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Harry Truman on the day after the election of 1948 and a Henry A.Wallace campaign poster of 1948, with an image of FDR in the background

Last chance for America: In September and October of 1948, the last debate took place on the policies America should adopt towards the Soviet Union. But that election was more than just a referendum on how we should relate to Russia and Communism. Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate, opposed Truman’s policies that created the Cold War; he spoke forcefully about the dangers of creating a militarized society in which personal freedoms would be compromised and America would be denied the kinds of investments needed to convert our economy from its wartime mode to a more peaceful form of prosperity through investments in our economy and the well-being of our citizens. But red-baiting by many of his fellow Democrats who labeled him as a dupe for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, led to a colossal defeat in that election and the more peaceful postwar model of America that Wallace championed was denied a seat at the table. Wallace had spoken passionately about a twentieth century America that could prosper as the “century of the common man,” with international peace as a goal for the brave new world of the United Nations. He was in favor of sharing atomic secrets with other nations through the United Nations. His electoral defeat meant the Cold War policies of Truman would not only continue, but would now be energized as America would be denied the opportunity to explore a different post-war future. From then on, the future of America and our Cold War policies marched in lock-step and provided us with an over-investment in the military-industrial complex, as these policies robbed us of the capacity to more innovatively develop our economy and stabilize our society. Dwight Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex at the end of his Presidency, about which nothing much has been done. We remain a militarized and now securitized state in which our personal freedoms continue to be compromised, our heroes are treated as criminals, while multinational corporations impose their will on our laws as they create wealth through the economic strangulation of the poor and the Middle Class.

Wallace was not afraid of Communism: Unlike Truman, Wallace did not fear Communism; he had resonated with the Russian people when he visited that country in 1944. Indeed, Wallace’s travels during the Second World War (ten days after Pearl Harbor, FDR formed the Board of Economic Warfare and named Wallace to head it; never before or since has a Vice President had so much executive authority) had taken him to many countries, where he assimilated a far more international sense of the global condition than Truman would ever have.  His focus was much more on the people being governed rather than the form of government imposed on them. He always took a keen interest on farm productivity and how it might be improved in each country to feed more people. When Wallace thought and planned for improved agricultural techniques, he wasn’t just thinking about America, he thought about the global conditions of agriculture. This is an issue today that has come full circle as we face food shortage problems created by global climate change. The Arab Spring revolt had a lot to do with food price escalation created by food scarcity emanating from a poor wheat crop in Russia that year.  Food production was a constant theme when Wallace visited other countries. In contrast, Truman’s policies, in part stimulated by America’s development and use of the atomic bomb, began the process that we are only coming to grips with now as a nation—to establish American hegemony over Russia: Truman’s rigid, hard-line attitude, allowed him to succeed in dividing the world in two—the Communists and the Capitalists, with the United States as the flag-bearer intent on stamping out the evils of Communism which, according to the Truman doctrine, was a system designed to rule the world, while robbing us of our capitalist pleasures. In the post-war anticommunist fever, it increasingly became a minority opinion that Russia was a country who had lost 27 million of its citizens during the war, with an economy in shambles, destroyed by Hitler’s invading Army. Russia finally won out through a war of attrition against the invading army and improvements in the production and quality of Russian armaments. Though Russia was a World War II victor, the cost was devastatingly high. It also seemed to occur to few in America that Russia was demobilizing rather than preparing for a global conflict. It was America that rattled her sword and talked of war.

We didn’t give Russia enough credit for winning WW II: On top of this, we gave Russia little credit and no appreciation for their defeat of the German army, thus saving thousands of American lives, since something like 94 percent of the casualties inflicted on Hitler’s army was done by Russian soldiers. Russia had to face up to 200 German divisions, while at the most, the Allied forces faced about 10. Truman also reneged on promises that FDR had made to Stalin to provide loan support for rebuilding the Russian economy. Wallace correctly identified the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe as merely the “economic branch” of Truman’s Cold War policies. Ostensibly, Russia could have received Marshall Plan resources, but to do so would have required Stalin to surrender Russian sovereignty. The sole purpose of the Marshall Plan, although advertised as an act of American generosity, was to spread American Hegemony and provide new business opportunities for American Corporations, while insuring that the countries receiving money would turn away from Communist party influence in their political institutions. Given these errors of commission under-girding the intentions of America in the early post-war period, one might expect a string of errors to follow through  folly compounding, and so they did.

Truman didn’t understand the world: Truman failed to properly grasp the world before him, and separate nationalist movements and civil wars from attempts at Communist conspiracies. Truman was a decent domestic President—he wanted his administration to pass universal health care to serve as continuity with the principals of the New Deal of FDR. He was shocked when he couldn’t achieve it. But in foreign policy, he succumbed to the influence of hard-liners who conformed to his own view of Russia and Communism. The hard-line view of the world painted an image of a titanic struggle between two incompatible systems that couldn’t share the same planet. Wallace was far better prepared to assume this responsibility because he saw the people first and their governing system as something of an after thought. For Wallace it was the fortunes of people that mattered and for Truman, the ideologue, it was the system of government, one of which had to be stamped out and Truman was going to lay the template that we would have to follow. And so we did, right into the Korean War, right into Vietnam War, right into a string of ideologues as Presidents, into Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and Iraq and Afghanistan. Truman made his decision-making much easier by surrounding himself with hard-liners like himself, who reinforced and helped shape the postwar world of America. Historian Jeffrey Perret, in his excellent book “Commander in Chief” revealed that, “the buck stops here” President needed drugs provided by the White House physician to embolden his decision-making process. Perhaps it was through the use of drugs that we got the Cold War.  We are still living in that world, still living in the bubble, created by Truman and his crew at the end of WW II. Through his naivete Truman unleashed the bogey man in America. The black and white binary world he fabricated for himself led directly to the Korean War and the war in Vietnam, as the portrayal of Communism in America transmogrified from appropriately viewing Russia as an ally, into Russia as a mythological, grotesque, evil force designed to enslave the world and swallow all the wee little capitalists. What America was really afraid of was the possibility that people might find something highly valuable and socially redeemable in the Communist system. Thus the Cold War was really a war to insure that America would not tolerate a system other than toxic capitalism we have today.  After all, it had only been about 10 years or so earlier that the Russian system was being touted by many as a system that could feed its population as opposed to capitalism in America, where thousands of children suffered from malnutrition and labor abuses that became apparent during the Great Depression. Of course this was America’s thrust into world hegemony urged on by the neoliberals who could foresee an “American Century” in our future. Those sentiments are still advocated by the neoliberals of today, such as William Kristol.  And, as a victor of WW II and the sole possessor of atomic weaponry, America under Truman not only began the Cold War, but the increasing fear of Communism unleashed America’s dark side by stimulating the witch hunts of McCarthyism with similar actions carried out by the House UN-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Watching replays of the HUAC or McCarthy in action makes one’s blood curl to imagine how we, as a nation, could generate such hysteria that it was necessary to ruin lives and destroy the ability of some Americans to get jobs and make a living. In that era, America became self destructive and fed on her own children. And yet we see something like that period repeat itself today in our reaction to 9/11, where we unleashed an illegal war against Iraq and a failed war in Afghanistan, coupled with national hysteria directed towards Muslims. Would the recent bombing in Boston have taken place without Harry Truman and George W. Bush as Presidents? That may seem like a stretch, but there is far more continuity in our electoral politics that there are truly surprising results. A Wallace victory in 1948 would have been a truly surprising result.

McCarthyism helped create the folly of Vietnam: McCarthy’s initial focus was the State Department; he purged many in that unit, eliminating old hands who might have steered us clear of needless wars and these same Cold War forces left us with a military—industrial economy that we still don’t know how to tame. We continue to manufacture things like tanks and planes that were planned when we were still at the height of the Cold War. Without Truman’s Cold War, we would not have had the red-baiting, black-balling mess in which a bold group of Americans, searching for a better form of government in the depression of 1930s, came under suspicion by the Federal Government and were outcast in part by false stories created by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Tragically, it was one branch of the Democratic Party, the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) who helped fan the flames of an irrational attitude towards Communism in America and who called Wallace a dupe for Soviet Communism during the election of 1948. That split in the Democratic Party is still with us today but now runs across the fault line of “socialism” rather than Communism.

The wars: The Cold War that Truman started and the sharp right turn that he used as a template for the country’s future, paved the way for the Korean war, followed by the Vietnam war, and his policies opened the gates for McCarthyism, and eventually Ronald Reagan walked through the door opened by Truman, as Reagan put us on the trajectory that eventually demolished the remnants of the New Deal of FDR and introduced us to the new gilded age as neoliberalism became the new model for life in America. Truman also set in play the events that led to the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, but about which, everyone since has said very little. Truman’s policies eventually built up a national hysteria against Communism, such that other countries learned to play the American reflex against Communism as one might play a fiddle: despite FDR’s objections, after the war, the French were allowed to go back into Vietnam because they said they would fight a Communist takeover (we fell for this one hook, line and sinker) and the British got American cooperation to overthrow Mogadishu in 1953, the democratically elected leader in Iran, as they portrayed him as a Communist.  On and on rode the American anticommunist army into the valley of death and destruction.

A split in the Democratic Party: In one of the most crucial periods in postwar development, the Democratic Party split into two divisions based on how they viewed the Soviet Union and the Wallace candidacy of 1948. The Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) advocated viewing Russia in more modest way. Organizationally, the PCA included Communists in its organization and often in positions of leadership. The opposition to the PCA was the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which was an outgrowth of the Union for Democratic Action (UDA); it was resolutely anti-communist and excluded Communists from their organization. The ADA had as their luminaries most of the New Deal FDR Democrats, including Eleanor Roosevelt,  while the PCA had Henry Wallace, who at the time was the heir-apparent to the more liberal and progressive instincts of FDR. Both organizations were formed within weeks of one another in December 1946 and both were formed with the 1948 election in mind. The ADA consisted of members such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who provided some of the salvos that were launched against Wallace leading up to the election. These were the same people that pushed for Wallace as FDR’s Vice President in 1944. The chairman of the ADA was Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian who was highly influential in the postwar era. He stated that on domestic issues, the PCA and the ADA shared the same views, but on foreign policy, the ADA felt that Wallace and the PCA were too tolerant of Russia and Stalin. Stalin was a ruthless, savage, paranoid dictator, but we might have helped move him, for the benefit of his own people, towards a more modest position by following through with our promise to provide aid for rebuilding the Russian economy and sharing the atomic secrets which the scientists wanted to do. Then too consider what Nixon did when he went to China and opened the door for trade and development. Nixon did it to resolve the Vietnam conflict, realizing that he couldn’t win the war on the battlefield. You can argue whether Stalin or Mayo was the most ruthless dictator, as both leaders initiated policies that killed hundreds of thousands or more of their own citizens. Furthermore, we aided in the development of ruthless dictators in Haiti, Iran and many countries in South America. Pinochet is a recent example of a dictator we put in place, as Reagan referred to him as another “George Washington.” It became more like a hobby for us to install foreign military dictators who were compliant with our interests and business policies, which typically included support for anti-labor practices.

The End Game for Wallace: As the election of 1948 approached the finish line, it was clear that Wallace was going to lose–the question was by how much. Wallace always knew that he couldn’t win the Presidency in 1948, but his political calculation was that if he could get something like 10 million votes, it would have an impact on slowing the Truman administration down in their march towards the Cold War. But, all the red-baiting that went on during the campaign, largely perpetrated by the ADA wing of the Democratic Party, was beginning to weigh heavily on his campaign. In addition to the ADA faction of the Democratic Party, Wallace lost the support of labor. Yet, he continued to advocate his belief that America was headed down the wrong path, not just with respect to Russia and the emerging Cold War that the Truman administration had started, but also with respect to the long-term future of America, which he saw as a country preparing for a new war, rather than trying to get over the most horrific conflict man had ever perpetrated on his own species. Wallace also predicted and was witness to the anti-democratic institutions that were put in place as a result of the Cold War. Truman introduced loyalty oaths, which every government employee had to take and this spread to many states reaching a crescendo of hysteria in which all one had to do was accuse someone of being a Communist and they would be fired. Wallace had his own problems, but one feature of his campaign that his opponents found very frustrating was that wherever he went, he drew huge crowds of enthusiastic supporters. He was the first candidate to conduct a non-racial campaign in the South, where both blacks and whites were allowed to attend. As a result, he received many death threats to worried his campaign organizers. Wallace was not an effective politician and he didn’t relate well to members of the press. He was a visionary, and as such lacked the political skills required to be a success in American politics. As the campaign was drawing to a close, it seemed like he and he alone had the gift of long-term thinking that most politicians cannot afford to have, because they must box themselves in to time frames limited by the election cycles of their office, either two, four or six years. Thinking beyond those cycles is hard to do for any politician and yet that’s where Wallace shined. The vision that Wallace projected for the country was one that grasped the future, not by any election cycle but his vision projected into the future by decades if not more than a century. Global climate change today would be handled far differently by our government if Wallace had been elected President in 1948, or if he had been chosen as the Vice President during the Democratic Convention of 1944. He saw the acute need to transform the American economy into a civilian  jobs program and wrote a book “Six Million Jobs” in which he laid out a plan to transition the American economy from its wartime footing to that of a peaceful, progressive country highlighted by new industrial growth. But America never got there. Who is to say where the country might be today if Wallace had been Vice President when FDR died. As President, would his model for the country have stimulated others with diverse backgrounds to enter politics—more longitudinal thinkers? Would his Presidency have prepared the country to accept a more long-term view of history and would he have been able to convince the country to form a more peaceful relationship with Russia and Communism? (the Communist Party in America was a legal party but never very large one America—I have read counts that put the figure of membership anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 range at its peak). Could Wallace’s vision for America have taken us on a pathway against militarism, in favor of a more sound and just development of our postwar economy? Perhaps he would have been another assassinated President because of the opposition to his policies. One thing is certain however. Had Wallace become President and stayed alive during his Presidency, we would not have had the Korean War, nor the War in Vietnam and if he had managed to convince the country to emerge on a more peaceful, progressive path, we would not be dragged down by a military-industrial complex that prevents us from developing a more sound and resilient economy, with more economic justice than anything we have today.

Communists under arrest: On July 20, 1948, just a few days before the Progressive Party Convention, the United States indicted the entire leadership of the Communist Party, charging them with advocating the “destruction of the government of the United States by force and violence.” Major figures in the Communist Party were indicted, including William Zoster, national chairman, Eugene Dennis, general secretary and John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker. This began a terrible siege against the Communist Party and further alienated the general public against Wallace and the Progressive Party. Across the nation individual states made similar charges against party members. As one leader succeeded another, he too was indicted. This action by our government took a terrible toll on the emotional and financial well-being of party members and the timing was such that the Progressive Convention was held under a cloud, as these indictments further alarmed Wallace’s supporters and drained his campaign of its vitality. In the end, Wallace got fewer votes than did Strom Thurmond running as a Dixiecrat, who bolted from the Democratic Party.

Wallace retires from politics: After the disastrous 1948 election, Henry Wallace never entered politics again and the nation lost a visionary leader who might have steered us clear of the confrontational military mentality that remains as our first reflex for viewing global conflict. We still live underneath the umbrella-void of policies put in place during the aftermath of WW II. The ADA continued their support of the non-communist Cold War policies of Truman through the Eisenhower administration and on into the Vietnam War. It was during the Vietnam War that many members of the ADA began to see the error of their policy support for Truman. The Vietnam War was a civil war, in which Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist trying to unite his country. As a personal aside, I had to serve in the Navy during the Vietnam War from 1969-1971. As a Navy officer stationed in Pensacola Florida (I had a scientific research billet), I had to attend weekly indoctrination sessions where we were given special “insights” into the cause of the war. The presiding officer knew little about the war and as soon as I began to challenge his assertions, that the Viet Cong were sponsored by the Soviet Union, at the first hint of a voice opposing this interpretation, he hesitantly backed down as if he didn’t have the courage of his convictions. During those sessions, we were first told that North Vietnam was a client state of Russia, who was spreading Communist revolutions throughout the world. But when challenged to show evidence in favor of such an interpretation, he eventually, over the course of weeks,  switched by claiming that Ho Chi Minh was supported by the Chinese, acting in support of their expansionist ambitions. Eventually these meetings seem to run out of steam and faded in parallel with with the public perception that we were confronted by a war we could not win perhaps because the military had run out of countries with whom to pin the donkey on the tail. I did notice however, that being in the South, I was the only officer who was challenging the interpretation of the Navy’s propaganda officer (oddly enough I met plenty of enlisted men and non-commissioned officers that seemed to have much better insights and curiosity about the justification for the war), and came away with the strong impression that if you are committed to war as an ideologue, it doesn’t really matter if you understand its origins, it only matters that you win the war, which of course we did not do. Hubert Humphrey was a member of the ADA and gave castigating remarks against Wallace in the election of 1948; years later as Johnson’s Vice President he was obligated to support the war effort, though he had acquired enough visual capacity by then to see that the Vietnam War was an American disaster and that we were becoming a monster in the way we were conducting the war.  Only during the last month or so of his campaign for the Presidency, was Humphrey released by Johnson to pursue what had become his opinion that the war in Vietnam was a disaster that needed to end immediately. Humphrey never got a chance to end the war and Nixon, who won the 1968 election, continued to prosecute the war until we were exhausted and then he went to China to end the war through that doorway.

A final note: I have read many articles and books about Henry A. Wallace, which accounts for the long pause in MillerCircle articles.  My favorite book was written by Richard J. Walton entitled “Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War.” Walton’s book was published in 1976, at which time some perspective was available for judging the Wallace campaign of 1948 and Truman’s continued pursuit of phantom threats to America. On page 355 of the hardback edition, Walton states “Nonetheless, despite these and, no doubt, other criticisms that can be made of him, Henry Wallace was essentially right and Harry Truman was essentially and tragically wrong. Henry Wallace said that the United States couldn’t purchase reliable friends. He said that the United States would end up supporting corrupt, incompetent and repressive dictators all over the world. He said the United States would not be able to stamp out revolution the world over. He said that the effort to contain Communism would be costly in blood and treasure. He said that a crusade against Communism would lead to repression of civil liberties at home. He said that American foreign policy would lead to militarism. He said that the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO would divide the world into hostile camps. He said that Truman’s foreign policy would cause colonial peoples of the world to identify Russia and Communism as their friends and the United States as their enemy. He said in short, that Harry Truman’s foreign policy would lead to disaster at home and abroad. Henry Wallace was right. Henry Wallace has been vindicated by history.” Henry Wallace retired from politics and went back to farming. He died in 1965 of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

RFM

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Archerfish spitting at an insect

During my early childhood, before the age of six, my family and I spent most of the war (WW II) living with my grandparents in a house on 12th East, not far from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  When the war was over, the postwar boom began, housing costs and mortgage rates were low and my parents built a new home in a suburb of Salt lake City, not far from the mouth of Parley’s Canyon, one of the major entrances into the Salt Lake Valley (though not the one that Brigham Young took, when he led the Mormons into Utah–that’s one canyon over–called Emigration Canyon).

The new suburb we moved into seemed thrillingly wild to me. There were many vacant lots, with lots of  lizards, horned toads, mounds of red ants and large herds of deer and elk  running through the nearby Salt Lake Country Club in the winter and hawks were almost always flying overhead. In the distant background one could see the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains to the east with Mount Olympus rising majestically as the most imposing, rock-faced mountain one could imagine; as I kid I thought that Mt Olympus had probably never been climbed before–sort of like Mount Everest in the pre-Hillary/Norgay era. Later I learned that climbing Mount Olympus was a comfortable day hike for most climbers and did not require the use of pitons. But I wasn’t interested in climbing as I was captivated by exploring this new untamed land, armed with an excessively wild imagination.

In retrospect, I had an idyllic childhood, something I imagine most children of my generation would identify as an element in their own history.  I was free to pursue just about anything that popped into my head–like the idea de jour. Of course, this was before the days of pedophiles, serial killers, drug addiction, psychotic neighbors,  domestic violence, homelessness, naked streakers, burglars, sinister gays and lesbians,  so my parents let me roam freely, as long as I came home for lunch and showed up at dinner. Lunch as I recall was something of an option or at least could be negotiated; if I wasn’t coming home for lunch my mother would pack a bologna or tuna fish sandwich, that I took along with me.  Our new home was not far away from a wild undeveloped canyon we called “the gully” which had a creek running through it and, at the time, I thought if there was any chance that dinosaurs were still living, they would undoubtedly be hanging out in the gully; not all of my friends were convinced of this theory, but I had one friend, Jim Pierce, who was equally willing to share in this fantasy and act on it with the committed sense of a serious explorer. Jim and I would search periodically into the deep recesses of the gully underbrush looking for things that had not been discovered. He would always bring along a butterfly net and a cyanide jar, so if we came across a butterfly, he would net it and put it in the cyanide jar and add it to his huge collection—boxes and boxes of glass covered insect cases with an insect pin holding each specimen. Jim was interested in collecting dead things, while my interests were in collecting live animals and keeping them that way, watching their behavior and suitably modifying the cage environment to provide my interpretation of a bio-compatible home for each animal. Mostly however, my efforts at keeping animals proved just as lethal as Jim’s, but it at least started out with a different objective.  In the several years of looking in the gully  we discovered nothing original or new in nature, but always stopped somewhere along the way to hang from an old car tire on a rope over the creek. There were limits about how far you could go up the gully towards Parley’s canyon: everyone knew that Crazy Mary lived alone in a house somewhere near the beginning of the gully and we all believed that not everyone who trespassed on Crazy Mary’s property could be accounted for. We didn’t ever go far enough up the gully to see Crazy Mary’s house, but the very thought of having our childhood spoiled by an encounter with her put a natural limit to our range of gully exploration. Once I got a cut which then got infected, presumably by exposure to the creek in the gully and my parents thought that the source of my infection could be traced to raw sewage from one or more of the  houses upstream. I was more cautious after that, at least more cautious about going in the creek. Had I realized that someone putting raw sewage into the creek included human shit, that might have done it for the gully, but I don’t believe I made the connection between raw sewage and human feces, so staying in the gully but avoiding the creek was OK at the time. That topic about what’s in raw sewage must have surely been one covered by Seinfeld: if not the series should be resurrected.

Free from the boundaries of an urban life, I was able to hit the restart button and start over with a less restricted childhood. As if my energy had been penned up and stifled by the presence of too many houses, to close together,  in a relatively short period of time in our postwar home, I acquired an array of pets that included frogs, toads, lizards, chickens, homing pigeons, rabbits, tropical fish, an ant farm, a horse named Dolly and a dog named King; there was no particular sequence to the pet acquisition mode and some of them happened by accident (it used to be that at Easter, my parents would give us colored live baby chicks, so that’s how I acquired that particular animal). I was not a serial pet-lover, but had many of these pets in parallel and my parents must have frequently wondered where it would all end, but they did nothing to discourage my behavior, so there was never any stop sign in the road. But the experience that carried with me beyond my childhood was my fascination with archerfish, whose rather amazing skills at having their own personal water cannon, which they use to knock insects into the water, is something you can witness on You Tube.

My introduction to archerfish has a background story to it and began as I was walking in downtown Salt Lake City and came across something I hadn’t seen before: a sign pointed to a narrow downstairs corridor and said  “Tropical Fish.” As if magnetically attracted by the sign, I went downstairs to check it out: it turned out to be a basement bar, a section of which had been cordoned off into a small place where an interesting man with smooth dark oily hair had established a tropical fish store. He was of Italian descent and his name was Amondo; his store was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Amondo’s interest in tropical fish had germinated when he was in the war (WW-II) stationed in the Pacific, where he saw directly a variety of tropical fish species in different regions. In time, Amondo and I became good friends and I worked a bit in his store, in exchange for reveling in his deep knowledge of tropical fish and the freedom to read some of the many books he had on the subject, which fascinated me as I learned about things I had never known before. All of the fish I saw in the many aquariums in the bar were all new to me and I gradually learned that most of them did not come from the United States, but were native to many different regions of the world. Small bright shiny neon tetras were next to black tetras, zebra fish and many different gouramis, including kissing gouramis. There were no goldfish, which to Amondo were pets for children and not for the serious hobbyist. So, I bypassed goldfish and went straight to tropical fish. My parents were generous enough to buy me an aquarium that Christmas and my first fish was a black tetra.

I was thumbing through one of Amondo’s books and came upon the most unbelievable fish behavior that I could imagine. The page had a picture of an archerfish spitting water an an insect, something like the image above [the story behind the discovery of the Archer fish, surely a tall tale designed for British consumption, is that a British officer, stationed in India, discovered that his lighted cigarette was being put out by little drops of water that were eventually traced to an archerfish taking aim from the water below; however, it is known that the archerfish was introduced to the West in 1767]. The image of the archerfish, in possession of  his personal water cannon, left my mouth gaping; that single image stretched and instantly redefined my comprehension of what was out there in nature: how could I have so seriously underestimated the power and diversity of nature? What else was out there that I had missed? I had to quickly recalibrate for I could never imagine a behavior so unique and clever and so unanticipated. As I read on I learned that these fish were very accurate with their spitting behavior and typically let go a volley of drops that could fell any insect within about 3 meters from the surface. I was instantly mesmerized from reading that page and I was pretty sure I had to have an archerfish. I conveyed my enthusiasm to Amondo about the archerfish and was told that they were hard to get, because they were not indigenous to the United States and although he had shipping sources, he had never before purchased or shipped one to the United States. Archerfish are indigenous to India, the Philippines, Australia and throughout Polynesia. They exist in estuaries and swamps and thrive in both fresh and brackish water and have been found in oceans—a highly adaptable fish. The problem I faced was that Amondo didn’t want to purchase just one and have it shipped, but needed to order several and didn’t feel there would be much of a local market for the archerfish (he didn’t see them as a compellingly attractive fish like a neon tetra). If I wanted to own one, I was on my own. No matter.

I consulted with my father. He came up with the ingenious idea that I needed to form my own company and we formulated the name B0b’s Tropaquarium (I’m pretty sure this was my father’s phraseology). He had a friend in the publishing business who ran a newspaper in Murray, Utah. He printed out letterhead with the name of my new company and my home address: I was suddenly a businessman and adopted a swagger appropriate for my new status. Of course there were zoning laws that made it illegal to run a business out of your home and I never imagined that I would try to put a fish store in my parents basement. The letterhead served one purpose only—to allow me to purchase an archerfish, but armed with the letterhead, I could appear to be a tropical fish retailer: otherwise, I probably wouldn’t get  to first base.  I got the name of several tropical fish supply houses from Amondo, after promising that I was not going to go into competition with him for fish sales. Using my letterhead I wrote to several dealers and after some delay, I was able to find one that had access to archerfish; it was a supply house that was willing to sell me just one, though the cost would be high ($20.00; a lot of money in those days—early 1950s) and I would have to pay for airfreight shipping, adding another $20.00 to the total. I was able to scrape together $40.00 by mowing lawns and baby sitting and sent a money order for the fish. I was given the air freight information and advised to meet the plane at the airport and transfer the fish from the shipping container as soon as possible. My father drove me to the airport. As I recall it was an evening flight. The plane was on time and the archerfish was shipped in a large five gallon container. We put the container in the car and drove home immediately. I had already prepared a freshwater tank (I think it was a ten gallon tank, not really big enough) and gradually mixed the shipping tank water with water from the aquarium, until I thought the fish had properly acclimated. I netted the fish from the shipping container and released it into the aquarium, covering the top of the aquarium carefully, as I read that archerfish are excellent jumpers and can readily jump out of the water to grasp a low-hanging insect instead of spitting at them. With the archer safely in my aquarium, I began a new chapter in my life.

While the archerfish was acclimating to his new home, I began to think about the kind of structure I would need above the aquarium to suitably encourage the fish to spit water and then too, I puzzled about the kind of insects that would prove most suitable. My grandfather was an excellent carpenter and had a way with wood. When I pointed out what was required, he made some measurements and quickly assembled an excellent  wooden frame structure that fit above the aquarium and was covered with screen, with a trap door on top, to introduce insects into the space above the aquarium. At first, I struggled to find the right kind of insect. Ants worked, but they crawled around the screen and the archerfish was just as likely to jump as opposed to spit at the object. Grasshoppers were plentiful but a bit too large and often intimidating. I eventually stumbled on the ideal insect—the common house fly. Initially however, it was not self-evident where to get houseflies in an suburban setting. But I eventually learned that a nearby ice cream and hamburger shop (Leonard’s Ice Cream) had large windows where flies would accumulate and the owner let me come into his store with a mason jar, where I learned to catch flies by placing the mouth of the mason jar against the window over the fly, waiting for the fly to come off the window, at which time I closed the lid. This was a laborious process, but in this new chapter of my life, I didn’t have many other projects on my radar screen.  I don’t know if the owner (Leonard) thought I was providing entertainment for his customers, but it must have looked odd to see a kid putting a mason jar over flies lodged on the window. But in return for an access to flies, I significantly depleted the fly population in Leonard’s Ice Cream store. This method allowed me to capture a large number of flies without investing too much time or effort. Once I learned this procedure, flies were sufficiently plentiful that they proved to be the best possible insect among the options for evoking the remarkable behavior of archerfish, invoking their water cannon to spit at the fly, knock it off the screen and devouring it almost instantaneously. With the right kind of target insect, the archerfish began to put on a show that was inspiring. As soon as the flies were released into the screen cage above the aquarium, the fish began to  spit a stream of water droplets that collided with the screen and provided little droplets that one could feel if you were standing nearby; the fly stood no  chance of avoiding the certainty of becoming fish food. Flies did not last long when introduced into the cage. The archerfish, while a bit shy at first, became progressively more emboldened and would recognize me as soon as I came into the room with the mason jar, as he would position himself to fire his first volley. Sometimes he would release his water volley into the mason jar as I was transferring the fly to the cage.  It was an amazing display of species adaptation that I did not appreciate at the time for its novelty and the adaptive skill for survival that was probably important when waterborne food was scarce. The archerfish had evolved into more than one option as a food source.

Soon the neighborhood began to hear about the archerfish; I got phone calls and requests at school from friends and others in the neighborhood, some of whom would come with their parents to watch the show. The archerfish never disappointed, and as soon as the fly was released  into the cage, he promptly positioned his body and squirted a quick succession of droplets that would always knock the fly off the screen into the water, at which point he made an aggressive swallowing act by half jumping out of the water as he devoured his prey and then rapidly retreated behind a rock in the aquarium seemingly to avoid eating in public. The resulting noise of his devouring act was surprisingly loud given the relatively small size of the fish (about three to four inches). I could tell by watching the faces of the other kids and their parents, that they were truly amazed at seeing a version of fish behavior that, like me,  none of them could ever imagine. The fish would also squirt water droplets when the fly was in the air, as if practicing on target aim and performance. He seemed to improve with time and wowed all who came to see him work his trade and show off the power of his personal water cannon. For any day, the archerfish performance was largely limited by the number of flies that I had caught and in the winter things slowed down because flies were more scarce. There were many times when I had to feed him regular tropical fish food, which he seemed to tolerate (it wasn’t until the second iteration of the Archer fish story that I started to raise flies rather than recruit them from neighboring stores). Soon, the entire neighborhood knew about the archerfish in the Miller household. In school I was recognized as something of an expert on tropical fish and often described the archerfish, which many students refused to believe until they saw it for themselves. In the meantime, Jim Pierce and I convinced ourselves that there were no surviving dinosaurs in the gully, but through the archerfish I was able to directly confront a fascinating example of adaptive behavior which ignited a passion for biology that perhaps eventually led me into medicine as a career, followed by a transition into neuroscience. Through my experience with archerfish, I acquired a fascination about nature—a kind of—my God, what else is out there—attitude that is still with me today. It is hard to imagine that many of the creatures, no matter what the species, big or small, may be gone—long before we understand them, as we are in the sixth mass species extinction,  this one attributed to solely to man.

All good things come to an end and one day I found the archerfish dead after keeping him alive for about 2 years. The cause of death was unknown, but in that era of keeping tropical fish, knowledge of ammonia intoxication, advantages of changing water regularly and the quality of water and its pH, particularly important for keeping marine fish (the archerfish is a brackish water fish), were largely unknown and certainly not emphasized to the beginning hobbyist. I was very sad about the loss of the archerfish, but I didn’t want to get another one until many years later. It was time to move on. The next thing I did was buy a horse, but that’s another story. And, there is still another chapter about my life with archerfish, after I evolved into adulthood.

RFM

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L. L. Polk from the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina

Perils for the agrarian revolt. Like a bridge too far, the Populist movement or the agrarian revolt and its emergence as the People’s Party in the late nineteenth century was hobbled by the fact that some who identified with the movement, did so without understanding its revolutionary nature, or defending it in the manner that members of the Farmers Alliance had learned to do; the level of commitment to the movement varied on a state by state basis, but also in the degree to which the Farmers Alliance lecturers had reached the local communities. Texas and Kansas were at the top of the list, while Nebraska and the Northwestern Farmers Alliance were at the bottom; many of them were opposed to the formation of the People’s Party and their actions at the 1896 People’s Party convention virtually destroyed the movement, which many of them later regretted. Leadership counted for a lot, but more important was the penetration of the lecturer system and the degree to which the message penetrated into their regional assignments. And, like any educational system, some lecturers were more inspiring than others. The major hurdle was always the sub-treasury system when it was finally laid out in detail by Charles Macune in the summer of 1892 (earlier versions emphasized the Greenback concept of a new currency). A second problematic issue for the populists was that they had spent a large part of their capital on educating farmers through the lecturing system and had invested less effort in developing nationally visible candidates. Yet a third problem was one with which every farmer could identify—the problem of sectionalism: when it came time to vote, the sectional lines that determined how they voted in the South and North and East and West would determine how they would always vote, meaning that the Alliance needed to develop an identity that would break out of the barriers of sectionalism created by the Civil War. As a Republican you could get elected without significant violations of sectionalism and the same applied if you were a Democrat. But a Populist candidate needed to not only break the sectional boundaries, he needed to smash them and that was a formidable task, which no one had yet achieved. What the Populists attempted to do, though few of them realized it during the early organization of the People’s Party, was to reorganize the voting behavior of the nation. In the South, the party of the “fathers” held sway since the first days of the Republic and the Civil War had further intensified their loyalty to the Democratic party. It was, after all, the “party of Lincoln (Republicans) that started the Civil War.” Thus, the Alliance needed to overcome the sectionalism generated by the Civil War and they knew this would be one of their greatest challenges. One of the best agrarian candidates for bridging  the issue of sectionalism was L.L. Polk from North Carolina, who could have maintained a vigorous, full-throated campaign, with rhetorical competition against any candidate from any party. He had been politically active in North Carolina and started the Progressive Farmer, a publication that reached 12,000 farmers in North Carolina and throughout the South (this publication is still active today). Polk was elected national President of the Alliance in 1890 and in that year, the Fourth of July was designated as “Alliance Day.” Polk went to Kansas on Alliance Day to persuade Kansans that his vision of “trans-sectionalism” (not to be confused with trans-sexualism) could be achieved. Speaking on Alliance Day in Kansas, Polk remarked,

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