Tag Archives: History

“Where the West Begins”

Posted on by
Fort Worth, Chisholm Trail

(photo: author)

Just back from a week in Fort Worth, Texas. Enough fun to make any Easterner sit high in the saddle and holler “Yee-haw!” When friends heard where I was spending Thanksgiving, the universal response was either “Where?” or “Why?” Now I’m here to tell you. It’s a vacation you might enjoy, too. Fort Worth has its own running “w” brand, but it could just as easily be the 5-C’s: cowboys, chow, culture, characters, and community.

Just to remind you, in 1849, Fort Worth was established as an actual fort, one of a string of outposts at the very edge of the Wild West, meant to protect settlers after the Mexican-American War. Soon “civilization,” such as it was, moved westward, and the fort was abandoned (now the site is occupied by the Beaux Arts Tarrant County Courthouse). A town grew up around the place on the Trinity River that was so well suited to watering and grazing livestock for a few days before the long trek north to market along the Chisholm Trail, and while the cows rested up, the cowboys made the best use of the neighborhood called “Hell’s Half Acre.”

Cowboys

Unique to Fort Worth is the stockyards area, much of which has been preserved as a tourist attraction, where once literally millions of beeves, sheep, and pigs were housed, awaiting their trips that end at our dinner tables. At first, cowboys drove the longhorn cattle north to slaughter, to feed Easterners’ desire for beef after the Civil War. Then the railroads came and made transportation faster. Then the big meat processors—Swift and Armour—decided to build factories right there and save the animals the trip.

cowboy boots

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Several museums and walking tours describe the cowboy way of life, including a fine exhibit of beautifully maintained wagons. Shops of cowboy and cowgal gear, too, including drool-worthy boots.

In keeping with the cowboy theme, we attended an initial National Cutting Horse Association World Championship Futurity round at the Will Rogers Coliseum. Despite having no idea how such an event is scored, we spent a morning spellbound, seeing these talented horses and their riders separate a cow from the herd and keep it from doing what it most wants to do—rejoin its companions. Lightning reflexes, flawless technique, intensive training, and inbred determination.

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame (photo: author)

Must mention the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, about the women who’ve participated in rodeo events, trick riding, barrel-racing, sharp-shooting (Annie Oakley!), as well as the Romance of the West (Dale Evans!!). (The horse-head detail is from a column in this museum.) Beautifully put together exhibits in an Art Deco building in the Cultural District.

Chow

With all this stockyards-walking, museum-going, and cow-watching, a gal’s gotta eat. What can you get, besides Tex-Mex? Steak. Big and delicious. Hickory Bar-B-Que in Bonham, Texas (why Bonham? Answer next week). Chicken-fried steak, a personal favorite, at Cowtown Diner, where the wry humor of our server-manager-barman provided unexpected entertainment. Saint-Emilion—Le restaurant Français de Fort Worth. Great wines, excellent food! Not a bad meal on the whole trip.

It’s always great to leave a place feeling there’s more to see and do, and that’s how we left Fort Worth! Culture, Characters, and Community next week!

***The Orphan Train

Posted on by
Orphan Train

Orphan train flyer, 1910 (photo: wikimedia)

By Christina Baker Kline – This book tells an interesting story, two of them, in fact. The modern-day story is about foster child Molly, goth makeup and hair, piercings, who has trouble fitting in with the multiple families she’s rotated through. Not an orphan, her mother’s persistent drug abuse has made Molly a ward of the state of Maine. When she steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the library, she receives the surprisingly harsh punishment (reading ought to be encouraged, one would think, the classics especially!), of 50 hours of community service.

The job she finds is helping 91-year-old Vivian clean her attic, but it turns out Vivian doesn’t really want to discard anything; the tidying up is an excuse for her to revisit the boxes of memories hidden away up there, some of which she hasn’t touched literally or emotionally in decades. Vivian, it turns out, was one of the 200,000 abandoned, homeless, or orphaned children transported on the “orphan trains” from the East Coast to the Midwest during a 75-year period between 1854 and 1929. Many found loving homes, many others found conditions of neglect and near-slavery. It was a confusing, uncertain, and frightening time for them. (The orphan trains were the subject of an American Experience documentary, also, if you’d like to learn more about this topic.)

For both Molly and Vivian, growing up had its perils, though the advantages they had in sheer intelligence may have set them apart from other children in similar difficult situations. They both have secrets and have to learn to trust each other, if they are ever to be able to share them. A quick read.

PRIDE

Posted on by

Pride, Dominic West, Bill NighyIt’s easy to be swept along by the positive emotion and engaging performances in Pride (trailer), including its stirring climactic music (oddly recalling the heart-swelling “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Mis, another losing battle against implacable authority). The story is based on the extraordinary outreach of London’s gay community to striking Welch miners and their families in 1984.

Going with the flow, you may feel something more was accomplished by this effort, but in fact Margaret Thatcher’s intransigent government broke the strike after a hellish year, and the gays didn’t quite know it yet, but they were staring into the dark pit of AIDS. Perhaps successfully reaching across a cultural divide is sufficient cause for celebration in these polarized times. Pride without the prejudice.

Setting aside the larger context, it’s altogether a feel-good movie, and I felt very good any time Dominic West was on screen. The entire Pride cast is strong, including stalwarts Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, baby-faced Ben Schnetzer as the real-life Mark Ashton, George MacKay, and Jessica Gunning as Siân James.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 94%, audience rating 93%.

Henry VIII

Posted on by
Henry VIII, English king

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a wildly popular play up until the 1800’s, is rarely performed today. Surely not because we like our history delivered with somewhat more accuracy, and surely not because producers are unable to cut its approximately six-hour running time down to a more manageable two-and-a-quarter, as the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has done in its current, excellent production. The prologue includes a bit of optimistic false advertising in that regard:

Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I’ll undertake may see away their shilling
Richly in two short hours.

Today, the play is probably best known for a mishap during a 1613 performance, in which the play’s cannonfire set afire the thatched roof of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which burned to the ground.

Twenty-four pivotal years are condensed in the play’s action, which covers the early days of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon up to and including his infatuation and marriage with Anne Bullen (Boleyn) and birth of their daughter, Elizabeth. The end of the play is a long forward-looking tribute to the future of baby Elizabeth, anticipating a glorious era, her father’s legacy.

Although most modern dramatizations of Henry’s life linger on the problem of the six wives, the period of the play is much more interesting for the conflicts between Henry and the Pope and his agent in England, Cardinal Wolsey (subject of Hilary Mantel’s award winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies). Although the conflict came to a head over Henry’s wish for annulment of his marriage to Catherine that would free him to marry Anne, it was fed by Henry’s desire to acquire the massive wealth and property owned by the country’s hundreds of churches, monasteries, church schools, priories, convents, and other religious entities. His break with Rome led, of course, to formation of the Church of England with him at its head and turned that country from a Catholic to a Protestant one—a course his daughter Elizabeth vigorously pursued in her long reign.

The STNJ production is brilliantly acted, with special praise going to Philip Goodwin, who inhabits the role of Cardinal Wolsey like a second skin, David Foubert’s King Henry, and Jessica Wortham’s Queen Catherine. The “just enough” set design offers plenty of flexibility and space for the action, allowing large groups of the cast of 15 to be comfortably on stage at once, including for some period dance scenes (Henry was a fair composer). The costume design is spectacular.

I wondered at the drawing on the cover of the playbill of the baby wearing Henry’s locket only to realize that in this play, the baby is much the point.

****Alice

Posted on by

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Stacy CorderyBy Stacy A. Cordery – Drawing on diaries and personal papers previously unavailable to biographers and scholars, this detailed portrait of Alice Roosevelt Longworth reveals a woman passionate in her opinions who kept herself in the middle of Washington’s political scene for eight decades. Although she’s known as a wit and for her legendary skewering of political figures, especially her disdain for the Hyde Park Roosevelts—Franklin for his politics and Eleanor for, well, being Eleanor—it was her ability to converse on any subject, her vivacious style, and her political acumen that made her parties the refuge of Washingtonians in and out of office. When the Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White House, they seated Alice next to him, and the two talked about his previous visit there, in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was President.

Alice was 16 when her family moved into the White House in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley. The media and the public fell in love with this high-spirited teenager and soon dubbed her Princess Alice. When Teddy Roosevelt received complaints about her behavior, he said, “I can be President of the United States—or—I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Nevertheless, when she was only twenty-one he sent her as a goodwill ambassador on a four-month East Asia trip where she impressed the 75-person U.S. delegation as well as the leaders of the countries visited. It was a remarkable transition from teenage party girl to trusted political adviser, a shift made in large part to gain the elusive attention of her adored father.

Ultimately she was just too smart to for him to ignore. And from Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, few Presidents did, even when they disagreed with her strongly held views. For Republicans, as Cordery says, she was “part court jester, part Machiavelli.” Not surprisingly, Richard Nixon found her “the most fascinating conversationalist of our time.” An autodidact, she read incessantly, could recite poetry by the yard, and could converse easily about history, science, philosophy, and first, last, and always, politics. She opposed the League of Nations and entry into World War II, yet socially she was liberal. The famous needlepoint pillow that read, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me” shows she was good-humored about her jibes, and she did rip off some good one-liners. When told the nomination of Wendell Willkie as the Republican presidential candidate in 1940 came from the grassroots, she melded her quick wit and political savvy, saying, “Yes, from the grassroots of 10,000 country clubs.”

Unfortunately, the men in her life never achieved the high ambitions she had for them. Her father lost his 1912 presidential bid and died before he could make a comeback. Her brother Ted lost a close race for New York State governor, was appointed Governor of Puerto Rico and Governor-General of the Philippines, and died in France in World War II after heroic action on Utah Beach. Alice’s husband Nick was Speaker of the House, but further career advancement suffered from the combination of alcoholism and womanizing. And long-time lover Idaho Senator William Borah (father of Alice’s only child) repeatedly missed opportunities for national leadership through a stubbornness of personality. As Janet Maslin in her New York Times review put it, “However fraught her relationships with men may have been, politics remained her first love.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth died in 1980 at age 96.

Cordery chairs the history department at Monmouth College in Illinois and obtained access to the remarkable cache of personal documents that informed this biography through Alice’s granddaughter, with whom Alice had an unusually close relationship. This biography would appeal to anyone interested in 20th century U.S. political history or feisty women!

Related articles

The Rouge Shadow

Posted on by

I see my grandfather in the background in Diego Rivera’s North Wall mural at the Detroit Institute of Art, (here’s a link; these famous works aren’t free for reproduction), dwarfed by the scale of the machinery and the enterprise around him. For decades, he worked at the legendary Ford Rouge plant, where Great Lakes freighters brought sand (for glassmaking), iron ore, and coal to the mile-long factory, and, every 49 seconds, out rolled an automobile.

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan (photo: wikimedia)

Today, a tour of an auto plant suggests a relatively clean job. Robots do the heavy lifting, with just-in-time sourcing of parts. In the 1920s to 1940s, when my grandfather worked there, the Rouge was the country’s only auto factory with its own steel mill, and clouds of sulphurous smoke and grit filled the air. It had a tire-making plant, a glass furnace, plants for making transmissions and radiators, its own railroad, and even a paper mill. As I understand it, one of my uncles was in charge of keeping the steel mill’s fires stoked, which explains why he always had to work Christmas Day.

My grandfather was born in 1888, and I could not find his immigration record until I realized the Hungarian spelling of Frank is Ferencz. Even then I had to search using all the spellings of the family’s last name my various uncles used: Hadde, Hedge, Hegyi, and Heddi. By the process of elimination, my best candidate is Ferencz Hegyi, who immigrated from Fiatfalva, Transylvania, Hungary, in 1906 and arriving at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Alfred Stieglitz’s photo “The Steerage,”—called “one of the greatest photographs of all time,” was taken aboard that ship.)

(2017 research unearthed my grandfather’s naturalization papers, which reveal a quite different story. It was hard for me to give up this Transylvania connection!)

****The Danube

Posted on by
Danube, river

(photo: author)

By Nick Thorpe, a BBC East and Central European correspondent who has lived in Budapest for more than 25 years. Subtitle of this book is “a journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest”—in Bavaria, home of Danube’s the headwaters, a spring in the town of Donaueschingen. The Danube, queen of rivers, runs through and along the borders of ten countries of Western and Central Europe—Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—the middle six of which I’ve visited. In one brief stretch, it passes through four nations’ capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. And through great swaths of sparsely populated countryside, known mainly to birds and watermen.

Thorpe’s travelogue-cum-history lesson-cum natural history exploration ranges widely and freely over this vast geographic and intellectual territory. In part his story is told through the wars and occupations, the conquests and lost empires that have shaped the region over thousands of years, and in part through his warm-hearted stories of individual men and women who still depend on the river as neighbor and provider today. Ways of life that withstood centuries of disruption have been torn apart by modern improvements—hydroelectric dams, locks, canals, diversions, “straightening.”

Though Thorpe understands the motives behind these changes, his heart is on the side of the scattered environmentalists who are trying to restore the natural flow of the river and, here and there, to nudge it back into its old, meandering course. Efforts to do so have led to a resurgence of wildlife and an elevation of spirit among those who perceive a river as a living thing, moving and changing, mile by mile, as Thorpe’s book so eloquently shows.

Related articles

Coming to Amerika

Posted on by

In a historical irony, both of my paternal grandparents listed their country of origin as Hungary when they immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s and continued to do so in census records up through 1940, yet both their towns of origin were lost to Hungary after World War I. The treaty of Trianon punished Hungary for siding with Germany in that war, and gave vast areas of its territory (see map) to surrounding countries. Hungary once comprised all the pink areas, but today is just the red-outlined middle portion of the map that includes Budapest.

Dissolution of Austria-Hungary

Dissolution of Austria-Hungary (source: en.wikipedia.org)

The town I believe with some confidence was the original home of my grandmother—Maria Krausz—is now part of Slovakia. What on the map is labeled “Czechoslovakia” was split in 1993 into the prosperous Czech Republic and the proud but impecunious Slovakia (on the map, the pink part of “Czechoslovakia”). Similarly, the small town in Transylvania that I believe my grandfather—Ferencz Hegyi—emigrated from is now part of Romania. This remarkable territorial loss helps explain the running street battles between the Hungarian and Romanian boys in the Dearborn, Michigan, immigrant neighborhood where my father and his brothers and sisters grew up in the 1920s.

The history of middle Europe is long and complex and generally unknown to Americans, unless they’ve made a special study of it. I learned a tiny portion when we took our 2013 Danube cruise from Budapest to Bucharest, as I did some pre-cruise reading. I hadn’t known, remembered, or thought about the many years in which that part of the world was under Ottoman rule. Centuries before that, the Roman empire had a significant presence there (some remnants of which are still visible). That influence explains why the Romanian language is more similar to Italian than to the Slavic languages (at least in appearance; the pronunciation is different), and the fact that the Hungarian Parliament conducted its business in Latin until the mid-1800s, so I was told.

One tantalizing possibility is that the Mongolian hordes that repeatedly crossed middle Europe from the East, doing what invading hordes do—raping and pillaging—left a legacy for my family, too. Estimates are that one in every 200 males on earth is related to Genghis Khan. In part that’s because Khan’s forces killed off most of the men where they rampaged, which meant his own genetic heritage had less competition from the existing population. Khan, his son, and his grandsons had dozens of legitimate—and who knows how many illegitimate—sons who spread his genetic code far and wide.

In 1241, Mongol forces conquered medieval Hungary at the Battle of Mohi. An idea regarding how this distant episode might relate to our family—if it does—was unexpectedly sparked by an experience I had in the dentist’s chair. The endodontist required a large number of visits to finish my root canal (don’t ask), and finally said, “No wonder it’s taking so long! You have an extra root on this tooth. I hardly ever see that, except among my Chinese patients.” Thanks, Great Khan.

Gizella, Queen of Hungary

(photo: author)

History also explains the tantalizing bit of information from aunts Gizella and Clara that their mother was actually German, which was always a little confusing. It turns out that the immigration of German-speaking peoples into Hungary was widespread and began in approximately 1000, when German knights came into the country in the company of Giselle of Bavaria (Gizella in Hungarian), the German-born Queen of Hungary’s first king, Stephen I. (Boldog Gizella, in the stained glass panel means “Blessed Giselle”). Hungary by the 1800s had numerous German settlements, which is how Maria could be both Hungarian and German.

According to the manifest of the ship Amerika, which by a process of elimination I believe included my grandmother among its passengers, Maria traveled to the United States from Dobšiná (German: Dobschau) Hungary (photo below). Dobšiná is located in the Carpathian Mountains, “to the south of the beautiful Stratená valley,” near the Hnilec (Slana) River, and enclosed on all sides by mountains.The historic postcard below is of a hotel built near the town’s famous Ice Cave.

In the town’s heyday, local tilt hammers produced high-quality steel, and so it was no accident that during the anti-Habsburg uprisings of the 18th century, it was Dobšiná that supplied swords, cannonballs, and rifle barrels to the rebel armies of Ferenc Rákóczi II. When peace was established between the Habsburgs and the rebels, army workshops in the town had to be torn down. With the lengthy history of steel-making in her home town, Mary’s ultimate residence in the shadow of the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and the patina of fine steel grit on every surface must have felt very familiar.

Dobsina Slovakia Ice Cave hotel

(source: wikimedia.org)

Related articles

History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

Posted on by
4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

Related articles

*****Down by the River

Posted on by
drugs, El Paso, Rio Grande, narcotraficantes, DEA, Border Patrol, Mexico, Texas

U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)

By Charles Bowden. Investigative reporter Bowden has produced a number of excellent nonfiction books, and this 2002 book about the porous U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the heavy traffic in drugs and violence spanning the Rio Grande there–was highly regarded from the start. Since it’s a dozen years old, as I read, I couldn’t help hoping the situation has improved. Ample recent evidence here, here, and here, suggests it has not, and ongoing drug-related violence throughout the Central American region is a principal reason its children are fleeing here.

The rivalry, lack of cooperation, and mutual undermining of DEA, FBI, and CIA agents in their interactions with the corrupt Mexican hierarchy clouded any comprehensive understanding of the problem and precluded any effective action. When one of these government agencies would get the goods on a bad guy, another would put on the brakes, maybe because the man was one of their thousands of snitches–an always shaky investigational strategy, as any TV watcher knows–or maybe for some other reason. The Mexican drug lords outflanked the clueless American agents at every turn, playing one against the other.

Bowden had no idea it would take eight years to sieve the truth from the slurry of lies and to assemble the fragments of this accounting from hints, scattered news reports, reportorial digging, and conversations with people afraid to talk. He doesn’t discuss the risks to himself, but they had to be industrial grade. He frames the whole convoluted, vague, and hopelessly tangled mess with the story of the death of one 26-year-old El Paso man, Bruno Jordan. Jordan’s family lives close to a border bridge, dangerous Ciudad Juarez crowded up to the Rio Grande’s opposite bank. Jordan was shot down in a K-Mart parking lot in what the police claimed was a car-jacking by a 13-year-old boy, and what his family believes was a hit. Bruno had nothing to do with drugs, but his older brother headed the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and, in the course of his career, had rubbed a great many of the vindictive and ultra-violent narcotraficantes the wrong way.

The cupidity and corruption of Mexico’s elected leaders, the federal police, the army, and every “get tough on drugs” task force they set up is old news now, but the extent of it is nonetheless shocking. According to a source Bowden cites, when Vincente Fox became president, one of his cabinet members said, “All of our phones, faxes and e-mails are monitored by the narcos. We are surrounded by enemies. We cannot attack corruption unless Washington ends its indifference to wrongdoing by the Mexican elite.” But Washington ignored it, for political reasons of its own, and instead, for decades, has touted the phony War on Drugs.

confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

While the people live in poverty and terror, the drug czars live in multimillion-dollar mansions, protected by gun-toting federales. One provincial governor cracked down on the drug lords who live in luxury and some safety in his prisons (operating their networks unimpeded, of course), by decreeing they could no longer have Jacuzzis in their cells. At the time of Bowden’s writing, Northern Mexico was essentially a lawless region where the amounts of money are so huge that anyone can be bought. According to the DEA, in 1995 Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s Juarez-based cartel alone was generating approximately $200 million every week.) With cash flow like that, the Mexican government couldn’t afford to shut it down if it wanted to. “Unsuspecting” U.S. and European banks launder perhaps $.5 to $1 trillion dollars a year of this dirty money. Have an account at Citibank?

U.S. law enforcement and border officials may not be corrupt individuals, but everyone they must deal with is likely to be, or might be, today, or another day. In a 2013 interview Bowden talked about the continued violence and murder in Mexico, spawned by Americans’ drug habits, and how this violence is routinely ignored by politicians, bankers, and others who wink-wink don’t ask where the money comes from, calling it “the willful ignorance of the US press covering Mexico. The Mexican press is terrorized. The U.S. press does not like to challenge power.”

Author Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014, at his Las Cruces, New Mexico, home.

Mother Jones encomium and other excellent links.

Related articles