, and replanting “transgenic” species. I also recently learned that there is a grove of American elms in Central Park. Surrounding skycrapers protected them from the beatle that destroyed other trees.

Another reader queried my use of Black and white as adjectives, which depends on the context. I don’t want to leave the impression that everyone I write about is white, or that American history has one skin tone. As for capitalization, I follow the NYTimes Style Guide. I’m still working out the nuances.

I appreciate your patience, participation, enthusiasm and support. Thanks for sticking with this enterprise. And supporting our democracy.

ONWARD! Betsy