 In the Nixon Era, Republicans discounted Martha Mitchell's accusations, saying she was mentally unstable. Her attacker got promoted and President Trump recently promoted him again. In voting to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the swing voters said the same thing about Christine Blasey Ford. They just used more subtle phrasing. They implied she had been so traumatized she couldn't tell what was real and what was not. Nothing has changed but the excuses people use to justify discounting women's stories, and the science that would support them. Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly. “The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.  Martha & husband John Mitchell, attorney general in the Richard Nixon administration.  But then Martha began to suspect Nixon's men were up to "dirty tricks." She listened in on her husband's meetings with Nixon, and concluded members of the campaign were acting illegally. Martha had always spoken her mind; the press had dubbed her "mouth from the south." She complained about the label, which wasn’t applied to men in Washington. “Why do they always call me outspoken? Can’t they just say I’m frank?” She asked. The name calling got worse. The night arrests in the Watergate break-in hit the news, Martha called reporter Helen Thomas of United Press International to say she thought her husband and the president were somehow involved. The phone call was suddenly cut short. According to Thomas, “…it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand." She heard Martha say, ‘You just get away.’” Thomas said she called back and the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”  Martha later charged an FBI agent named Stephen King ripped the phone from her hands and subsequently threw her down and kicked her to keep her from making any phone calls. She says under orders from her husband she was locked in her room incommunicado for 24-hours. She was given alcohol, but no food. This seems like a good point in the story to introduce Stephen King (shown at left). After Nixon was re-elected in 1972, King left the FBI for private industry. Then last year, he was appointed Ambassador to the Czech Republic by Donald Trump. During his confirmation hearings, no questions came up about allegations he helped in the Watergate cover-up, or that he assaulted a woman to that end. Martha Mitchell claimed King held her prisoner despite a number of escape attempts. When she tried to exit through a glass door they got into a tussle that broke the glass and her hand was cut so badly she required six stitches. Martha said a doctor was finally summoned to aide King in keeping her a prisoner. King forced Martha onto the bed and held her down while the doctor removed her pants and gave her a shot of tranquilizer. A reporter who spoke with Martha after she was released described her as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms. As Nixon fought for his office and reputation, his administration briefed the press about the Martha's lack of credibility. She was portrayed as a paranoid, publicity-seeking and, possibly alcoholic, housewife. Rumors spread that she had been institutionalized for insanity.   Martha wanted Nixon to fire Steve King, but the agent was promoted to chief of security. After leaving the FBI he went on to a lucrative career in chemical manufacturing. Arriving in Prague, last December, to take up duties as Trump's Ambassador to the Czech Republic, King told Radio Free Europe reporters, "I was there when this matter occurred [with Martha Mitchell]....But I have chosen -- then and now -- not to really speak to it specifically only out of respect to the Mitchell family, those that survive today." Nixon himself said, “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate [scandal].” Scandal, he means. But by the time he resigned in August of 1974, Martha's marriage had crumbled, she appeared to have possibly had an emotional breakdown and had suffered embarrassing publicity. So far, the only justice for Martha has been in the form of recognition by the mental health community. Harvard psychologist Brendan Maher encountered mental patients incorrectly diagnosed as being delusional, when it turned out their "delusions" were true. He named this the Martha Mitchell Effect. The effect is not a mental problem of the patient, but a mental block on the part of the psychiatrist. Seems like today we have a mental block on the part of half the senators in Washington. Thanks to YA Author Jody Casella for telling me about Martha Mitchell. Another courageous woman whose story I had not known.  Cornelia Fort was born to wealth and privilege, but in a time and place that prescribed her a very narrow role in life. Yet she made bold choices push boundaries and lived of life of daring and adventure few women would even dream of. Would she have made the same choices, if she'd known it would lead to hear at 24? Growing up in a luxurious mansion built in 1815 on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee, she was expected to become a Southern debutante, attend society functions, marry and have children. At eighteen, Cornelia wanted to attend Sarah Lawrence College where young women could design their own course of study. Her father at first refused to allow her to apply to that "liberal northern school" and she was sent to Ogontz School for Young Ladies. In her first major rebellion against the "proper" role assigned to her, Cornelia got her mother to help change her father's mind. She was finally allowed to leave the "oppressive atmosphere" and transfer to Sarah Lawrence, where she graduated with a two-year degree. Cornelia's next bold move challenging the strictures of women's lives in the 1940s,  At age five, with her father and three older brothers, Cornelia saw a daring pilot perform acrobatics in the sky. It appeared so dangerous, Dr. Rufus Fort made his sons promise ( as one story goes, swear an oath on the family bible) they would never fly. Later, when Cornelia made her first solo flight, one brother chided her for breaking a promise to their father. But Dr. Fort had not thought to ask his daughter not to fly. She was hooked from her very first time in the sky, saying “It gets under your skin, deep down inside.” Cornelia Fort became the first female flying instructor in all of Tennessee in 1940. The next year she got a job in Hawaii teaching defense workers, soldiers and sailors to fly.  In November 1941, Cornelia wrote home (her father had died more than year before). "If I leave here, I will leave the best job that I can have (unless the national emergency creates a still better one), a very pleasant atmosphere, a good salary, but far the best of all are the planes I fly. Big and fast and better suited for advanced flying. On December 7, 1941, she was in the sky with a student pilot when a small plane nearly collided with them. Cornelia grabbed the controls and saved their lives. Later, she said the plane “passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was. The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes.” “Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor. I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane and I set about landing as quickly as ever I could. A few seconds later a shadow passed over me, and simultaneously bullets spattered all around me.” See below the entry in Cornelia's logbook for that flight  “Later, we counted anxiously as our little civilian planes came flying home to roost. Two never came back. They were washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of the island, bullet-riddled. Not a pretty way for the brave yellow Cubs and their pilots to go down to death.” Cornelia survived. And then stepped out of bounds again. She knew the risks when she became one of the first to volunteer for Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squad (WAFS) “I felt I could be doing something more constructive for my country than knitting socks. Better to go to war than lose the things that make life worth living.”  “Because there were so many disbelievers in women pilots, especially in their place in the army....We had to deliver the goods or else. Or else there wouldn’t ever be another chance for women pilots in any part of the service.” The WAFS ferried planes for the U.S. military during WWII, flying them from factories to points of embarkation. The group later merged with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). The women pilots faced painful prejudice from some of the male pilots, who Cornelia said went "to great lengths to discredit them whenever possible.” The end came quickly, and far to soon. March 21, 1943, flying over Texas in a six-plane formation, Cornelia's Fort's wing tip was clipped by another plane. She crashed to the ground and died instantly. Cornelia was twenty-four, and became the first female pilot in American history to die in the line of duty, though the WAFS were not recognized as official military service members 1977.  A year prior to her death, Cornelia had written her mother, poetically describing how much she had loved life, loved green pastures and cities,
sunshine on the plains and rain in the mountains, blue jeans, red wine, books, music and the kindness of friends. She wrote: If I die violently, who can say it was "before my time"? I should have dearly loved to have had a husband and children. My talents in that line would have been pretty good but if that was not to be, I want no one to grieve for me. I was happiest in the sky--at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light. Think of me there and remember me...Love, Cornelia. Cornelia's story reminds me we do not have time to be mired in self-doubt and regret. We make the best decisions we can without the benefit of knowing how they will unfold. Like Cornelia, I want to choose boldly and love life hugely. What about you?  When you hear the call: "Build the wall" take a moment and tell someone about Carmellita Torres. This 17-year-old girl sparked a protest on the Juarez/El Paso border in 1917 when customs officials ordered her to undress and submit to being doused with gasoline. The kind of guys in charge back then were the same kind of guys we have in charge now. So, unfortunately, Carmellita's courageous action did not bring change. But women's voices are being heard today, in way they never have been before. Carmellita Torres freely crossed the border from Mexico almost every day to work as a maid for an American family. She wasn't alone. Farmers and ranchers in the Southwest were completely dependent on Mexican labor. White families in El Paso could easily afford the wages they paid Mexican girls and women to do their cleaning and laundry. So many Mexicans from Juarez came to El Paso every day for work that a trolley was set up for them to ride across the Santa Fe Bridge between the two cities.   But El Paso Mayor Tom Lea, Jr. feared Carmellita and the other workers, whom he called "dirty, lousy, destitute," would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic in his city. Rates of typhus infection were no higher in El Paso, than they were in other large American cities. But in January 1917, Mexicans were suddenly required to show a certificate to cross the border, a certificate indicating that "the bearer, ___ has been this day deloused, bathed, vaccinated, clothing and baggage disinfected.” Carmellita and the others were forced to strip nude for inspection, bathe, and be drenched in gasoline to kill any lice that might be on their bodies. Their clothing and shoes were fumigated and put through a steam dryer. The women were subjected to lewd comments and there were rumors that nude photographs of them were showing up in nearby bars. Sunday morning, January 28th, 1917, Carmellita reached the end of her trolley ride and was told to get off, take a bath and be disinfected. She refused. Carmellita convinced thirty other women on the trolley to refuse as well. By 8AM the crowd of protesters, mostly servant girls, grew to 200 and packed half the bridge. Some of the women stopped the trolley by laying down on the tracks. By noon some 2000 people stood with Carmellita.   Both Mexican and American soldiers showed up to subdue the crowd, and Monday morning it was back to fumigation as usual. There's little trace of Carmellita Torres in the pages of history. She's named in the newspaper for leading what came to be called "the bath house riots," and we know that she and eight other women were arrested and went to jail for "inciting riot" that day. Their stories may have been passed down the years orally, but the white men writing the newspapers and making the rules preserved a different story. The reporter for the El Paso Morning Times wrote that once Mexicans got familiar with the bathing process, they would welcome it. He said the Mexicans "came out [of the bath house] with clothes wrinkled from the steam sterilizer, hair wet and faces shining, generally laughing and in good humor." Raul Delgado, a man who went through the "cleansing" gave his description decades later. “An immigration agent with a fumigation pump would spray our whole body with insecticide, especially our rear and our partes nobles. Some of us ran away from the spray and began to cough. Some even vomited from the stench of those chemical pesticides…the agent would laugh at the grimacing faces we would make. He had a gas mask on, but we didn’t."   Bracero workers, hired for seasonal farm work, are sprayed with DDT after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 1956. (Smithsonian Institution) The risk of typhus has been used by both American and German leaders to whip up fear and prejudice against a segment of the population they wanted to deem inferior. The notion that Mexicans crossing into the U.S. for work each day would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic, was used as an excuse to spray them with toxic chemicals. Men, women and children crossing the Juarez/El Paso border were doused or sprayed with chemicals like gasoline and DDT for more than 40-years. In Poland, the Nazis posted placards around Warsaw in 1940 declaring that Jewish people were infested with lice and carrying typhus. To protect the rest of the populace all Jews were required to move into a small section of the city that became the Warsaw Ghetto.  Author David Dorado Romo heard stories of fumigation from his aunt who had experienced it. When he started researching the subject at the National Archives, he discovered there was a lot more to the story and wrote about it in his book Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923. "These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany...." I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B," writes Romo. In 1939, the Nazis started using Zyklon B to fumigate people at border crossings and concentration camps. Later, they used Zyklon B pellets in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps, not to kill lice, but people.  In 1917, after Carmellita's protest, the US/Mexican border was closed for the first time, customs officials
prohibiting anyone from crossing without authorization. That is, without the required fumigation of their clothing, shoes and body. That year alone, 127,000 people suffered humiliation and were doused with toxic disinfectant at the El Paso end of the Santa Fe Bridge. This federal policy would promulgate a stereotypical negative view of Mexicans and their American descendants for decades to come. U.S. Public Health Service photos thanks to https://elpasogasbaths.weebly.com/  Marjory Stoneman Douglas earned her place in history for helping preserve the Florida Everglades. She did it all in the second half of life. At first glance Marjory appears an unlikely heroine. She began her journalism career as the society reporter for the Miami Herald and later published short stories and novels. She rarely went out for a picnic, let alone visited the crocodile invested Everglades, saying it was "too buggy, too wet, and too generally inhospitable....I know it’s out there, and I know it’s important.... There are no other Everglades in the world." South Florida land developers considered the Everglades a useless swamp just waiting for them to turn it into shopping malls and subdivision.  Marjory wrote stories set in South Florida and vividly described the natural world. She was writing a novel 1941 when an editor asked her to write a non-fiction book addressing threats to the Everglades and she agreed. Scientists warned if the area wasn't protected, soon all wildlife there would be extinct.   They are unique...in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose," wrote Marjory. "The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida." At age 57, Marjory published The Everglades: River of Grass. It hit the shelves in November 1947 and sold out before Christmas. The impact of the book is sometimes compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And it launched Marjory into her role as an environmental activist, which took up the next 51-years of her life. She founded Friends of the Everglades, wrote more books on the subject and fought developers, the Army Corp of Engineers, and anyone else who threatened the unique species and habitat of South Florida. "[She's a] tiny, slim, perfectly dressed, utterly ferocious grande dame who can make a redneck shake in his boots," said Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathaniel Reed. "When Marjory bites you, you bleed."  Marjory's wisdom is crucial today as we face climate change. She said. "I would be very sad if I had not fought. I'd have a guilty conscience if I had been here and watched all this happen to the environment and not been on the right side."
In 1990, Marjory published her autobiography, Voice of the River beginning with the admission "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself." And ending with the advice, "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary." Marjory lived “my own life in my own way,” for 108 years. Her spirit gives me hope and challenges me live vividly and intensely. Second grader LaVaun Smith heard a great uproar outside her school in southeast Kansas. She and the other students rushed to the door of their country school house to see the commotion. They threw open the door that cold December day in 1921, and a rowdy parade of women filled the road beating on dish pans, wash pans and metal buckets with sticks and kitchen utensils. A number of the students spotted their mothers as the women converged on the mine across the road to confront strike-breakers, who had taken their husbands' coal mining jobs.  The school kids' dads had struck the mines in Crawford and Cherokee County three months prior, but companies kept operations running with non-union workers, and the sheriff arrested labor leaders for violating a statewide strike injunction. With a harsh winter on the horizen coming, wives, mothers, and sisters of the mine workers decided to take things into their own hands. Gathering before dawn, December 12, they marched through the region, routing "scabs" at 63 different mines. No fear One marcher recorded in her diary, the women “rolled down to the [mine] pits like balls and the men ran like deers....There was absolutely no fear in these women’s hearts.” The throng of marching women, some pregnant and others carrying small children, grew from two-thousand to possibly six-thousand. For three days they completely shut down coal production in the region.  One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had immigrated from Slovenia as a child. According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a house." Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers. Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags.  The first day there was little violence, but the following two days when large numbers of men joined the protest, strikebreakers were beaten and property vandalized, inflaming headlines across the nation. The New York Times declared them an Amazon Army...on the warpath...invading mines and scattering workers with pepper spray. December 16, Sheriff Milt Gould arrested Mary and three other women, who spent one night in jail due a $750 bail. Over the following month, the sheriff and his deputies hoped to make massive arrests, bystanders would not cooperate in naming names, and women protesters told deputies they could not recall who had marched beside them. Deputies jailed 50-some men and women who participated in the action. And Crawford County District Judge Andrew Curran handed down fines to forty-nine protesters for disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly, and assault. The marching women were characterized by the newspapers in one of two ways. Benjamin W. Goossen write in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains (Autumn 2011), "either it was a laughable “Petticoat March” of witless and misguided domestics, or the attack of a ferocious 'Amazon Army' that threatened to destroy traditional notions of women’s role in society."  The Wichita Beacon described them as “a few women, peeking from behind windows, sometimes waving handkerchiefs and sometimes ‘making eyes’ at the soldiers."
The Kansas City Kansan labed them “women terrorists,” who “clawed and used teeth” like “tigresses.” Some of the women defended themselves in letters to the editors, and small groups of women continued to accost strikebreakers even after the strike was called off. The following election season, (this was just two years after American women got the vote) the women who had tested their strength marching turned their energy to campaigning against the men who'd opposed them. Both Sheriff Gould, who had arrested dozens of marchers and Judge Curran, who had sentenced them were ousted from office. |
I'm fascinated to discover little-known history, stories of people and events that provide a new perspective on why and how things happened, new voices that haven't been heard, insight into how the past brought us here today, and how it might guide us to a better future.
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