History

In 2007, a historical artifact of immeasurable cultural and national value was returned to Greece from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This artifact, a lavish Macedonian gold funerary wreath, dates back to the 4th century BC and is believed to have belonged to a relative of the great conqueror, Alexander the Great. The return of this treasure marked not only the correction of a historical wrong but also a reaffirmation of the ethical importance of cultural restitution.
A Symbol of Prestige and Power
The wreath, described by the Getty as a “lavish miniature garden,” was crafted from delicate gold leaves and flowers. Its intricate design reflected the craftsmanship of ancient Macedonian goldsmiths, and the wreath was likely worn during important ceremonial occasions. In Macedonian culture, these wreaths were symbols of both power and divine favor—reserved for royalty, military leaders, or individuals of high societal status.
The precise origin of the wreath, though not definitively known, links it to a period of Macedonian ascendancy. Given its dating to the 4th century BC, it is highly likely that the wreath once adorned the grave of a close family member of Alexander the Great—possibly a royal or noble personage. For historians, this connection makes the artifact an essential link to Hellenistic history and the cultural splendor of ancient Greece.
The Journey Back Home
The journey of the wreath from Greece to Los Angeles and eventually back home mirrors the story of countless other looted artifacts scattered across the globe. The Getty Museum had long held the wreath in its collection until 2007, when it finally admitted that the piece had been illicitly removed from Greece. The museum's acknowledgment of the wreath's looted status was a significant moment in the growing global movement toward the repatriation of cultural treasures.
For Greece, the return of the wreath was a victory not only for cultural heritage but also for national pride. The wreath had long been a symbol of Greek antiquity, and its repatriation represented a restitution of identity and history. Greek officials emphasized that artifacts such as the gold wreath are not mere objects but embodiments of national history that should be preserved in their country of origin.
The Global Importance of Cultural Repatriation
The return of the Macedonian wreath is emblematic of the broader global debate on the ethics of artifact collection and museum curation. For decades, Western museums have acquired artifacts through various means, often under circumstances where the legality of their acquisition is questionable. However, the tide has begun to turn, with countries like Greece, Egypt, and Nigeria advocating for the return of looted treasures.
This trend is not just about returning objects but also about acknowledging and rectifying the historical injustices of colonialism, war, and illicit trade. Each return signifies a broader cultural reckoning, highlighting the need for museums to re-examine their collections and the provenance of artifacts within them. As these objects return to their homelands, they reconnect cultures with their lost histories, allowing new generations to engage with their heritage.
Conclusion: An Artifact Beyond Gold
The Macedonian gold funerary wreath is more than a remarkable piece of ancient craftsmanship—it is a symbol of both the splendor and challenges of ancient and modern history. Its return to Greece underscores the importance of protecting cultural heritage and the role that ethical stewardship plays in modern museums. For an international audience, the story of the wreath serves as a reminder of the delicate balance between preserving the past and respecting the rightful ownership of the world’s treasures.

Did you know that the humble carob seed played a crucial role in the history of weighing precious metals and gemstones? The story behind the karat, a term we still use today to measure the purity of gold, is both fascinating and little known, spanning ancient civilizations and linguistic journeys.
The Carob Seed: A Weight Standard
The Ancient Greeks discovered an interesting trait of the carob seed (Ceratonia siliqua). Each seed weighs almost exactly the same, around 0.20 grams. Because of this remarkable consistency, they began using carob seeds as a standard for measuring the weight of precious metals, such as gold. This practice wasn’t just local but spread across regions, influencing other cultures, particularly in trade.
How the Arabs Adopted and Adapted
As the Greek influence spread, their word for carob seed — kerátion — became known in the Arab world. The Arabs referred to it as qīrāṭ, meaning "small weight" or "carob seed." This term eventually morphed into the "carat" we recognize today, not just for weighing gold but also for diamonds and gemstones.
The Word’s Journey into European Languages
By the mid-15th century, the term carat entered the English language, carried by trade and cultural exchange. The word had already traveled through French ("carat") and Italian ("carato") before reaching its final form in English. Yet, its origins remained firmly tied to the Greek and Arabic terms, which both referred back to the carob seed.
A Modern Measure with Ancient Roots
While we now use precise scientific methods to measure weight and purity, the legacy of the carob seed remains in the way we speak about gold purity — karats — and gemstone weight — carats. Each time you hear about 24-karat gold, you're actually touching on a history that dates back thousands of years, to the seeds of the carob tree.
The Value of Ancient Knowledge Today
The use of carob seeds might seem like a simple or even quaint solution to measuring weight, but it highlights the ingenuity of ancient civilizations. They found natural resources to develop systems that not only worked for them but lasted throughout the centuries.
In a world of technological advancements, we can still appreciate the cleverness of the Greeks, the Arabs, and those who contributed to shaping how we measure the value of precious materials. The fact that a single seed became the foundation for an international standard reminds us of the incredible connections between language, culture, and science.
The Global Legacy of Carats and Karats
Today, whether you're buying a 2-carat diamond or 24-karat gold jewelry, you are part of a tradition that connects you to ancient trade routes, civilizations, and linguistic evolution. The simplicity of the carob seed has left a lasting mark on the world of commerce, reminding us that even small things can hold great value — both literally and metaphorically.
By exploring this historical journey, we see how the influence of different cultures and civilizations persists in everyday life, often in ways we take for granted. Understanding this background enriches our appreciation of the present and offers insight into the timeless connections between the past and the modern world.

Martha Hodes (l) and her older sister Catherine on the single passport they shared. Photo courtesy of Martha Hodes.
On September 6, 1970 Martha Hodes, then aged 12, and her older sister Catherine boarded a TWA around-the-world flight in Tel Aviv to return to New York after spending the summer in Israel. After a stop in Frankfurt, militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked the flight and rerouted it to a makeshift airfield in the Jordan desert, part of a coordinated campaign of four hijackings. The Hodes sisters became part of a six-day drama that held the world’s attention before the ultimate release of all of the hostages.
Yet, for years her own memories of the event were vague and unclear, and she occasionally felt as if it weren’t certain that she had, in fact been inside that plane at all. Her new book My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, published to acclaim by HarperCollins, describes her work to apply her craft as a historian to her own memory.
Professor Hodes agreed to a discussion over email of the book and her unique experiences as a historian examining her own hostage crisis.
HNN: Readers might initially be shocked to learn about your longstanding ways of relating to your experience, which included anxiety and avoidance around air travel, but also a sense of unreality and detachment from the events. How did you begin to approach your own experience as a historian?
Martha Hodes: One of the oddest parts of thinking back on the hijacking was the sense that it had never happened to me. As a historian, I wanted to dispel this illogical perception by researching, documenting, and reconstructing the event—from the moment of the hijacking up in the air, to our week inside the plane in the desert, to our release. Yet even when I came upon raw news footage in which my sister and I appeared on screen, I felt more like a historian coming upon evidence of a distant historical subject. 
Bringing a historian’s skills to memoir-writing, I studied the work of other scholars writing about their own lives: Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies, Clifton Crais’s History Lessons, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Jonathan Scott Holloway’s Jim Crow Wisdom, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, Edward Said’s Out of Place, Richard White’s Remembering Ahanagran, to name a few. Working as a memoirist writing a personal story and working at the same time as a historian writing about the past, I found it valuable to think of my twelve-year-old self as an historical actor in the past. In the end, that helped me come around to the fact that I had really been there, in the desert.
Part of this journey was reading your own diary from this period. I imagine most people would find their half-century old diary a challenging reading assignment even with much lower stakes—What did this document tell you?
My 1970 diary turned out to be a key document, though not in the way I’d expected. I’d packed my diary in my carry-on bag and wrote every day during the hijacking, so I thought it would be the scaffolding on which to build the book—after all, historians place considerable trust in documents from the time and place about which we are writing. Soon, though, I discovered that I’d omitted a great deal from those pages, in particular descriptions of frightening circumstances and events, as well as my own feelings of fear. When my students work with primary sources, I always teach them to ask, “Why did this person tell this story this way?” In that light, I came to understand my own inability, as a twelve-year-old caught in a world historical event, to absorb everything that was happening around me. Or maybe it was that I didn’t want to record what I knew I wouldn’t want to remember.
At many other times, documents speak to you in ways that disrupt your understanding; can you describe some of these moments?
I’ll mention a crucial one. Along with my diary, the other key document I discovered was a tape recording of an interview that my sister and I had given less than a week after we returned home—again, valuable as a document created very close in time to the event under investigation. From that astounding document I learned a great deal about how my family handled the immediate aftermath of the hijacking and how I would approach the hijacking for decades afterward. For me, writing the book broke my own pattern of denial and dismissiveness.
Your writing is particularly effective, I think, in mirroring your own developing understanding of the unfolding of the hostage crisis breaking emotional barriers you had long maintained. For me, this was most dramatic when you begin to confront a question that preoccupied people from your 12-year-old self to Henry Kissinger for that week in September: would the PFLP follow through on its threat to kill hostages? What can you conclude about as a historian about the danger you and your fellow hostages faced?
The dynamics of hostage-taking required our captors to keep their hostages off-balance. Sometimes they conveyed that no one would be harmed and occasionally they threatened that if their demands were not soon met, we would all die. And of course they told the world that the planes, along with the hostages, would be destroyed if their demands were not honored. In the course of my research, though, I learned that the Popular Front’s internal policy was not to harm anyone (and all the hostages did in fact return unharmed). But I also learned, during my research, of other ways that harm could have come to us—say, in an attack from the outside or by the accidental firing of one of the many weapons all around us. As a historian of the American Civil War, I teach my students about contingency on the battlefield; looking back, there was also considerable contingency out there in the desert.
Your parents’ story also presents something remarkable from today’s perspective: two people of modest origins making long, gainfully employed careers in the arts (dance, in their case). Can you discuss a bit the story of your family, and how it placed you on that TWA airliner?
My parents were both modern dancers in the Martha Graham Dance Company. They were divorced, and my sister and I had spent the summer in Israel with our mother, who had moved there to help start the Batsheva Dance Company, Israel’s first modern dance troupe. I learned during my research—something I hadn’t quite understood at the time—that my sister and I were different from most of the other American Jews among the hostages, who were keen on visiting Israel after the 1967 war. Both my parents were raised as secular Jews, and my mother had moved to Israel as a dancer, with no interest in Zionism, or even any particular interest in Israel. My childhood attachment to Israel stemmed from the fact that Tel Aviv was the place I spent carefree summers.
Stepping back a bit, I want to talk about historiography. In your career, you’ve been no stranger to writing about other people’s grief and trauma as it’s preserved and remembered in the archives. In My Hijacking you explore the way that forgetting can be a necessary, even purposeful, part of people’s response to loss and harm. How can readers and writers understand how this work shapes the historical record?
I’m a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, and in different ways, each of my previous books has addressed the problem of forgetting in the historical record. In White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, I found that overpowering ideas of white anxiety about sex between white women and black men erased the historical record of white southerners’ toleration for such liaisons under the institution of slavery. In The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth-Century, the act of forgetting was more personal: the protagonist, a white New England woman who married a Caribbean man of color, had been partially erased from family history. In Mourning Lincoln, I found that widespread gleeful responses to Lincoln’s assassination—in the North as well as the South—came to be forgotten, overtaken by narratives of universal grief.
Returning to the dilemma of my diary in My Hijacking, I saw quite starkly how first-person documents can be crafted in particular ways, and how erasure can then foster forgetting. As for My Hijacking shaping the historical record, it’s deeply researched, but it’s also my story alone. The experience of each hostage depended on factors ranging from where you were sitting on the plane to your convictions about the history of Israel/Palestine. As I write in the book, “I could strive only to tell my own story of the hijacking in the truest possible way.”
At HNN, we seek to connect the past and the present, and to draw insight onto current events from historical thought. It seems to me that in Americans’ collective responses to upheavals in recent history, from 9/11 to the COVID pandemic are deeply structured and enabled  by forgetting. Would you agree? And how can understanding the work of forgetting help us think about the recent past? 
Forgetting can be a way to survive, and during my research I found that my family was not alone in not talking much about the hijacking after my sister and I returned home. But it’s also the work of historians to remember, and while researching My Hijacking I learned about the process of forgetting in another way. Like many American Jews in 1970, I had no idea that Palestinians had once lived on the same land. In the book, I recount a visit my sister and I took with our mother to the village of Ein Hod. We didn’t know that in 1948 Palestinians had been exiled and the village resettledby Israeli artists. My sister wrote a letter home to our father, saying that the artists lived “in quaint little Arab style houses” surrounded by “beautiful mountain views and flowers,” thereby illuminating a kind of collective forgetting. At twelve years old, in the desert, I began to learn about the irreconcilable narratives told by different sides of the conflict. On the plane, my sister and I felt sorry for everyone—for our fellow captives, especially the Holocaust survivors among us, and for our captors and their families, some of whom had lost their homes in 1948 and 1967. We puzzled out the conflict, but at twelve and thirteen years old we couldn’t think of a solution.
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Blaine Harden (Photo by Jessica Kowal)
"The Whitman lie is a timeless reminder that in America a good story has an insidious way of trumping a true one, especially if that story confirms our virtue, congratulates our pluck, and enshrines our status as God’s chosen people."—Blaine Harden, Murder at the Mission
           
As the result of a good story, the Reverend Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa became perhaps the most revered pioneer couple in the history of America’s westward expansion.
Six decades ago, as a student in Spokane, Washington, I learned of the Whitmans in a course on our state history, a requirement in Washington schools.
 In our textbooks and lectures, the Whitman couple was virtually deified as benevolent Christian pioneers who offered Indians salvation as they brought civilization to their backward flock. At the same time, they encouraged others from the East to join them where land was plentiful and open for the taking. And Reverend Whitman was celebrated as an American patriot who saved for America the territory that became the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho from a plot hatched by the British with Catholic and Native co-conspirators.
We also learned of the Whitman massacre: the shocking and gruesome 1847 murders of the gracious Whitmans and eleven other white people by renegade Cayuse Indians in an unprovoked attack at their mission near present day Walla Walla. The massacre became a flashpoint in the history of the West.
It turns out that the Whitman story we were taught decades ago was rife with lies, as acclaimed journalist and author Blaine Harden reveals in his lively recent book, a masterwork of historical detection, Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the West (Viking).
Mr. Harden learned the same version of the Whitman tale that I did in the early sixties as a fifth-grade student in Moses Lake, Washington. In recent years, he decided to meticulously investigate the Whitman legend and set forth an accurate historical account of the amazing story we learned in school.
Murder at the Mission presents a nuanced and complicated history of settler colonialism, racism, greed, righteousness, and mythmaking. Based on exhaustive research, including recent interviews with members of the Cayuse tribe, Mr. Harden traces the actual journey of the Whitmans and events leading to their deaths. He also reveals the origins of the Whitman hoax and how the lies about the Whitmans were spread after the massacre, notably by an embittered fellow missionary, the Reverend Henry Spalding.
With the help of religious, business and political leaders invested in a story to justify the evils of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, Spalding’s exalted tale of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman was endorsed by major publications and the Congress and was shared in textbooks. The lie was so effectively spread that, by the end of the nineteenth century, Marcus Whitman was seen as one of the most significant men in our nation’s history.
Mr. Harden dissects and analyzes every aspect of the fabulous Whitman tale as he debunks the lie with primary sources and other evidence. The book also brings to life the predicament of the Cayuse people and other Native Americans where the Whitmans settled, as epidemics ravaged the tribes and a flood of white settlers pushed them from their traditional lands. And Mr. Harden places the Whitman lore in historical context by examining parallel accounts of the dispossession and extermination of other Native Americans in the conquest of the West.
Murder at the Mission exposes the lies at the center of a foundational American myth and examines how a false story enthralled a public weaned on Manifest Destiny and eager for validation of its rapacious conquest and intolerance while ignoring evidence-based history and countervailing arguments. As we continue to deal with the disinformation, potent political lies, genocidal conflicts, and systemic racism, Mr. Harden’s re-assessment of this history is powerfully resonant now.
Blaine Harden is an award-winning journalist who served as The Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia and Africa, as a local and national correspondent for The New York Times, and as a writer for the Times Magazine. He was also Post bureau chief in Warsaw, during the collapse of Communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia (1989-1993), and in Nairobi, where he covered sub-Saharan Africa (1985-1989). His other books include The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot; King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea; Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent; A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia; and Escape from Camp 14. Africa won a Pen American Center citation for first book of non-fiction. Escape From Camp 14 won the 2112 Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique, a French literary award and enjoyed several weeks on various New York Times bestseller lists and was an international bestseller published in 28 languages.
Mr. Harden’s journalism awards include the Ernie Pyle Award for coverage of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War; the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Nondeadline Writing (stories about Africa); and the Livingston Award for International Reporting (stories about Africa).  He has contributed to The Economist, PBS Frontline, Foreign Policy, and more. He lives in Seattle with his family.
Mr. Harden sat down at a Seattle café and generously discussed his work and his recent book Murder at the Mission.
Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. Harden on your revelatory work on the myth of Marcus Whitman in your new book, Murder at the Mission. Before we get to the book, could you talk about your background as a globetrotting foreign correspondent and author of several previous books?
Blaine Harden: I grew up in Moses Lake, a little town in eastern Washington, and in Aberdeen, which is on the coast. My father was a construction welder and we moved when he found jobs or when he lost jobs. And so, we moved from Moses Lake to Aberdeen and back to Moses Lake. My father’s work was dependent on the construction of dams on the Columbia River and on other federal spending in the Columbia Basin. His wages as a union welder catapulted him and his family from working class poor to middle class. So, when I graduated from high school, there was enough money for me to go to a private college. I went to Gonzaga University in Spokane and then to graduate school at Syracuse.
When I was at Syracuse, I had the great good fortune of having a visiting professor who was the managing editor of the Washington Post, Howard Simons. I made his course my full-time job and ignored every other class. He offered me a job. I worked for one year at the Trenton (N.J.) Times, a farm-club paper then owned by the Washington Post.
When I was 25, I was at the Washington Post. I worked there locally for about five years. Then I worked from abroad, which is something I always wanted to do when I was at college. I was a philosophy major, and I read Hume who wrote that you could only know what you see in front of you, what you experience with your senses. I had this narcissistic view that the world didn't exist unless I saw it.
I went to Africa for the Post and was there for five years. Then I was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans for three years during the collapse of Communism and the collapse of Yugoslavia. When that was over, I'd been abroad for eight years, and I was a little tired of it. I wanted to write another book. I'd already written one about Africa.
I came back and to the Northwest and wrote a book about the rivers and the dams and the natural resource wars that were going on in the Pacific Northwest over salmon and the proper use of the Columbia River.
I did that book, and then went back to Washington, D.C., and then to Japan in 2007. I came back to the Northwest in 2010 when I left the newspaper business and wrote three books about North Korea. I'd been in Eastern Europe and then the Far East. These books sort of fell together, one after another.
Robin Lindley: And then you focused on the Whitman story?
Blaine Harden: Yes. Then I was looking for another project. When I was in elementary school in Moses Lake, there was a school play about Marcus Whitman and I played a role. For some reason I remembered that story, and I just started investigating Marcus Whitman. Did he really save the Pacific Northwest from the British?
I went to the University of Washington and spent a couple weeks reading the incredibly voluminous literature about Whitman. It didn't take long to understand that everything I had been taught in school was nonsense.
The history we learned was a lie, and it was a deliberate lie, one that had been debunked in 1900 by scholars at Yale and in Chicago. But the people of the Pacific Northwest, despite all evidence to the contrary, had clung to a story that was baloney. That's what hooked me. I thought this could be a really good book about the power of a lie in America. It was the kind of lie that makes Americans feel good about themselves.
The Whitman lie was perfect for a nation that thinks of itself as extra special. It was action-packed, hero-driven, sanctified by God. It also made Americans feel good about taking land away from Indians.
Robin Lindley: With the Whitman story, many people might ask first wasn't there really a massacre in 1847? And didn't Indians attack the Whitmans and kill them and other white settlers?
Blaine Harden: Right. The story of the Whitman massacre is true.
Marcus and Narcissa Whitman came out to the Pacific Northwest in 1836. They were part of the first group of missionaries to settle in the Columbia River Basin. They were there for eleven years, during which time they failed as missionaries. Marcus and Narcissa converted only two people in eleven years. They also infuriated their Cayuse hosts, who frequently asked them to move on, and they refused. The Cayuse asked them to pay rent, and they refused. The Cayuse also noticed that when epidemics occurred, measles in particular, white people would get sick, but they wouldn't die. Members of the Cayuse and the Nez Perce tribes, however, would die in terrifying numbers. They had no immunity to diseases imported by whites.
Years of bitterness between the missionaries and the tribes culminated with an especially severe measles epidemic, which for many complicated reasons the Cayuse blamed on Marcus Whitman and his wife. So, they murdered the Whitmans along with eleven other white people. The murders were grisly. The Whitmans were cut up, decapitated, stomped into the ground, and buried in a shallow grave.
When word of this atrocity reached the much larger white settlement in the Willamette Valley in what is now western Oregon, people got very upset. They mobilized a militia to punish the Cayuse and sent a delegation to Washington, D.C. They hoped to persuade President Polk and Congress to abrogate a decades-old treaty under which the Oregon County was jointly owned by Britain and the United States. And they succeeded.
The Whitman massacre turned out to be the precipitating event for an official government declaration that Oregon was a territory of the United States. Within a few years, it became the states of Oregon, Washington, and then later Idaho.
Whitman is justifiably famous for getting himself killed in a macabre and sensational way. His murder was indeed the pivot point for the creation of a continental nation that included the Pacific Northwest. But that is where truth ends and lies begin. It would take another two decades after Whitman’s murder for a big whopper to emerge—the claim that Whitman saved Oregon from a British, Catholic and Indian scheme to steal the territory.
Robin Lindley: What was the myth that emerged about Whitman and what was the reality?
Blaine Harden: As I said, the reality was that Whitman and his wife were failed missionaries who antagonized the Cayuse and refused to move. Marcus Whitman was a medical doctor as well as a missionary, and the Cayuse had a long tradition of killing failed medicine men. Marcus Whitman was aware of that tradition and had written about it. He knew he was taking a great risk by working among the Cayuse and he was repeatedly warned that he should leave. He and his wife ignored all the warnings.
When a measles epidemic swept into Cayuse country in 1847, Whitman gave medical treatment to whites and Indians. Most whites survived; most Indians died. In the Cayuse tradition, this meant that Whitman needed killing.
Robin Lindley: And Narcissa Whitman was known for her racist remarks and dislike of the Indigenous people.
Blaine Harden: Narcissa wrote some rather affecting letters about being a missionary and traveling across the country. They were widely read in the East and much appreciated. She became something of a of a darling as a frontierswoman, a missionary icon.
But she never learned to speak the Nez Perce language, which was the lingua franca of the Cayuse. She described them in letters as dirty and flea infected. By the time of her death, she had almost nothing to do with the Cayuse, whom she had come to save. She was teaching white children who arrived on the Oregon Trail.
So that's the true Whitman story. As for the creation of the Whitman lie, there is another figure in my book who is very important, the Reverend Henry Spalding. He came west with the Whitmans and, strangely enough, he had proposed to Narcissa years before she married Marcus Whitman. He had been turned down and he never forgave her.
Spalding was constantly irritating and speaking ill of the Whitmans during their lifetime. But after their deaths, he decided to cast them as heroes. He claimed that in 1842 Whitman rode a horse by himself back to Washington, D.C., and burst into the White House and persuaded President Tyler to send settlers to the Pacific Northwest—and was thus successful in blocking a British and Indian plot to steal the Northwest away from America.
Robin Lindley: And didn’t Spalding also claim that Catholics were allies of the British in this so-called plot.
Blaine Harden: Yes. Spalding said Catholics were in the plot—and politicians believed him. Spalding was a big bearded, authoritative-looking figure when he traveled back to Washington in 1870. By then, he was pushing 70 himself and was probably the longest-tenured missionary in the Northwest, perhaps in the entire West.
Spalding went to the U.S. Senate with his manifesto, which was a grab bag of lies and insinuations. And the Senate and House bought it hook, line and sinker.
The manifesto was reprinted as an official U.S. government document. It became a primary source for almost every history book that was printed between 1878 and 1900. Every school kid, every college kid, every church kid in America learned this false story about Marcus Whitman, and it catapulted Whitman from a nobody into a hero of the status of Meriweather Lewis or Sam Houston. That’s according to a survey of eminent thinkers in 1900.
Spalding was spectacularly successful in marketing his lie. What's important for readers to think about is that this lie appealed to Americans in the same way that lies now appeal to Americans. As I said, it was simple. It was hero driven, action packed, ordained by God, and it sanctified whatever Americans had done. And when they came to the West, white Americans stole the land of the Indians. They knew what they were doing, but to have the taking of the West sanctified by this heroic story made it much more palatable. You could feel much better about yourself if you did it in response to the killing of a heroic man of God who saved the West from a nefarious plot.
Spalding was a smart demagogue who intuited what Americans wanted to hear, and he sold it to them. That may sound like some politicians we know now in our current political discourse, but Spalding got away with it. He died a happy man and was later lauded, even in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt as a very effective, heroic missionary. That's the lie.
Robin Lindley: And you discovered early evidence of those who were skeptics of Spalding’s tale and who debunked his version of the Whitman story.
Blaine Harden: Around 1898, there was a student at the University of Washington who read about Spalding’s Whitman story and didn't believe it. Then he went to Yale for a graduate degree. While there, he told his professor of history, Edward Gaylord Bourne, about his suspicions of the Whitman story. Bourne was an eminent scholar, a founder of the modern school of history based on primary sources. He didn't rely on what people were saying happened, but would look at original letters, documents, and other contemporaneous material.
Bourne started to investigate the Whitman story and he soon found irrefutable primary sources showing that Whitman did not save the Pacific Northwest from a plot. Instead, Whitman went to Washington, DC, briefly in 1842 and then went to Boston to save his mission because it was in danger of losing its funding. That was the actual story.
Professor Bourne debunked the Spalding story at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1900. Most of America’s major newspapers and its academic establishment accepted Bourne's evidence that Whitman was not a hero and Spalding was a world-class liar. But that didn't happen in the Pacific Northwest.
Much of the Pacific Northwest continued to believe in the lie. Politicians continued to promote Whitman as the most important individual who ever lived in Washington state. A huge bronze statue of Whitman was chosen to represent Washington State in the U.S. Capitol beginning in 1953, more than half a century after his legend had been debunked. The state legislature in Washington still chose him as the state’s most important historical personage. My book explains why.
Robin Lindley: That Whitman statue to represent Washington State in the Capitol was replaced in the last couple of years. Did your book have anything to do with that? 
Blaine Harden: The state legislature made a decision to replace the statue in the month that my book came out, but I can't claim credit for persuading them to do so. There was just a reassessment going on and my book was part of it [for more on Whitman and his commemoration, see this 2020 essay by Cassandra Tate—ed.].
It's important to understand why the lie had such legs in the Northwest after it had been debunked nationally. A primary reason was support for the lie from Whitman College. Whitman College was created by a missionary (the Reverend Cushing Eells) who was a peer of Marcus Whitman. It was founded in 1859 and struggled mightily for decades.
Robin Lindley: Didn’t Whitman College begin in Walla Walla as a seminary?
Blaine Harden: Yes. It was a seminary, but by 1882 had become a four-year college for men. By the 1890s, it was in dire financial straits. It couldn't pay its mortgage. It was losing students. It couldn't pay its faculty. Presidents of the college kept getting fired. Finally, they hired a young graduate of Williams College who had come west to work as a Congregational pastor in Dayton, Washington, a small town not far from Walla Walla. This young pastor, Stephen B. L. Penrose, joined the board of Whitman College, and very soon thereafter, the college president was fired. Penrose, who was not yet 30, then became youngest college president in America.
Penrose inherited a mess. The college was bleeding students and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Searching for a way to save it, he went into the library at Whitman College and discovered a book (Oregon: The Struggle for Possession, Houghton Mifflin, 1883). It told the amazing but of course false story of Marcus Whitman saving the Pacific Northwest and being killed by Indians for his trouble. Penrose was thunderstruck. He believed he’d found a public-relations bonanza for his college. He boiled the Whitman myth down to a seven-page pamphlet that equated Marcus Whitman with Jesus Christ. The pamphlet said that Whitman, not unlike Christ on the cross, had shed his blood for a noble cause—saving Oregon. The least that Americans could do, Penrose argued in his elegantly written pamphlet, was donate money to rescue the worthy but struggling western college named after the martyred missionary.
Penrose took this spiel on the road. It was a spectacular success in a Christian nation that believed in Manifest Destiny and admired missionaries. Penrose went to Chicago, sold the lie to a very rich man and a powerful newspaper editor. He then shared the story on the East Coast as he traveled between Philadelphia and Boston among some of the richest Protestants in the country.
Penrose raised the equivalent of millions of dollars. That money saved Whitman College. Penrose went on to serve as president of the college for 40 years and, from the mid-1890s until his death, he kept repeating the Whitman lie despite overwhelming evidence that it was not true.
Penrose, though, was much more than merely a factually challenged fundraiser. He was also a scholar obsessed with building a first-class, Williams-like liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest. And, by the 1920s, he had succeeded. Whitman became one of the best private colleges in the Pacific Northwest, one of the best in the West. And it still is. It ranks among the top liberal arts colleges in America. Penrose used an absurd lie to create a fine school. It has educated many, many thousands of the people who now are leaders in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
Robin Lindley: Was Penrose aware that the Whitman story he shared through the years was a lie?
Blaine Harden: He never acknowledged that, but the people who knew him also knew how sophisticated and well-read he was. He taught Greek and Latin, and he was expert in many fields. He probably knew that the story he told was nonsense, but it was such a useful story for the college that he kept telling it until the day he died.
Robin Lindley: Your book deals with the legacy of Marcus Whitman at Whitman College in recent years and some of the controversy. You indicate that most of the Whitman students now don't know much about Marcus Whitman.
Blaine Harden: Penrose was around until the 1940s. After that, the school quietly walked back its commitment to the false story, without formally denouncing it. It didn't say we were wrong, and we built this institution on the lie. It has never said that to this day, but they backed away from it. Two historians who taught at Whitman said that the college could not have survived without the lie. In fact, they published papers and books to that effect and gave speeches at the school about that. No president of Whitman College has formally acknowledged this truth. Instead, the college quietly backed away from the lie. It stopped taking students from the campus out to the massacre site where the National Park Service has honored the Whitmans. Most students since the sixties and into the 21st century didn’t learn much about Marcus Whitman. The massacre and its relationship to the college and to the land that the school is built on was fuzzily understood. There was a deliberate plan by college administrators to move away from the myth, focusing instead on more global issues.
But in the past ten years students have become very much aware of the actual history. They've changed the name of the college newspaper from The Pioneer to the Wire. They've changed the name of the mascot from the Missionaries to the Blues. A portrait of Narcissa Whitman was defaced and a statue of her was quietly removed from campus. There's a statue of Marcus Whitman that the students want to remove; many professors hate it. In fact, a faculty committee located the statue on a far edge of the campus, near a railroad track. One professor said they put it there in the hope that a train might derail and destroy it. I asked the administration, as I finished the book, about any plans to change the name of the college or thoroughly investigate its historical dependence on a lie. The answer was no.
The college has, to its credit, become much more involved with the Cayuse, the Umatilla, and the Walla Walla tribes who live nearby on the Umatilla Reservation. They've offered five full scholarships to students from the reservation. They're also inviting elders from the tribes to talk to students. Students now are much more knowledgeable than they were in the past as the result of raising awareness.
Robin Lindley: You detail the lives of white missionaries in the Oregon region. Most people probably thought of missionaries as well intentioned, but you capture the bickering between the Protestant missionaries and their deep animosity toward Catholics. A reader might wonder about this feuding and the tensions when all the missionaries were Christians. Of course, as you stress, it was a time of strong anti-Catholic sentiment, xenophobia and nativism in America.
Blaine Harden: The Protestants and the Catholics were competing for Indian souls. In the early competition, the Catholics were lighter on their feet. They didn't require so much complicated theological understanding among the Native Americans before they would allow them to be baptized and take communion. Basically, if you expressed an interest, you were in. But the Protestants were Calvinists. They demanded that tribal members jump through an almost endless series of theological and behavioral hoops before they could be baptized. Very few Indians were willing to do what the Protestants required.
The Protestants saw the Catholics gaining ground, and they deeply resented it. In fact, they hated the Catholics, and they viewed the Catholic Church as controlled by a far-off figure in Rome. Catholics represented, in the minds of many of the Protestants, an invasion of immigrants. In the 1830s through the 1860s, the United States absorbed the biggest percentage of immigrants in its history, including Catholics from Italy and Ireland. Those immigrants not only came to East Coast cities, but they also came to Midwestern cities, and they also came west. If you were anti-Catholic, you were anti-immigrant. The anti-immigrant stance still has a resonance today.
Spalding was a Protestant who had gone to school at Case Western in Cleveland, where he was drilled in anti-Catholic madness. He created the Whitman lie to wrap all that prejudice, all that fear, into an appealing tale of Manifest Destiny with Catholics as villains.
Robin Lindley: And Spalding was in competition with Whitman although were both trying to convert people to the same Protestant sect.
Blaine Harden: To some extent, there was competition even among the Protestant missionaries, but the real competition was between the Protestants and the Catholics. The anti-Catholicism that was engendered by Spalding and by the Whitmans persisted in Oregon where anti-immigrant and anti-Black provisions were written into the State constitution. Blacks were banned from the state of Oregon until the 1920s under the state law. The Ku Klux Klan had a very receptive audience there and a fundamental hold on the politics of Oregon for many years. Oregon, in fact, banned parochial schools until that ban was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States in a landmark case.
The spillover from this conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants in the 1830s and forties and fifties lasted well into the 20th century. Even now, there's strong strain of anti-immigrant and anti-Black and anti-minority sentiment in Oregon. It’s a minority view, but it hasn’t disappeared.
Robin Lindley: You set out the context of the Whitman story at a time when Americans embraced Manifest Destiny and the white settler conquest of the West. You vividly describe how the settlers and missionaries treated the Indians. You detail the cycles of dispossession as the Cayuse and other tribes were displaced and attacked violently as whites overran the region.
Blaine Harden: The Cayuse and the Walla Wallas and the Umatillas controlled as their traditional lands an area about the size of Massachusetts, north and south of the Columbia River in what became the Oregon territory.
In 1855, the federal government sent out a governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, who was to negotiate the taking of Indian land. There was a large meeting right where the campus of Whitman College is today. All the tribes attended. At first, the Cayuse were offered nothing. They were told to move to a reservation that would be established for the Yakima nation, and they refused. They made it clear to Stevens and the 25 to 30 white soldiers that were with him that, unless they got a better deal, they might kill all the whites at the meeting.
Robin Lindley: Weren’t the Cayuse more belligerent than other tribes in the region?
Blaine Harden:  They were known for being tough and willing to resort to violence to get what they wanted. So Stevens recalculated and decided to give them a reservation on traditional Cayuse land with the Umatillas and the Walla Wallas. It is near what’s now Pendleton, Oregon. The three tribes had treaty-guaranteed control of this land after 1855, but white people living around the reservation coveted its best farmland and kept pressing the state and federal government to allow them to take it. White people didn't take all the reservation, but white leases and white ownership created a checkerboard of non-Indian landholdings. By 1979, the reservation had shrunk by nearly two-thirds.
From 1850s all the way to 1980s, the tribes who lived on that reservation were marginalized. They were poor. They were pushed around. They didn't have self-government. There was a lot of hopelessness. There was also a lot of alcoholism and suicide, and a lot of people left the reservation. It was a situation not unlike reservations across the west.
Robin Lindley: You recount the investigation of the Whitman murders, if you could call it that. Five members of the Cayuse tribe were eventually arrested and tried for killing the Whitmans and eleven other white people in the 1847 massacre.
Blaine Harden: By the time of the Whitman killings, there were more white people in the Oregon Territory than Native Americans. Most of that was because of disease. About 90 percent of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest died in the first 50 years of white contact.
In any case, the white majority wanted vengeance and they wanted justice for the massacre. They wanted to round up the perpetrators and hang them. And they did. They sent an army unit to round up some suspects. They captured five Cayuse men. Whether these were all involved in the killing, it's not clear. One of them almost certainly wasn't involved. But at least two were clearly involved. The role of the other two is not so clear.
The detained men became known as the Cayuse Five, and they were tried eventually in Oregon City, now a suburb of Portland. They were convicted and hanged before a huge crowd. Thousands of people watched the hanging and then, once they were dead, they were loaded on a wagon and the bodies were taken to the edge of town and buried in an unmarked grave that's been lost. The loss of the bodies has tormented the Cayuse. They want to find those remains and bring them back to their land to gain some closure on this business. And they still are looking and there's been some progress. They might be under a Clackamas County gravel yard used for a snow mitigation, but that hasn't yet been resolved.
Robin Lindley:  From your book, it's unclear if the Cayuse defendants even understood what was going on at trial, let alone had an opportunity to confront their accusers.
Blaine Harden: They had lawyers, and the lawyers presented a couple decent arguments. One argument was that the land where the killing of Marcus Whitman and his wife and eleven others occurred, was not US territory, and it also wasn't Indian territory under federal law. It was basically a no man's land governed by a treaty between the British and the Americans with no law enforcement infrastructure or legal authority. Because it occurred there and because the traditional laws of the Cayuse said that failed medicine men can be killed, the lawyers argued that no one could be prosecuted for the murders. The lawyers argued that American courts had no jurisdiction. The judge rejected the argument because he knew that if the Cayuse Five weren't legally convicted, they would be lynched. That was the sentiment of the time, so they were legally convicted and then quickly hanged.
Robin Lindley: And you provide the context of that verdict and sentence by recounting how often Native Americans were hanged throughout the country. And, in places like California, it seems white citizens were encouraged under law to exterminate the Indian population and were rewarded for it.
Blaine Harden: There was a pattern that repeated itself again and again and again in the South, in the Southwest, in California, in Minnesota and in Washington State. White people would come into an area where Native Americans were hunting and fishing and doing things that they'd been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they would crowd out the Indians, push them away, and take the best land. Then sooner or later, a group of Natives Americans would strike back. Sometimes they'd kill some white men, sometimes they'd kill some children, sometimes they'd kill women and children. And then, after that provocation, after the killing of whites, there was a huge overreaction by whites and disproportionate justice was enforced. Native people were rounded up, murdered, and hanged, and survivors were moved off their land.
In Minnesota, more than 300 Native Americans were arrested and condemned to death following a fierce war. About forty of them eventually were hanged and the entire Indian population was removed from Minnesota. It happened again in Colorado. It happened in California. Indians were punished with extreme prejudice.
The goal of the violence against Native Americans was to clear land for white settlement. The provocations that produced an Indian backlash were the perfect way to advance Manifest Destiny: They killed our women and children so we must kill them all or remove them all. The Whitman case is one of the earlier examples. The trial that occurred in Oregon City in the wake of the Whitman killings was well documented and covered by the press. There's a precise, verbatim record of what happened there that I used in the book.
Robin Lindley: The Spalding tale and the treatment of Native Americans, as you note, were examples of virulent racism. The Indians were seen as backward and inferior in a white supremacist nation.
Blaine Harden: Yes. There is a link between the way whites in the Pacific Northwest treated Native American and the way whites in the South treated Blacks after the Civil War. There was a defense of state's rights against an overbearing federal government. The defenders of state's rights were Civil War generals and big statues of these Confederate generals went up throughout the early 20th century in every small, medium, and large city in the South.
In the same way, the statues of Marcus Whitman that went up in the Pacific Northwest and in Washington DC represented a whitewashed, politically accessible self-congratulatory story about land taking. That's why the Whitman story persisted so long.
I think there is a certain sanctimony about living in the liberal Pacific Northwest—that we understand the power and the poison of racism, particularly when you look at it in the context of American South. But if you look at it in the context of whites and Native Americans around here, the legacy of racism is obvious and enduring. I do think, however, that there's been a sea change in the past ten or fifteen years in education in schools at all levels, and books like Murder at the Mission have proliferated, so I think there is a much more sophisticated understanding of racism in the West.
Robin Lindley: You conclude your book with how the Cayuse nation has fared in the past few decades and you offer some evidence of positive recent developments after a history of racism, exploitation, and marginalization.
Blaine Harden: Yes. The book ends with an account of how the Umatilla Reservation has had a Phoenix-like rebirth. That’s a story I report I didn't know when I started the book. And it's hopeful and it speaks well for the character of the tribes and some of the people who engineered this transformation. It also speaks well for the rule of law in America because the treaty that gave them the land promised certain rights under the law. The treaty was ratified by the US Senate, but its language was largely ignored for nearly a century. However, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, federal judges started to read the language of that treaty, and they decided that the tribes have guaranteed rights under the law, and we are a country of laws, and we're going to respect those rights.
Slowly, self-government took hold on the reservation. Young people from the reservation were drafted to serve in World War II and then in Korea and Vietnam. There was also the Indian Relocation Act that moved a lot of young people to cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland. While they were away, many got college educations. They learned about business management and land use planning. Some of the principal actors in the rebirth of the reservation became PhD students in land use planning. Others became lawyers. They understood their rights under state and federal law.
Starting in the seventies and eighties, these men and women went back to the reservation and started organizing self-governance. They started suing the federal government and winning some large settlements for dams that were built on the Columbia. With that money, they slowly started to assert their rights. They reclaimed the Umatilla River, which had been ruined for fish by irrigators who took all its water during the summer. Salmon couldn't swim up and down.
The big thing for the tribes happened in the early 1990s with the Indian Gaming Act, which allowed them to build a casino on the reservation. The reservation is on the only interstate that crosses northwest Oregon, east to west, and that highway runs right past the casino. The casino turned out to be spectacularly successful. By the time money started to flow, the tribe was well organized enough to use that money to do a whole range of things to improve life on the reservation ranging from better medical care to better educational facilities to broader opportunity for businesses.
Gambling money has been a remarkable boon to health. Since it started flowing into reservation programs, rates of suicide, alcoholism, smoking, obesity, and drug abuse have all declined. There are still serious problems, but no longer cataclysmic, existential threats to the survival of these reservations. Money with good planning and investment of the gaming money led to building   offices, projects for big farming, and more. They’ve been successful. And the tribe has acquired major commercial operations around Pendleton. They own one of the biggest outdoor stores and a few golf courses. They are political players in Eastern Oregon that politicians statewide respect. This is recompense for past wrongs.
Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing this story of the Cayuse and their situation now. You interviewed many tribal members for the book. How did you introduce yourself to the tribe and eventually arrange to talk with tribal elders? There must have been trust issues.
Blaine Harden: There were difficulties and it's not surprising. I'm a white guy from Seattle and my father had built dams that flooded parts of the Columbia plateau. My requests to have in-depth interviews with the elders were not looked upon with a great deal of favor for sound historical reasons.
They were distrustful, but I managed to make an acquaintance with Chuck Sams, who was at that point in charge of press relations for the reservation. He agreed to meet with me and, like many of the other influential people on the reservations, he had gone to college. He also had served in the military in naval intelligence. I wrote a book about an Air Force intelligence officer who was very important in the history of the Korean War. Sams read the book, and I think he thought I was a serious person who was trying to tell the truth. He slowly began to introduce me to some of the elders.
Finally, I sat down with two of the elders who were key players in the transformation of the reservation. They talked to me for hours and then I followed up by phone.
Robin Lindley: You were persistent. Have you heard from any of the Cayuse people about your book?
Blaine Harden: Yes. The key men that I interviewed have been in contact. They like the book. It’s now sold at a museum on the reservation.
Another thing about this book is that I asked several Native Americans to read it before publication. They helped me figure out where I'd made mistakes because of my prejudices or blind spots. Bobbie Connor, an elder of the tribe on the reservation and head of the museum there, pointed out hundreds of things that she found questionable. She helped me correct many errors. The book was greatly improved by her attention to detail.
Robin Lindley: It’s a gift to have that kind of support.
Blaine Harden: Yes. I hadn't done that with my five previous books but in this case, it really helped.
Robin Lindley: Your exhaustive research and astute use of historical detection have won widespread praise. You did extensive archival research and then many interviews, including the crucial interviews with Cayuse elders. Is there anything you’d like to add about your research process?
Blaine Harden: There have been many hundreds of books written about the Whitman story in the past 150 years. A lot of them are nonsense, but there is a long historical trail, and it goes back to the letters that the missionaries wrote back to the missionary headquarters in Boston that sent them west.
Many of the missionaries wrote every week, and these were literate people who weren't lying to their bosses in most cases. They were telling what they thought. All those letters have been kept and entered a database so you can search them by words. The research on Spalding particularly was greatly simplified because I could read those databases, search them, and then create chronologies that were informed by what these people wrote in their letters. And that really helped.
Robin Lindley: Didn’t many doubts arise about Spalding in these letters?
Blaine Harden: Yes, from a lot of the correspondence I reviewed. The correspondence database simplified the research, and it also made it possible to speak with real authority because the letters reveal that Spalding says one thing in the year it happened, and then 20 years later, he's telling a completely different story. It's clear that he's lying. There's no doubt because the primary sources tell you that he's lying, and that's why the professor at Yale in 1900 could say that Spalding’s story was nonsense. And looking back at the documents, you can see just how ridiculous it was.
I also studied the records that are were kept by the people who raised money for Whitman College about how they did it, the stories that they were selling, and then how they panicked when it became clear that their story was being questioned.
Robin Lindley: What did you think of the replacement of the Whitman statue at the US Capitol in Washington DC with a statue of Billy Frank, a hero for Native American rights?
Blaine Harden: There's poetic justice to having Billy Frank’s statue replace the statue of Whitman. It makes a lot of sense because he empowered the tribes by using the rule of law. Billy Frank Jr. went out and fished in many places and got arrested, but he fished in places where he was allowed to under federal and state law. He kept asserting his rights under the law that the federal government and the states had on the books. That's in effect what happened with the Umatilla and Cayuse reservation. They asserted their rights under the law and their conditions improved.
 The one thing about Whitman is that he didn't make up the lie about himself. He was a man of his time who thought the way people of his time thought. And we can't blame him for that.
Robin Lindley: It seems that there's a lot of material in your book that hasn't been shared or widely known before.
Blaine Harden: Some of the actual story was widely known for a while, and then it just disappeared. It didn't become a part of what was taught in public schools. And into the 1980s, a phony version of history was taught officially in the state of Washington.
Robin Lindley: Thank you Mr. Harden for your patience and thoughtful remarks on your work and your revelatory book, Murder at the Mission. Your book provides an antidote to a foundational American myth and serves as a model of historical detection and investigation. Congratulations and best wishes on your next project.
Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. He is currently preparing a book of selected past interviews. Robin’s email: *****@*****.tld.  
Editor's note: for more on the memorialization of Marcus Whitman, see this essay from 2020 by Cassanda Tate. 
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Matthew Hawn, a high school teacher for sixteen years in conservative Sullivan County, Tennessee, opened the 2020-21 year in his Contemporary Issues class with a discussion of police shootings.  White privilege is a fact, he told the students.  He had a history of challenging his classes, which led to lively discussions among those who agreed and disagreed with his views.  But this day’s discussion got back to a parent who objected.  Hawn apologized – but didn’t relent.  Months later, with more parents complaining, school officials reprimanded him for assigning “The First White President,” an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which argues that white supremacy was the basis for Donald Trump’s presidency.  After another incident in April, school officials fired him for insubordination and unprofessional behavior.
Days later, Tennessee outlawed his teaching statewide, placing restrictions on what could be taught about race and sex.  Students should learn “the exceptionalism of our nation,” not “things that inherently divide or pit either Americans against Americans or people groups against people groups,” Governor Bill Lee announced.  The new laws also required advance notice to parents of instruction on sexual orientation, gender identity, and contraception, with an option to withdraw their children.
Over the past three years, at least 18 states have enacted laws governing what is and is not taught in schools. Restricted topics mirror Tennessee’s, focusing on race, gender identity, and sexual orientation.  In some cases, legislation bans the more general category of “divisive concepts,” a term coined in a 2020 executive order issued by the Trump administration and now promoted by conservative advocates.  In recent months, Florida has been at the forefront of extending such laws to cover political ideology, mandating lessons that communism could lead to the overthrow of the US government.  Even the teaching of mathematics has not escaped Florida politics, with 44 books banned for infractions like using race-based examples in word problems.
In a sense the country is stepping back a century to when a similar hysteria invaded New York’s schools during the “Red Scare” at the end of World War I, when fear of socialism and Bolshevism spread throughout the US.  New York City launched its reaction in 1918 when Mayor John Francis Hylan banned public display of the red flag.  He considered the Socialist Party’s banner “an insignia for law hating and anarchy . . .  repulsive to ideals of civilization and the principles upon which our Government is founded.”
In the schools, Benjamin Glassberg, a teacher at Commercial High School in Brooklyn, was cast in Matthew Hawn’s role.  On January 14, 1919, his history class discussed Bolshevism.  The next day, twelve students, about one-third, signed a statement that their teacher had portrayed Bolshevism as a form of political expression not nearly so black as people painted it.  The students cited specifics Glassberg gave them – that the State Department forbade publishing the truth about Bolshevism; that Red Cross staff with first-hand knowledge were prevented from talking about conditions in Russia; that Lenin and Trotsky had undermined rather than supported Germany and helped end the war.  The school’s principal forwarded the statement to Dr. John L. Tildsley, Associate Superintendent of Schools, who suspended Glassberg, pending a trial by the Board of Education.
Glassberg’s trial played out through May.  Several students repeated the charges in their statement, while others testified their teacher had said nothing disrespectful to the US government.  Over that period, the sentiments of school officials became clear.  Dr. Tildsley proclaimed that no person adhering to the Marxian program should become a teacher in the public schools, and if discovered should be forced to resign.  He would be sending to everyone in the school system a circular making clear that “Americanism is to be put above everything else in classroom study.”  He directed teachers to correct students’ opinions contrary to fundamental American ideas. The Board of Education empowered City Superintendent William Ettinger to undertake an “exhaustive examination into the life, affiliations, opinions, and loyalty of every member” of the teachers union.  Organizations like the National Security League and the American Defense Society pushed the fight against Bolshevism across the country.
After the Board declared Glassberg guilty, the pace picked up.  In June, the city’s high school students took a test entitled Examination For High Schools on the Great War.  The title was misleading.  The first question was designed to assess students’ knowledge of and attitude toward Bolshevism.  The instructions to principals said this question was of greatest interest and teachers should highlight any students who displayed an especially intimate knowledge of that subject.  The results pleased school officials when only 1 in 300 students showed any significant knowledge of or leaning toward Bolshevism.  The “self-confessed radicals” would be given a six-month course on the “economic and social system recognized in America.”  Only if they failed that course would their diplomas be denied.
In September, the state got involved.  New York Attorney General Charles D. Newton called for “Americanization,” describing it as “intensive instruction in our schools in the ideals and traditions of America.”  Also serving as counsel to the New York State Legislative Committee to Investigate Bolshevism, commonly known as the Lusk Committee after its chairman, Newton was in a position to make it happen.  In January 1920, Lusk began hearings on education.  Tildsly, Ettinger, and Board of Education President Anning S. Prawl all testified in favor of an Americanization plan.
In April, the New York Senate and Assembly passed three anti-Socialist “Lusk bills.”  The “Teachers’ Loyalty” bill required public school teachers to obtain from the Board of Regents a Certificate of Loyalty to the State and Federal Constitutions and the country’s laws and institutions.  “Sorely needed,” praised the New York Times, a long-time advocate for Americanization in the schools.  But any celebration was premature.  Governor Alfred E. Smith had his objections.  Stating that the Teacher Loyalty Bill “permits one man to place upon any teacher the stigma of disloyalty, and this even without hearing or trial,” he vetoed it along with the others.  Lusk and his backers would have to wait until the governor’s election in November when Nathan L. Miller beat Smith in a squeaker.  After Miller’s inauguration, the Legislature passed the bills again.  Miller signed them in May despite substantial opposition from prominent New Yorkers.
Over the next two years, the opposition grew.  Even the New York Times backed off its unrelenting anti-Socialist stance.  With the governor’s term lasting only two years, opponents got another chance in November, 1922, in a Smith-Miller rematch.  Making the Lusk laws a major issue, Smith won in a landslide.  He announced his intention to repeal the laws days after his inauguration.  Lusk and his backers fought viciously but the Legislature finally passed repeal in April.  Calling the teacher loyalty law (and a second Lusk law on private school licensing) “repugnant to the fundamentals of American democracy,” Smith signed their repeal.
More than any other factor, the experience of the teachers fueled the growing opposition to the Teachers’ Loyalty bill.  After its enactment, state authorities administered two oaths to teachers statewide.  That effort didn’t satisfy Dr. Frank P. Graves, State Commissioner of Education.  In April 1922, he established the Advisory Council on Qualifications of Teachers of the State of New York to hear cases of teachers charged with disloyalty.  He appointed Archibald Stevenson, counsel to the Lusk committee and arch-proponent of rooting out disloyalty in the schools, as one member.  By summer the Council had earned a reputation as a witch hunt.  Its activities drew headlines such as Teachers Secretly Quizzed on Loyalty and Teachers Defy Loyalty Court.  Teachers and principals called before it refused to attend.  Its reputation grew so bad that New York’s Board of Education asked for its abolishment and the President of the Board told teachers that they need not appear if summoned.
A lesson perhaps lies in that experience for proponents of restrictions on what can be taught today.  Already teachers, principals, and superintendents risk fines and termination from violating laws ambiguous on what is and is not allowed.  The result has been a chilling environment where educators simply avoid controversial issues altogether.  Punishing long-time and respected teachers – like Matthew Hawn, whom dozens of his former students defend – will put faces on the fallout from the laws being passed.  How long before a backlash rears up, as it did in New York over Teachers’ Loyalty?
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On March 25, 1945, the United States Army issued “Fact Sheet #64: Fascism!” to promote discussions amongst American troops about fascism as the war in Europe wound down to a close. Discussion leaders were alerted “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
It is worth revisiting the Army’s warnings as Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans denounce legal due process and threaten civil war.
Four key points were addressed in the Army fact sheet to be included in discussions.
(1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis;
(2) Fascism inevitably leads to war;
(3) It can come to any country;
(4) We can best combat it by making our democracy work.
The fact sheet described findings by war correspondent Cecil Brown who toured the United States after leaving Europe. Brown discovered that most Americans he talked with were “vague about just what fascism really means. He found few Americans who were confident they would recognize a fascist if they saw one.” The War Department was concerned that ignorance about fascism could make it possible for it to emerge in the United States and issued recommendations for how to prevent it.
As a simple definition, the War Department described fascism as the “opposite of democracy. The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people. Fascism is government by the few and for the few.” Fascists remain in power through “skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security . . . At the very time that the fascists proclaimed that their party was the party of the ‘average citizen,’ they were in the pay of certain big industrialists and financiers . . . They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled against each other.”
The War Department acknowledged that the United States had
native fascists who say that they are ‘100 percent American’ . . . [A]t various times and places in our history, we have had sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which experience has shown can be properly identified as ‘fascist’.
The War Department warned,
An American fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist. Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes . . . Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-American- ism’.
The War Department identified three attitudes and practices that fascists share in common. Fascists pit “religious, racial, and economic groups against one another in order to break down national unity . . . In the United States, native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor, anti- foreign-born.” Fascists also “deny the need for international cooperation” and that “all people — regardless of color, race, creed, or nationality have rights.” They “substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count.” Finally, for fascists, the “[i]ndiscriminate pinning of the label ‘Red’ on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device.”
Learning to identify American fascists and detect their techniques was not going to be easy, but
it is vitally important to learn to spot them, even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy . . . In its bid for power, it is ready to drive wedges that will disunite the people and weaken the nation. It supplies the scapegoat — Catholics, Jews, Negroes, labor unions, big business — any group upon which the insecure and unemployed
are willing to blame.
They become frightened, angry, desperate, confused. Many, in their misery, seek to find somebody to blame . . . The resentment may be directed against minorities — especially if undemocratic organizations with power and money can direct our emotions and thinking along these lines.
The goal of the fascist doctrine is to prevent “men from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.”
Fascists may talk about freedom, but
freedom . . . involves being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.
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The latest twist in America’s culture wars saw crowds at the capitol in Salt Lake City this summer, protesting a book ban from the elementary and middle school libraries of Davis County, Utah. Such bans are increasingly prevalent in American public life, with issues of race and sexuality proving especially controversial. In this instance, though, contention arose because an unexpected book was deemed too “violent or vulgar” for children.
The Davis School District’s decision to ban the Bible has riled many, but Utah’s case is not unprecedented. Although the cultural context has changed, controversy over scripture in America’s public schools dates back to the “Bible Wars” of the 1840s, when use of the Protestant King James Bible came under fire. In cities throughout the United States, Protestants clashed with Catholics over the Bible’s place in the nation’s nominally secular but culturally evangelical public schools. In Philadelphia, rumors that Catholics sought to ban the King James Bible from city classrooms sparked deadly riots in 1844, with over twenty killed and dozens injured.
In Utah—at the time of writing—the controversy has not yet triggered physical violence, although today’s “Bible War” is entangled with broader conflict. The angry ambivalence of cancel culture is well illustrated in the placard of one protestor at the Utah Capitol, urging lawmakers to “Remove Porn Not the Holy Bible.”
The Davis School District Bible ban stems from H.B. 374—a “sensitive content” law enacted by Utah’s State Legislature last year. This legislation, backed by activist groups such as Utah Parents United, targets “pornographic or indecent material,” and provides a fast track for the removal of offending literature. Davis had already banned such books as Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and John Green’s Looking for Alaska when it received an anonymous complaint in December 2022. “Utah Parents United left off one of the most sex-ridden books around: The Bible,” asserted the plaintiff. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible (under state law) has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.” Tellingly, the Davis school board upheld this objection and removed the Bible, although this decision is under appeal. A similar complaint has since been lodged within the district against the Book of Mormon.
Support for the Utah Bible ban comes from unexpected quarters. Republican state representative Ken Ivory, a co-sponsor of H. B. 374, initially criticized this removal, but since reversed his position. Ivory admitted that the Bible is a “challenging read” for children. More to the point, he questioned whether the school library was the best place for them to encounter scripture. “Traditionally, in America,” he added, “the Bible is best taught, and best understood, in the home, and around the hearth.” Doubling down on his broader skepticism of public education, Ivory demanded Utah school boards review “all instructional materials” for content, though failing to address how such sweeping assessment might work.
Ivory’s appeal to hearth and home hints at a deeper ideology; one that evokes the tradition of limited government and what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation between church and State.” Such historical parallels, though beguiling, are misleading. Jefferson was neither the consistent partisan idealized by today’s libertarians, nor the die-hard secularist admired by critics of religion. On the contrary, his pragmatism was reflected in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which framed the territories between the Ohio River and Great Lakes as a political template for American expansion. This ordinance stated that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” In so doing, it earmarked public lands for future schools and colleges, while accepting the generally porous boundaries then maintained between the pulpit and the classroom.
Even as the Northwest Ordinance established public education in the Midwest, immigrants from Catholic Europe challenged the region’s dominant Protestant culture by the 1830s. Tensions peaked in Cincinnati, the urban hub of the Ohio Valley and America’s sixth-largest city by 1840. Cincinnati largely escaped the ethnic violence experienced in Philadelphia, but nativist demagogues flooded in by the score. Among them was Lyman Beecher, the notorious New England evangelical who strove to redeem the frontier for Christ. In his 1835 anti-Catholic tract, A Plea for the West, Beecher declaimed: “We must educate! We must educate! Or we must perish by our own prosperity.” Beecher demanded militant Protestant nationalism to stanch the foreign influence of Catholicism. The growing competition between the secular public and Catholic parochial school systems, both of which developed in close competition through the early nineteenth century, only intensified such demands.
Rivalry between Cincinnati’s public and parochial schools culminated shortly after the Civil War. In 1869, hoping to appeal to Catholic and Jewish parents, the public school board voted to ban the King James Bible, which had been assigned “without note or comment.” Outraged citizens took to streets and to the courts in protest. In Minor v. Board of Education (1869), Cincinnati’s Superior Court upheld plaintiff John D. Minor’s assertion that the board acted illegally. Many children, Minor insisted, “receive no religious instruction or knowledge of the Holy Bible, except that communicated as aforesaid in said schools.” In a dissenting opinion, Judge Alphonso Taft defended the board’s position. “This great principle of equality in the enjoyment of religious liberty, and the faithful preservation of the rights of each individual conscience is important in itself ... But in a city and State whose people have been drawn from the four quarters of the world, with a great diversity of inherited religious opinions, it is indispensable.” Ohio’s Supreme Court later overruled Minor v. Board following appeal by the school district. The later ruling, Board of Education v. Minor (1873) “broke open the floodgates,” wrote historian Steven K. Green, “ushering in a national conversation about the meaning of separation of church and state.” Ohio became the first state to authorize (but not require) the Bible to be banned in public schools. The Buckeye State’s decision predated by nearly a century Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), whereby the U.S. Supreme Court banned Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer in public schools, leading to complaints that “the Supreme Court has made God unconstitutional.”
Cincinnati’s Bible War exposed a nerve. In his Second Inaugural Address, a few years before, Abraham Lincoln reflected on the Civil War: “Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” Goaded and consoled by the same text, Americans slaughtered each another. As historian Mark A. Noll argued in America’s Book (2022), “the importance of the Bible for explaining the meaning of America,” and “the importance of America for explaining the history of the Bible” are tightly woven motifs. Following the Civil War, “the inability of Bible believers to find common ground in the Book they championed as the comprehensive guide to all truth” signaled the demise of a distinctly Protestant “Bible civilization,” among other consequences, heralding a more multicultural—apparently more secular—nation.
As Utah’s controversy suggests, the Bible may have fallen from grace, yet it remains a potent symbol. No longer assigned as a devotional text in America’s public schools, its mere presence on library shelves remains incendiary. The context surrounding its removal has shifted from nineteenth century sectarianism to twenty-first century culture wars, but continuities ignite destructive passions. Cynics might contend that Utah’s anti-woke warriors have been hoisted on their own censorious petard. However tempting this conclusion, we should also recognize the bitterness of old wine in a new wineskin, as the Bible once more becomes a focus of partisan discord.
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An 1880 Puck Cartoon depicts Ulysses Grant surrendering his sword to James Garfield after being defeated for the Republican nomination.
The candidate, at first glance, seemed to have no business being his party’s nominee for the White House. In an era seething with political strife, he had long been viewed by peers in Washington as a pleasant but out-of-touch figure. Partisan warfare was not his strong suit; he cultivated friendships with civil rights opponents and election deniers alike. He enjoyed scrappy political debate but refused to aim any blows below the belt (“I never feel that to slap a man in the face is any real gain to the truth.”) What’s more, American voters seemed to be in a decisively anti-establishment mood, and this nominee had been a presence in Washington for almost two decades – the epitome of a swamp creature.
Yet, somehow, it added up to a winning formula: James Garfield, the nicest man remaining in a polarized Washington, would be elected America’s next president in 1880. His rise to power would be framed as a rare triumph of decency in the increasingly bitter political environment of late 19th century America. It has resonance today as our country again navigates similar public conditions.
Garfield’s election was the very first of the Gilded Age. It was a time defined by tremendous disparity emerging in America. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould were ascendant members of a new ruling class of industrialists, the so-called “robber barons.” But their factories were grinding down the working class; America’s first nationwide strike had broken out in 1877. Meanwhile, Reconstruction had failed in the South, leaving Black Americans in a perilous spot. They technically possessed rights, but, in practice, had lost most of them after former Confederates returned to power and reversed the policies of Reconstruction.
Yet the period’s discord was most obvious in its politics. The last presidential election had produced what half of Americans considered an illegitimate result: poor Rutherford Hayes had to put up with being called “Rutherfraud” for his term in the White House.  Meanwhile, the broader Republican Party had fractured into two vividly-named blocs (the “Stalwarts” and the “Half-Breeds”), each of which loathed Hayes almost as much as they did each another.  
In this setting, Minority Leader James Garfield was a uniquely conciliatory figure – the lone Republican who could get along with all the fractious, squabbling members of his party. Stalwarts described him as “a most attractive man to meet,” while the leader of the Half-Breeds was, perhaps, Garfield’s best friend in Congress. President Hayes also considered Garfield a trustworthy legislative lieutenant. The overall picture was a distinctly muddled approach to factional politics: Garfield did not fall into any of his party’s camps but was still treated as a valued partner by each.
Much of this came naturally (“I am a poor hater,” Garfield was fond of saying). But there was also, inevitably, political calculus informing it – the kind that comes from decades spent in Washington, trying in vain to solve the nation’s most pressing issues.
Exceptional as Garfield’s political style was, his life story was more so. He had been born in poverty on the Ohio frontier in 1831 and raised by a single mother. A dizzying ascent followed: by his late twenties, James Garfield was a college president, preacher, and state senator; only a few years later, he had become not just the youngest brigadier general fighting in the Union Army, but also the youngest Congressman in the country by 1864.
His talent seemed limitless; his politics, uncompromising. The young Garfield was an ardent Radical Republican – a member of the most progressive wing of his party on civil rights and the need for an aggressive Reconstruction policy in the postwar South. “So long as I have a voice in public affairs,” Garfield vowed during this time, “it shall not be silent until every leading traitor is completely shut out of all participation of in the management of the Republic.”
But he lived to see this pledge go unfulfilled. Garfield’s Congressional career was exceptionally long – stretching from the Civil War through Reconstruction and beyond – and his politics softened as events unfolded. Principle yielded to pragmatism during what felt like countless national crises. “I am trying to be a radical, and not a fool,” Garfield wrote during President Johnson’s impeachment trial. By the end of 1876, a young firebrand of American politics had evolved into a mature legislative chieftain – the Minority Leader of a fractious Republican Party. Younger ideologues of the Party had Garfield’s sympathy but not his support. “It is the business of statesmanship to wield the political forces so as not to destroy the end to be gained,” he would lecture them.
It is no wonder, then, that Garfield’s reputation as an agreeable Republican was not entirely a positive one. From Frederick Douglass to Ulysses Grant, friends tended to say the same thing: that Garfield’s flip-flopping and politeness indicated he “lacked moral backbone.” Garfield, in contrast, would argue that open-mindedness was a sign of inner strength rather than weakness.
This argument was put to the test in the election of 1880. Republicans entered their nominating convention with a handful of declared candidates who had no clear path to a majority of party support. They emerged behind a surprising choice – James Garfield, who had been picked (apparently against his will) off the convention floor as a compromise candidate. The rank-and-file rejoiced. “His nomination will produce perfect unison,” one celebrated, “because he has helped everybody when asked, and antagonized none.” Garfield was not so exuberant about the outcome. Over the course of his political career, he had learned to view the presidency with deep suspicion; none of the Administrations he had witnessed up-close ended well.
His reservations were well-placed. While trying to appease his party’s different blocs, President Garfield ultimately failed to keep the peace between them – kick-starting a chain of events that led to his murder. The result, ironically, was the nation’s politics suddenly shifted to resemble his own. Americans made Garfield into a martyr and blamed the hyperpartisan political climate of the country for his death. A great period of correction began, but, in all the drama around Garfield’s assassination, his remarkable life was overshadowed by its own untimely end.
On his deathbed, President Garfield seemed to sense this would be the case. Turning to a friend, he asked if his name would “have a place in human history.” The friend’s affirmative answer appeared to relax him. “My work is done.”
 
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