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Independent People on an Iceland Journey (continued)

That Icelanders are obsessed with volcanoes is perfectly understandable because their land has so many of them. They were mentioned over and over by our guide. It is telling that in the recent, very good novel, Miss Iceland, by Auour Ava Olafsdóttir, each time the main character (named Hekla after a volcano) talks to her father, he discusses volcanoes and the likelihood of another eruption that he can watch.

Iceland has given the world many things: fish, meat, and wool; music, literature, and mystery series; movies and television shows; a famous chess match and an important summit. But perhaps its most infamous contribution has been volcanic schmutz. A volcano erupted in 2010 spewing ash into the atmosphere which spread over parts of Europe causing the shutdown of airplane traffic. The big one, however, was in 1783, when a volcano erupted for eight months pouring lava out of 135 fissures and craters that covered about 1,000 square miles. The eruption spewed a huge amount of ash into the air, ash that contained fluorine, poisoning animals, fields, and the ocean. A resulting famine killed a fifth of the Icelandic population.

The ash got into the upper atmosphere, absorbing sunlight and moisture, and changed the world’s climate. For the next several years, the Northern Hemisphere experienced ruinous droughts, exceptionally cold winters, and disastrous floods. The winter average temperatures in the eastern United States were seven degrees Fahrenheit colder than the subsequent two-century averages. Food shortages were widespread, including in France, perhaps promoting the French Revolution a half decade later. 

I did not see an active volcano, but the results of past eruptions are omnipresent—lava flows, lava rocks, and basalt can be seen on just about any drive.

The countryside

Hikes to and around volcanic craters were part of our trip as was a famous black sand beach of pulverized lava. At the black sand beach, we were repeatedly warned not to get close to the water for periodically a sudden large wave was possible, and similar ones have washed people out to sea. Signs at the beach reiterated the guide’s words saying that the beach had “sneaker waves.” The beach’s fame extends beyond Iceland. A photo shoot was going on there with people dressed in fantastical costumes that maybe were period pieces, but of no period I could identify. I asked one of the people involved in the activity what was going on and was told that they were Germans shooting a travel documentary. I still couldn’t make sense of it, and it seems highly unlikely that I will ever see the finished product.

Black sand beach
Photo shoot at the black sand beach

Iceland also has geysers that I assume are somehow connected to the volcanic activity (I’ve already admitted to my limited geological expertise). One puts to shame Yellowstone’s Old Faithful where I had to wait an hour for the spouting. The Icelandic one shoots up once–even twice–every two to four minutes. Quite a sight, but it made me a little sad as I was reminded of my earlier sex life.

Almost everywhere on the island are rock formations where, with a little imagination, you can see giant faces and little hideaways. It makes it easy to understand why Icelandic myth is filled with stories about trolls who turn to stone if they are caught out in daylight.

See any trolls or hideaways?

The geology that produces volcanoes also produces geothermal pools and other sources of natural hot water. We visited a geothermal plant where that water is used to drive turbines to generate electricity. The plant employees were proud of a pioneering effort to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, pump it down to the geothermal pools where it turns into calcite. In short, they’re turning CO2 into stone!

The geothermal hot water is also used to heat homes some 60+ miles away in Reykjavik. Then the still-warm water drains under streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. Iceland’s abundant streams and waterfalls are also used to generate electricity; not surprisingly, then, electricity is inexpensive. This has led to an incongruous industry: Even though it does not have bauxite and does not have much industry depending on the metal, Iceland is a leader in aluminum smelting, which requires a significant amount of electricity and abundant water. It was done in a narrow, non-descript building hundreds of yards long outside Reykjavik.

Not all Icelanders are pleased with the power lines and the industrial uses of the electricity. At least that is what is indicated by the excellent Icelandic movie, Woman at War (made in conjunction with Ukraine), in which a 49-year-old choir director with expert command of bow and arrow, sabotages power lines, including ones to that self-same aluminum smelting plant.

(to be continued)

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Independent People on an Iceland Journey

          Iceland is that island on my map that is a little to the right of Greenland, a bit further to the left of Norway, and on a northwest diagonal from the Faroe Islands. (Until recently, I was not sure whether Iceland was east or west of Greenland, and I was unaware of the Faroes.) Two facts I heard over and over on my trip to Iceland is that it is located in the North Atlantic and that it is small, both physically and in population.

          Apparently because Americans (I am in this group) cannot readily understand land mass numbers—Iceland comprises 102,775 square kilometers, that is, 39,682 square miles—small countries are often compared to the size of some U.S. state. When I was in Israel, the comparison was to New Jersey, which surely was the foundation for a joke. The analogy I heard for Iceland was Ohio, which comprises 116,096 square kilometers.

          Americans also seem to want the physical size of a place given in driving terms. Iceland’s Route 1, known as the Ring Road, mostly circles the island, and it is 821 miles in length. The Ring Road was finished only in 1974; before that many parts of the country were effectively isolated from each other. It is now paved and in good shape. Considering how hard the winters and springs are supposed to be, I was surprised to see no potholes. Except in some cities where it is wider and for some one-lane bridges and tunnels, it has two lanes, and the speed limit is the equivalent of 55 mph. You can do the arithmetic to figure out how long it would take to drive the whole thing.

          The population of places in my experience is just given as a number without any American comparison. Iceland has about 370,000 inhabitants, but let’s give some U.S. numbers. Ohio has nearly 12 million people, and the greater Columbus area has over 2 million residents. Wyoming has the smallest population of the American states, and it has 576,000 residents (and it still gets two Senators.)

          Just the name Iceland implies a harsh climate, and that topic seems to play a role in every one of the eight or nine books I have read set in or about the country. While Iceland does have prominent glaciers, the climate’s harshness, on the one hand, is overstated. For example, in Reykjavik, which is in the southwest corner of the Island, the average high and low temperatures in January are 35 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit. In Akureyri, the largest town in the north, they are 34 and 22 degrees. Much of the northern tier of the United States is colder. Where I grew up the average temperatures in January are 30 and 15 degrees, and Sheboygan is hardly the coldest place in the continental United States Iceland’s snowfall is also not spectacularly high compared to many places in the United States. Reykjavik averages 20 inches of snow in January, while Buffalo, New York, averages 27 inches. Even so, stories about towns isolated by snows are a common feature of Icelandic books. Snowblind, the first book in an excellent mystery story series by Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Quentin Bates) is an example. I am guessing the isolation caused by snow results partly from the climate’s harshness but also from the sparsely settled landscape. Plowing the 800 miles of the Ring Road must take a bit of time.

          On the other hand, Iceland does not get very warm during the summer with average highs and lows in Reykjavik of 58 and 48 degrees in July. And on the third hand, Iceland, I am assured, feels colder than other places because of regular high winds. Icelanders seldom carry umbrellas because, I was told, the rain comes sideways, not vertically

          Iceland’s geology is another dominant topic. As I have confessed before, I have a block when it comes to learning geology, but I think I am doing better, partly because I went to a good Icelandic museum on volcanoes with outstanding interactive displays.

If I got this right, the distinctive geology has to do with tableware displays. Iceland is at the conjunction of two things I think are called textile dishes, although the one on the European side might be called the Teutonic plate. For some reason I don’t fully grasp, the table is slowly drifting apart, a centimeter or two each year. Perhaps it is because of the frequent earthquakes (100 a year). Or perhaps the earthquakes are caused by the drifting plates. Whatever. It must be for the same reason that the pictures on my wall regularly go out of skew.

You might think that the moving dishes and plates would cause them to fall off the table and smash into pieces, as no doubt—don’t pretend otherwise—has happened in your home. But no, the drifting allows stuff to come up from below, as if it were a dog in the cellar that darts through the opening when the door is opened. Apparently this dog comes up from the center of the earth, which only superheroes, Jules Verne, and trolls (there are many trolls in Iceland) have ever seen. That stuff I think is Magnum Bars, which I learned about on a trip to Turkey. A good treat, but then again, it may not be Magnum Bars since the stuff that’s oozing to the surface because of jiggling plates (perhaps they are spinning on rods like those frantic entertainers on the Ed Sullivan Show) is hot, not just warm, but hot, hot, hot, seriously hot. And when this hot stuff escapes to Iceland’s surface all sorts of things happen—most dramatically and significantly, volcanoes.

Volcanic eruptions are not one in a hundred-year events in Iceland. A volcano erupted without warning on an island just off the “mainland” in 1973. Luckily, the fishing fleet was in the harbor and safely evacuated 5,300 people. Seawater was sprayed onto the advancing lava flow to stop it from destroying the harbor. Another volcano did its thing in 2011, and yet another one erupted in 2014 for 180 days, which spewed large amounts of sulphur dioxide into the air, making it hard for many Icelanders to breathe. In 2021, a volcano near Reykjavik erupted attracting hundreds of thousands who hiked to watch it. In short, these eruptions happen with disturbing regularity.

(to be continued)

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Guns and Insurrection

Tucker Carlson proclaimed that January 6, 2022, was not an insurrection because insurrectionists must be carrying guns. Apparently there is no reason to limit yourself to making up facts. Might as well create your own language and create your own definitions as well.

Two of my most easily accessible dictionaries define insurrection almost identically: “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority”; “an act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government.” A third, however, does mention weapons and defines an insurrection as “an act of rising in arms or open resistance against civil or established authority.” But that “or” bears notice. An insurrection can be armed, but open resistance, with or without guns, against civil authority is an insurrection. Let’s be clear: January 6 was an insurrection. Aldous Huxley had it right: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Underlying Carlson’s inanity, however, is an important observation. The January 6 insurrectionists were not openly armed, and it is here that more attention and respect should be paid to the gun safety laws in the District of Columbia. In the nation’s capital, firearms must be licensed and registered. Concealed carry requires a special license. Assault weapons are illegal. Extended magazines are illegal. Neither long guns nor handguns may be openly carried.

No doubt January 6 insurrectionists were aware of these restrictions. If they had openly carried guns as they went to hear Trump’s rants and to the Capitol, they could have expected that they would have been stopped by the police long before the Capitol was invaded. If they had openly carried their firearms, they might not have been able to commit their insurrection.

Imagine, however, if the law had allowed them to move about Washington openly carrying the weapons as they could have in many places in the United States. What do you think would have happened that day? What might the death toll have been?

In considering the events of January 6, we should be considering that the gun safety laws of Washington in all likelihood prevented deaths. In short, gun safety laws matter.

It is expected, however, that shortly the Supreme Court will render a decision creating a new right for people to carry guns into public spaces. The District of Columbia will no longer have its gun safety laws that prevented the open carrying of firearms. If that prediction turns out to be right, what will the next attempt to overthrow an election be like?

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Gun Violence/Gun Safety (concluded)

          Even if we knew more about the warning signs for shootings, authorities can only take action if they are legally authorized to do so. That is where red flag laws (they go by different names in different places) come into play. These provisions allow police, family members, and others to petition a court to order the temporary removal of firearms from people whose behavior and statements indicate they present a danger to others or themselves. Although opinion polls indicate strong support for such laws, only about a dozen states have them. Perhaps surprisingly, Florida is one of them. Not surprisingly, the National Rifle Association has opposed such laws as an infringement of the Second Amendment, although I am aware of no court agreeing with them.

In a sensible world–unlike the U.S.–all would be trying to figure out the best possible red flag laws. The details of such provisions do matter, such as the standard of proof and the duration of the firearms’ removal. We should be studying the red flag laws that exist to see what insights they offer for future or amended laws, and we would also be seeing what we can learn from orders of protection in domestic disputes, which bear many similarities to red flag laws.

          Studies have shown that red flag laws have a positive effect on gun violence especially when it comes to suicides, but this aspect of the laws is important. The largest number of deaths by guns is not from mass shootings, other homicides, accidents, and certainly not from self-defense; they are from suicides. Red flag laws do not prevent all suicides or even most of them. Nevertheless, we should understand that no single reform can be expected to have a huge effect. Instead, we need many reforms each bringing an incremental decline in gun violence.

          Red flag laws highlight how much more we need to know about gun violence and gun safety. We are far behind where we could be in our knowledge because of the Dickey Amendment. A study funded by the Centers for Disease Control published in the early 1990s found that having a gun in the home was correlated with an increased risk of homicide. Those conclusions, of course, undermined the NRA message and the conclusion of the Supreme Court that guns are needed for protection and the defense of liberty. In response to that study, the NRA pushed what became known as the Dickey Amendment. Passed by Congress in 1996, it stated that CDC funds available for “injury prevention and control” could not be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” Of course, while the offending study may have led reasonable people to think about gun control, the study did not advocate it. Even so, Congress not only passed the Dickey Amendment, it also reduced the CDC budget by the exact amount that the guns-in-the-home study had cost. The message became clear: no studies of guns by federal agencies if the agencies did not want their budgets slashed by Congress. (The Dickey Amendment was expanded to other government funding agencies in 2012.) However, in 2018, Congress accepted the interpretation of the Dickey Amendment by a Health and Human Services secretary; it voted to allow the government to fund and conduct research into gun violence that does not specifically advocate for gun control. The government now funds some of that research, but only at modest levels. Of course, in a sensible government, this research would have a high priority. The first defense of weak minds is to remain ignorant, and that has been the official stance of our government about gun violence. Perhaps that can be changed, but I am willing to bet few conservatives will stand against ignorance.

          Many of our politicians have lived in fear of the NRA. For example, the Colorado legislature a while ago passed gun safety measures. The NRA went to work and got recall elections against some of the supporters of the legislation. Stories like that scare politicians about the consequences of opposing the NRA. Even if the power of the NRA is waning because of its internal problems, many politicians pledge fealty to the Second Amendment and are concerned that they could lose in a primary to someone who is even more opposed to gun safety.

          The fear of that power needs to be broken if we are ever to advance towards sensible gun measures. Here’s my suggestion: Gun safety organizations should identify five or six legislative districts in each state that might be swing districts where the incumbent unthinkingly follows the NRA line. Time, money, and effort should be concentrated by the reformers on these relatively small number of elections. Gun safety advocates would not have to win all these elections to have an impact. If thirty or forty state legislative incumbents around the country lost their positions at least partly because they were allied with the NRA, the NRA would start to look less invincible. Only when legislators begin to think that they could lose their seats because of their opposition to gun safety measures supported by most American will the NRA’s hold on this country start to weaken.

          Mass shootings are (generally mistakenly) seen as an opportunity for gun safety reform, but there are other possibilities. As I have been working on this post, a man was arrested near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He was exercising what many would see as his Second Amendment right to carry a pistol, but when he saw federal marshals outside the Justice’s house, he called a Maryland county emergency number and said that he was having suicidal thoughts, planned to kill a Justice, and had a firearm in his suitcase. While he was still on the phone, the police arrived and arrested him.

          This is, of course, akin to a red flag situation and highlights the need for such laws.

          Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said about the incident: “I call on leaders in both parties in Washington to strongly condemn these actions. It is vital to our constitutional system that the justices be able to carry out their duties without fear of violence against them and their families.”

          Of course, but it also should be vital to our society that schoolchildren, worshippers, shoppers, subway riders–all of us–be able to go about our lives without fear of violence against ourselves or our families. Condemning such potential violence is easy. Taking steps to try to prevent more of it seems to be beyond the ability of our elected representatives.

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Gun Violence/Gun Safety

          The term “gun violence” misleads. There is not a single violence problem; there are several. Gun violence includes mass shootings, but the term should also refer to suicide by firearms, which takes more lives than homicides in this country. Urban shootings are also part of the violence as are family killings. It is important to recognize the different problems because the motivations for them vary. Important, too, to understand that different firearms are involved in the different settings. Because there are different problems, there can be no one solution or even one palliative for “gun violence.” We can, however, hope to have reforms that serve to decrease violence in a particular area. With enough incremental reforms a significant dent can be made in our national shame.

          A discussion of gun violence should recognize that there is a constitutional right “to keep and bear arms.”  The goal for those wishing to decrease gun violence should be to make it more likely guns are used safely rather than to take guns away from responsible people. A recent column by Nicholas Kristoff offers many sensible proposals. Opinion | These Gun Reforms Could Save 15,000 Lives. We Can Achieve Them. – The New York Times (nytimes.com) None of these possibilities is “the solution” to gun violence—there is no such thing. However, incremental improvements in gun safety can add up to a real difference. Increasing the age to buy assault rifles will not by itself make a huge difference in gun violence, but it may lessen gun deaths and injuries a little. Requiring all who buy guns to have background checks will not make a huge difference, but perhaps things will improve somewhat. Better  reporting of felony and domestic violence convictions will not make a huge difference, but it might help some. Limiting the size of magazines will not make a large difference, but perhaps some lives will be saved. If we make enough little changes, we might end up strides ahead of where we are now.

          Here’s my suggestion for an incremental improvement: Make it a crime to carry a gun while intoxicated. Of course, carrying a gun is not the same as using it, but even carrying one while drunk should be prohibited because the decision whether to use a carried firearm should not be made when a person is intoxicated. The consequences should be similar to drunken driving. Perhaps a first conviction would be a misdemeanor, but just as driving licenses are suspended for a period for a DUI, the right to possess guns would be suspended for a period, and all guns owned by the offender placed in police custody during that time. A second conviction would be a felony, and the person could no longer possess guns. . . and might even go to jail.

          Frequently after a car mishap, the driver gets tested for intoxication. The same should happen after gun accidents. Each year at least a few people are hurt or killed in hunting accidents when there has been too much drinking, and perhaps that problem can be lessened.

          Those who favor the status quo on gun violence often proclaim that new gun safety measures will not accomplish anything. Sometimes this is an act of misdirection. They might say, for example, that age restrictions on the purchase of an AR-15 will do little about urban gun violence because assault weapons are hardly ever the firearms used on city streets. The response should be–once again–that there is no single solution to gun violence, but that the different components of gun violence must be addressed in different ways to make incremental increases in safety in all the areas.

          Gun safety advocates need to shape the debate on the effectiveness of reform. Part of it might be mockery. Those of us who regularly read The Onion are familiar with its headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where It Regularly Happens.” But more data-driven responses should also be regularly presented, such as was done in the New York Times recently. The study indicated that up to a third of mass shootings might not have happened or could have been less deadly if simple reforms had been in place—such as universal background checks, no extended magazines, and no sale of guns, or at least assault weapons, to those under twenty-one. None of these would have removed guns from responsible people.

          A few days after a mass shooting, a story often appears telling us about the “warning signs” exhibited by the shooter missed by the “authorities” implying that the shooting could have, or perhaps should have, been prevented. In considering the “warning signs,” however, there is a hindsight bias. We know that the shooter has slaughtered many people, and that makes the missed warning signs seem especially egregious. But we need to evaluate “warning signs” before the violence, not after. Many people engage in the behavior that are called warning signs after a mass shooting and almost none of them become murderers. . We need to find the predicters of future gun violence. How often are the signs accurate? How often do they produce false positives? What are the responses that lessen the possibility of future violence? How often are such warning signs reported to law enforcement or other agencies? What resources does it take to respond? Where do the resources come from? What responses will politicians legally authorize? We need to know more.

(concluded June 10)

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Abortion Ban Redux (concluded)

          If the abortion rate dropped–and I repeat, if–from Kate Simon’s youth and the time when Delmar’s book was written, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of other forms of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote. The spread of birth control information was hard work that took years to have any significant effect. Four decades after Simon, Delmar, and Sanger there was still limited discussion of birth control. In my senior class of my high school, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without it becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

          Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, but common social norms kept contraception under wraps. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that prohibited birth control.

          Many states at one time prohibited not only abortion but all forms of birth control. By 1960, only a few still had such laws, including Connecticut, which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried. We should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too intrusive. What could be more big-brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that governments once prohibited the use of birth control.

          The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to invoke this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

          It was settled, then. All had legal access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control. Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortions decrease with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again may make not just abortion but also birth-control availability more difficult.

          Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The Trump administration expanded this exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just “closely held” ones. The exemptions currently extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

          That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley surrounding the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholders because the rich person will own more shares. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

          And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex in the Holy Book. Did anything like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

          The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon that since there is no explicit right of privacy in the Constitution, the private act of choosing to have an abortion is not constitutionally protected. Of course, if the right to choose is not protected, then, if the Court is intellectually consistent—a big if—there should not be a constitutional right to choose birth control. Of course, you might not be able to imagine that any government would ban contraception, but Trump appointed a person who had spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception to a position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans and through which about four million women get family planning services.  

          Furthermore, if the abortion decision finds that there is no right of privacy in the Constitution, states can, as they have done in the past, regulate sexual practices of consenting adults. They can even make it a crime, as some did until recently, for married, heterosexual couples to engage in oral sex.

          I do not know if, as expected, the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade that we will move back to Big Brother regulations of sex lives, but we will move back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk.

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Abortion Ban Redux (continued)

          Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

          Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry James. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.”

          To prevent such deaths, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

          James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother had already had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

            Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl and Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive, both set in lower-class communities of 1920s New York City, indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, and they were common earlier.  Thomas J. Schlereth, in his book, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, cites data showing that abortions were inexpensive and common in the late nineteenth century, with ten dollars being the standard rate in Boston and New York. He reports that in 1898 the Michigan Board of Health estimated that one-third of pregnancies were artificially terminated.

          Willful infant deaths may also have been frequent. We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it was so great that special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.

          One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar. In our colonial history, and even into the twenty-first century some men believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant.

          Surely sexual ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of other forms of birth control so that the only meaningful “birth control” was abortion.

          Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women of my mother’s and my generation who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

(concluded June 3)

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Abortion Ban Redux

          Her mother told her, “I had an abortion after you because you were such a terrible child!” Michelle Zauner in Crying in H Mart, a marvelous memoir, writes, “I knew there was no way I was truly to blame for the abortion. More than anything, I was just shocked she had withheld something so monumental.”

          I know women who have had abortions. You do, too, even if you are not aware of it, and there is a good chance that you know women who had illegal abortions, as I do. Many women, however, do not mention their abortions, as Michelle’s mother did not until she had that pique of anger. Too often when we learn much after the event that a woman terminated a pregnancy, we conclude that she kept it a secret because she was ashamed of her action. Instead, as with many things in all our lives, we should see that it was a private decision—it involved her right to privacy–and she has every right not to divulge her action to others. Most people are not ashamed of having had sex. Most do not divulge the details far and wide. These events are private actions, and a woman has the right when, where, or if to discuss them. The passage in Crying in H Mart, however, had me thinking about anovel and another memoir from earlier times that told us, whether we realize it or not, abortion has been an important part of our history.

          Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were apparently not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot, a working-class New York City woman, does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

          Even though it is against the law, she gets a purported miscarriage-inducing concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

          Dot and her husband Eddie are constrained from talking freely about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

          Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in a different way from the way we use the term now, that procedure is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

          Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about childbirth and abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

          Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

          I have not seen many references to Viña Delmar, who not long after Bad Girl, became a screenwriter, but she makes a cameo appearance in the 1935 noir novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. The novel’s setting is a marathon dance held in a hall built out over the Pacific. As the marathon goes on, Hollywood personalities attend. One night the personality to fire the starter’s pistol for the brutal “derby,” where the couples race around an oval painted on the floor with the last couple being eliminated from the competition, is Miss Delmar. Rocky, the emcee, played by Gig Young in the movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”—it is hard to say which is better, or more depressing, the movie or the book—explains, “Miss Delmar, is a famous Hollywood author and novelist.” I am not sure why Viña, of all the possibilities was plunked down in this book, but it could have been an homage to Bad Girl. Both books, written less than a decade apart, explore, with sensitive understanding, the difficulties of lower-class life in the 1920s and 1930s. Abortion is at the core of Bad Girl and is an undercurrent in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Early on in McCoy’s book, Gloria, played by Jane Fonda in the movie, urges a fellow competitor who is pregnant to get an abortion. At the book’s end, Gloria worries that she is pregnant by Rocky, and she does not want a child. “Suppose I do have a kid?” she said. “You know what it’ll grow up to be, don’t you, just like us.” The narrator, her dance partner says to himself, “She’s right; she’s exactly right. It’ll grow up to be just like us–.”

(continued June 1)

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The Worst of Times? The Indiana Pope, Fluoride, Daniels, and Wilmington (concluded)

          America has been fueled by conspiracies throughout its history, many concerning race. And its government has always been populated with racists. Recently, many of us learned what we had not been taught before, the racism of Woodrow Wilson. But let’s consider the lesser-known Josephus Daniels. I first learned about him in biographies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Daniels was Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and FDR served as his Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The two became friends, and when he became President, Roosevelt appointed Daniels to be ambassador to Mexico, a position he filled from 1933 to 1941. These biographies told me that Daniels for decades at the end of the nineteenth century controlled and edited the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer. He held progressive political positions, supporting public schools and public works, seeking more regulation of trusts and railroads, supporting prohibition and women’s suffrage. However, I don’t remember those books telling me that Daniels was a vehement racist and white supremacist. He maintained that America’s greatest mistake was to give Blacks the vote, and his newspaper published vicious editorials, letters, articles, and cartoons about what was labeled the “horrors of negro rule.” Through his newspaper and personal contacts, he was a promotor of a successful overthrow of a validly elected American government, what has been called the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. Yes, this country has had precursors to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Wilmington was one.

          The oppression of the Jim Crow laws had not yet descended upon North Carolina in the 1890s, but economic disparities had. A populist party with an emphasis on the needs of poor whites allied with the biracial Republican party to form Fusionist slates that won statewide offices during that decade. Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina, was majority Black, and Blacks held political offices in a biracial government. Moreover, they held economic power by being successful in many professions and by owning butcher shops, restaurants, carpentry businesses, and a newspaper.

          To regain its ascendance, the statewide Democratic party, with Josephus Daniels as one of its leaders, consciously used white supremacist rhetoric, leaning heavily on the unfounded fear of rapes of white women by Blacks. Finding this propaganda insufficient, a NC Democratic official said, “We cannot outnumber the negroes, and so we must outcheat, outcount or outshoot them!” Blacks had to be either frightened away from the polls or be forcibly resisted when they tried to vote. And in the 1898 elections for statewide office, the Democrats were successful—perhaps, many thought, with the aid of stuffed ballot boxes—in removing the integrated Fusionists. Local officials, however, were not part of this election, and the biracial government of Wilmington remained.

          A self-appointed committee of nine white men who were not happy with such a government issued a manifesto telling the Wilmington elected officials to leave and insisting further that if Blacks were not going to be servile to whites in the future, they, too, should depart. Next day, not seeing the demanded exodus, up to a thousand whites exercised what today would be called their Second Amendment rights by arming themselves, not just with rifles, pistols, and shotguns, but also with a gatling gun. Accurate records of the ensuing carnage were not kept, but the estimates of Blacks killed go from 60 up to 300. The rampaging whites installed their own unelected government officials.

          Americans often profess a belief in democracy and elections, but in Wilmington a duly elected government was violently overthrown and replaced without any voting. The slaughter was the coup. Then came the revolution. The white insurrections recognized that without further steps, they might face a biracial government again. After the 1898 election, the white supremacist government gave North Carolina voting officials, who of course would be white, broad discretion in deciding who was eligible to vote. They could ask any “material” question on identity and qualifications. Legislators advocated for a poll tax and literacy test, but others pointed out that these devices could also prevent whites from voting. North Carolina then adopted the “grandfather clause” that exempted those who had voted before 1867 or whose father or grandfather had voted before 1867 from a poll tax or literacy test. In 1868, 80,000 blacks were registered to vote; by 1900, it was 15,000, and “perhaps half of them were able to vote.” By 1906, about 6,100 North Carolina Blacks were registered to vote.

          The Wilmington Insurrection pioneered a formula that would be used throughout the South: deny black citizens the vote, first through terror and then by legislation. And even when the Supreme Court did rule in 1915 that the grandfather clause violated the Fifteenth Amendment, the South found other ways to suppress the Black vote.

          Although I consider myself reasonably well versed in American history, I had not heard of the Wilmington Insurrection until recently. For those who want to learn more, I recommend David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (2020). Zucchino goes on to point out that Blacks in North Carolina did not vote after 1898 in significant numbers until after Voting Rights Act of 1965.

          However, NC Republicans in 2012 started collecting data on such things as how many Blacks did not have a driver’s license; how many used early voting hours; how many voted on Sundays. A voter identification law was thwarted by the preclearance provision of Voting Rights Act, but in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the democratically enacted Voting Rights Act, and North Carolina immediately enacted a voter ID law, which is now enshrined in the state constitution. The crazy, conspiratorial actions of today follow the steps taken in 1898 in Wilmington.

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The Worst of Times? The Indiana Pope, Fluoride, Daniels, and Wilmington

          Does anyone think it is the best of times? Many of my friends seem to think it is the worst of times. They refer to the Big Lie claims of a stolen election, the insurrection of January 6, 2021, trying to prevent the consequences of a valid election, conspiracy theories from pedophilia to the great replacement, to racists in office, and so on. They believe that the internet and social media have made America’s worst tendencies worse and that they will continue to spread misinformation, hate, and divisiveness among us. My pessimism about America may not be as great as my friends’, not, however, because I don’t share their feelings, but because I realize that racial hate and violence, attacks on our elections, and dangerous conspiracy theories have been imbedded in this country from its beginnings. American exceptionalism has always contained a heavy dose of craziness.

          Long before the internet and social media, this country was crawling with controversies. Looking back many of them seem comical. But many weren’t. They were taken seriously. Many harmed individuals and families. Many harmed the country. A few examples. Consider North Manchester, Indiana.

          The 1920s saw an extensive resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. We may think of the Klan today as a group of anti-Black organizations, and racism has always been a dominant ideology of the KKK, but a hundred years ago, the Klan also heavily featured antisemitism and anti-Catholicism. The anti-Catholicism was a component of an anti-immigrant animus. The Klan followed a Great Replacement theory. Native-born whites were being replaced by dark immigrants from Southern Europe who held a foreign, dangerous, and anti-Christian ideology, that is, Roman Catholicism, and of course, the leader of this Devil’s brigade, and therefore, the figure for reviling, was the Pope. The politics of many northern states were heavily influenced by anti-Catholicism, including attempts to ban Catholic parochial schools. Bizarre conspiracy theories were rampant, including one that affected North Manchester, then and now a small town in north central Indiana.

          The 2,700 residents of North Manchester in 1923 saw much Klan activity including a cross burning in February that apparently gave concern only because it was windy that night, and a fire might have spread from the oil-saturated burlap that covered the twenty-foot construction of two-by-four timbers. In April, the local newspaper reported a talk by Reverend Blair to a “large audience,” who explained that the Klan was founded in the South during Reconstruction “when the negroes, controlled by unscrupulous white men, were creating terrorism.” He said that the Klan had been recently reorganized and it was now “composed of American-born Protestant citizens to combat existing evils in the U.S. The Klan never took the law into its own hands, but that it obtained evidence and then turned that information over to the proper authorities.”

          A Klan parade in May clogged the roads, and the North Manchesterites saw 129 hooded people participate. In September, 2,500 people attended a Klan picnic and heard Klan speakers.

          And during these times, a Klan lecturer warned that the arch-villain, the Pope, was coming on the morning train to Chicago the next day. To protect the native-born Protestants who were exceptional defenders of the country, a thousand people met the train and confronted the one person who disembarked. That man spent an uncomfortable half-hour and finally convinced the concerned citizens that he was not the Pope in disguise but only a corset salesman. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side the Klan acolytes put him on the next train out of town. (See Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan by David Mark Chalmers.) No one was hurt although one corset salesman had to have been terrified and could not do his job, but this craziness was a mere sliver of what affected the country.

          A different conspiracy theory affected my hometown while I was growing up. In the 1940s, scientists learned that fluoride could help prevent tooth decay. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has not been a national leader in many things, but according to the Sheboygan Water Utility Company, in 1946 it became the first water company in Wisconsin and the third in the country to fluoridate its water supply. I drank that water from infancy and do have good teeth. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, far right politicians maintained that fluoridation was a plot to impose a communist regime in this country by sapping the brainpower and strength of a generation of kids. I would explain the logic behind this movement, but I was mystified by it then, and I still am. Even as a pre-teen, I thought that if the communists sought to take over this country by targeting Sheboygan, then those Bolsheviks were a long way away from dominating the world. But the spread of this paranoia had significant success as referendums around the country defeated fluoridated water, and it was not until the 1990s that most of the country had the benefits that it brings.

          We tend to forget now how often the communist label was spread to oppose progress. Rachel Carson writing about imminent ecological damage was a tool of the communists. Martin Luther King, Jr., if not an actual communist, was a dupe of them. The National Council of Churches had communistic tendencies. Medicare is communism. Teachers teaching anything that a red-blooded American might object to was a communist. Rock ‘n roll fostered communism. And so on. The right wing in the era of McCarthyism and beyond trotted out fears of a giant communist conspiracy again and again with as much basis as the Big Lie today, and many individuals and this country suffered because of it. Conservatives then and now could not tell the difference between radicalism to be feared and an idea.

(concluded May 27)