Each week The Extraordinary Times catches up with good friends in the historical community. This week, it’s been a pleasure catching up with Dr. Curt Ellison, emeritus Director of Miami University Appalachian Studies and the Michael J. Colligan History Project. Curt is also professor emeritus of history and American studies at Miami University, author of Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven, and editor of Donald Davidson’s The Big Ballad Jamboree, and Miami University, 1809-2009: Bicentennial Perspectives. He was recently interviewed on WVXU 91.7, reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the April 1970 Vietnam War protest which culminated in the student-led occupation of Miami’s ROTC building (link opens to WVXU interview):
https://tinyurl.com/ufpotap * How have you been getting along during this time of social distancing? I’ve added FaceBook friends, done online research, watched Ohio’s governor and public health director on TV, and hoped for a gradual, safe, return to “normal.” * In your recent WVXU interview, you describe the parallels between the tragic events of May 1970 at Kent State and the less well-known events of April 15, 1970 at Miami. What were the key similarities and differences? On April 15, 1970, a year of Vietnam anti-war and anti-draft protest at Miami erupted in student occupation of Miami’s ROTC building, Rowan Hall. Miami’s administration responded by suspending a reported 176 students, who, upon refusing to leave Rowan Hall, were arrested by Ohio Highway Patrol. Seventeen law enforcement agencies were on campus responding to the occupation, many of them unaccustomed to students, and few with coordinated communication. Confrontations emerged, and both tear gas and police dogs were deployed for crowd control. An increasingly chaotic scene spread across campus, and into the town of Oxford. Governor James Rhodes dispatched a battalion of 700 National Guard to a Nike Missile Base near Oxford the day after the sit-in, but President Phillip Shriver is credited with preventing them from being ordered to campus. They did not enter the town. In days following a long night of disturbances, students first called for a strike to boycott classes, then engaged in a “flush-in,” an act of resistance that opened faucets and flushed toilets in residence halls, draining the Oxford water tower. That turned public sentiment against students, and the scene at Miami calmed. Then on May 4, in a similar protest, the National Guard killed four students at Kent State. Miami had foreshadowed what would happen at Kent, but fortunately for Miami, the National Guard did not come on campus and no one was killed. * How did the legacy of Kent State affect the Miami University community? Two days after the killings at Kent State, Dr. Shriver, fearing violence, closed all Miami campuses and sent students home. During ensuing ten days, a few student leaders remained on campus to negotiate with Miami administrators. When Miami reopened May 17, liberalizations of both academic and student life policies were announced, including allowing courses to be taken for credit/no-credit, placing students on Miami governing bodies, and allowing male/female visitation in residence halls. Then in July, 1970, a new Vice President for Academic Affairs, David G. Brown, joined an administration that had previously consisted solely of the WWII generation. This 37-year-old academic leader guided a variety of changes that would lay groundwork for the kinds of undergraduate teaching, student engagement with professors, and student life programs that Miami has featured since that time, and celebrates today as a “Public Ivy.” The occupation of Rowan Hall was one of the turning points of Miami history, because of the way Miami responded afterward, and in following years, to create a different kind of campus than had previously existed. * Where were you in 1970 when these events took place, and what do you recall? I interviewed at Miami in January of 1970, and that month was hired to direct the American Studies Program. In April I was at the University of Minnesota completing a doctoral dissertation. In July, when I arrived in Oxford, I found it a different place than when I had interviewed. This was visible in the American Studies Program, where many students who were political activists in January were caught in the April turmoil, and did not return in the fall. That was also true of some young faculty who had worked with the program. So, with new colleagues also hired in 1970, we set about rebuilding. For fifty years I’ve been fascinated by what happened between the time I was hired at Miami and the time I arrived. While working on the Miami Stories Oral History Project for Miami’s 2009 bicentennial, I learned that many former students, faculty, staff and administrators remember that time quite vividly, and not all agree about either what happened or who bears responsibility for it. * How would you compare today’s polarized political landscape to the turbulence of 1970? Events at Miami in the spring of 1970, and at universities across the United States, left a traumatic imprint on the historical memory of those who were involved in them. There was deep, maybe irreconcilable, polarization of political opinion leading up to those situations, and politicians who, hoping to gain power and influence, inflamed opinion for political gain. Getting out of Vietnam was a costly process for the nation that left scars. I hope we can escape today’s landscape with less long-term damage. * Any other projects? I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with Fred Bartenstein recently in editing a forthcoming book from the University of Illinois Press, Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy, to be released in January, 2021. It’s part of a larger project on the history of bluegrass music in the Miami Valley, a tradition that emerged here as one result of Appalachian migration for 20th c. industrial work. The larger project was initiated at Miami University Regionals, and has featured public presentations and musical programs as well as research and writing.
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Each week, this blog will catch up with some of the leading voices on the local historical scene. First up is legendary broadcaster, journalist, author, and educator Dan Hurley. The founder and principal at Applied History Associates, a public history consulting firm, Dan retired as Director of Leadership Cincinnati in June 2016. Since then he has served as interim host of WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition and interim President of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in 2017-18. He worked for WKRC-TV News for 36 years, including Executive Producer and host of Local 12 Newsmakers and Assistant Vice President of the Cincinnati Museum Center.
* How have you been filling your time during these weeks of social isolation? Although we are trying to follow the social distancing rules, our daughter is a nurse manager in a cancer center at Christ Hospital. As a result, my wife and I are caring for our seven-year-old granddaughter, including her homeschooling (the teacher prefers "home learning"). I started out as a high school teacher (1968-72; 1977-1979 with graduate school in between). I have always said that I see the world through an historian's lens, but I am a teacher by profession. I never wanted to teach anyone younger than high school (most of whom are "minimally human") and I decided that I didn't really want to teach in universities either. I came to believe that history is best done by adults who have some life experience to bring to the table. As a result, figuring out how to be a creative teacher of a first grader is challenging. Academically, she is doing great, but this is really hard on her without the structure of the classroom and no ability to make use of community resources. She loves the Zoo, the Children's Theater, the Cincinnati Art Museum (Rosenthal Education Center) and the Cincinnati Museum Center, all of which are closed. Besides reading (the Mercy Eatson series is great) and doing math, we have developed a couple of "museum" exhibits collecting seed pods, pine cones, flowers, leaves. She loves doing research on the web so she can write simple levels. On an adult level, I am a member of the POTUS Book Club at the Mercantile Library. This is a seven-year project to read a recent biography of each president in order. This year we have read Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and I am now reading The Worst President Ever on James Buchanan. I have also jumped ahead to read both the Chernow biography of Grant and Robert White's American Ulysses. Chernow is the designated book, but I prefer the "short,” 650-page White biography. I have been working on my next book. My mother saved my father's 648 World War II letters and two diaries. In civilian life he was a lawyer (YMCA Law School/ Chase) who worked in the S&L business. He was drafted, sent to Officer Candidate School and was a white officer over an all-black Quartermaster company in the European Theater. The company was led by a Jewish Captain and ended the war helping to liberate Dachau. I have completed all the letters and diaries. Have begun the secondary research, and had planned a trip to the National Archives to recover the company records (he wrote a 14-page company history). The book will be entitled Dearest Margie. That project is now on hold with all of my energy absorbed with homeschooling. * Your career has covered many aspects of public history. Did you ever regret not going down the traditional route of college history professor? I was fortunate that I taught high school for four years before going to graduate school (College of William and Mary--late 18th and early 19th American religious experience). Because of that experience, I knew that there was life beyond the academy. Over the years, I have taught at XU, MSJ, and in the School of Planning at UC. I enjoyed each of those experiences, but have always liked informal adult education more fulfilling. Using multiple media--TV reporter/producer, book author, newspaper columnist, magazine journalist, museum exhibit curator, etc. has been challenging and rewarding. Each outlet has its own expectations and rhythms and learning to write for each has been a real experience. As a public historian, I have not pigeonholed myself as a specialist, but responded to what people (clients) needed. That took me into areas I would never have gone if I had been a early American historian--mini-museum on the history of the Cincinnati Waterworks; exhibit on the 1937 Ohio River Flood; legal brief on the history of underground electrical conduit; documentary of the history of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati; book on the history of Otterbein University (never was a student or faculty member), seven television shows with Charles Kuralt, etc. That is not to mention being a museum administrator at the Cincinnati Museum Center and President of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. And through that work, because of the way that I approach history, I was not pigeonholed as someone who only dealt with the past. I have gotten to be a political reporter and talk show host for both TV (Local 12 Newsmakers for 22 years) and WVXU Cincinnati Edition. * Do you agree with the observation: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? Although not knowing history can be a terrible handicap, I do not see history as cyclical. The COVID 19 pandemic is not the 1918 flu and human understanding of science and biology is fundamentally different. * Have we ever lived through anything quite like this coronavirus pandemic? No. * Do you anticipate the coronavirus will have any lasting impact on the public culture of our region? Yes, though I am not sure the exact shape. The experience of working remotely through digital connections has the potential of accelerating trends that were already emerging. I cannot imagine liberal arts education that is not personal and face-to-face. Information is not education. Interacting with professors and other students is what was most important to shaping my stance towards life. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote the Spanish-born Harvard scholar George Santayana in 1905. A century of unimaginable change lay over the horizon, including two world wars, global pandemics, women’s voting rights, the first moon landings, and the dawning of the internet age.
Needless to say, Santayana’s famous quotation has taken on a life of its own. Reworking his words to the point of exhaustion, those who remember Santayana’s insight ironically take it for granted more often than not. *** “In these uncertain times…”. No expression has aged more quickly. In these uncertain times we are told to wash our hands, cough into our sleeves, socially isolate, and avoid gatherings of more than two people (three’s a crowd). In these uncertain times, however, all is not lost. The study of the past can guide us in the face of political alarm, social anxiety, and public crisis. Contagion, and the fear it inspires, are as old as history. In 431 B.C., a mysterious plague ravaged Athens. Its impact, described by the Greek historian Thucydides, was eerily familiar. “Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them all together.” Happily, medical science has moved on, but few readers will overlook the universal challenge of pandemic disease, resurrected in the ominous form of COVID-19. Left to their own devices, Athenians embraced measures that afforded some respite: social distancing and self-isolation. Similar patterns held during the terrifying pandemic of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Another eyewitness to history, Giovanni Boccaccio captured the moment in his classic account, The Decameron. The plague’s relentless progress terrorized Boccaccio and fellow citizens of medieval Florence: “despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health.” Some coped by taking to prayer, others to the bottle: “drinking with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the houses of others, as it were, their inns.” Still others coped, in that Netflix-less age, by the oldest medium of all: telling fantastic stories around the fireside, inspiring those Boccaccio captured forever in his writing. Closer to home and our own time, southwest Ohio is no stranger to epidemic disease. Outbreaks of cholera in 1832 and 1849 claimed around 2 and 4 percent of Cincinnati’s population respectively, attesting to the dismal sanitation of the nineteenth century Queen City. In light of current events, much has been written about the 1918-1919 global pandemic, which infected perhaps a third of humanity. With a fatality rate of some 2.5 percent, “Spanish Influenza” killed up to 50 million worldwide: more than the First World War to which it furnished such a gruesome epilogue. In Cincinnati, city leaders responded with closures of schools, theaters, libraries, bars, and other public spaces. Different times, but oddly familiar. If history teaches us one thing, then the lessons of the past are not enough to save us from the ignorance of the present. There’s much about COVID-19 we don’t know, much we can only guess at in the coming months. To acknowledge and embrace uncertainty is itself a lesson from history, perhaps the most important. Thankfully coronavirus is not cholera or the Black Death. But it is not nothing. The uncertain months before us will be a time for putting history to the test, and for recognizing our shared humanity above all else. |
AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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