White Hoods, Lynchings and Polish War Heroes, Oh My!

Let’s talk about process. I came upon a convergence recently and attempted to clothe it in language twice, then thrice, and yet a fourth time. Thing was, the “clothing” didn’t fashionably and comfortably suit the grandeur of the project. I like all the concepts I just need them to play nice together. The beauty is that to address one goal is to address all three. I see the cots donnected quite clearly. My anguish, dear reader, is how to get you, dear reader, to see things as I do, dear reader.

I’ll start with a guy named Casimir Pulaski, or “‘ol Cas’” as his friends called him (that’s a lie, I’ve no idea what his friends called him). He was born in Warsaw, Poland on or about March 6, 1745.

Suffice it to say that Pulaski helped change the course of history by hatching a plan to have George Washington (yes, that George Washington) removed to safety after the continental army was defeated at the Battle of Brandywine.

Thanks to the timely bravery and military savvy of this *ahem* immigrant *ahem* we have baseball, apple pie, fidget spinners and, God help us, a system that allows the election of an orange guy to the most powerful office in the world.

Then, on October 11, 1779, Pulaski expired from wounds he sustained from cannon fire at the battle of Savannah two days prior. He died on a boat called “the Wasp”, I’ll explain the significance of this name a little later. Long story short, Pulaski was a foreign-born patriot who died for Murica(!)

I don’t want my sarcastic undertones to suggest that I don’t greatly respect and admire this man. He fought and died for the United States. Pulaski’s example is a microcosm of the great value visitors from foreign lands bring to this country.

Skip forward twenty years to south-central Tennessee. Tennesseeans, having gathered as humans do, were compelled to incorporate a municipality. What to call this conglomeration of people, edifices, residential abodes, eateries, and what have you? Verily, an astute student (astutent?) of US history suggested Polish war hero, the “father of the American cavalry”, ol’ Cas’ Pulaski.

Skip ahead nine more years to 1818. A group of Arkansans honor Cas’ “Saved Washington’s Ass” Pulaski when they named the county that would host the capital city of Little Rock in a few short years.

Now, Sherman, set the WABAC (“wayback”) machine to late 1865. The now defunct Confederacy are stewing about their defeat in the Civil War. Some royally miffed citizens of the municipality of Pulaski, TN give their bigotry and intolerance form and direction by joining together in a social club. They decide on the name “Ku Klux Klan” or “KKK”.

Social activities include hating African Americans, hating Catholics, debasing women, burning crosses, and to quote Forrest Gump, “dressing up in they robes and they bedsheets and act like a bunch of spooks or something.”

Let’s take the DeLorean this time, assuming the flux capacitor is functional, and we have enough room to reach 88 MPH, to April 30, 1927.

On that day, the body of a 12-year-old white girl was found by an African American janitor at a Presbyterian church in Little Rock, in Pulaski County, AR. Per the usual M.O. of the time, authorities sought out the closest black man to blame it on. Luckily for the police, the janitor who reported the crime was black, so they pinned it on him and his 17-year-old son. Tensions in the town were high, leading to an African American named John Carter being accused of assaulting two white women (I should note that the John Carter incident is related to the janitor and the murder of the little girl only in that they took place so close to each other - John Carter was not the janitor.)

Again, per custom at that time, a mob of angry white folks tracked him down, strung him up and shot him. What do these locales and time periods have to do with Casimir Pulaski? NOTHING!

At least not on its face.

Pulaski was not a flagrant racist. I initially thought he had some tie to the Confederacy; I came across both the city and the county on separate Google queries as I was researching various instances of racial violence for a short story. Come to find, he’s a true patriot from the long long ago.

So, why am I going on about a Polish patriot and racial violence? I’m going to solicit academic maverick C. Wright Mills to help me with this one.

About 30 years after the lynching of John Carter, Mills declared, among many other bold statements, that

“No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.”*

Well, dear reader, this brings me to the “why”. If you’ve come with me this far, I sincerely thank you.

Listen, I’ve two degrees in sociology. I’m not going to go so far as to call myself a bona fide sociologist, but what is a sociologist really? One could say “professional people watcher”. Now, this is not meant as a slight to the diligent, hard-working sociologists out there. I say “people watcher” in the 99% confidence interval, fail to reject the null hypothesis, Functionalism vs. Conflict theory kind of way.

Strictly speaking, I’m a well-trained amateur — that is to say, I don’t get paid to peoplewatch. Take my observations here. Is Pulaski responsible for the KKK and its atrocities? For bigotry and intolerance? No. BUT the mechanisms that allowed the citizens of Tennessee and Arkansas the freedom to name their respective locales also spawned two enclaves that would later advocate violence and unadulterated hate.

Fast forward to our troubled times. That same mechanism. Though we haven’t seen occurrences as atrocious as a lynching — intolerance, hate and bigotry have taken root.

Mills has an answer for these troubling developments too –

“Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change?”*

C. Wright Mills

Within the last 100 years, we’ve seen women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, an explosive powerful enough to destroy an entire city (and worse), the near genocide of an entire race, massive oil spills, the senseless murder of school children, a trip to the moon, and as I mentioned earlier, an orange guy, a demagogue, running the country.

Thus, history is in man’s DNA and the biography of every human is but a single cell in a vast organism. In other words, there are no accidents. Even the accidents can be shown to follow a causal chain. I know I missed a bunch of the major events of the last hundred years. I encourage you, dear reader, to mention more such occurrences in the comments.

TOODLES!

And I forgot to mention my reason for including the name of the boat that Pulaski died on. The name of the boat was “The Wasp”. As some of you may know, “WASP” is an acronym for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant — the classification that white supremacists most identify with. Causal? No. Relevant? No. Interesting? Yes.