Barack Obama is declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States on Saturday, two days before Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday, not in Chicago, the city where he launched his political career, but in Springfield, the Illinois state capital.
The meaning of Springfield will not be lost on anyone who paid attention in history class. Springfield was Abe Lincoln’s hometown, the frontier settlement-turned-capital where Lincoln started a law practice in 1837 and from which he later launched his own national political career. What better place to roll out the campaign of the first African-American with a realistic shot at becoming president than in the city that gave us the “Great Emancipator”? Whatever Obama may say on Saturday, the mere sight of him among the Lincoln monuments in Springfield — the old statehouse where Lincoln gave his famous “house divided” speech, his home on the corner of Eighth and Jackson, the grave in Oak Ridge Cemetery — will deliver a feel-good message of racial harmony, of white goodwill and black perseverance, that Americans can embrace.
Except, as Obama may know, there’s more to the history of Springfield than Abe Lincoln. There’s the part, for instance, where the whites tried to run the blacks out of town.
Though now largely forgotten, the events and aftermath of the Springfield Race Riot, as it came to be known, are as relevant to the hopes of Obama as is the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.
The year was 1908. It was mid-August and America was in the throes of a very different presidential race. Republican William Howard Taft was running out the clock against perennial Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whom Taft would beat easily in November. The economy had rebounded from a crash in 1907 and was back on a soaring trajectory. The U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet was sailing around the world, the Wright brothers were being hailed as “conquerors of the air,” and Robert Peary had sailed off to discover the North Pole. These were giddy times in America, and booming times in Springfield, which had grown from a country village to a city of 50,000.
The one group untouched by the nation’s prosperity and optimism was African-Americans. Even by the standards of what had come before, and would come later, 1908 was a brutal year for black people in this country. Jim Crow laws had wiped out most of the gains of Reconstruction and a steady campaign of lynching and other forms of physical intimidation kept blacks in near subjugation throughout the South. More recently, and ominously, Northern cities had begun imposing their own brand of Jim Crow. “A few years ago no hotel or restaurant refused Negro guests,” journalist Ray Stannard Baker noted in 1908 after visiting Boston. “Now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.”
And then came August, and Springfield exploded.
The incendiary event was a white woman’s accusation of rape against a black man. The charge would later turn out to be the deception of an unfaithful wife; her boyfriend had beaten her up and she’d used the excuse of a black stranger to explain the bruises. For the moment, though, her lie was taken as gospel truth. On Aug. 14, as local newspapers fanned outrage, several thousand whites descended on the county jail. They demanded that the suspect, a laborer named George Richardson, be delivered to them. What the mob intended to do to Richardson did not, in 1908, require much imagination.
Getting no satisfaction at the county jail, the mob turned its wrath elsewhere. Thousands marched into the black sections of town. “Abe Lincoln brought them to Springfield,” someone shouted, “and we will run them out.” Which is exactly what they attempted to do. Over the next several hours, whites attacked blacks wherever they found them and set fire to dozens of black businesses and homes. Whites who feared their own homes would be accidentally torched nailed white sheets to their doors.
As midnight passed, the mob advanced remorselessly into an area of town known as the Badlands. Coming upon an elderly black man named Harrison West, the rioters beat him severely. Finding a paralyzed man named William Smith, they dragged him from his house and threw him into a patch of weeds.
At 2 a.m., the mob arrived at the home of Scott Burton, a 56-year-old black barber. After firing buckshot at the mob, Burton tried to escape through a side door of his house, but he was overtaken and knocked unconscious. In the light of burning buildings, the mob lynched Burton from a nearby tree.
With daybreak on Saturday, Aug. 15, as Springfield smoldered and state militia poured in by train, some of the city’s 3,000 blacks took refuge in the State Arsenal downtown. Many more fled into the surrounding countryside. Finding nearby towns inhospitable, they camped in the forest and cornfields.
The soldiers tamped down the violence, but only temporarily. Saturday night brought more rioting and burning, and ended with the lynching of an 84-year-old African-American named William Donnegan. A retired cobbler, Donnegan had been friends, long ago, with Abraham Lincoln.
When the white journalist William English Walling arrived in Springfield from Chicago on Sunday, he was stunned by the lack of remorse he encountered among the city’s whites. Even those who had not participated in the pogrom seemed to condone it. Certainly few had intervened to stop it. “Springfield,” Walling would write in a widely circulated left-wing journal, “had no shame.”
Nor apparently did the rest of America. “If these outrages had happened thirty years ago, when memories of Lincoln, Garrison and Wendell Phillips were still fresh,” Walling asked his readers to imagine, “what would not have happened in the North?”
What happened in the North in 1908 was tepid outrage, followed by tenuous explanations, followed quickly by nothing at all. By the time America celebrated the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth on Feb. 12, 1909, the riot had been effectively brushed under the rug. In Springfield, the Great Emancipator’s centennial was celebrated with a feast in the State Arsenal, the same building into which blacks had fled back in August. This time, no blacks were invited.
But there was a silver lining in the dark cloud over Springfield, one that has not been forgotten. Galvanized by the riot, a group of 60 prominent men and women, white and black alike, including Walling, Jane Addams, Ida Wells-Barnett, John Dewey and W.E.B. DuBois, cosigned an open letter, released that same Feb. 12, to protest injustices and violence against African-Americans. The letter became the founding document of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The NAACP, as we now know, went on to become a beacon of hope to African-Americans in the 20th century, even when there was not much reason to hope. It’s in large part thanks to the NAACP that the Civil Rights Act was passed 56 years after the Springfield riot– and that an African-American named Barack Obama has a chance to become the next president of the United States.
As I write I don’t know whether Obama will mention the 1908 riot in his announcement speech. Given that his bid for 2008 rests partly on his appeal as a man who can cross America’s racial divide, I wouldn’t be shocked if he skipped it. Does he really want to dredge up a century-old race riot in the kickoff speech of his campaign?
But here’s hoping he does mention it. Because there is a message in the shameful history of the 1908 riot that is every bit as stirring as memories of Lincoln. The riot reminds us, for one thing, that as far as we still have to go in race relations, we have come a very long way. More broadly, it reminds us that even when things seem to be beyond hope, as they do now in Iraq, for instance, and in New Orleans — and as they did for African-Americans in the early part of the last century — they do sometimes, in some ways, get better.
If Obama can make Americans believe that, he really may be our next president.
In one of the more curious publishing phenomena of the year, “Beowulf,” an epic poem written over a millennium ago — and loathed by high school students ever since — has moved up to No. 8 on the New York Times bestseller list. Meanwhile, over in TV land, the World Wrestling Federation continues its mystifying climb in the ratings. As of two weeks ago, the WWF’s “Raw Is War” program on Monday nights is pulling in 7.7 million viewers, dominating cable in its time slot.
At first glance, “Beowulf” and the WWF don’t seem to have much in common. But closer inspection reveals some startling similarities. Both feature ominously named, testosterone-fueled men who are capable of unlikely and bizarre feats of prowess. Both ostensibly revolve around blood-drenched free-for-alls but, in fact, mainly entail oversize guys boasting and shouting between fights.
Putting aside possible reasons for their convergent popularity, here’s a more pressing question: How would Beowulf do in the ring against one of the WWF’s reigning champs, say, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin? Let’s compare:
The contestants
Beowulf, aka “Prince of the War-Geats”
“Stone Cold” Steve Austin, aka “The Rattlesnake”
Place of birth
Beowulf: Geatland
Stone Cold: Texas
What they wear
Beowulf: Hard-ringed, gold-filigreed chain mail
Stone Cold: Black lace-up boots, black leather vest, black briefs
What the writers say
Beowulf: “The mightiest man on Earth.” (Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winning poet)
Stone Cold: “Stands head and shoulders above the rest.” (Jorge Montenegro, contributor to Wrestling World magazine)
Best finishing move
Beowulf: The “grip of 30″
Stone Cold: The “stunner”
Defining moment
Beowulf: Engaged in an ocean-swimming contest with his childhood friend, Breca. Swam a full week while wearing armor and carrying a sword. Lost the race but survived an onslaught of “sea-brutes” before reaching the coast of Finland.
Stone Cold: Bled profusely and passed out during a “Submission Match” with his archrival, Canadian “Hit Man” Bret Hart. Lost the match but received exuberant cheers of “Austin! Austin!” from the sold-out crowd.
Career highlight
Beowulf: Tussled barehanded with the monster Grendel in the Mead Hall. Used his celebrated “grip of 30″ to rip off Grendel’s arm and throw it into the rafters. Later, tracked Grendel’s mother to her underwater lair and whupped her, too, before lopping off Grendel’s head.
Stone Cold: Smashed Hart over the head with a steel chair on “Raw.” Later, brutalized Hart’s knee with a wrenching “sharpshooter.” Then hid in Hart’s ambulance and attacked again, putting Hit Man out of commission for three months. After that, took on Hart’s brother, Owen, and whupped him, too.
When not engaged in mortal combat
Beowulf: Peacefully rules the Geats for 50 years.
Stone Cold: Guest-stars on “Nash Bridges.”
Best quote
Beowulf: “Hand-to-hand is how it will be, a life-and-death fight with the fiend.”
Stone Cold: “And that’s the bottom line, ’cause Stone Cold says so!”
The verdict
This would be a bruising, no-holds-barred grapple. On the verbal front, the edge goes to the foulmouthed Rattlesnake. His unprintable boasts are legendary. Also, nobody knows what Beowulf is bragging about most of the time. (What are sea-brutes, anyway?) In the ring, the thane’s acclaimed breath-holding abilities will stand him in good stead when the 254-pound beer-swilling Austin sits on his face and corkscrews his left knee. Once the real brawling begins, however, the edge goes to the Geat. That grip spells sheer doom for Stone Cold’s rotator cuff!
Putting aside my own sorry generation for the moment — I’ll get there soon enough — has there ever been a more grating bunch of people than the current crop of 20-somethings? Don’t you just want to smack one sometimes? Of course you do. Don’t be ashamed of that feeling. It’s natural. Let’s talk about it.
Like most disagreeable things in life, negative feelings about 20-somethings should be blamed on the media. Slackers, Gen X, grunge kids — whatever. Far too much ink has been spilled trying to coax a bunch of disgruntled juvies into one package or another. Until recently, it was fairly easy to dismiss all of this misspent type and move on to things that actually mattered, like Marv Albert’s sex life.
But now everything has changed. Now these people are young men and women. And lying in wait under those mopey expressions, it turns out, were the toothy smiles of Internet tycoons. The slackers have backers! They’re mutating into millionaires!
The result: more damn coverage. Not a day passes without another story about a 20-something entrepreneur funded by a 20-something venture capitalist launching an Internet company aimed at the only demographic that matters anymore: 20-somethings. And these dot.com kids aren’t just getting obscenely rich at an obscenely young age; they’re changing the world as we know it. They are “revolutionaries,” as Bob Simon repeatedly referred to them on a recent segment of “60 Minutes II.” Which might be easier to stomach if it didn’t happen to be, quite possibly, true.
I feel your anger.
I am, at 37, no longer in any demographic that matters. Other than the not mattering part, which stings a little, 37 is a fine age. There are even occasions when 37 can seem young, as if the numbers 3 and 7 were some sort of clerical error. You remind yourself of all the great professional athletes who are 37. (Um, Patrick Ewing.) Then you put on an old album by a great defunct band like the Feelies and rock out in the living room until your 3-year-old walks in and tells you to stop acting “stupid.”
I envy 20-somethings, but it’s not their youth or their freedom or their hot little hardbodies that I envy. No, the place from which my rancor pours — the true source of my bile — is their timing. Because, by some inexplicable (and unjust) force of dumb chance or intergalactic intelligence, this generation has landed in its 20s at an especially opportune moment in human history.
The Internet boom of the last few years is one of those seismic shifts societies go through now and then that get put in uppercase letters, like the Dawn of Democracy. It’s nice to be around for such occasions because they make life more interesting. But it is particularly nice to be around and very young.
When you’re young, you have little to lose and much to gain from massive social or economic rearrangements. You have no career to tank, no family to support, fewer promises to keep, fewer wounds to lick. In short, you are in a good position to fully enjoy whatever lunacy is at hand.
Furthermore — and this is important — you’re still cocky enough to imagine yourself a “revolutionary.” So as you sip your single malt amid the warm glow of your Louis Vuitton accessories, you aren’t just one more cutthroat, nest-feathering capitalist — you’re the architect of a better world.
There’s no good word for what I feel for these dot.commies so I made one up: genvy. It means acute envy of a member of one generation for another generation. For a good example of genvy — a case study — see Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” in which anchorman Brokaw heaps praise upon the men and women who spent their youths fighting World War II and saving the world from tyranny. (While Brokaw presumably spent his youth learning to speak in a very deep voice.)
Genvy is what I used to feel for the generation that came of age during the ’60s — which still has to be the finest time ever to have been young. In five or six years, the children of America transformed themselves from clean-cut, church-going virgins into unshorn, drug-addled sex-degenerates. And, like 20-somethings today, they did it all under the pretext that it absolutely mattered.
Now that old feeling is coming back: genvy. (This is the last time I’ll use the word, I swear.) It’s more unpleasant this time around, though, because now I have my own youth for comparison. I’ve seen myself and my peers pass through the gantlet of our 20s. And I am forced to accept that my generation — the generation that came of age in the “go-go ’80s” — is the most luckless and lackluster generation that ever walked the earth.
So I land, at last, upon my real subject. I’m talking about my generation: people born, say, between 1958 and 1966. It’s true that the demographers lump us in with boomers or Gen X, but the demographers are wrong. We have little in common with either group. For those having a hard time placing us: We are the generation that entered our 20s under the rule of Ronald Reagan, an air-head septuagenarian for whom most of us enthusiastically voted.
We are the generation that produced “writers” like Brett Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney.
We are the generation that bought investment banking as an exciting and sexy profession.
We are the generation that made Charlie Sheen a movie star.
We are the generation that said “Just say no.”
We are the generation that lived through the merger of Time and Warner.
Still with me?
Exciting things did happen when we were young. The Berlin Wall fell. Tianamen Square erupted. It’s just that these things inevitably happened elsewhere. As for our own generation-defining, history-making acts of daring — well, there were none. We were too busy aspiring to new levels of mediocrity. At the college I attended, the great life ambition of 98 percent of us was to make executive V.P. at Proctor & Gamble. If recent class notes are any indication, many of us got exactly what we wished for.
It’s senseless to waste five minutes thinking up a clever term for a generation as insipid as my own. But here’s one that took five seconds: Generation Sucks.
How we got to be so sucky is a matter for history and science to decide. My own theory is that we were ruined by the ’70s. It was in the ’70s that we first became aware of the world outside our backyards, and what a dreary world it was. Watergate backwash. Recession. Gas lines. Jimmy Carter. Hostages in Iran. The Bee Gees. The impact of all of this on our young selves was crippling. By the time we made it into the placid ’80s, we were just happy to be alive.
My point: It’s not really our fault that we turned out this way. Generations don’t make history; history makes generations. The fact that the Internet boom decided to happen now — a few years too late for our maximum profit and pleasure — this is just further proof that cosmic forces conspire against us.
So here we are now, my fellow Gen Suckers. We’re nearing and entering middle age, a forgotten and forgettable generation, and the sands are shifting fast beneath our feet. For a lucky and daring few, the Internet boom will be an opportunity to strike it rich and partake of the great bounty. But for most of us, these next few years will see us grasping at outmoded jobs and struggling to learn new ways while others get rich.
And to make matters worse, that kid we used to baby-sit? Our buddy’s drooling little brother we made fun of when we were stoned? He’s our 25-year-old CEO now. Because he — damn him and his kind — started the Internet company that just bought the company that merged with the company where we just got promoted to executive V.P.
I’m sure there is a better response to all of this than anger and envy, a way of looking at it that won’t lead to myocardial infarction. (We Suckers have to start worrying about such things.) One of these was suggested to me by a fellow 37-year-old I met on jury duty recently. We got into one of those spill-gut conversations you get into on jury duty and when I professed my feelings about our luckless generation, my fellow juror clucked his tongue. Oh, no, he corrected me, we play a very important role in this New World. We are the “bridge” between the upstarts and the old farts. We have a foot in either generation and so we can “explain” them to each other.
For a few days, I liked the sound of this. But then I started to reflect upon what it means to be a bridge. You’re a hard, cold immobile structure that gets walked all over as they — the other guys — meet and trade. Who wants to be a bridge?
No, thanks. I’ll take anger and envy. You want to smack a 20-something? Claim that feeling. Go for it.
