ONCE MORE, WAKING A GIANT

ONCE MORE, WAKING A GIANT

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 3, 2020

Klaus writes,

Jim,

Did you get the article from the WSJ? Racism is still an issue as well anti-Semitism. I read Eric Hoffer a long time ago and still have his book.

I do think all the confederate monuments should be taken down as well as the bases named after confederates should be changed. Those people were traitors, and they were lucky at the end they were not hanged.

The statues and the bases were erected and named during the Jim Crow era. When the mayor of Washington DC painted black lives matter in front of White House Trump did not complain, but when it was going to be painted on street where Trump tower is located, he complained. All police are not evil either, but when they do something bad like kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over 8 minutes even though he had his hands handcuffed behind his back they should be punished.

As I have said before when I first came from Germany at the age of nine, I played with black kids. At one point a bunch of white kids our age started throwing rocks at us, and shouting I assume racial words at us even though my understanding of English was not that great at the time. I was also a teacher when they first integrated the schools. The first year we had about a hundred white kids at Young Junior High and the rest were black. Trump also tweeted that video where the man was shouting white power. Also, I think that the people who were doing the looting used the demonstrations as a back drop.

Klaus

Jim Responds:

Yes, I read this, piece and, sadly, I know it is only too true.  

I also agree criminals were at the ready to exploit the situation.  

Your view is legitimate.  Mine may differ a bit with yours, but it is respectfully submitted, not to refute yours, but to explain mine.

During the 1970s, when I was a police consultant, I witnessed this bias with some police organizations in terms of failure to promote deserving African American and Jewish police officers.  While traveling over a thousand hours with police officer in patrol, I never witnessed anything approaching what happened to George Floyd.  

That said, I did, however, write my Master's thesis on my nine months while embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department, an affluent county just outside Washington, DC.  What brought me to be so situated was a white police officers emptied his revolver on a 27 year old black man in a 7-11 Store in Herndon, killing him, after the man took the police officer’s nightstick, and began to beat the police officer on his head and shoulders.  A riot followed (re: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, University of South Florida, 1976).   

Unlike you, I grew up in a community of 33,000 in Iowa without a single African American in my high school class, although when I was a junior, there was one on my high school football team.  

Less than one-tenth of one percent African Americans lived in Clinton, Iowa in the 1950s, or less than 300.  I never saw them at the Clinton swimming pool, the stores downtown, at the baseball ballpark, or in the neighborhood. 

It was not until I was at the University of Iowa that I had classes and made friends with them.  Throughout my life, I have always had African American friends, and have a granddaughter whose late mother was African American.  Her father, my son, has a tennis club in Jupiter, Florida.  The great African American tennis professional, Venus William, a friend of my son’s, while visiting him, met my six-year old granddaughter, who appears to be white, but who declared to Venus proudly, “I am an African American like you are.”

I had Jewish classmates in high school and at university, and during Christmas vacations, I would hang out at the Clinton County Library every day, studying.  My mother once asked me, “Jimmy, do you see any of your friends at the library?”  I answered, “Only my Jewish friends.”  My mother was quite enamored of the Jewish ethnicity, I think, because Jewish parents in her experience motivated their children to study.  She once said, “If I were not an Irish Catholic, I would prefer being Jewish.”

ONCE AGAIN, WAKING THE GIANT

Comparing the history of the United States to what you remember from Europe, and especially Germany may not be a reliable gauge. 

It is not in most history books, but the Thirteen Colonies that fought the Revolutionary War of Independence from Great Britain, were not all interested in being part of the United States of America. 

Tiny Rhode Island held out before finally abandoning its independence as a “separate country” within the confines of the United States. 

Southern states, of the 13 colonies, also demonstrated similar reluctance (see “The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1788 – 1789” by John J. Ellis, 2015, profiling George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and their respective roles in The Federalist Papers and the American Constitution). 

Another source, which demonstrates the ambivalence of the 13 colonies, was the War of 1812, in which Great Britain attempted to step into the American chaos of the time and regain control of its original colonies (See “Union1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A. J. Langguth, 2006, and “Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle that shaped America’s Destiny” by Brian Kilmeade, 2017).

We have always been a violent society according to sociologist David Riesman informs us in “The Lonely Crowd,” (1950).  See Chapter One: The American Character & Society. 

The irony is that American society, while seemingly to be individualistic, at one level, and has always been a contentiously conforming society at another, with resistance to that conformity always percolating just below the surface. 

Force harmony, which is compliance, is not the glue that holds a people to a common purpose but managed conflict, which sponsors cooperation.  This is a major theme in itself and can only be mentioned here.

My point is that Southerners did not see themselves as traitors, but as patriots defending States’ Rights in which slavery became the burning issue supplanting this original complaint.  Ken Burns did a television series on the American Civil War with Southern historian Shelby Foote eloquently presenting the States’ Rights justification for the rebellion of the South.

Closer to our own time, Texas and California have threatened to succeed from these United States. 

That said, slavery cannot now, then or ever be justified. 

In this era of the pandemic, we might just be awakening the sleeping giant in the American electorate.  Andrew Jackson did it in his presidency, which changed the presidency forever (See “America in the Age of Jackson” by David S. Reynolds, 2008) and Japan did it once again on December 7, 1941 bombing the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. 

Jim       

PS I am using Eric Hoffer quotations from his books to illustrate The Fisher Paradigm©™ in a new way vis-à-vis the Pandemic.  Stay tuned.