SENATOR WETBACK, Anti-immigrant hatred in the 1950's

I prefer to refer to him as Senator Wetback. His real name was Patrick Anthony McCarran, and this bitter xenophobic, contemptuous narcissistic windbag, represented the very worst in the American character. He  preached fear of the future, fear of our enemies,  fear of our friends and even fear of ourselves. It was Pat McCarran who gave the Health Insurance Industry their anti-trust status, allowing them to collude in setting drug prices.  It was Pat McCarran who fed America’s vile dead end phobia of Mexican immigration.  It was Pat McCarran who first used the Senate of the United States to bully and terrorize loyal American citizens. It was Pat McCarran who turned Joe McCarthy’s bungling histrionics into the best weapon the Communists had in the cold war. In short, it was Pat McCarran who was the wellspring of much that poisons American politics to this day.

Pat McCarran was born the same year that George Custer died on the Little Big Horn; 1876. He was raised on an isolated sheep farm outside of Reno, Nevada, 15 miles from his nearest human playmate. He remained an isolationist his entire life. He attended the University of Nevada Law School, but had to drop out when his father was injured. Pat would later pass the bar, studying on his own.

As a new lawyer Pat McCarran made two big mistakes. The first was in 1907 when Nevada Governor John Sparks offered the thirty year old an appointment as a judge. But Pat’s paranoia drove him to reject the appointment. He later admitted ruefully, “That was the first and only appointment that was ever offered to me.”

His second mistake was when he served as counsel in a divorce case, Wingfield v Wingfield. The husband, George Wingfield, was the Democratic political boss who ran Nevada politics. And by representing the wife, Mae Wingfield, Pat McCarran earned the undying enmity of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership. When he tried to run for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1908 he was black balled. One party leader noted, “His reputation as a double-crosser is too well established throughout the state.” Twenty years later the black ball still denied him a nomination for a Senate run.

Pat McCarran was finally allowed to run for the for U.S. Senate in 1932, at the age of 56, primarily because nobody else wanted what seemed like a useless nomination. But in the general election this “ rotund man with a double chin, wavy hair and a high-pitched voice, who often says "My hide yearns for the alkali dust and the desert"— was swept into Washington on Franklin Roosevelt’s coat tails. And then proceeded to spit on them.

But the new Junior Senator (left - second row) from Nevada opposed every element of the New Deal. “The innovations of executive power, indulged in by Jackson, promoted by Lincoln, expounded by Garfield, declared righteous by Roosevelt and philosophically promulgated by Wilson, appear to have been but forerunners, rivulets, as it were, contributing to a flood that now sweeps on, submerging the Utopian doctrines and theories of Jefferson and conferring unheard of and unfettered expansion to the executive” That kind of rhetoric got him re-elected in 1938 with 73% of the vote.

Now secure in his seat, McCarran made speech's along side fellow Catholic Charles Lindberg, preaching isolationism. “I think one American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all central Europe.” He condemned Roosevelt’s “secret plan” to push America into WW II, and it was the desperate attempt to justify his prewar opposition to increased military budgets, which gave birth to the conspiracy myths that FDR had purposefully ignored Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact it was McCarran's stinginess over military budgets that left the Army and Navy short planes and radar to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, however, Senator McCarran was certain that Nevada got it’s share of war spending, including the third largest manufacturing facility built during the war, Basic Magnesim’s $140 million plant, built at government expense, and the town of Henderson, built to house the plant’s 15,000 workers. Pat won re-election in 1944 with 68% of the vote.

The war and time made Pat McCarran one of the nation’s most powerful senators, by making him one of its most senior Senators. By 1945 he had become the new political boss of Nevada, the new George Wingfield. Pat even filled the U.S. capital building with so many graduates from Nevada Universities that they became known as “McCarran’s Boys”. And after a couple of years working in Washington, many of the “boys” became part of the McCarran Machine, back home in Nevada.

Pat McCarran handed out just as many “black balls” as he had been handed. Federal Marshal Les Kofed explained to the Senator that Federal law prevented political appointees like him from making speeches in support of a local politician. Marshal Kofed explained, “Out of a clear blue sky, shortly thereafter,…I received a call from the chief deputy at Carson City, that a new marshal had been appointed, that I had better come in and turn in my key.”

By 1950 Time magazine had begun describing the 73 year old Pat McCarran as “pompous, vindictive and power-grabbing”. According to the magazine he “staged a one-man committee filibuster against an “Emergency Immigration bill” to admit (250,000) D. P’s to the U.S  The D.P.’s were Displaced Persons, who had survived the Nazi death and work camps, but whose identification papers had been lost or destroyed. They were people without homes or a nation willing to accept them. What concerned Pat McCarran was that many of them were Jews. He argued that the “Emergency Immigration Bill” was supported by a particular “pressure group” with “unlimited money” - code words for Jews.

The DP bill had the support of President Eisenhower. But when it was first introduced into a subcommittee in the spring of 1953, Senator McCarran “demanded” a ten day delay while his wife sought medical treatment. But when “Senator Wetback” instead surfaced in Los Angles, holding hearings for his own Senate Security and Intelligence Sub Committee, and asked for three more weeks of delay, the immigration hearings finally began.

Three weeks into the hearings McCarran managed to snooker the Judiciary Committee (parent committee to the subcommittee) into voting to delay any further action by the subcommittee. When most of the Senators realized they had been tricked, fisticuffs almost broke out. It took a week, but the delay was eventually overturned. Still, in the end, McCarran managed to kill the bill. And tens of thousands of desperate people were turned away from America's shores because of one biggott.

In June of 1952 Pat McCarran co-sponsored a rewriting of immigration law, declaring that “…we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated..." More code words for Jews. "Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.”

Next came the program which, for me, earned the Senator his nickname, “Operation Wetback.” That was really its name, and it was launched in 1954 after Senator McCarran’s prodded the bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program contrasted with the ten year old “Bracero” system, in which Mexican recruiters contracted to supply workers for American farmers and railroads.

By 1954 some 300,000 Mexican citizens were legally working in the United States on temporary “Bracero” visas. Few stayed in the United States at the end of their contracts. However those programs, which protected worker’s rights and wages, were disliked by employers. Racists forces in Texas had prevented that state from participating in the program for five years. But in 1954 this successful program was killed, in favor of mass deportations - the same program favored by the Republican Party now.

The INS would later claim to have expelled 1.3 million Mexicans (not the 13 million claimed in recent mythology) under Operation Wetback.  But a closer examination of the data shows the service could only prove some 80,000 were expelled. The addition half a million were an estimate of those who left the country out of fear, but the number was more hopeful than accurate.

The U.S. Army succesfully resisted joining Operation Wetback, and in an internal report written later carried the notation, "Thank goodness"   The program ended abruptly when seven “illegals” being deported by ship, drowned while trying to swim back to the American shore. The crew of the steamer transporting them, then mutinied against their captain, and against the entire program. In the conservative myth the mutiny may get mentioned but never discussed.

But Pat McCarran’s most powerful weapon was his anti-communism. In this he was merely echoed by Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarran also supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to the point that he was called “The Senator from Madrid.” He was an equally fierce supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek, after Chiang and his supporters were driven out of mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan. So rabid was McCarran's defense that it was not until Richard Nixon visited China in the 1970’s that some sanity and common sense return to American foreign policy in the region.

The McCarran’s Internal Security Act (of September 1950) required members of the communist party to register with the Attorney General. So onerous were the details of the act that between 1965 and 1967 almost all of it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Walt Kelly, who drew the popular "Pogo" comic strip chose to memorialize McCarrain with "Mole J. Macarney", a blind, paranoid creature, who spread tar on everything and everyone within reach.

Pat McCarran died of a heart attack in September of 1954, proving once again that politics is not about being right. It is about being re-elected. To most politicians, nothing else matters.

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ITS A WONDER, or Opps, We executed 3 innocent people.

I might have voted with the rest of the jury in the Perry trial, voted for guilt, even though one of the defendants had been charged with being a witch, and I don’t believe in witches. That was Joan Perry. She and her sons, John and Richard, were all hanged, but she was hanged first. The authorities were hoping the older boy, Richard, freed from Joan's witchcraft, would confess. But he did not. Which leaves me to wonder if being a witch was just an ‘eggcorn’ for that other crime women are often accused of being guilty of.  And then to everyone’s surprise, after Richard, too, was dead, the youngest boy, John, whose confession had led to the prosecution of his entire family, recanted. Still the judges remained certain. So John was duly hanged as well. If I had been the judge, I like to think that John's recantation would have led me to have second thoughts. Of course, by then it a little was too late. (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/eggcorn.html)

The story behind the trial takes place in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswold of England. "Chipping" is an old Welsh word for market, and “wold” is Welsh for an upland meadow, so this was a market town amidst the rolling limestone hills and open fields which were once the property of the Saxon King, Harold.

Under the Normans it became sheep country. In 1340, in Chipping Camden, the wool merchants were already so wealthy they built a hall on the High Street, using the honey-colored “Cotswold stone” as facing.

Even today Chipping Camden looks as if it were untouched since the middle ages. In fact, this western corner of England was a violent incubator for the industrial revolution.

It is human nature that wealth surrounded by poverty requires a justification. So it was no accident then that the Nuevo-rich Calvinist wool merchants in the Cotswold welcomed a belief in predestination – the certainty that they were wealthy and successful because God predestined them to be wealthy and successful before they had even been born. Thus the will of the successful was God’s will. Of this the Calvinists were certain. And they were certain that opposing them was to oppose God’s will.

Thus, in 1649, after seven years of civil war, these dead-certain Calvinists were comfortable in beheading their intransigent King, and suspected Catholic, Charles I. But the Calvinist experiment in government came to an end on January 1st, 1660 when soldiers under Colonel George Monck crossed the River Tweed at the village of Coldstream, thus earning the regiment supporting the restoration of the monarchy the eternal and future title “The Coldstream Guards”.

A month later they were in London, and in late April Charles Stuart, son of the last King of England, was crowned Charles II, the next King of England. But if anybody thought the restoration of the monarchy was going to return a certain stability to Britain, they were about to suffer a very rude awakening.

Three months later, on Thursday, 16 August,  1660, the estate manager for a wealthy Calvinist merchant left his home in Chipping Camden, tasked to walk the two miles to the village of Charingworth. His name was William Harrison and he must have been an amazing fellow, as he was already 70 years old, and facing an eight mile hike to collect rents for his merchant master and return home by dark; except, he did not return.

 At about 9 p.m. his servant, John Perry, was sent out to look for the old man at Charingworth and Paxford. The next morning Harrison’s son went out to search for them both. The son found John Perry, who explained he had been looking all night for Mr. Harrison  - and his purse filled with collected rents.  Together they continued looking, and later that morning found William Harrison’s hat, slashed by a knife, and his shirt, caked in blood.

Suspicion quickly fell on Harrison's servant , John Perry.  Over several days of constant questioning and torture, John Perry told several stories but finally admitted he had suggested his own mother and brother should rob Mr Harrison and then murder him.  And even though Joan and Richard both insisted on their innocence, the investigators felt certain that John had not lied, since he had implicated himself . No sane person would admit to that, even under torture.  Ponds and streams and wells were searched for poor Mr. Harrison's  body, or the rents he had collected. No trace of the old man or the money was found. The Perry family were  held over the winter for trial.

On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, fifty lunatics (most of them ex-soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s Calvinist army), calling themselves Fifth Monarchists, stormed into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and started roughing people up. They shot one poor fellow who talked back to them. They were preparing the way, they said, for the return of Jesus Christ, whom they intended to crown the next King of England.  It took an armed band of militia to chase the loonies out of the church.

Three days later the same loonies  stormed a prison and tried to free the prisoners. None of the prisoners was insane enough to follow the fanatics. They stayed in their cells. This time it took the loyal Coldstream guards to trap the loonies in a couple of taverns.  Muskets and the bayonet, finished off the religious revolutionaries.  The leaders were captured, tried for treason, hanged, drawn and quartered. It seemed there was such an air of un-certainty hanging over England, the citizens had become inspired to begin to demand certainty.  And these loonies at least were certainly dead.

In April of 1661 the Perry family were brought to trial and duly hanged, one after the other. And if there were second thoughts after John's gallows conversion to innocence, they were put aside.

For even if Joan and Richard Perry had not killed poor Mr. Harrison, then John Perry, the self confessed murderer, certainly had. - even if he had recanted.  And it was certainly important that justice was seen to be done. than that un-certainly be tolerated.   Without the certain avenging hand of justice there would be no respect for the law, and English society would return to the rule of the beast, the rule of eat or be eaten.  And then in 1662, wonder of wonders, William Harrison walked back into to the village of Chipping Camden, certainly alive and allegedly well.

When questioned the old man (he was now seventy-two) told a murky tale of being set upon, stabbed, kidnapped, hustled aboard a ship, and sold in a Turkish slave market. He escaped, he said, when his new master died.  Mr. Harrison claimed he then caught a ship back to England.   As others have noted, “The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false.”  And as a Mr. Paget noted, “much profit was not likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave…especially as the old man was delivered in a wounded and imperfect condition.”

So where did Mr. Harrison disappear to in the summer of 1660?  Given that transportation in that age was mostly limited to “shanks mare”, William Harrison might have walked far enough that no one would recognize him,  But he must have been close enough to Chipping Camden to have heard, in the eight months after his disappearance, of the trial and the hanging sentence of his accused murderers. And yet the old man did not return to save those three lives.

But why did Mr. Harrison wait two years to return? Why not sooner? Why did Harrison return at all? And why did John Perry tell such wild tales?  Why did he send his own mother and brother to the gallows? Why did he not recant until the last moments of his life?  Could torture, the standard method used for questioning at the time, have produced  false testimony?  Perhaps. Perhaps the human soul is the real mystery, and not certain at all,   

In the end, all we know for certain is that John Perry, Richard Perry and Joan Perry were slowly strangled at the end of a rope, as punishment for a crime which they did not commit and which never happened.  Every thing else about this case is a mystery and a wonder. It is the Camden Wonder.

It is a wonder that, 300 years later, juries remain so certain that they continue to take the lives of those accused, when they have no earthly reason to be so certain, and certainly no heavenly justification either.

http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/

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LESSON LEARNED - The Port of Chicago Disaster

I was curious why the the tragedy of 17 July, 1944 happened. That it happened just five weeks after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, which in the first 24 hours left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, and two weeks after the United States Navy invaded Saipan in the central Pacific, which over the next month killed or wound another 66,000, was no coincidence. But even those horrors cannot detract from the anguish of 320 killed and 390 injured in a split second on an isolated pier in a Northern California backwater. The tragedy of Port Chicago was a mere drop of blood into a world wide abattoir, where on average 220 Americans were killed in combat each day. Still it is not enough to say it happened because during a war human life is cheap. The victims of Port Chicago and their families deserve the respect of an explanation. Why did what happened, happen?

It happened because of extraordinary geology. It took 3 million years for the the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to carve a deep canyon to the sea. Then, just 10,000 years ago, the rising ocean filled the gorge creating 275 miles of nooks and crannies, lobes and outlets. For 400 years ocean going ships have sailed through the mile wide Golden Gate, slipping between the sentries of Angel and Alcatraz islands, then north beyond San Quentin Point, west through San Rafael Bay and passed the broad mouth of the Napa River, beyond San Pablo Bay and the Carquinez Strait, and passed Roe and Ryer Islands, thirty miles inland to a deep water port on the south shore of Suisin Bay, just nine miles from the mouth of the Sacramento - San Joaquin delta, that is the head of San Francisco Bay.

It happened because just after 5:00 p.m. on 10 July, 1926, a bolt of lightning set off fires in New Jersey that over the next three days set off 600,000 tons of World War One surplus explosives, destroying 200 buildings and killing 21 souls. Because of this multi-billion inflation adjusted dollar disaster, the U.S. Navy established a new west coast ammunition depot in the Nevada desert, forty miles south south-west of Lake Tahoe, far from most thunderstorms, in the isolated desert village of Hawthorne. After Pearl Harbor, the 5,000 employees at this facility assembled and shipped almost all of the explosives the United States used in the Pacific, from Naval TNT (Trinitrotoluene) shells, Torpex (50% stronger than TNT) torpedoes and sea mines, and Marine Corps TNT mortar and artillery shells. The assembled mayhem was then shipped by rail 120 miles over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Port Chicago, California..

It happened because in 1928 California was hit by a drought that would last until 1937. In response the state and federal governments approved large scale water projects, like the Shasta dam on the Sacramento River headwaters, and the Central Valley project on the upper San Joaquin River, and many smaller one, like the Contra Costa Canal, which diverted fresh water around the delta. In 1940 the canal construction reached the head of the San Francisco bay. This ensured potable water for the 1,700 residents of the little town of Port Chicago. Serviced by three railroad lines, it boasted 660 homes, three hotels, a small shopping district – even a movie theater. The canal also guaranteed water for the new naval base and dock on the water front a mile and a half to the north of the town.

It happened because in 1922 Annapolis graduate Merrill Talmadge Kinne resigned from the United States Navy. In his seven years of service, he had risen to the rank of commander, and was being groomed as a staff officer.   But the Washington Naval treaty signed that year required the scrapping of 30 combat ships under construction or planned, and cutting the existing U.S. fleet from 774 to 365 ships. Seeing this contraction, the 28 year old Merrill traded in his uniform for a business suit. He remained in the Naval Reserve but did not go to sea again until he was called back in 1941. Now a 48 year old, Captain Merrill quietly commanded a supply ship transport for two years, until April of 1944,  when he was given the command of Port Chicago.  He had no training in handling munitions, and at 50 had spent just nine years in uniform, but 19 years selling men's clothing

It happened because until 1932 African-Americans were not accepted into the Navy, because, as one report insisted “The enlistment of Negros...leads to disruptive and undermining conditions....” Pearl Harbor and a Presidential order broke through the racism, but African-Americans were still not allowed to serve on combat vessels because they had “poor eyesight”. 

So all 1,400 stevedores loading explosives at Port Chicago were black. Racism forced these men to walk half a mile to use a “colored” toilet. Because there was just one commissary building, blacks had to wait outside until all whites had finished their meals. They were provided no public transport off the base, and even if they walked the mile and a half,  they could not even enter the movie house at the town of Port Chicago.  No wonder they described the base as a “slave labor camp”. 

Institutional racism encouraged the white officers to discount enlisted men's  suggestions for safety or efficiency. Even when the supervising white U.S. Coast Guard Commander Paul Cronk warned that working conditions at Port Chicago were “ripe for disaster”,  he was ignored. As a protest, and to protect his own men, he withdrew his crew from the base. The black stevedores had no such option.

It happened because sixteen at a time the rail cars packed with explosives from Hawthorne were pushed on three parallel rail spurs onto the 90 foot wide, 1, 200 foot long pier. Each “division” of 100  stevedores unloaded the cars by hand, transferred the ammunition to cargo nets, which a boom winch lowered down a hatch into one of the ship's 5 holds and re-packed them by hand.

Competition between divisions were encouraged, the goal being ten tons per hour, but the average speed being closer to seven. Running totals for each division were posted on chalk boards, with junior officers wagering on the results. Safety was not entirely ignored, just mostly. 

On the land side were 27 barricaded sidings where 203 rail cars could be safely “parked” until they were needed. The administrative buildings were a mile inland, including 4 navy enlisted (black) and one marine (white) barracks. During its first year of operation, 39 ships were loaded at Port Chicago with 115,000 tons of high explosives. Command was on target to more than double that amount for 1944.

It happened because on 17 July the SS E. A. Bryon was preparing to start her second voyage, which meant she had already earned the $1.5 million invested in building her.

Her keel, number 2761, had been laid down on 11 February, 1944 at the Kaiser Permanente Shipyard Number Two, in Richmond, California - less than 20 miles from Port Chicago. Eighteen 24 hour work days later she hit the water, and just eight days after that she went into service. 

Named after a popular president of Washington State University, she was one of 2,700 “Ugly Ducklings” built during the war.  Each "Liberty Ship" was identical,  441 feet long and 28 feet wide, with three holds forward of the central island and two toward the stern. Her best speed was barely 11 knots. And at 8:15 the morning of 17 July, 1944, she tied up on the land side of the Port Chicago pier, and at ten that morning started taking on cargo.

It happened because by night fall the number five (stern) hold of the Byron was stuffed with  40mm cannon shells. Her number four hold held  462 tons of fragmentation and cluster bombs. The Byron's number three hold (midships) contained 525 tons of 1,000 pound bombs. The  number two hold held 565 tons of Mark 47 Torpex air dropped sea mines. And the number one (bow) hold was still being loaded with “live” 660 pound incendiary bombs. 

Still less than half full, at 10:00 a.m. the Byron contained 3,600 tons of high explosives. There were another 1,000 tons waiting to be unloaded from the rail cars when, at eighteen minutes and forty-four seconds after ten, the S.S. Byron blew up.

Seismographs in Berkeley recorded the explosion at that moment, as a 3.4 on the Richter scale. The 25 million pound Byron, her cargo, her crew, most of the pier, the box cars sitting on it, the steam locomotives moving rail cars, and 320 human beings were all vaporized. A 66 foot deep, 300 feet wide and 700 foot long crater was carved into the sea bed beneath where the Byron had floated an instant before. 

A larger cargo ship, S.S. "Quinalt Victory", which was waiting to be loaded on the bay side of the wharf, was lifted out of the water by the explosion, torn in half, and its stern left floating 500 yards into Suisin Bay (above). A Coast Guard fire boat stationed at the end of the wharf was thrown 600 feet and destroyed.. 

 Three thousand feet from the center of the blast, the Roe Island lighthouse (above)  was shattered by the blast wave moments before a 30 foot tidal wave shoved the entire structure 40 feet up the beach.

Commercial pilots at 9,000 feet reported house sized hull fragments of the ships flying past their plane. A mile and a half south of the base every home in the town of Port Chicago was damaged. 

The northern wall of the crowded movie theater (above)  buckled as if punched by a giant fist and the ceiling fell - but none of the 192 white patrons were injured. 

Debris fell two miles away. Forty miles away the fireball 3 miles in diameter was clearly visible. People 200 miles away heard the blast. The explosion was comparable in size to that which would occur one year and three weeks later over Hiroshima, Japan.

Three weeks and one day later, on 8 August, 1944. 328 African-American stevedore survivors at Port Chicago refused to load another Liberty Ship, the USS Sangay,  unless their officers were replaced and safety procedures were improved.  Eventually 208 men were reassigned to menial duties until finally issued a dishonorable discharge. Another 50 were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to hard labor. After the end of the war the fifty were released and given a “general discharge under honorable circumstances”.

The irrational disparity of punishments made no more sense than the reasons some lived while others died in the explosion. Within a few months, a Navy review board offered lessons learned, and last on their list of suggestions, was: “The inadvisability of employing 100% colored ordnance battalions to handle and load ammunition was amply demonstrated.”  It wasn't much as a lesson, and the language invited misunderstanding and false justification. But for the victims, each distanced now from the blast by space and time, the explanation of the tragedy at Port Chicago was pure farce and insult. And surely we can do better than that, three quarters of a century later. 

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