Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I thought I’d take a moment to share some of the things I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for my wife who loves me and tolerates my politico-blogging obsessions and my kids who have great senses of humor, not least because they still think Dad is the funniest person in the world. I’m thankful for a roof over my head and plenty of food on the table. I’m thankful for a steady job, and pleasant co-workers. I’m thankful to practice law in front of the wisest judges that ever graced a court room (psst, some of them read this blog). I’m thankful for my dogs who give me a proper greeting every day when I get home. I’m thankful for parents who raised me right, even if I didn’t always heed the lessons. I’m thankful for a good education and teachers who encouraged me to think rather than merely to recite. I’m also thankful for those teachers who taught me that, sometimes, there just isn’t any substitute for buckling down and memorizing a few facts. I’m thankful that the NFL has football games on that I can watch when my belly is groaning under the weight of turkey and mashed potatoes. I’m thankful I was born and raised in the United States and Indiana….
And, I’m thankful that my son wants to spend time with me, RIGHT NOW. So I won’t go into the rest of the stuff I’m thankful for. Have a good Thanksgiving everyone.
You indeed have many reasons for thanksgiving about your family and your good fortune coming from and flourishing in Indiana. If this is too personalized, indiscreet, or outrageous, just let me know, and don’t post it, because you need your Indiana audience more than I need this to go out to them.
I’d like to give Masson’s Blog a pessimistic/optimistic take on Indiana, where I lived until I was 18. I have mostly worried Indiana about some from afar ever since 1980, when Birch Bayh was defeated by Dan Quayle. As a progressive Democrat from pretty-liberal California, I realize it takes world-class incompetence and a drawn-out, expensive war to take enough of the glow off of George W. Bush’s down-home manner to push his approval rating in Indiana below his disapproval rating (45% approve, 50% disapprove, according to Survey USA on 16 January).
I see that you live in Monticello. My two brothers and I own 158 acres in soybeans and 42 acres in “woods” 5 miles north of Burnettsville. We were raised near and in Lafayette before leaving in the 1960’s – Steve, who’s now in Chicago, to Indianapolis, while Alan and I wound up, after being drafted, as bachelors in San Francisco and Berkeley (me, divorced). Our folks were liberal Democrats and good-works churchgoers in the 40’s at the Federated Church in West Lafayette (Northern Baptist/Disciples of Christ; Rev. Doyle Mullen), then Bethany Presbyterian (Rev. Frederick Allen) once my dad and some other union carpenters built a three-bedroom split-level on Elmwood near Market Square. The move to town meant we boys could get an adequate college-preparation at Jeff starting Thanksgiving Day 1955 (although the heating system was not installed, we moved in). We thought Lafayette was definitely one of the better towns in Indiana, principally because of the good schools and the modest standard of living our family enjoyed from my father’s union wages and my mother’s home-keeping frugality and efficiency, partly because of the Big Ten sports and cultural events traveling to Purdue.
In Lafayette, I and my two brothers were unmistakably working-class, short, wearing patched clothes, and walking or bicycling rather than driving two miles to school. The oldest, I was maybe more resentful of social slights than I should have been. I had an anti-Republican attitude; that, getting a scholarship, and the draft contributed to my leaving Indiana. Much later, I found out who the Durgan School (closed down last fall) was named after: Mayor George Durgan, who blocked anti-KKK from taking over the town in 1923, then came in second in the 1924 Democratic gubernatorial primary on an anti-Klan platform weakly adopted by the nominee. I now think I know why the Journal-Courier wouldn’t print the school name chosen by a Democratic school board after his death in 1942: publisher Henry Marshall, the Republican National Committeeman, hated Durgan (for imaginable but as yet undocumented reasons). After all the years of World War II and cold war industrial affluence that made Lafayette a strong union town, I was disappointed but not surprised at the forty-fifth reunion of my graduating class (1958) that so many of the other working-class kids had become Republicans.
On visits back before my mother died in 1986, I began to hear strident reactionaries — particularly “The Sagamore of the Wabash” — dominating WASK’s call-in program. I had heard nothing about this from my mother on occasional visits in the years from 1960 to 1982; it hearkened back to the sadistic anti-liberal meanness of 30 years earlier, with the red-baiting of Democrats and corrupt labor unions and the Ford Foundation by the columnists in the Indianapolis Star and by Fulton Lewis Jr. on WASK. The vitriolic Old Guard Republican hatred for the Roosevelt and Truman administrations now has been replaced with the more presentable notions of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, which he ably presented on PBS for many years, without rebuttal from a Paul Krugman, a Paul Samuelson or Joseph Stieglitiz (both graduates of Gary Horace Mann, incidentally, before going on to be Nobel-Prize-winning liberal economists out of the University of Chicago!)
Inevitably, the thirty percent or so of Christians – 84% of the adult population, according to the Pew Trust Report on Politics and Religion — who were doctrinally and temperamentally anti-modern conservatives felt their ministerial and parental authority threatened by the life-style changers – not just the hippies, but to the McCarthy precinct-walkers with somewhat shorter hair like me — of the1960’s and 1970’s, and they reacted hostilely to us. As I got eventually settled into a groove of social-change advocacy in California, I lost track of what was happening in Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District, which Charles Halleck had held from 1935 to 1966, and which sent Purdue historian Floyd Fithian to Congress in 1974 after Earl Landgrebe became too embarrassing. I thought religious conservatism was a menace to the social vision I would like to become a reality mostly in places like Roanoke, Virginia and Garden Grove, California and Oklahoma City. Now I have a better idea of how widespread it has become – even in the supposedly liberal Lafayette area.
I expect that you have heard of the publication last summer of Jesusland, a recent memoir about being raised by religiously conservative Indiana parents, by Julia Scheeres. She now lives in Oakland, but I missed her appearance at Cody’s Books in Berkeley in October. The memoir is compelling, and has gotten nine very positive and mostly-accurate notices in liberal publications, i.e., The New York Times, Mother Jones, Publisher’s Weekly, BookList, and Kirkus Journal; (Counterpoint, $23). I would not be amazed if it had received little to no publicity in Indiana.
Her father, a Porsche-driving surgeon who came from western Michigan to Lafayette’s Arnett Clinic, and her mother, an evangelical Dutch Reformed Calvinist, moved her, her three siblings and two adopted boys (the parents had reluctantly settled for black children at an agency, and never whole-heartedly loved them) into the semi-rural but affluent Harrison High School District in northern Tippecanoe County, rather than into West Lafayette or Lafayette (both among Indiana’s better high schools academically, at least in my day). Whatever her parents’ reasons for choosing to be rural, she does not explore their possible motivations, which nonetheless set her and the boys up for confrontations with stereotypically – but believable – farm boys and girls who bullied and ostracized them – and worse.
On top of that, the parents emotionally abused her and her adoptive brother David, with whom she closely bonded, and, after the older adopted brother ran away, and the father broke David’s arm with a two-by-four, they shipped the two, first to a Dutch Reformed school in Lafayette, then off to a church-operated school resembling a reformatory in the Dominican Republic.
Scheere’s church’s youth minister and his efforts to steer his charges toward adult economic striving and away from the normal adolescent sexuality, as she portrays them, are pathetic and just short of contemptible, in contrast to my adolescence, when public school teachers (beyond showing hygiene films and resorting if challenged too mockingly to corporal punishment and expulsion to enforce classroom decorum) simply took in stride and very-loosely supervised adolescent showing off. The youth minister’s exhortations to abstinence reflect a long-standing Calvinist anxiety about human affections far exceeding anything I remember about mine or other mid-century Lafayette-area Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and Catholic parents. Even with Hollywood’s Hays Code, our parents were moviegoers, they saw plenty of kissing and dancing at the movies, and they knew that their kids sometimes did even more in their cars, just as the parents had done since the 1920s.
Scheere’s reports of her rural neighbors ring true, and they are believably somewhat meaner than thirty years earlier. In the years my brothers and I attended Klondike School we traveled in this same rural area north of the mildly-pungent Purdue Swine Farm on the “hack” twice daily. There was occasional prejudice and bullying (of a “hillbilly†family from eastern Kentucky, two Catholics who lived near us in the Wabash Valley, and of smart-alecks like me), but the old farmer who drove the bus was able to prevent serious violence. And we were not innocents about others’ family problems: kids talked about them. Until network TV, particularly I Love Lucy, arrived, basketball was the dominant passion. I and my two brothers enjoyed living on the scenic North River Road, partly because we could easily bicycle into the two cities. And we were proud of the Klondike Nuggets basketball team, always one of the best because, with a graduating class of 30, it was the largest of Tippecanoe County’s 13 rural high schools.
Twenty years after leaving Lafayette, I followed, by telephone calls and by three-day old copies of the Indianapolis Star, how a very strong Republican organization and the slickly amiable ex-Midwesterner Reagan’s coattails had brought on the defeat of Senator Birch Bayh by Dan Quayle in the 1980 election. After later learning that Indiana Democrats finally lost their registration edge in 1993, I did not doubt that this and many other semi-rural areas of the lower Midwest would have noticeably increased in social meanness despite quality-of-life improvements since the 1950’s (notably better rural education because of school-consolidation legislation by Democratic Governor Matt Welsh and Assembly Speaker Bayh, and the Great Society’s federal school aid).
But the miseries revealed in Julia Scheeres’ eloquent memoir of her family now make me wonder if the lives of tens of thousands of children and adolescents in strictly conservative homes, despite their prospects for adult affluence, may be more troubled than anything known to rural, small-town and city children in Indiana (except to the truly destitute among us) more than fifty years ago, when most of the boys (myself included) just wanted to be starters on the high school basketball team. Dismaying as what Scheeres and her brothers suffered, and because of the resurgence of conservative politics since about 1966 in Indiana, I am pessimistic about the lowering of expectations brought on by religious conservatives, but optimistic that their influence will decline. I would expect that probably three-fourths of Indiana’s Protestant and Catholic families are more nurturing and tolerant and effective parents than Scheere’s. I still have contact with several relatives or in-laws (who are more liberal in their expectations about their children’s behavior than their parents — me, one brother, old friends, and several cousins — were forty years ago) to bear me out.