Editorial: Celebrate independence and equality.

July 2, 2015 editorial, The Mendocino Beacon: Celebrate independence and equality

Hendy Woods State Park day use area reopens

Hendy Woods State Park reopens. The Mendocino Beacon, July 2, 2015

The Hendy Woods State Park day use area reopens with free event and song.

State OKs proposals to transfer Mendocino Coast to Mendocino College

From The Mendocino Beacon, May 28, State approves proposals to transfer Mendocino Coast to Mendocino College. Substantive changes proposals from Mendocino College and College of the Redwoods approved by the ACCJC.

Joshua Grindle Inn to reopen

From The Mendocino Beacon, May 21, "Joshua Grindle Inn to reopen this summer." A Mendocino landmark will reopen for business.

Mendocino County budget is balanced, but revenue is flat, Sept.4, 2014

Ireland’s Third Home Rule Crisis: Another Cause for Emigration

Moses Watt Little wept as he watched the steamer sail for America with his daughter, Mary. For a staunch Protestant Unionist in 1912 who had signed the Ulster Covenant, the impending partition of Ireland would have been enough to send his children to America, especially if he lived in one of the counties of Ulster not included in North Ireland. The nature of the divisive issue of Nationalism versus Unionism, overlaid with the resentments between the majority, yet relatively powerless, Catholics and the minority, yet powerful, Protestants was a strong blend of social and political elements capable of frightening a middle-aged farmer. The keystone of the Irish conflict that would continue for most of the rest of the twentieth century was laid at the turn of the century. It did not require a highly educated man to be able to foresee the troubles that were near to boiling over.

A farmer in County Monaghan, Moses was born in 1837. County Monaghan was one of the nine ancestral counties of the Kingdom of Ulster. In the comprises,Monaghan was excluded from Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland was based on population density of Catholics and Protestants. Protestant counties were generally included in Northern Ireland, but those counties with a higher population of Catholics were excluded and were thus included in the Irish Free State. When he died in 1919, Moses had lived to witness the Potato Famine, the Easter Uprising of 1916, World War I, and the third Home Rule crisis. He would not witness the final partition of his country.

 The Home Rule crisis that climaxed in years from 1912 to 1914 was different from the Home Rule crises of 1886 and 1893. Specifically, it was very clear to the Irish who supported union with Great Britain and opposed a proposed “Government of Ireland” bill the center of opposition was primarily Ulster where a majority of Ireland’s Protestant population lived. Nicola Morris points out the central cause of disagreement.

The Government of Ireland bill of 1912 proposed that a Home Rule parliament should be established at Dublin for the whole of Ireland dealing with such domestic matters as education, policing, and taxation. Unionists objected in principle to the creation of a Dublin legislature, but—given that some form of Home Rule was at that point inevitable—argued during the third Home Rule crisis for some form of exclusion for certain of the counties of Ulster.

To refute such an Irish government, Protestant men and women signed a petition to the British government. The so-called “Ulster Covenant” was a public protest against Home rule in any form. Morris declares, “[s]igning the Ulster Covenant became the touchstone of loyalty, with considerable scorn rapidly displayed to those who had failed to exhibit their allegiance, whom contemporaries designated as ‘traitors to their faith’”. Moses was either not a “traitor” to his faith or a man who stood by his community’s identity. Likely, it was the former, as his émigré daughter, Mary, would pass on to her children and grandchildren that “we were Orangemen.”

More than just a common religion or political bent informed a regional identification with old Ulster. Those who lived in the nine counties, especially near the city of Belfast, would have been pulled into a commercial orbit. “…it was not just that the north-east evidenced a prosperous aspect, but that the nature of that prosperity invested the region with an integrated identity. In fact, the same Parnell who ridiculed the region as a ‘little yellow patch up in the north-east’ in 1886 visited Belfast in May 1891…and, like many travelers, having proceeded from the south, declared himself impressed by the region’s prosperity and the functional, complementary relationship between Belfast…and outlying towns that underpinned it.”

From the British public’s point of view, large portions of Ireland’s residents were savages. Since relatively recent military conflicts on the island were focused in the southern portion, even those residents of northern Ireland could accept a basic difference between the two areas. This difference was reinforced by the development of photography, which assisted in the formation of a greater regional identity. James Loughlin argues, “…photography in Ulster should be seen in the late nineteenth century, for the enormous popularity of urban/rural, local/national photography—fueled by a symbiotic relationship with the growth of tourism—helped enormously, it can be argued, to enhance a regional self-consciousness and identity.” For an older man, like Moses Little, the visual depiction of a romantic Ulster would have a great impact.

For a man like Moses Little, who was both Protestant and Unionist, living in the midst of a largely Catholic country had its potential problems. Under a political system that was sure to represent the majority, the Protestants, previously the beneficiaries of political power when the British Parliament controlled the country, would become powerless. “There was finally a thing to be feared by all Unionists who were Protestants, and that was the existence of an overwhelming majority of Catholic voters, who under Home Rule would gradually but surely yield the government in large part into the hands of the church… In 1912, according to the Irish News of Belfast, the Reverend Gerald O’Nolan said: ‘We shall have a free hand in the future. Let us use it well. This is a Catholic country, and if we do not govern it on Catholic lines, according to Catholic ideals, and the safeguard Catholic interests, it will be all the worse for the country and all the worse for us. Here it is that religion and nationality meet, and may, and should, go hand-in-hand.’” There was no question for Protestants that Catholics would control an Ireland with its own parliament, for Catholics.

Indeed the split from the dominant Protestant power had already occurred for Catholics. The 1908 decree of Ne Temere, released by Pope Pius X, invalidated Catholic marriages performed by Protestant or civil authority. Catholic marriages were similarly declared outside the jurisdiction of civil authority and exclusively under the authority of the church. A secondary decree by Rome set Catholic priests out of touch of non-Catholic trials. With the majority of the population now essentially beyond secular control, it would not be much of a logical reach for Moses Little, and others like him, to understand that should Catholics gain control, politically, the system would be geared toward papal decree, making Protestants outcasts in their own nation.

A Catholic-controlled parliament was a well-founded fear for Protestants. Protestants dominated the political infrastructure of Ireland, even if they were in a numerical minority. Until 1840, there was essentially no representative form of government in Ireland. The minority Protestant landowners controlled what electoral government existed in Ireland. These men in power did not hesitate to use their power for their own benefit and to the detriment of Catholics. Subsequent to 1840, urban and rural district councils, county councils, and boards of guardians were chosen by popular election. While this meant a modicum of enfranchisement for Catholics, Irish elementary and technical education, fisheries, agriculture, congested districts, and old age pensions were still run by appointees.

One example of Protestant appointed political control was the Grand Jury. John Clancey describes the Grand Jury by writing,

It consisted, usually, of a couple of dozen persons chosen from a larger number selected by the High Sheriff for the county or the city…the High Sheriff himself being the nominee of the Lord Lieutenant, who acted on the recommendations of the Superior Court Judges, who, in their turn, always recommended some leading landlord and magistrate… [T]he Grand Jury in every Irish county, down even to the present year, has always consisted almost entirely of members of the landlord class, and mainly Protestants also.

The Grand Jury was responsible for maintenance of public infrastructure, including roads and other large works, buildings, prisons, hospitals, appointments. The Grand Jury could also levy a specific county tax, which was an engine for raising considerable revenue.

For Moses Watt Little, the certain future partition of Ireland and the inclusion of his native County Monaghan in the Catholic Ireland may well have been the signal that what stability he and his family had known was at an end. Already, one of Moses’ daughters, Hannah, was in America and preparing to get married in San Francisco. When Hannah’s sister, Mary, told their father that Hannah had sent Mary a ticket to America so Mary could attend Hannah’s wedding, Moses likely encouraged Mary to stay in America. Mary, in her mid-20s, was no longer living in her father’s household, but was rather working as a domestic worker in a Catholic household. From Moses’ perspective, emigration to the United States protected Mary’s future prospects, as well as her physical well-being.

To be sure, Moses Little’s County Monaghan was historically associated with the Protestant Orangemen. The conflicts between Protestant and Catholic became the core of local legend. These legends and oral family histories would find their form in a 1915 American novel, The Orangeman. The novel, written by John H. Finlay, was based on the oral histories of his grandfather’s life in County Monaghan, though fictionalized. In a review of The Orangeman, The Irish Book Lover wrote, “We would hazard the guesses, first, that this book was written, after a visit to the scenes described, by a descendant of the hero… Secondly, that it is founded on tales told by him in his declining years of the bitter feuds between the contending factions on the Ulster border, and the squalid party feuds are magnified in the course of time into Homeric combats…” Without doubt, Finlay’s family would not be the only Monaghan family to pass down tales of violent sectarian clashes.

This was a clue to what Irish society could become under Home Rule. Edward Turner described the process of Ireland becoming dominated by Catholics when he wrote, “If the people were mostly incapable, then Irish administration, no longer supervised from England, would inevitably come into the keeping of the politicians who were now at the head of powerful organizations, like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and others allied with it…” A significant portion of the debate over Home Rule for Ireland was that it would be the heads of Catholic organizations, like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who take control of a free Ireland’s politics. The Ancient Order of Hibernians were also known as “Molly Maguires”, a Catholic counterpart to the Orangemen, and were loathed by Protestants and Unionists. There were even Catholics who feared and hated the Molly Maguires.

The resistance methods utilized by the Molly Maguires, and other Catholic nationalist groups, were often coercive in nature. Such methods included boycotting, intimidation, destruction of property, threats of violence, ravaging farms, and attacking crops or cattle. “The methods employed to extend and perpetuate the greatness of these bodies, it was said, would be using unseen power, coercion by boycotting, intimidation, and destruction of property. Additionally, “[t]here were stories of brutal murder and cruel revenge, of moonlighting, hayburning, arson. And it was said that such conditions prevailed and such was the character of the Irish magistracy that either criminals were not prosecuted or the trials resulted in gross miscarriage of justice, with secret societies intervening and malefactors allowed to escape.” The situation was unlikely to improve with the establishment of an Irish parliament. Law enforcement and the judiciary would be taken over by a Catholic political power. As Edward Turner wrote in 1917, “…the situation would then be to the advantage of ambitious and reckless political leaders for the control of their supporters and the crushing of those who opposed them.” Moses Little had definitely opposed such Catholic power in 1912 when he signed the Ulster Covenant. His farm and his family would be at risk of reprisal should Ireland gain Home Rule.

Such was the situation when Moses Little, a man who had lived through many troubles and who supported the status quo, waved good-bye to another daughter he would never see again. The combination of political and historical grievances that the Catholics bore against Protestants was sure, under Home Rule, to be redressed in a manner like what the Protestants had delivered to the majority of Irish. Moses stood with those who would have had Monaghan excluded from a free Ireland, but only six of the nine counties of Ulster were ultimately included in Northern Ireland. Moses foresaw the coming troubles for Ireland and, when opportunity came for him to try to protect at least one daughter, he ensured that Mary would not return to Ireland.

Bibliography

Primary Documents

Brooks, Sydney. “The New Ireland: V.” The North American Review, vol. 188, no. 632 (July 1908): 101-111. http://www.jstor.org/stable/251061. Accessed October 29, 2012.

Clancey, John J. “The Latest Reform in Ireland.” The North American Review, vol 167, no. 502 (September 1898): 287-299. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25119059>. (Accessed October 26, 2012).

Irish Census, 1901. <http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Monaghan/Dawsongrove/Kilcrow/1633482> (Accessed November 25, 2012).

Irish Census, 1911. <http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Monaghan/Dawsongrove/Kilcrow/806402> (Accessed November 25, 2012).

Redmond, John E. “Ireland since ’98.” The North American Review, vol. 166, no. 497 (April 1898): 385-397. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25118978> Accessed October 26, 2012.

Turner, Edward Raymond. “Opposition to Home Rule.” The American Political Science Review, vol 11, no 3 (August 1917): 448-460. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1944247> (Accessed November 25, 2012).

Secondary Sources

Kennedy, Thomas C. "Tory Radicalism and the Home Rule Crisis, 1910-1914: The Case of Lord Willoughby de Broke." Canadian Journal of History 37, no. 1 (April 2002): 23. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 25, 2012).

Maume, Patrick. “The Orangeman (1915) as Ulster-American Origin Narrative.” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, (Spring 2002): 113-130. <http://muse.jhu.edu> (Accessed November 25, 2012).

Morris, Nicola K. “Traitors to Their Faith? Protestant Clergy and the Ulster Covenant of 1912.” New Hibernia Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 16-35. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed November 25, 2012).

Letter to Governor Jerry Brown Protesting Closure of California's State Parks

This letter was sent June 9, 2011.

Dear Governor Brown,

I protest the planned closures of any of California’s State Parks. These parks are our heritage and our legacy to our future generations. In your recent budget proposal, you seek to fund our state’s schools to the full extent possible. While I laud your support for schools, the California State Parks are educational aids that cannot be equaled by any videos or photos studied by students in a classroom. When a student visits one of our parks, he or she gets to see first-hand the environments and historical sites that contributed to our cultural and environmental diversity. Our parks represent the best progressive spirit of our state’s heritage. To close our state’s parks is a crime against our children’s’ futures.

Governor, if you seek to move California’s government toward a program of austerity, then perhaps you should review the salaries of your staff and senior department officials. According to the Salary Transparency website (http://www.transparency.ca.gov), in 2009, the Secretary for Environmental Protection received $158,208 in pay. In the governor’s office, the Senior Assistant to the Governor received $167,994 in salary that same year. Others received salaries of comparable size including Ruth Coleman, Director of Parks and Recreation, who received $129,294 in compensation. Additionally, the website for California’s State Senate reveals that members of the Senate received salaries of approximately $94,000 or more. If these leaders are truly public servants, why do they receive compensation equal to private for-profit corporations? Rather than cut funding to the Department of Parks and Recreation, funding for salaries of elected officials and non-civil service appointees need to be cut and limited annually to not more than the mean income for California residents or $48,000, whichever is less. Also, eliminate travel expenses across the board for legislators, yourself, the state’s Supreme Court justices, and all non-civil service appointees. If our state’s leaders cannot support themselves on $4,000 a month, then something is seriously wrong with our government. Government service in a representative democracy is not about becoming a millionaire.

California State Parks represent 150 years of our cultural and intellectual development. To spare the parks, I propose that you, by executive order, decentralize operations of the parks system to the district level with all associated revenues from fees being directed to accounts unavailable to General Fund financial liabilities. The local costs of operations would consequently be the responsibilities of the regional parks districts. Parks closures would then be determined by local interests and necessity rather than the vagaries of the political give-and-take of Sacramento. Furthermore, I encourage you, sir, to continue to promote the establishment of private not-for-profit entities for the assumption of operations in those parks that are slated to be closed. The park system could then evolve into a collaboration between private citizens who volunteer, regional economic organizations, and parks districts.

Again, I protest the draconian solution of closing any of California’s valuable state parks. The issues associated with the deficit are due to legislative and executive branches’ irresponsibility. Let the members of those branches of government carry the burden of spending cuts rather than the repositories of California’s heritage.

Sincerely,

Matthew Reed

Native Americans in the US Civil War

For a majority of Americans, the American Civil War was a war to end slavery in the South. The nuances of the debate over a state’s right to secede or the degree of control by the federal government, indeed most issues related to the United States Constitution, are ignored in favor of a narrow, easy to understand idea. Yet within the indigenous nations of North America a separate Civil War was raging. The motivations for Indians were often similar to white Americans, but also included past grievances against the United States that were unique to Native Americans. Unlike the states that seceded from the Union, the American Indians who enlisted, either as part of their tribes’ support for a side or as individuals, considered themselves as sovereign people with the power to decide their own fate. However, the choices made by the leaders of the Indian nations gave further impetus to the white war on Native Americans.

The motivations for choosing a particular side in the Civil War compared favorably to white motivations, but were dissimilar in a number of respects. For the Cherokee, the plight of the South bore more than a passing similarity to the centuries of strife Native Americans faced from Europeans. In declaring themselves independent from the United States, the leaders of the Cherokee nation declared that

Foreign mercenaries and the scum of cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into regiments and brigades and sent into Southern States to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom, to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on women; while the heels of armed tyranny trod upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri, and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion and without process of law in jails, in forts, and in prison-ships, and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet ministers…[1]

Aside from the references to Maryland and Missouri, this declaration seemed more a reiteration of wrongs committed against Indians than an enumeration of Union injustices against the South. Further, a core issue raised by the Cherokee in their declaration of independence was the “fate befallen those of their race in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon…” which was very much a separate issue than the issue of slavery or states’ rights. The Cherokee, then, found common cause with other Indians as well as with the Confederacy.

The Cherokee declaration of independence from the United States did not come immediately with the secession of the South. A principal signer of the Declaration of Causes, John Ross, was a conditional Unionist. While other members of the Cherokee leadership, most notably among them the future Confederate general Stand Watie, urged Ross to accept an alliance with the Confederate States, negotiated by Confederate agent Albert Pike, Ross urged his people to forego any alliance with the Confederacy and adhere to a policy of strict neutrality.[2]

Other Indian nations, such as the Chippewa, were actively pursuing support for the Union. Hole-in-the-Day, a prominent Chippewa chief in Minnesota, volunteered a hundred of his warriors for the war against the Confederacy on May 1, 1861, but was dismissed out-of-hand a week later by Secretary of War Simon Cameron with the statement that the secession of states “forbids the use of savages.”[3] H.B. Branch, of the Central Superintendency, explained his opposition to the enlistment of Native Americans by stating, “The Indians…must follow the chase, and they cannot engage in war and also pursue the hunt, while civilization and humanity demand that they confine themselves to peaceful avocations…”[4] The imperial paternalism expressed, by viewing Indians as outside “civilization and humanity”, was a further contrast to the South’s willingness to accept Indians as a slaveholding class within its society.

For Native Americans who lived in Border States, such as Arkansas and in Indian Territory, the choice between the Union and the Confederacy was a choice similar to whites. However, for American Indians living on reservations far to the north of significant sectional conflict, the alliances formed between the CSA and Indian nations had profound repercussions on a people already willing to submit to US authority. A cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly during the war illustrates Northerners’ disregard for distinctions in Native American relations. In Figure 1, Indians attack two white settler families. The native men are shown with knives raised above the family in the foreground, with one native holding an infant by the foot and preparing to kill the baby while the baby’s mother begs for mercy for her child. The woman is being pulled backward by the hair, an Indian standing with arm raised in preparation to scalp her. A man, possibly her husband, lies on the ground beside the woman. Another man is shown knifed by an Indian. A jug of whiskey lies at the feet of the third Indian with the words “agent C.S.A.” on the jug. The caption of the cartoon is a quote from Confederate president Jefferson Davis with an explanatory comment

“I am happy to inform you that, in spite both of blandishments and threats, used in profusion by the agents of the government of the United States, the Indian nations within the confederacy have remained firm in their loyalty and steadfast in the observance of their treaty engagements with this government.” The above extract from Jeff Davis’ last message will serve to explain the news from Minnesota. [5]

The situation in Minnesota in 1862, however, was only marginally related to the War Between the States. Rather than being encouraged by Confederate agents, the Sioux in Minnesota were fighting for their treaty rights and for survival. In 1851, the Santee Sioux, now known as the Dakota, ceded 24 million acres to the US government, which immediately opened the land to settlers. The Santee then were forced to cede control of an additional 1 million acres, reducing their reservation by half. Congress only paid 30 cents per acre two years later, less than the average price for prime farmland. 

Simultaneously, the US government was attempting to force American Indians to turn to farming. White traders fronted the Indian farmer’s credit on supplies and then, when the tribe was paid annuities, claimed inflated charges, leaving the native farmers with little or no money. Finally, in the winter of 1861-1862, a major crop failure left the Santee near starvation. Ultimately, the last straw came when the white traders refused to provide credit for food during the winter and spring, because Congress, engaged in funding a war with secessionist states, had not yet appropriated money for the Sioux. When the money did come, $71,000 in gold, it was two months late. On September 5, 1862, the Santee Sioux revolted, attacking the traders and white settlers who cheated them.[6]

The caption of Figure 1, then, becomes a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The Sioux in Minnesota rose against white authority, therefore, the fallacy states, the violence in the northern plains must be a result of Confederate incitement. Unfortunately, the split among Americans during the Civil War was not limited to Euro-Americans, but also to Native Americans. When war erupted between the states, the fourteen thousand Creeks in Indian Territory split roughly evenly along social and cultural lines. The Southern faction was comprised predominantly of educated, mixed-heritage slave-owners who were offered favorable treaties with the Confederacy. The Southern faction of the Creeks signed an alliance in 1861 and began raising troops for service in Indian Territory, Arkansas, and Missouri; the Northern Creeks, less formally educated and non-slaveholders, continued to support the Union.

One of the most ardent supporters among the northern Creeks was Opothleyoholo, who had led three thousand of his people into Kansas late in 1861. He considered Chief Ross “a man lying on his belly, watching for the opportunity to turn over.”[7] Opothleyoholo’s men were the nucleus of the First, Second, and Third Home Guards of Kansas. He best states the cultural split that occurred when he said, “The educated part of our tribes is the worst.”[8] It would ultimately be his fierce resistance against Confederate forces that would encourage the Union to accept the mass enlistment of Native Americans.

The Civil War rent asunder American society. Not only did white Americans face the agony of families divided, but Native Americans faced a more uncertain future if they chose the wrong side. The view that the Minnesota Sioux strife was connected to the Civil War only further muddied the politics surrounding Indian policy. While chiefs like Hole-in-the-Day and Opothleyoholo were as supportive of the United States as any white citizen, their ethnicity set them apart as unworthy, initially, to be Union soldiers. The Confederacy, ironically, had little issue with the formation of native units and the enlistment of Native Americans. The Civil War fought by Native Americans, then, was a war unto themselves.

Figure 1

Bibliography

Freeman, Charles. “The Battle of Honey Springs.” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 1935, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v013/v013p154.html

Kachuba, John B. “Sioux Terror on the Prairie.” America’s Civil War vol. 10, no 1 (1997):30

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1900, Series 3, Vol. 1, pg 184, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ANU4519-0122

 “The Cherokee Nation Declaration of Causes.” October 28, 1861, http://www.civilwar.com/cherokeecauses.htm

Seccia, Patrick T. “An Officer and an Indian.” Civil War Times, vol. 45. no. 7 (2006): 46-52

Trickett, Dean. “The Civil War in the Indian Territory, 1862”, Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol, 19, No. 1, March 1941, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v019/v019p055.html

unknown artist, Harper’s Weekly. September 13, 1862, http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=September&Date=13

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[1] “The Cherokee Nation Declaration of Causes,” October 28, 1861, http://www.civilwar.com/cherokeecauses.htm

[2] Charles Freeman, “The Battle of Honey Springs,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 1935, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v013/v013p154.html

[3] Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1900), Series 3, Vol. 1, pg 184, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ANU4519-0122

[4] Dean Trickett, “The Civil War in the Indian Territory, 1862”, Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol, 19, No. 1, March 1941, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v019/v019p055.html

[5] cartoon, Harper’s Weekly, September 13, 1862, http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=September&Date=13

[6] John B. Kachuba. “Sioux Terror on the Prairie.” America’s Civil War vol. 10, no 1 (1997):30

[7] Trickett, “The Civil War in Indian Territory 1862”, 64

[8] Ibid

A Mendocino Immigrant: Antone Carvalho

On November twenty-second, 1896, thirty-two-year-old woodsman Antone Raposo Carvalho was a man ascendant. Not three years prior, the native of Sao Miguel, Azores, had been a subject of King Luis I of Portugal. Now he stood in the Fort Bragg Catholic Church before his, and seventeen-year-old Maria Pacheco’s, friends and family as a citizen of the United States. Antone’s Certificate of Naturalization, dated January 8, 1894, states that he was a resident of the United States for at least five years. In fact, Antone immigrated to the US eleven years previously in 1883 at the age of 19. At this time, the Azores Islands were in the middle of a century of unrest and violence, bracketed at one end by bloody civil war in the 1830s and at the other end of the century with revolutions in the early 1900s. From this turmoil, Antone Carvalho fled, leaving behind everything he knew and taking only his trade as a woodsman, to build a new life half-way around the world. In contrast to the turmoil of the Azores, confined as it was to small geography, the labor strikes and riots that occurred in the sprawling United States during the 1890s must have seemed far away from Mendocino and tame.

Mendocino was a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic city for much of its existence. Mendocino’ story is less the story of Euro-Americans than it is the story of cultural amalgamation. The coast was settled by immigrants from Portugal and the Azores, Sweden, Finland, Latin America, as well as Americans from other parts of the country. Mill and logging crews were littered with people with last names like Paoli, Gomes, and Silvia as well as  Kontag,  Klienschmidt, and Olsen. Other men were known to their peers by such colorful pseudonyms as Old Man MacDonald and Little River Smith. Other higher profile individuals in the Mendocino coast community were likewise either immigrants or first generation Americans. William Heeser was an immigrant from Germany who was invited into the homes of most coastal residents by way of his newspapers, The Fort Bragg Advocate-News and The Mendocino Beacon. Heeser also started newspapers in Kibbesillah, Westport, and Rockport.

Antone Carvalho resided on the Mendocino coast for fifty years. In 1903, he purchased his first family home in Mendocino at 44460 Little Lake Road. In 1921, Carvalho purchased and moved his family to the Blair House, which remained with the family until the 1940s. In Antone Carvalho’s fifty years on the Mendocino Coast, he witnessed nine children born and grown to adulthood. When he died in 1933, Antone was missed as a well-liked and well-respected member of the coastal community. Antone’s Certificate of Naturalization and marriage certificate to Maria Pacheco, in addition to other artifacts such as Antone’s workman’s pocket watch, are maintained by the Kelley House; images of these and other items can be viewed at the Kelley House’s website, www.mendocinohistory.org.

A View on the Treaty of Versailles

In the years leading up to World War Two, Germany was ostracized by the international community for its significant role in World War One. This ostracism was more than a popular misconception of German motivations during the Great War. In the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One (WWI), Germany was held accountable for everything that had happened in the years other countries were fighting Germany, paving the way for general anti-German sentiment abroad. Domestically, the Treaty of Versailles was viewed with opprobrium by policy makers and big business. Germans were humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and resented the loss of territory as well as the onerous reparations required by the treaty.

On June 28, 1919, Germany accepted the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles as a defeated belligerent nation. The United States, Great Britain, and France stripped Germany of many of a nation-state’s accepted arsenal of economic and military tools. German possessions won from the Turkish Empire were granted provisional recognition of independence. The provision required a foreign “Mandatory” such as France or Great Britain to oversee administration of internal policy “…until such time as they are able to stand alone.”[1] Similarly, the territories of Alsace and Lorraine were restored to France as they were in 1871, with the treaty noting “…the wrong done by Germany…both to the rights of France and to the wishes of the population of Alsace and Lorraine…” Certainly, there would be a grudge felt by Germans at having territory they possessed for forty years taken away.[2]

The grudge was further strengthened by Germany’s agreement to pay reparations. Part of the territory lost by Germany was the coal-mining region of the Saar Basin; the mining region was transferred to France and was to be considered part of Germany’s reparations.[3] Though the Treaty of Versailles recognized that “…the resources of Germany are not adequate…to make complete reparation for all such loss and damage…” the treaty nonetheless required that Germany would “…make compensation for all damage done to the civilian population…during the period of the belligerency…against Germany.” If Germany was held accountable for “all damage done to the civilian population” during the entire span of time it engaged in hostile military actions, then social and environmental issues only marginally related to the war became the fault of Germany and Germans.

The Allies further declared that “…Germany accepts the responsibility…for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” Germany was essentially blamed for everything that happened during the war. And though World War I was begun by a Serbian assassinating the Austrian heir in Bosnia, Germany was blamed for everything that occurred during the Great War. Such a stark declaration within an international treaty bred bitterness within German hearts.[4]

Also a source of bitterness was the threadbare state in which the German state was left by the Versailles treaty. The Allied powers stripped Germany of its offensive and most of its defensive capabilities. For example, the German Army was limited to seven divisions of infantry and three divisions of cavalry with the total fighting force not to exceed 100,000 men, including four thousand officers. The Army was “…devoted exclusively to the maintenance of order within the territory and to the control of the frontiers…”[5]  Defensively, Germany was could not fortify the banks of the Rhine river, its common border with France, nor build fortifications within fifty kilometers of the Rhine. Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, was to be considered the global equivalent of a toothless lion.[6]

There can be no doubt that the German political and social environment was primed with bitterness, anger, and resentment toward the Treaty of Versailles and the disposition of German defeat in 1918. From the losses of territory, to the laying blame for the war on Germany, and finally to the severe limitations on German military forces, Germans were ready to strike out against what they perceived as unfair international restrictions and prejudicial ostracism.

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[1] Article 22. The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)

[2] The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)

[3] Article 45. The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)

[4] Articles 231 and 232. The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)

[5] Article 160. The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)

[6] Article 42. The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944)