Monthly Archives: August 2020

Coronavirus

Epidemic, Onondaga, 1918.

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How did the “Spanish Flu” epidemic that hit the United States in 1918 affect the Onondaga Nation? I cannot tell for sure, but going through the census records kept by the Interior Department and the State of New York has given me some ideas.

We know that the epidemic did great damage in Native American communities. One scholar estimated that more than 6200 Native peoples died from influenza in 1918, 2% of the total Native American population. The Seneca Jesse Cornplanter returned home from his service overseas during the first World War to learn that his parents, sister, brother-in-law, and two children had died. Joaqlin Estus’s piece in Indian Country Today from last February highlights some of the massive desolation, with a particular focus on Alaska Native communities. Estus mentions Harold Napoleon’s Yuuyaraq, one of the most powerful and important indigenous assessments of what the epidemic meant. I have assigned it to my students, and I encourage you to consider it as well.

In 1918 418 Onondagas lived on the Nation Territory located a bit to the south of Syracuse, New York. Another 128 Oneidas lived on the reservation. Between July 1, 1918 and June 30, 1919, nine Onondagas and seven Oneidas died. Some, like Mary Jones, were elderly, and some were very young, like Eliza Homer’s baby boy. Two had attended Carlisle. Jerry Homer I have written about on this blog in the past when I knew less about him. Eva Waterman was a popular rebel at the Boarding School, expelled for her behavior. She was a talented student, but O. H. Lipps, the school’s superintendent, wrote to Eva’s mother in 1913 to tell her that “because of continued misconduct your daughter Eva Waterman, will be returned to you tomorrow. Her influence for the bad,” Lipps continued, “is so great that I deem it advisable to separate her from the rest of our girls.” He said he was sorry that he had to do this. She was, according to one report of her outing, “impudent at times.” She had a smart mouth, and she made the other students laugh. She had influence. In a letter from “Behind the Bars” to “Dearest,” undated, Eva wrote from one of her outings to a friend back at Carlisle. She missed her friend, and she missed the school. She said that it was good to receive a loving letter from her because “the only kind I hear is these coarse, hoggish, indigestible commands.” A Carlisle investigator, looking into Eva’s complaints about one of her outing situations, found that she spent her time lying around in the hammock, playing croquet, and reading. She was impudent. She had little interest in farm work and she ran away. To me, she sounds like a teenager, a kid, who refused to take the adults around her seriously. But she needed to be broken. One of the matrons at Carlisle suggested that for Eva “all privileges might be taken away and work all day in the laundry might be required for a certain length of time and if possible she should be prevented from communicating with the girls and making herself a heroine instead of a failure.” It did not work and she was sent home. She spent some time living in Syracuse, and at other times she lived on the Nation Territory. She was still a young woman when she died.

The census records do not tell us the causes of death for these individuals. It is worthy of note that during this twelve-month period which contained the peaks of the influenza epidemic fewer people died than during the previous year. From July of 1917 until June 30 1918, twelve Onondagas and 9 Oneidas died. From July of 1916 to the end of June in 1917 thirteen Onondagas and three Oneidas died.

The evidence suggests that a fourth wave of the Spanish Flu hit New York City and other locations around the country early in 1920. And between July 1 1919 and June 30 1920, nineteen Onondagas and four Oneidas died. Some of the relatively large number of Onondagas who died had lived long lives. Joshua Pierce was in his mid-90s. Mary BigBear and Abner Printup both had been born in 1836. Others were struck down in middle age. Nine of the Onondagas who died were under thirty years old. Lavina Hill and Lena Jacobs both were around five years old. David George and the “Baby Isaacs” were just one. Bernice Jacobs, George Archie Logan, and Florence Tallchief all were teenagers.

Other diseases, or accidents, could have killed people. Life could be fragile in the early twentieth century. Death could strike suddenly. Tuberculosis was a steady enemy of Indigenous peoples’ health. There is much we cannot know, but the leap in the number of Onondaga deaths between 1918-19 and 1919-20 is striking. Nearly twenty people dying in a community of a bit more than 400 would have been felt acutely, especially with the deaths of so many young people who should have had so many more years to live. These deaths, however, did not draw the attention of local journalist or the legions of judgmental observers who criticized the Onondagas for their backwardness and continued embrace of “paganism.” And they would have gone unnoticed by me had I not devoted the past month to reading through these figures. This is the sort of work we must do, even if it is only a start. Each death, in a community where there were no strangers, would have been a blow, with waves of grief that must have swept throughout the small community from the very young to the very old.

What’s it like to live in a community in which every single person in it feels the same grief at the same time? I have thought about this question a lot as I looked through these records. I have thought about it as well when I read the Jesuits’ 17th century descriptions of the epidemics that swept through Iroquoia, cutting jagged holes in the fabric of everyday life. Whether Spanish Flu, consumption, suicide or accident, or in our own time killer cops, the coronavirus, or colon cancer, these historical moments may lead some of us towards greater empathy. It is a difficult journey, and one we need to make.

Current Events

Lezmond Mitchell is Dead

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Last night officials at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute executed Lezmond Mitchell for a brutal crime committed half his lifetime ago.  The 38-year-old was the only Native American on federal death row, and the fourth person killed by the government since the Trump Administration resumed executions after a hiatus of nearly two decades.

            Mitchell was convicted of a truly horrifying double homicide.  In 2001, according to the New York Times, Mitchell and three others “plotted to carjack a vehicle to use in an armed robbery. Mr. Mitchell and Johnny Orsinger, his 16-year-old accomplice, killed Alyce Slim and her granddaughter, before decapitating them and disposing of the bodies in a shallow hole.  Three days later, Mr. Mitchell and two others robbed a trading post on the Navajo Reservation, using Mrs. Slim’s pickup truck.”

            There are problems with this case.  Because both Mitchell and his victim were Navajos, the crime fell under federal jurisdiction because of the 1885 Major Crimes Act, an important piece of legislation that played a role as well in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McGirt. Mitchell was arrested and held in a tribal jail for nearly a month. Without an attorney present, FBI agents interrogated him.  They brought him before the court only after he had confessed. Mitchell’s confession was never recorded and in his only recorded statement, said that he had no direct role in the slayings. The jury also learned little of Mitchell’s tragic life story: the horrors of intergenerational trauma, drug abuse, and mental illness. Only one Navajo sat on the jury.

            Now here is where things get complicated.  As the New York Times put it, “the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 allowed tribes to opt in to the death penalty, and nearly all—including the Navajo Nation—have opted out. But Mr. Mitchell was convicted of a federal crime to which the tribal option did not apply, ‘carjacking resulting in death.’”  The federal prosecutors understood that Mitchell’s accomplice was the primary assailant, but he was 16, and ineligible for capital punishment.  Mitchell, just twenty, took the bulk of the blame and faced execution if convicted. Had he been tried for murder, he could not have been executed; the carjacking charge was a federal government workaround by a Justice Department that wanted to prosecute a capital crime.  Navajo officials repeatedly called upon the government to commute Mitchell’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, as the government had done in twenty other murder cases.

            Lezmond Mitchell is dead.  As Carl Slater, a delegate to the Navajo Nation Council put it in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, “this case remains the only time in the history of the modern death penalty that the federal government has sought capital punishment over tribal objection for a crime committed on tribal land.”  This judicial murder was a violation of the government’s promises to Native peoples under the Federal Death Penalty Act. It was, as Slater pointed out, a “grave injustice.” It is also proof that the federal government is a large and mighty beast, and that steps forward like the decision in McGirt are nearly always followed by steps backward. 

            The Major Crimes Act of 1885 amounted to the imposition of colonial control over native nations.  When the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality a year later, it acknowledged that the Constitution contained no language granting to the United States the power to prosecute crimes between Indians committed on the lands of a Native nation.  As a result, it justified this action on the basis of federal strength and the relative weakness of Native peoples.  Echoing the language of John Marshall’s decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Court held that “these Indian tribes are the wards of the nation.

These Indian tribes are wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States. Dependent largely for their daily food. Dependent for their political rights. They owe no allegiance to the States, and receive from them no protection. Because of local ill feeling, the people of the States where they are found are often their deadliest enemies. From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due t the course of dealing of the Federal Government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power.

The 1994 act tempered federal power over Native nations when it came to the imposition of penalties for Major Crimes. It accorded Native nations the power to determine who would face capital punishment for crimes committed on Indian reservations. It was a pledge that tribes, in this very constrained circumstance, could choose to follow their own values.  In Lezond Mitchell’s case, the Federal Government turned its back on that promise.

Current Events

The Republican Party’s View of American History is Stupid and Dangerous

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The list of the Republican National Committee’s resolutions and the bullet-point list of goals the Trump Administration has set for its second term show that the Republican Party is as obsessed with the teaching of American history as at any time since Rush Limbaugh began decrying the National History Standards back during Clinton’s first term. It is more racist now than it was then.

            Limbaugh had read Lynne Cheney’s infamous piece in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the Standards, in which she had argued that the National Center for History in the Schools’ effort to create a guidebook for teaching American history was “politically correct.” It left out the Founding Fathers, she claimed falsely, and it celebrated the stories of minorities and women and would leave students with a cynical and pessimistic view of their Nation’s history.

            Acting on this cue, Limbaugh took an American history textbook on his show (Yes! He had a television show!) and proceeded to tear the pages out of the book to demonstrate the sort of censorship “liberals” were imposing on American children. It was brainwashing, he charged, and it was dangerous.

            These sorts of reactions to the teaching of history are commonplace. Teaching history is always political. There has always existed a tension between history as civic education (the production of patriotic and law-abiding citizens) and history as academic discipline (the critical study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures).

            Now the target is not the National History Standards but the 1619 Project, and all it represents to the fever-dream imagination of the Republican Right. You can see this reaction in the efforts of Republican Senator (and 2024 GOP Presidential candidate) Tom Cotton, who late in July introduced his “Saving American History Act of 2020.”  In it, he proposed “that the true date of America’s founding is July 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress,” and that “the self-evident truths set forth by that Declaration are the fundamental principles upon which America was founded.”

            Many Americans who know little of their nation’s history would have agreed with Cotton. But Cotton was worried nonetheless.  He warned that “an activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration but rather on slavery and oppression.” In the aftermath of the murder of an African-American man by four Minneapolis police officers, protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement had agitated successfully for the removal of monuments to Confederate “heroes” and other racists, slaveowners, and secessionists. Earlier Cotton had called for the use of American military forces to violently remove these almost entirely non-violent protesters, a suggestion the President evidently liked.

            But now Cotton was taking aim at the 1619 Project. It had appeared in the New York Times a year before he introduced his legislation. Cotton’s resolution required that no federal funding be provided to public schools that used or taught any of the 1619 Project materials.  Cotton asserted that the 1619 Project was a “racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the principles upon which it was founded.” It must be suppressed. It must never be taught to children.

            So we should not be surprised that the Republican National Committee last month waded into the controversy by passing a resolution “to conserve history and combat prejudice—Christopher Columbus.”  The Genoese explorer was, the resolution read, “a courageous, determined, faithful man of vision, whose voyages to the Americas linked two continents…and ultimately laid the foundations for the birth of the United States of America.”  Columbus’s voyage, part of “the expansion of Western Civilization, and the establishment of the United States, has led to an ever-improving free and equal society benefitting all Americans.” Therefore, the RNC resolved to encourage “public educational institutions to celebrate Columbus’s unparalleled contributions to human connectedness; his role in the creation of America, and his importance as a figurehead for Americans facing anti-Italian and anti-Catholic prejudice.”

            The Republican National Committee also approved a resolution denouncing the “threats to the First Amendment,” which it believed had escalated “in the wake of the Chinese Coronavirus outbreak.”  Among these threats was that “Freedom of Speech” was “trampled on daily with the notion of political correctness; the plan to eliminate ‘hate speech’; and the promotion of a ‘cancel culture,’ which has grown into an erasing of history, encouraging lawlessness, and violating the free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”

            That probably sounds a bit over the top in comparison with the relatively sparse language of President Trump’s fifty-point list of goals for his second term.  One of these is to “teach American Exceptionalism.”

            But what that means is quite simple.  The President may be a clown, but he is still dangerous. 

            If you argue, as nearly every historian does, that enslavement was central to the growth and development of the United States, that the Constitution as an instrument of governance protected the institution of slavery and hard-wired it for control by slavers, you are anathema to today’s Republican Party. If you assert that this country could not have developed in the way that it did without a systematic program of Native American dispossession, your loyalty is suspect.  If anyone has ever told you that what you have written or said is “politically correct,” what they are really trying to do is dismiss your hard work without doing the heavy lifting required to counter the evidence upon which you built it.

            Republicans have committed themselves in 2020 to writing into textbooks and curricula the biggest lie in American history, a self-serving and propagandistic depiction of the nation’s history that either out of ignorance or ideology denies the role of slavery and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in its founding.

            This entire administration, for the past four years, has shown its incapacity for telling the truth.  Lie after lie, it is exhausting.  Its brazen corruption, its monumental incompetence—I feel like it grinds me down at times.  And now, they want to teach and preach that Columbus was brave and pure, that slavery was an aberrant flaw rather than the absolute foundation, and that this country was founded on principles of liberty and equality it has never managed to live up to.  I write these words in the aftermath of yet another police shooting, this time in Kenosha, where a white officer fired seven shots at point-blank range into the back of a young African-American man in front of his three children. Racism lies at the heart of this republic’s story.  You cannot deny that.  It lies at the core of the reasons why Donald Trump became president in the first place.  And in its diseased interpretations of the American past, it lies so very close to the heart of today’s Republican Party.

Current Events

Goodbye, Columbus

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This past Thursday, the Onondaga Nation issued a statement on the notorious statue of Christopher Columbus located in Columbus Circle in downtown Syracuse. They did so at the invitation of a Syracuse Inter-Faith Commission, and as a contribution to the 23-member panel that will issue recommendations to the mayor about what to do by the end of the summer. The Onondaga Nation’s statement is worth your time and attention.

The Nation expressed their hope that “through diplomacy, discussion, and open minds, these discussions will lead to a positive solution for the future of Syracuse with inclusion for all people to live in peace as neighbors and brothers.” They looked forward to “an outcome that will encourage peace, understanding, and the united brotherhood exemplifying the foundation of cooperation, peace, and equality for the generations yet to come.” They reminded Syracusans that the city stood in the heart of what was once their homeland, the site of the central council fire of the Haudenosaunee, and that the Onondaga Nation “carries a great responsibility in the continued existence of our sovereign government.” The Nation’s “traditional teachings are morally dignified and highly principled in peace and democracy and our way of life means being ever thankful for the many gifts of our mother earth. We are,” the statement reads, “people culturally mandated to respectfully live as caretakers of Mother Earth and as equals to all beings within the natural realm.” Anyone who knows anything about the history of Syracuse knows that the City and its people have seldom lived up to these ideals.

The statement struck a conciliatory and diplomatic tone in addressing the City’s Italian-American community, which has raised money to keep the Columbus statue right where it is.

We fully understand the wishes of the Italian American community to honor their heritage, but it is burdensome for the people of Onondaga to see Christopher Columbus memorialized with a statue.   Within our lands and hearts, finding equality and peace is difficult knowing the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign. Our own monuments, beautiful lakes, streams, rivers, and the earth itself, has suffered greatly as a direct result principle of the Doctrine of Discovery to which Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish crown.

The power of the pen favors the writers of history. In truth, what was “discovered” on this continent we know as Turtle Island were well established independent nations of indigenous peoples.  People living within their respected ways of life in accordance with their individual cultures. As indigenous people, we are taught of the exploits of Columbus while our own history was being unheard, misunderstood, and often erased.

The Onondagas thought it best that the statue be removed. The space it occupies might be repurposed to better ends.

At this crucial time in our joint history with the need for unity and compassion at hand, we ask ourselves is honoring the heritage of the Columbus righteous and just? Should we continue to ignore all the different peoples who suffered enumerable atrocities? We think not. We know we are not responsible for the transgressions of our ancestors, but it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. The Onondaga Nation does not wish anyone’s culture or heritage to be affronted in the manner ours have suffered; but to find a way to allow the space currently occupied by the Columbus statue to be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.

The statement concludes with a call to find a good mind, to come together and find a consensus and a solution “in which all the peoples who call Syracuse home may find a way to continue to honor each other’s heritage and cultures.”

There is a lot going on in this document. Columbus appears in it as both myth and symbol, as something more than a historical figure. I have written about this “mythical Columbus,” and the functions these myths serve, on this blog in the past. For Italian-Americans Columbus serves as a symbol of freedom and a hero whose experience shows that Italians are important in American history, and that Italians were present at the very creation of the American Nation. In reality, we know that Columbus was an aggressive slaver who never set foot in North America. For Native peoples, Columbus is made to stand in for all the burdens suffered by Indigenous peoples. To the Onondagas’ charge that Columbus was responsible for “the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign,” a historian might argue that Columbus never came close to the Longhouse. He did nothing to you, and neither to “the lakes, streams, rivers, and to the earth himself.” Those who followed him did loads of damage, but that is a longer and more complicated story. “The Doctrine of Discovery,” which according to the Onondaga Nation Statement “Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish Crown,” was as much a justification for colonization drawn up centuries later than it was license for empire: Indigenous peoples paid no attention to papal bulls and colonial charters, and the European “Ceremonies of Possession,” as historian Patrica Seed called them, were performed for other Europeans, not native peoples. The work of colonization was brutal and violent, but the process in North America especially was a remarkably unintellectual process. The Doctrine of Discovery mattered little on the ground in the Americas, where Native peoples retained the power to ignore it. Indeed one can find many instances of Haudenosaunee orators dressing down Europeans and their pretentious claims to discovery and conquest.

But there is a problem with these arguments. One of the things that has struck me as I have worked on a history of the Onondaga Nation is the Nation’s willingness and ability to speak for Indigenous America writ large, and to have Native North America listen. The Onondagas always have carried more influence than their relatively small numbers would lead one to believe. And for the Onondagas and their allies, the problem with the Columbus statue in Syracuse is precisely the things he has come to symbolize for all Indigenous peoples: the well-documented and undeniable brutality of European colonization, and a campaign erasure, violence, and exploitation that has lasted centuries, from 1492 to the present. With its feet on the heads of Indigenous peoples with Plains Indian Headdresses, and with its friezes depicting Columbus as both hero and conqueror, the statue is a grotesque and graphic celebration of five hundred years’ of genocide, and an white-washing of the viciousness of the Columbian Encounter in the Caribbean.

The Onondagas would like to see the statue removed. They are not alone in this. But they spoke to the people of Syracuse as neighbors. They acknowledged the position of the city’s Italian-American community. But in terms similar to what has been done with the Skä۰noñh Great Law of Peace Center, which repurposed an old living-history museum representing the Jesuits called Ste. Marie Among the Iroquois, the Onondagas spoke of working together in a unified manner to give new meaning to the space occupied by the Columbus statue, to allow it to “be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.”

When the Onondagas filed their “land rights action” more than fifteen years ago, they stated their wish to “bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time.” At a time when groups like Upstate Citizens for Equality were ginning up white peoples’ fears of being dispossessed by Native Americans in Cayuga and Oneida territory, the Nation made clear that it wanted justice and an acknowledgment of their rights to the lands taken in violation of United States law, but that “we will not displace any of our neighbors—the Onondaga know all too well the pain of being forced to leave our homes and do not wish that on anyone.”

There is a long history informing the Onondaga Nation statement. In its demonstration of the Nation’s leaders’ diplomatic skill, and the tactfulness with which the Nation’s leaders assert their will, and in its call for cooperatively defining and sharing space, it echoes themes that run throughout the long history of the Onondaga Nation, and especially in its relations to the non-Indigenous community of what has become over time Central New York. In the relationship between Syracuse and the Onondagas over many, many years, the Onondagas have often been been better neighbors to the City than the City has been to them. The City has expressed a willingness to listen, but acting on what it hears might be difficult. There are many who want the statue preserved. Let’s hope that the Mayor’s commission approaches its work with a good mind, and a desire to be good neighbors to the Onondaga Nation.

Current Events

The Saga of Dr. Jesse Goldberg

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Jesse Goldberg is a graduate of the institution where I teach, SUNY-Geneseo.  Though I never taught him, I have followed his career on Twitter largely because he was spoken of so highly by a number of my colleagues.  I have followed closely as well the recent controversy surrounding some of Dr. Goldberg’s tweets and the craven response of Auburn University, where he recently signed a one-year contract to teach.

            Dr. Goldberg wrote on Twitter, “F*ck every single cop. Every single one.”  He wrote that “the only ethical choice for any cop at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit. The police do not protect people. They protect capital. They are instruments of violence on behalf of capital.” 

            Strong words, indeed, but let’s not be too precious about this.  You have heard this rhetoric during the back-and-forths on cable news, and you have seen “FTP” and “ACAB” and more written on walls on TV and quite likely in your hometown. Nonetheless, the right-wing reaction was predictable.  The College Fix and similar sites went nuts.  Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks called for Dr. Goldberg’s firing.  Auburn’s administration clutched their collective pearls, shrieked “Oh My God!” and promised to weigh their available options in the face of such objectionable speech.

I have been in Dr. Goldberg’s shoes, though when I had this experience the internet was in its infancy, social media did not exist, and Montana, where I taught, was something of a closed circuit which by its nature contained the reach of the controversy.  People on cell phones across the world could not read about what I had said and contact me immediately. Dr. Goldberg was not so lucky. He had it a million times worse.

            I began teaching in Montana in the fall of 1994, right out of graduate school.  That December, the National Center for History in the Schools published the National History Standards.  I learned about them after stumbling across Lynne Cheney’s famous editorial in the Wall Street Journal. I saw the debate on CNN’s “Firing Line,” and thought I would read them for myself.  Most of my students aspired to be teachers, and it struck me as the responsible thing to do.

            I found nothing to object to in the Standards, and I said so in an editorial that appeared in the Billings Gazette. I argued the criticisms of the Standards came from those who objected to students learning about the history of BIPOC, Women, and non-elite Americans.  I asserted that those who objected to the Standards did not argue in good faith.

            I liked writing for the newspaper. More people would read one of my opinion pieces than any book I might write, it seemed, so a couple of weeks after the Oklahoma City Bombing, I wrote another one. There was at the time a lot of attention paid to Right-Wing militia groups like those to which Timothy McVeigh belonged.  I wrote that these groups certainly were a threat, but I asked readers to consider that “the threat these marginalized groups pose may…pale in comparison when weighed against the recent explosions of discriminatory legislation and racially charged public discourse” taking place in Congress and in state halls across the country.

            Both of these pieces pissed off a lot of people. I got mail at my home address, calling names and making threats.  Menacing phone calls. It was unnerving.

           

I taught at the time in a deeply dysfunctional department. There was the angry historian of Revolutionary France, a Harvard Ph.D, who seethed with resentment.  He had been denied tenure at the University of Rochester and, I believe, Case Western, and felt he deserved better than an open-admissions college in eastern Montana. Perhaps if he had written more and spent less time hanging around in the dorm lobbies, his career might have been different.  Then there was the Missouri-Synod Lutheran Pastor, who said that being a history professor was the “best part time job in the world.”  He reminded me of that “Joe Isuzu” guy from the old TV commercials. The department chair was an Iraqi Seventh-Day Adventist who believed, firmly, that African Americans and Native Americans came to Billings only because it was easier to commit crimes in the city than it was wherever they came from.  And there was a self-proclaimed expert on lynching, who told me that he thought the Willy Horton advertisement was a perfectly reasonable attack on Michael Dukakis. When I asked him why Lee Atwater, the ad’s creator, apologized for it on his deathbed, I received no answer.  Probably should not have asked that question.

            Two of these guys—the historians of Revolutionary France and the expert on lynching—took my articles personally.  They said that in my editorials I had, in effect, called them racists.  I hadn’t, but perceptions, you know?  At MSU-B, even though I was fortunate to be on the tenure track, my contract was renewed each year.  And every year, the Missouri-Synod pastor and the department chair voted to keep me.  Every year, the student representative on the committee voted to keep me.  And the other two voted to fire me.  Each of the four years I was there.

            I am close to my dissertation director. We still talk regularly.  I asked him for advice.  He wrote me a letter and said that I should remember that for the Old School, new professors should be like the children of long ago: seen and not heard.  I asked my dad for advice. He said “don’t get in a pissing contest with these guys.”  He may have used some word other than “guys,” but I cannot remember. I was never happy in Billings, and the only thing that solved the problem was to leave.  After I signed my book contract, I was hired in New York, and I never looked back.

I hear commentary all the time from people on the right denouncing what they call “cancel culture.”  Their laments were embodied in the resolution recently announced by 2024 GOP Presidential Candidate Tom Cotton and two of his colleagues that calls for Congress to protect the “First Amendment rights of students at public universities from unconstitutional speech codes and so-called free speech zones.”

            I am willing to concede that there are in my field closed-minded and dogmatic people.  That is true for any field.  Those who challenge certain orthodoxies might expect to be engaged in angry and urgent debate. Perhaps they will be “unfriended” on Facebook or no longer followed on Twitter.  Perhaps one of their critics will show their anger as “Reader No. 2” when they submit their work for publication.  THERE IS NOTHING NEW ABOUT THIS. CHALLENGING ORTHODOXIES ALWAYS PRODUCES A REACTION. It comes with the territory and, as my dad used to say in another line I grew up with, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

            What Dr. Goldberg faced is significantly different.  Dr. Goldberg received death threats, and threats of violence.  Social media makes it easier for those so inclined to spread terror, and no country makes it so easy for those who hate to do evil.

            I have had profound disagreements with colleagues in my field. If you are a professor, it is likely that you have, too. No one in academia has ever threatened to kill me or hurt my children. Nobody at an academic conference has listened to what I said, or read what I wrote, and tried to get me fired.  Write an opinion piece on the history of the 2nd Amendment, or pointing out that New York State is built on stolen indigenous land, however, and all hell breaks loose. Repeat the language coursing through American streets in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and your life and career are in danger. Alabama’s Mo Brooks called for the firing of Dr. Goldberg.  This from a representative who has lost no opportunity to debase himself for a President who boasts of his “pussy grabbing,” tells American-born congressional representatives to go back to where they came from, and dismisses those parts of the world where he does not own golf resorts as “Shithole countries.” You want to talk about objectionable and destructive speech? Please. Spare me.

           

Academia is in dire straits right now.  College budgets are broken.  Some schools, I am told, might go under. Others are laying off faculty and staff. Graduate programs, meanwhile, are filled with immensely talented young scholars.  Many of those who hope to pursue careers in academia will never get that chance. Tenure-track jobs are few and far between. The academic job market has long been horrible, but now it is even worse.

            Maybe you dislike what Dr. Goldberg wrote on his Twitter account. Maybe you found it intemperate, impetuous, rash, and unwise. Maybe you find it disturbing, provocative, or objectionable. You are entitled to all those feelings. I do not know what baggage you carry with you that causes you to find Dr. Goldberg so threatening that you need to threaten his already tenuous career. But here’s the thing.  You have no right not to be offended by things people say.  As long as those words do not threaten violence, than hearing them is part of the price you pay for living in a free society. If you disagree, fine, enter into a debate.  Argue. Pose your alternative.  And steel yourself to face some criticism. But that sort of exchange requires a degree of intellectual courage that is getting harder and harder to find every day, especially on the Right.

            Dr. Goldberg survived this. Auburn, seeking perhaps the path of least resistance, said that he would not teach, but that he would hold a research position this year. In support of Tom Cotton’s resolution, Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler said that the proposed legislation will “ensure students on college campuses will be able to express their beliefs without the fear on censorship or retribution.”  For students, this resolution is a solution in need of a problem. The senators are worried about leftists silencing students.  They are chasing phantoms, while ignoring the very real assaults on freedom-of-thought launched by the political right. Whether we like or dislike what Dr. Goldberg wrote, we all should be in agreement that he has the right to say it.