US history textbooks fantasise over World War 2

"All shared equally the risks of battle," it says of blacks and whites in the "A World Conflict" chapter of the Prentice Hall textbook used by Palm Beach County's 11th-grade honors students.

One text used in high schools says that on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan "declared war" on the United States.

African-Americans all work on the Mississippi

1. Find on war - no permalinks, for some unknown reason.

2. It was

   Niggers all work on the Mississippi

   of course. Not sung that way since well before the afore-mentioned World War 2, I suspect.

   According to an article Frank Sinatra and the American Presidency in Popular Music and Society

   On stage and in the recording studio, he changed the opening lines of "Old Man River" from "Niggers all work on the Mississippi" (or even "Darkies all work," which lyricist Oscar Hammerstein had substituted) to "Here we all work".

   There's a Yale Law Review piece from 1999 (PDF) which considers this sort of monkeying around with artistic texts more generally, in order to make points about interpreting the US Constitution.

Paul Robeson, one of whose signature songs was “Ol’ Man River,” changed the lyrics in significant ways. When Robeson first began to perform Hammerstein’s and Kern’s Showboat in 1928, he sang the lyrics as written, including the line “Niggers all work on the Mississippi.” By the early 1930s, he changed the key word to “Darkies,” and, when he filmed the movie in 1935, he substituted “There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi; that’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be.” He also changed the line “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” See MARTIN BAUML DUBERMAN, PAUL ROBESON 604-05 n.14 (1988).

Apparently, Showboat’s original lyricist was not amused. “In regard to Robeson’s changes in his lyrics,” Duberman writes, “Oscar Hammerstein II is quoted as saying, ‘As the author of these words, I have no intention of changing them or permitting anyone else to change them. I further suggest that Paul write his own songs and leave mine alone’.” Id. (quoting NEW YORK AGE, June 18, 1949). Nevertheless, Robeson has become so identified with the song over the years that one might well ask whether a truly “authentic” performance of “Ol’ Man River” is one using Robeson’s lyrics or Hammerstein’s. As we explain in this essay, it all depends on what one means by authenticity.

Interestingly, one of Robeson’s attempts at making Hammerstein’s lyrics less overtly racist backfired when he performed it in London; and it demonstrates how important audience response is to the political meaning of lyrics, whatever the author’s asserted intentions. Robeson changed the line “You get a little drunk and you land in jail,” which played to racist stereotypes, to the more defiant “You show a little spunk and you land in jail.” In New York, this line had been greeted with great applause, but it was met with “dead silence” in London. As Duberman reports, “Robeson later learned that to the English ‘spunk’ meant semen, and promptly changed the line again, substituting ‘grit’.” Id.

• Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (Ko-Ko's nigger serenader and the Mikado's lady who dyes a chemical yellow [who] Is blacked like a nigger/With permanent walnut juice.) - both bowdlerised, at the very least;

• the hymn Lord of the Dance (supposedly antisemitic, but left untouched);

• the Bach St John Passion (ditto and ditto); and

• a motet by Antoine Busnoys, a musician at the court of Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy. Included in the text is

  Credendum est magis soli Marie veraci
  quam Judeorum turbe fallaci

  which translates as

  More trust is to be put in honest Mary alone than in the lying crowd of Jews

  (sung as written).

• in a dead language; or, failing that,

• in a language foreign to most listeners; and

• in a work by a serious artist, rather than a mere entertainment.

nigger serenader

the others of his race

1. The writer-performer of one of the most popular of the coon songs - All Coons Look Alike To Me was a Negro, Ernest Hogan. I have in mind - no source! - that Hogan was one of the first writers of any race to insist on taking a royalty from the song, rather than selling it outright, and thereby made a mint out of it...

The Operation Rockingham saga gets a spin-off!

The Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

In an interview in the Scottish Sunday Herald in June, Ritter said: "Operation Rockingham [a unit set up by defence intelligence staff within the MoD in 1991] cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard data, but had a preordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD... It became part of an effort to maintain a public mindset that Iraq was not in compliance with the inspections. They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had WMD [when] Unscom was showing the opposite."

He told reporters in the House of Commons...

A spokesman for MI6 said the allegations were "unfounded".

1. Rufford was the hack who doorstepped David Kelly on July 9 2003, the day the MOD released his name to the media as the source of Andrew Gilligan's 45 minute claim (as discussed at length during the Hutton Inquiry.)

2. Links to several earlier pieces here, and to related material elsewhere, can be got by working back from this piece.

3. When? It doesn't say; and gives no information which yields by inference the date of the press briefing. More than a month before the Sunday Times piece, though!

4. I like the analogy between tracing media take up and chartism.

worked closely with MI6 to help to promote Britain's Middle East policy.

The campaign was judged to be having a successful effect on public opinion.

Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for the campaign because they were non-aligned UN countries not supporting the British and US position on sanctions.

asked Ritter for information on Iraq that could be planted in newspapers in India, Poland and South Africa from where it would “feed back” to Britain and America.

Strom, Essie Mae, Cold Mountain and the epidemic of Magnolia Madness

TV/Media Critic

Weeks after news of her existence was finally acknowledged in the mainstream press, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about Strom Thurmond's secret black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

I want to believe she's a heroine; someone long disadvantaged by a ruthless, powerful, hypocritical politician now getting her due. But isn't the essence of heroism doing things that don't necessarily advantage you or your family, but may help others?

I had no reason to do anything before now. It would not have been an advantage to him or to me to say anything about our relationship.

...criticizing a 78-year-old woman for not upending her life and destroying her father's career by going public with such a scandal 30 or 40 years ago is a near-nonsensical proposition.

Another taboo in Ball-family lore was discussion of sexual abuse. The Ball tradition is, or was, that the Ball slave owners did not have sex with their slaves. That was something that other slave owners did. If you ask any descendant of slave owners they will tell you the same thing, "My family didn't separate families, and our men did not sleep with the slave women." I knew that I would find some evidence to the contrary, but I didn't think I would find much. In fact I found a considerable amount of evidence that in each generation going back two hundred years at least one of the Ball men had a mulatto family...

1. The photo-byline is helpful in context; the fact that the rag thinks the photo needs a separate caption is puzzling.

2. To what extent is she responsible for the media spin on the point? It was reasonably foreseeable; but unavoidable.

3. On Thurmond's role - or lack of it - as a bulwark of segregation, my piece of December 23.

4. Touched on here on December 23. I've not seen it, so no review!

5. The movie's historical veracity I'm not concerned with - I assume it to be zero. But the freeing slaves question stands independently of the movie.

"The Octoroon narrowly escaped entire failure from a singular cause--namely, the death, instead of the triumph, of the heroine. This shows a sympathy in the audience, at which Mr. Boucicault, in a published letter, affects surprise. But the English do not like to see their heroines sacrificed" (Athenaeum, 23 November)...In less than a month, Boucicault changed the ending. Even so, The Octoroon never attained sufficient popularity to be the main attraction.

New York theater critic...pronounced the play abolitionist propaganda and Zoe an impossible creation.

In 1859 the runaway success of the New York Christmas theatrical season was Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, despite strident condemnation by Bennet's New York Herald, which maintained that "it is certainly disgraceful that the people of this metropolis--and they are conservative and sound in their hearts--cannot even go to the theatre without having the almighty nigger thrust under their noses." Bouciacult's play, which starred his wife Agnes Robertson in the title role, ran until late January 1860 and then was immediately picked up by not one but two theatres, then other theatres throughout the north, becoming the second most frequently performed anti-slavery play, after George Aiken's adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. But as Bennet's editorial response indicates, The Octoroon was cursed with living in interesting times: John Brown had been hanged three days before the play opened, and on the day of its opening a a bitterly divisive New York mayoral election resulted in the election of the pro-State's Rights candidate, Fernando Wood.

Where's Wally...er, Lt-Col al-Dabbagh?

Pentagon gunning for WaPo journo Tom Ricks

Defense Department spokesman Larry DiRita

1. The piece says that

   The Pentagon’s letter of complaint to Post executive editor Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely as possible and e-mails many people.

   Wow! I'm no expert, but that sounds remarkably like - well, journalism...

Tom Ricks, the Wall Street Journal's splendid defense reporter, has written the best non-fiction account of basic training you will ever read.

Objective journalism: the defence is made

1. no such animal; and

2. dire moral hazard.

Liberal and conservative intellectuals who have sipped more Kool-Aid than they realize from the post-modern punch bowl insist that because pure objectivity does not exist, only pure subjectivity remains. According to this view, because not every form of prejudice and predisposition can be eradicated, every piece of "fair and honest" journalism must contain a confession of the inevitable reportorial bias...

There is a certain kind of bright but brittle mind that loves this sort of either/or thinking. What such minds cannot accept is the common-sensical notion that real life - including that of the press - is lived mostly in the pragmatic middle. There, experience has demonstrated that intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline enable journalists to gather and report facts with an impartiality that - though sometimes imperfect - is good enough to serve the public's interest in the generality of cases.

Our nonfiction literature, in other words, is today a shouting match.

CNN political analyst Bill Schneider, who is also a leading scholar of public opinion

It's certainly true that we are now two Americas...Partisanship has grown much harsher in recent years, no question. There is also a more bitter atmosphere in the country generally because our politics have come to involve issues of values and religion in a way they did not 30 years ago."

This is a fault line that ruptured in the 1960s...

Both poles in our increasingly polarized society now want news as seen by people who see the world as they see it.

On the eve of the Civil War, Americans were per capita the greatest readers of newspapers in the world....Every single one of those publications was passionately - in fact, bitterly - partisan. A very good case could be made that the free press of that period, though vigorous, not only failed to arrest the nation's slide into civil strife but also played a major role in provoking it. Nobody is arguing that our current divisions remotely approach those of 1863. But it, too, was an era of value-laden politics in which popular sentiment demanded that the press take sides. A partisan press, though free and open about its bias, simply propelled its readers into the abyss.

the eve

From the journalists' perspective, I'd say it's damned hard to look at, say, Iraq coverage without having to parse the perspective of the source. When The Times doesn't cover anti-terrorism demonstrations but does cover anti-American demonstrations, they and we need to ask what that means.

1. Figure of speech: one might suggest Manichæism (love the ligature!) as a candidate for a US state religion, if ever such a thing were to be contemplated.

The Bremer-Blair story: pro bono publico...

1. In the UK, the summer - August, in particular - is acknowledged in political and media circles as such: Tony Blair and the rest of the grown-ups (ha!) in government are in whatever Italian province is The New Tuscany, and John Prescott - the man who is dyslexic in ordinary conversation - is in charge of the country. There is no diary news (95% of any newspaper is reactive to some bugger making a speech or issuing a press release) so desperate editors are not fussy about the material with which they fill their columns.

2. Son of British broadcasting legend Richard Dimbleby, the guy who first suggested the rudiments of broadcast news (at a time when William Shirer and HV Kaltenborn were doing it, and the BBC had squat), and whose commentary on the funeral of Winston Churchill can, fortunately, can be compared with advantage to the Elton John-ised happy-clappy nonsense which accompanied Princess Diana's squirmworthy send-off.

   Jonathan Dimbleby's is an ITV show - but there's no site, according to the ITV site drop-down menu. Nothing on the CPA site transcript page, either.

3. There's something here not unlike the technique of the stock market chartists: trying to evaluate the worth of a story from the patterns of coverage by various news outlets.

Last post before the festivities

Essie Mae: my very first personal attack!

Bigots defend Thurmond, dis' daughter

John Smith at Lincoln Plawg genuflects to Esmay and goes on to prove himself an insensitive and ignorant clod.

Have you ever? Short of a brain and heart transplant, Smith is hopeless.

Still, I will answer some of his foolishness, the 'Nawthunners do it, too' evasion Southern bigots often use to evade responsibility for their actions.

Thurmond was responsible for the stifling of millions of African-American lives and helped create the climate in which some were killed. But for his actions in the 1940s, it would not have taken until the 1960s for civil rights legislation to pass.

responsible for the stifling of millions of African-American lives

actions in the 1940s

...Thurmond's actions produced some criticism against other Southern senators from their southern constituents who questioned their decision not to join the South Carolinian.

The impregnation of, let's say, an Irish maid in Boston, would not be remotely equivalent because there is no similar history of slavery, segregation and continuing discrimination for a politician to have built his career on. This a no-brainer, in my opinion.

I suppose, Smith, a Brit, might use his nationality as an excuse. But, he states this nonsense authoritatively, as if he knows what he is talking about. He doesn't.

1. In Georgia, he got 20.3% of the votes as against Dewey's 18.3%.

2. He rates one mention in John Gunther's 1947 Inside USA (p726) - a distinct liberal - with no indication of any national profile at all. The page also reminds us that, in 1944, Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA) had been a candidate for the presidential nomination. He got 89 votes in the Convention (p708) - and Gunther calls him

   the obvious hero and candidate of the Bourbon South

The Rather awful Essie Mae interview

Essie Mae WaPo writer trips up on detail?

When Essie was born, her 16-year-old mother could not afford to feed or clothe her. At 6 months old, she was whisked out of town to live with a maternal aunt in a Pennsylvania steel town. As a teenager, she watched silently from afar as her father rose through the ranks of South Carolina politics, becoming a school superintendent, a circuit judge, a state lawmaker, a decorated D-Day hero, the state's youngest governor, the nation's oldest and longest-serving U.S. senator, at one time third in line in succession to the presidency.

Dan Rather:
Did your mother tell you that it was Strom Thurman [sic] and that he was white? Or did you first realize that when you actually came in his presence?

Essie Mae Williams:
She did not mention anything about his color. And when I met him, I was surprised because she'd never mentioned that he was white.

Not more Thurmond family miscegenation?

However, the Baltimore Afro-American newspapers reported in 1948, the same year South Carolina's then-Gov. James Strom Thurmond was the presidential nominee of the segregationist Dixiecrat Party, that he had several Black relatives, including an uncle and two cousins.

The AFRO initially reported in the edition dated Aug. 17, 1948, that a man named Robert Thurmond, from Morristown, N.J., was Strom Thurmond's first cousin.

Edgefield was the home of Strom Thurmond and his father, James E. ''Snip'' Thurmond, and, according to AFRO reporter Douglas Hall, Edgefield was the home to several other Thurmonds, many of whom were Black.

...In the Aug. 24, 1948, edition of the AFRO, he reported the existence of the Rev. James R. Thurmond, a half-cousin of Strom Thurmond, Eva Thurmond Smith, another cousin, and Thomas Thurmond, Strom Thurmond's uncle.

''It seems like everybody up there [Edgefield, S.C.] are Thurmonds. They are of all colors. Some are so White that you cannot tell them from the original Thurmonds. The only thing that surprises Colored Thurmonds is, why is it so important that they are related to the White Thurmonds? It is an old story and 'everybody in these parts knows it.'''.

Another triumph of fact-checking from the grownup US media

The Texas-wide holes in the Strom moral crusade

one that bears the blame for others

Valinda Littlefield, a professor of African-American history at the University of South Carolina

White men were king. She was basically a child. He can do with her what he wants. She's more or less the family's slave.

No one is saying that Mr. Thurmond forced the teenager to have sex.

many black families who sent their daughters off to work as maids equipped them with straight razors...

There was this uncontrollable, unconscious attraction to the otherness of black people...

uncontrollable

1. Figuring much in the Keith Finley thesis which is more or less a staple on these matters here.

2. The tendency is to assume that Southern white woman of all classes were deterred from interracial sex by the fear of pregnancy. And the Southern sex-race myth is, of course, centered on the supposed chastisty of the white woman, before and after marriage. A point to reserve for further consideration, I think.

After a long and exciting pursuit sequence (involving all three characters: Ben, Flora, and Gus), Flora scrambles higher and higher up a rocky cliff. As Gus approaches closer toward her and gestures for her to come down, she turns and repeatedly threatens him: "Stay away or I'll jump." With arms outstretched, Flora appears to lose her balance and fall off the cliff - seen from a long shot. [It could be interpreted that she committed suicide by jumping or leaping off the cliff to her tragic death, to avoid being raped and suffer dishonor, but it is more likely that her death is merely an accident.]

When he was 21 and the 20th century was nearly 25 years old, Strom Thurmond, scion of a South Carolina family, made love to a young black maid who worked in his parents' home. Did she respond willingly to the pale young man, who was taking a degree in horticulture at Clemson College? The maid was no slave. Her sexual desires were her own to satisfy, if she had any.

Strom and Carrie had sexual congress.

"Segregation now, segregation tomorrah and segregation forever, "thundered Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas to the damn liberals up North...

To be surprised by the loving relationship between Essie Mae and her segregationist father is to misunderstand the South. There could be great intimacy without equality between the races. It was like the relationship between liege lords and serfs, colonial masters and subjects. The further into the 20th century we got, the rarer such relationships became, but they were not rare historically and human nature was not formed in the 20th century. Essie Mae was loved and supported by Thurmond almost all her life, as was her mother. The conviction that they were not equals was acute in Strom's mind and it existed side by side with his affection for her. Though his public political stance softened during his life, in his soul he was probably a segregationist till the day he died.

A case study in hypocrisy on Jim Crow

Why the Hypocrisy of Thurmond Supporters Matter

Strom Thurmond was an evil man who did evil things, and excusing that evil as "complicated" perpetuates it.

On 17 February 1949, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration favorably reported S. Res. 15, a bipartisan resolution designed to close the loophole in Rule XXII that exempted procedural motions from cloture.

Among those voting against the new interpretation was, of course, the entire southern delegation, minus Claude Pepper and Estes Kefauver. In addition, twenty-three Republicans joined forces with the southerners; only sixteen sided with the twenty-five Democrats in favor.

1. Up to a point - it took the rest of the century to solidify, and even then, not every Southern voter voted a straight Democrat ticket (if that is one's definition of Solid) - not even in the Confederacy.

   For instance, the last Republican Governor of North Carolina before the 1970s was Daniel Lindsay Russell, who left office in 1901, for instance. There continued to be Republican-voting counties in the Confederacy; a piece on Southern politics on this interesting-looking New Deal site says

   Each state, of course, has a Republican Party, made up for the most part of former postmasters, their families, and such other patronage hunters as have faith in the return of national Republicanism. In the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama, there are counties as strongly Republican as the rest of the state is Democratic. Their Republicanism is traditional, an expression of old anti-slavery and anti-rest-of-the-state feeling, but it is sliding away as new roads and federal relief come in. These small groups make no bid for statewide power. They hold their counties; the Democrats hold theirs. Between the two is often a disturbingly close cooperation. In Kentucky, the only state with an opposition party strong enough to win a statewide election, the governorship swung back and forth between the parties every four years from 1907 to 1935, as if by arrangement. All the Republican counties are ones with small Negro populations.

2. I'm assuming he wouldn't be barred from so doing because it was his ruling that they were voting on!

3. Were the Republicans any more moral? I doubt it - merely (in the period under consideration) less successful!

The Dixie frame of mind: Ralph McGill

The bottom rail is on top

His state has never ceased to produce semi-reincarnations of him.

1. This one, not this one.

2. For reasons passing my understanding, there seems to be no text online. There is the text of a petition headed

   A. P. Upshur et al., Northampton County, to Virginia Legislature, 1831

   among a slew of petitions from around 1830 to Southern legislatures on the slavery question reprinted here. Links to 80 odd years of such petitions (running almost up to 1864) here: the site reprints The Southern Debate over Slavery (Ed Loren Schweninger).

3. McGill, nodding Homerically, says 1912. Apparently, some 29 states anticipated the 17th Amendment.

4. Another Ken Burns recollection.

The Petersburg Mine Explosion and a sense of proportion

His Troy is an apparently impregnable Confederate outpost at Petersburg, Virginia, where the Union engineers dug a long, deep tunnel under the fortifications, filled it with explosives and brought about one of the greatest massacres of the war.

known as "Elliott's Salient.", [the mine] blowing up or burying under it the debris of earth and timber, about three hundred officers and men belonging to the 18th and 22d South Carolina regiments, and Pegram's battery. This "Salient," or earthwork was a six gun battery situate about four hundred yards below the crest of Cemetery Hill.

Quite a number of those who fell safely were dug out and rescued alive by the assaulting column.

The Ten Costliest Battles of the Civil War

It all depends what you mean by massacre...

Duck Hill strangely absent online

Duck Hill is located 13 miles north of Winona, in what was once the Bogue Creek Wilds. The first house erected there was built by John A. Binford. The wild state of the place and the big game which was once found there are evidenced by the fact that a huge bear killed by Binford near his cabin was made into a rug, which practically covered the floor of his early log cabin home. Duck Hill was settled about 1834, and was originally in Carroll County. The first structures were erected between Bogue Creek and the foot of a hill known as Duck Hill. Tradition says that the hill was named for a Native American Choctaw who called himself Chief Duck, and lived on top of the hill. It was near this hill that a notorious bandit of the area, Rube Burrows, once killed the engineer and robbed the express car of the fast Illinois Central Express. In 1937, a double-lynching occurred nearby, which was given significant publicity, only because the Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill was under consideration in the U. S. Congress. James R. Binford, son of the founder of Duck Hill, was the legislator and statesman who gave Mississippi the Jim Crow Law [3], which was later adopted by the Southern States. The Lloyd T. Binford High School at Duck Hill was named for one of the most progressive and honored citizens the town of Duck Hill has ever known.

given significant publicity, only because the Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill was under consideration in the U. S. Congress.

the Jim Crow law

statesman

Lieut.-Col. Binford took command of the regiment.

1. My December 2 piece discusses this iconic event, with links.

2. This page has a deal of lynching material - lists of lynchees, for instance - the last time I looked, the Tuskegee Institute list (from 1882 onwards, from memory), which is a common reference - though it did not include the 1921 Tulsa Riots deaths (again, from memory) - was not online.

3. Which?

From Strom to Maternity: the mini-series looms

Several producers and publishers have contacted Essie Mae Washington-Williams' attorney, Frank Wheaton, including Craig Anderson, who produced a television mini-series on the romance between Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves.

"I've heard from feature-film producers, television networks and I just completed a meeting with a book publisher," said Wheaton, an entertainment lawyer based in Los Angeles.

once was a local NAACP leader

1. Even the Thomas Jefferson Foundation admits there is room for doubt on the matter.

"[Strom Thurmond] fought against the well-being of African Americans while having an African-American child himself," Davis said. "You'd think you'd root for your kid."

You'd think you'd root for your kid

About 85 percent of blacks and whites in America have ancestors of the other race because of the history of slavery, said Bucknell University professor T. Joel Wade, who has conducted research on attitudes toward biracial children and interracial marriage.

one-drop rule

Anyone having 1/8th or more Negro blood.-Anti-miscegenation law. Anyone having any "appreciable" Negro blood.-Court ruling on school segregation. Anyone having 1/8th or more Mongolian blood.

"Persons in whom there is a visible and distinct admixture of African blood shall be deemed to belong to the African race; all others shall be deemed to belong to the white race. "Anti-miscegenation law.

Today, depending on the region of the country, as high as an estimated 12 percent of "Whites" have some African ancestry.

Bucknell University professor T. Joel Wade

Telegraph intelligence scoops flaking into dust

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

clearly nonsense

Contacted by Newsweek, The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin acknowledged that he could not prove the authenticity of the document. He said that while he got the memo about Mohammed Atta and Baghdad from a "senior" member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was "genuine," he and his newspaper had "no way of verifying it. It's our job as journalists to air these things and see what happens," he said.

Bloviation on Strom reaching Force Trent

In 1948, while running for president of the United States on the Dixiecrat ticket, Strom Thurmond proclaimed, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."

But in 1925 it apparently had taken neither legislation nor bayonet to force a 16-year-old black maid named Carrie Butler into the bed of Thurmond himself, then a 22-year-old graduate of Clemson University living with his parents in Edgefield, S.C.

surely one of the oldest stories in America

But why is the truth of Thurmond's bloodlines only being reported widely now that Thurmond is dead? Why has the same press corps that was eager enough to expose the power-skewed sexual assignations of President Clinton held its tongue about a lawmaker whose interracial liaison might have changed the way his politics were received?

The most likely explanation for the mainstream news media's failure to report the story (assuming they knew about it and found it credible) is the ethics rule -- whether unspoken or explicit -- against exposing people's personal secrets or private lives, unless they are in a position of power and their personal life has a direct bearing on their official actions.

The Post identified Williams by her maiden name in 1992, in a lengthy account of Williams's relationship with Thurmond. The article reported that "both Thurmond and the supposed daughter have denied that he is her father, and no one has provided evidence that he is."

I wonder why was this not raised when he was alive and powerful and this might have been worth something?

Basically this smacks of hush money that was paid to silence her.

She didn't have Strom Thurmond as a father in any tangible sense. He was the classic absent father -- the thing they like to put on black men -- and she must have felt in her heart somewhere that he didn't love her.

And, Poussaint continued, the feelings of rejection would not have stopped at the particulars of their personal relationship. "Here was this rabid segregationist spewing hatred toward black people, a man who in every public way was saying 'You are inferior' and that on some level he despises you, in the same way that Jefferson kept his children slaves. This is beyond hypocrisy; there is something sick about this stuff."

One thing to consider is, Did he rape her? We know at that time in history that a white man could have had a black woman for the pickings ... The definition of rape down there, back then, this didn't have a definition for black women. They were close to property, totally disenfranchised and without power; there was no one to protect them.

In an interview on "60 Minutes II" Wednesday night, Washington-Williams characterized the relationship between her mother and Sen. Thurmond as an "affair"...

1. Who, failing online information, I'm assuming is white.

2. Similarly, she first refers to Essie Mae as half-black and later as

   Thurmond's black daughter

3. For earlier Strom pieces, work back from here.

4. Wainscott also casually states that

   People like George Wallace and Gene Talmadge may have had similar dalliances.

   No suggestion there might be any actual evidence: he just thought, it seems, that, while kicking one former segregationist, he might as well take a free swing at one or two others.