I can’t say this connection had occurred to me consciously, but it made only too much sense to see that in one suburb, at least,  two outsized, fearful items of modern conspicuous consumption have converged: Hummers and assault weapons. It does indeed seem to take a similar mentality to think that suburban personal safety requires driving to the supermarket in an armored personnel carrier and that personally acquiring enough munitions to capture Iwo Jima is a good idea. And to regard living that way as somehow cool and manly. But let the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tell it:

Chesterfield Hummer dealership fights declining sales with guns

Like many of his competitors, Hummer dealer Jim Lynch is fighting for survival.

Unlike the rest of them, Lynch reached for a gun. Lots of them, actually.

Faced with declining sales and an uncertain future, his Chesterfield dealership has expanded in a direction that’s drawing national attention. It’s what happens when you replace some of those pricey Hummers with dozens of Glocks, Sig Sauers, Colts, Berettas and Brownings.

For Lynch, those guns are the solution to a problem that’s been hounding him for months.

“We’ve got a beautiful building with a big mortgage,” Lynch said. “The Hummers weren’t going to cover it.”

In the good old days — way back in 2005 — Lynch’s dealership could sell 70 Hummers during a strong month. But high gas prices, a sour economy and the auto industry’s ongoing struggles have wreaked havoc. These days, he’s happy to watch 10 of the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles leave the lot. But the money he pockets selling guns makes up for the profit on about 15 Hummers.

But why guns? Why not flowers? Or lawn mowers? Or jewelry?

That’s easy. The people who like Hummers also tend to like guns.

The story goes on rather matter-of-factly from there, with the dealer, his customers, and even a Marketing professor from Philadelphia treating guns-n-Hummers as the most natural thing in the world, which I suppose it is, at least in this part of it.

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Now playing: Jon Auer – Six Feet Under
via FoxyTunes

. . . lived in Missouri, apparently. From local newspaper columinist T.J. Greaney, one more reason the Founders really should wonder about the quality of the p.r. representation they have been receiving. Apparently one of their recently-deceased modern legatees liked to spread his message on bathroom stalls:

In the 1960s if you entered a restroom or a phone booth, there’s a chance you might have noticed a three-inch-square sticker at eye level. A closer look might show the image of a rifle crosshairs superimposed over a menacing text:

“See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?” the sticker read. “He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure. … Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.”

The author of this screed is Robert Bolivar DePugh, and his goal was terror. For more than a decade, DePugh led a shadowy militia group known as the Minutemen. Their stated purpose was to use guerilla warfare to repel the Communist invasion they always believed was at hand. Later, they vowed to root out Communist spies they swore were entrenched in the U.S. government. War, in their minds, was always imminent, and a group of armed patriots was the last best hope for the Republic.

“He saw himself as the Paul Revere of the 20th century, that he was going to save the United States from Communism,” said Eric Beckemeier, who grew up in DePugh’s adopted hometown of Norborne and wrote a book in 2007 chronicling his movement. “It was delusions of grandeur, almost.”

Almost? Anyway, the whole piece is well worth reading. Not exactly a heart-warming local human interest story, but also not exactly not.

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Now playing: Graham Parker & The Rumour – Stupefaction
via FoxyTunes

We were in Kansas City much of this past week celebrating my son Isaac’s 16th birthday. (Someday I will have to share our tragic tale of having to become parents in the 6th grade — so young we were — as soon as I make it up.)

The trip included our first visit to the renovated Kauffman Stadium, where the Royals seemed as though they might break their latest losing streak … but then managed to blow a 6-2 lead in the 8th inning. (That game was Wednesday. The streak finally ended tonight, Saturday.) For me, the Royals are the living face of economic decline in the Kansas City region. Only Wal-Mart seems to thrive around here. The Royals are owned by a man who made his money at Wal-Mart and now runs the team like Wal-Mart: a shiny setting in which to sell the cheapest, flimsiest products undemanding consumers will buy. How cheap and flimsy? The Royals’ putative “power”-”hitting” outfielder, Jose Guillen, the best free agent the owner would shell out for, sustained a season-ending leg injury putting on his shin guard the night we were there. Guillen was announced in the starting line-up, then pinch-hit for in the first inning. Baseball fan Isaac focused on Mark Buehrle’s perfect game and the Cardinals’ much-needed trade for Matt Holliday to stay in his birthday happy place.

During our visit, my Mom had on hand the official photographic record of the Missouri School of Mines 50-year reunion Isaac and I attended with my Dad in June, chronicled in my controversial post on Rolla a while back. Readers may recall that this event featured a personal appearance by the King, in the form of Elvis Tribute Artist Rich Vickers, who was in no way an impersonator like those other guys. Accidentally, I assure you, it seems that the official photographic record included a shot of a certain historian studiusly avoiding eye contact with E.T.A. Vickers or his merch-selling Queen:

One more Show-Me travel note. It seems to be a bad idea to label any post as “part 1” or to promise continuations, as I did in the Rolla post mentioned above. I wrote most of “part 2” on our swing through the Lead Belt back then, but only finally finished and posted it yesterday. Exercising my control over space and time on this blog, I backdated the post so the internal references would make sense, but you can read it here. And it involves some actual history.
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Now playing: The Who – Substitute
via FoxyTunes

Some may be aware that one of St. Louis’s nicknames is “Mound City.” This moniker developed because of the many Indian mounds of different shapes and sizes that were found in the area when the Usonians started moving in approximately 200 years ago. Many of these were quite sizable, though none were as impressive as the Monk’s Mound over at Cahokia on the Illinois side of the river. (Now it is an archaeological site. Not that long before the French and Spanish hit the Mississippi Valley, Cahokia had the been the great metropolis of northern North America, such as it was.)

The early U.S. arrivals had lots of fanciful theories about the mysterious cultures that created the mounds, but that did not stop them from becoming popular spots on which to build your farm, home, or “entertainment complex.” Then, as the city grew, it became even more popular to flatten the mounds and use the dirt for other purposes. Today there are barely any hills at all in most of St. Louis, much less anything that would justify the appellation “Mound City.” Slightly-Raised-Above-the-Riverbed City would be more like it. (A few miles inland, there is The Hill, the Little Italy of St. Louis where Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, and Early Republic historian Rosemarie Zagarri were all raised. The singular article form of the name is a significant clue to the local topography.)

The ex-mounds of Mound City are in the news today because what is thought to be the last remaining St. Louis Indian mound, or the remaining half of it, is up for sale. Located in south St. Louis along the Mississippi, it is locally known as Sugar Loaf Mound and features an elderly couple’s house right on top. Supposedly the house has a nice view of the river, and it must have awesome freeway access — part of the mound was used as fill for I-55 next door. The Budweiser brewery and downtown STL are just minutes away.  Get your bid in now, because the Osage Nation is looking at buying the property to preserve it. The Osage would be buttressing what I gather is a somewhat disputed ancestral link between the historical Osage people and the Mississippian mound builders.
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Now playing: Ramsay Midwood – Mohawk River

After seeing my Dad receive his Golden Alumni regalia last Wednesday morning, Isaac and I set out for the serious driving part of the trip, a couple of hundred miles back and forth across the Ozarks. Isaac just likes roads he has never been on before, but I was on mission to take in some lead mines.

I have long been fascinated by the Lead Rush that took place in the mid-Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century. I gather there were actually several of these, and what interested me about them (besides the fact that such a thing could exist) was their total lack of Gold Rush-style romance. The early lead mines, which were worked by the French and Indians before the Usonians (U.S. Americans) came along, were known as “diggings” because they involved scraping around the surface for chunks of promising earth and then heating them to melt and extract the lead. Lead was valued for ammunition-making and various other industrial purposes, but it does not seem to have been valued all that much. Lead mines were more a case of scratching out some moderate prosperity than striking it rich.

The Lead Rushes brought out a rather eclectic set of hard-up entrepreneurs. Alexander Hamilton’s son William ended up out in Wisconsin Territory; they called him “Uncle Billy” in the squalid encampment where he and his rather dodgy crew of workers lived. Somehow I don’t think anyone who worked for William Hamilton’s father was in the habit of calling him “Cousin Al,” but I guess you never know. [See Juliette Kinzie's memoir of life as an Indian agent's wife on the Wisconsin frontier for a sad vignette of the downwardly mobile life of the upwardly mobile Founder's son.]

The Missouri lead belt attracted a Connecticut Yankee named Moses Austin whose previous bid for moderate success had been roofing the state capitol and mining the lead for it in Virginia. When the Virginia venture faltered, Moses initiated a family tradition of entrepreneurial expatriation, gaining the lead-mining concession in Spanish Louisiana and heading out for foreign territory where relatively few Anglo-Americans had yet ventured, at least with anything other than hunting or the Indian trade in mind. Austin did well enough to build himself a short-lived lead-mining empire, including a mansion called Durham Hall and the ambitiously named town of Potosi, after the silver mines that funded the Spanish Empire. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s View of the Lead Mines of Missouri will fill you in on the all the opportunities Austin was trying to seize.

While it’s not clear that Moses Austin was ever truly secure in Missouri, U.S. control of the area brought trouble for him. The Missouri lead business was ironically devastated by the coming of the War of 1812, and Austin’s control of his little empire, and his manhood, were challenged by the vicious competition and just plain bullying of heavily armed migrants from the U.S. South led by one John Smith T (for Tennessee, from which he hailed). Smith T was believed to have killed some 15 men on the field of “honor” and otherwise.  Though intimidation, legal chicanery, and some outright theft and violence, Smith T tried to take Austin’s land titles, frighten off his workers, and seize the Austin holdings for himself. Austin was not precisely defeated by Smith T, but by the end of his life he had largely given up the Missouri venture and turned his attention toward a new expatriation scheme in Mexico’s northernmost provinces, which his son Stephen would be the one to carry out. Moses Austin’s whole Missouri story reads kind of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance if the John Wayne and Lee Marvin characters had joined forces to wipe out Jimmy Stewart and take the town for themselves, civilization be damned. To put it another way, Moses Austin needed John Wayne for a neighbor and got Lee Marvin instead.

Since Potosi was sadly devoid of overt Moses Austin shrines, we continued east to Missouri Mines State Historic Site in Park Hills, MO. The museum is located in an impressively nasty-looking old lead mill sitting on a top of a mine and amidst some hills that appeared to be giant piles of mine waste.  After a lifetime of consciousness raising on the dangers of lead paint, Isaac handled the omnipresence of the feared substance pretty well, with a lot of discussion on my part about how spending a few hours in an old lead mine as a 15-year-old (on a rainy day) was not the same thing as ingesting refined lead over a long period of time as a toddler. Nevertheless, at one point during our tour, Ike blurted out, “I think can feel the effects [of lead poisoning] already.” Ah, the safety-conscious youth of today.

Unfortunately, Missouri Mines State Historic Site did not really address my lead belt western scenario. I did learn that I did not know much about “modern” lead mining. The diggings of Moses Austin’s day stopped at the bedrock. Around the time of the Civil War, the lead industry turned to deep rock mining, punching thousands of miles of tunnels as much as 400 feet deep into the Earth. By World War II, the main method of getting men in and ore out was an electric railroad system — the main line was 300 miles along at just this one site. Before that, the ore cars were pulled by good-old fashioned Missouri mules. I must say that the only thing worse than eating lead dust all day would be mixing it with the aroma of mule crap, but apparently the work paid well by Ozark standards. The long distances that the miners had to travel underground to reach the ore seems to have led the St. Joseph Lead Co. to create a task-based wage system I had not heard of. Every miner had to dig out a quota or “score” of a certain number of tons of ore each day to earn their pay, after which they could go home or stay and earn extra.

The museum displays and our docent were quite insistent that lead poisoning or other health effects had not been a problem in the area, though they did admit that smelting plants could cause problems. You hope they are right for the sake of the Lead Belt’s population, because lead was and possibly still is literally a part of growing up there.  Check out “Chat Dumps of St. Francois County” for pictures of children playing, Boy Scouts hiking, and town Christmas trees standing on the gigantic piles of mine waste (chat) that once loomed larger over the towns of the Lead Belt than the surrounding Ozark hills.

Finally, coming home from the Lead Belt on U.S. 50, we went through one of Missouri’s many strangely named burgs. The state has a quite a line in misspelled and/or mispronounced foreign capitals, but perhaps more distinctively, there are several towns named after qualities that their founders presumably prized or thought their settlements embodied. Economy and Peculiar are two we had noticed before, but Useful, MO, was new to us. I started laughing and immediately made the comment that I hoped there was a Useful Cemetery. Lo and behold, it immediately appeared. I was driving too fast to stop without needing to use the cemetery ourselves, but I also knew that someone must have put such a sight on the Internet already. I was not wrong. (Click the picture for an even artier one.)

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Now playing: Whiskeytown – Mining Town
via FoxyTunes

I need to finish up the Ozark travelogue soon, but first thought I would share another instance of political fantasy in real life, from a news article in our local Sunday paper. It seems that Barack Obama’s rise to power has coincided with a boom in weapons and ammunition sales (and applications to go packin’ in public) that continues to the present day. This has all developed, I might add, without the slightest hint or tell from the president or his official supporters that any kind of crackdown on gun owners is in the offing. I rather think Obama has his hands full enough leading the country through economic crises and major policy changes and a Supremes nomination without opening any new culture war fronts. Then again, you get the sense that some of the people mentioned in this story are expecting other kinds of wars entirely:

For whatever reason, guns and all things gun-related are a hot commodity these days.

Local law enforcement agencies are seeing an increase in the number of applications from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms, a continuation of a trend that started last year. At the same time, ammunition prices are up because of increased demand coinciding with more gun sales.

The Boone County Sheriff’s Department has received more than 250 new applications this year from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms after accepting 449 applications in all of 2008, sheriff’s Maj. Tom Reddin said. The sheriff’s department received only 116 applications in 2007, Reddin said.

[snip]

“I think a part of it is crime,” he said. “I think a part of it is politics and the national administration. I think a part of it is the hysteria.”

Another Columbia firearms trainer, Tim Oliver, said demand for his beginning firearms course has increased since last summer. He offered two courses a month last year but has increased that to nine courses a month. “All of my classes have been booked to capacity since October,” he said, attributing the increase to both crime and fear of stricter gun control.

Ammunition also has become a precious commodity.

“A lot of people are kind of grabbing up and hoarding ammo,” said Barry McKenzie, manager of Target Masters firing range and gun store in north Columbia.

McKenzie said a lot of dealers have placed limits on how much ammunition customers can buy in an effort to decrease demand, but his store has not.

“People are afraid” of increased federal regulations, McKenzie said “There’s just a lot of rumors out there right now.”

And then there was this additional testimony from the news story’s online comments section:

SickSigma says…

I worked for a shooting and reloading company before and after the election. Believe me, the election has a lot to do with what is going on. The call volume increased to staggering proportions immediately after the elections. People were grabbing everything they could, and that still has not subsided. Now prices are incredibly high becasue every dealer is out of stock. I am one of the lucky ones who stockpiled before prices skyrocketed. I have enough guns and ammo to form a small militia. [Let's hope it's a well-regulated militia.--JLP]

This jibes with what I was told last fall by a student who was working at what I imagine is the same business. An outfit called Midway USA has a rather unmarked facility west of Columbia. From what I have seen, there are few better places to experience Middle American cyber-aggression in action than the comments section of newspaper guns n’ crime stories.

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Now playing: Close Lobsters – Got Apprehension
via FoxyTunes

Isaac loves road trips to anywhere, so I agreed to do a little more driving than necessary after his last day of school earlier this week. Our primary purpose was attending a banquet and ceremony celebrating the accession of my father (and a bunch of distinguished gentlemen) to Golden Alumni status at what is now being called Missouri University of Science and Technology. It was formerly known as University of Missouri-Rolla, but in 1959 it was still called Missouri School of Mines.  It’s a nice, rather venerable little school despite the name changes, which make it seem as if they’re trying to keep anyone from finding out about the place, though I know the opposite is true. The preferred abbreviation is neither MO Tech (my favorite), nor MUST (Isaac’s), but instead Missouri S&T. I know this for certain because S&T (the preferred abbreviated abbreviation) has the most insanely detailed and sternly worded “brand identity” web site I have ever seen for an academic institution. (Not that I have seen that many.) There are official color palettes, fonts, and even PowerPoint templates. “Consistency is the key,” the main page lectures, going on to scold its own URL for employing the forbidden abbreviation MST. S&T also seems to have subtly youthified its scruffy old prospector mascot, “Joe Miner” (click the image to see the new one). He does still carry his slide rule, pick-axe, and gun, so there’s that.

While the school seems fine, I could not recommend its location, Rolla, MO, the Town That Couldn’t Spell Strait, as a vacation spot. Rolla is a homely little railroad real estate speculation in the Ozark foothills. This is the kind of place where instead of looking around the sleepy old downtown and thinking what a happening mini-metropolis this was once upon a time, as you do in many another small Missouri city, your dominant impression is, “Nothing ever happened here, did it?” One story is that they named the town after Raleigh, North Carolina, but the phonetic Rolla was easier for the hardscrabble locals to spell.  As an historian, I am not sure I quite accept that story, but the highway sign on the edge of town pointing the way to Cabool (named after the Afghan capital) would tend to corroborate it.

The entertainment at the banquet we attended was what I now know to call an “Elvis Tribute Artist,” a personable fellow named Rich Vickers who was keen to distinguish himself from his “deranged” competition on the ETA circuit. “Some of those guys really think they are Elvis,” Rich quipped. There was no danger of such excessive verisimilitude on this occasion, considering that Rich’s instrumental accompaniment was a laptop (awkwardly hooked up to PA system) that appeared to be running ITunes in karaoke mode. I do wish I had taken a picture of The King fiddling with his laptop on “stage” (a.ka. the side of the Rolla Comfort Suites function room). My mom and Isaac loved ETA Vickers, though Ike did take some umbrage when his request, “Viva Las Vegas,” was turned into a goof on those Viagra ads we know all too well from the Cardinals TV broadcasts.

You get the idea that entertainment has long been scarce in Rolla. A highlight of the Miner Class of 1959′s college years turned to be the time some drunken engineering students built a cement wall across a downtown street one Friday night. I don’t know about the rest of you, but heavy construction sure happens to me every time I have a few too many. Also, I guess there was not a lot of traffic in 1950s Rolla.

Since I see this post is now going out on the 6th of June, I guess I should also mention something else we learned in Rolla: my dad had forgotten to tell us all these years that his alma mater has a dorm named after a family member. This would be Holtman Hall, dedicated to his uncle Orvid Holtman, a Navy engineer who was one of the first men ashore on D-Day, and like a great many men in his position, did not live to tell anybody about it. He left behind a young wife I never met, and they had not had any children by the time he shipped out. I have never been much on nominating any generation as intrinsically greater than any other, but I do feel that the living generations in this country need to work a little harder sometimes on living up to the sacrifice — for democratic values — that thousands of young guys like Orvid made.
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Now playing: Mojo Nixon – Elvis is Everywhere
via FoxyTunes

Sorry to be away for a while. I had a feeling it was a bad idea to make any reference to “my next,” as I did in the last tea party post. The end of the semester just kind of bears down on us out here in the teaching trenches, especially when there are lectures to write and graduate students handing in chapters.  Out of my apparent masochistic tendencies, and the chance to get back together with one of my first historical loves, I agreed to take over our semi-required Missouri History course this semester. I have really enjoyed it, though by this point I am little worn out from having to download a new topic into my head every week and then process it into something intelligible (or not) for the students. The challenge and fun of doing the history of a particular place is that it has forced me to come much closer to “histoire totale” than I have ever had to in most of my other work. So I have had to learn or remind myself about riverboat technology, hemp production (not that kind), meatpacking, railroad land-jobbing, urban planning, organized crime, and myriad other social and economic details of Missouri’s past.

Music is one such topic I have spent a lot of time on, because certain branches of popular music — the kind they played in the many dive bars, brothels, and gambling dens found in seedy Missouri river and railroad towns — turn out to be the state’s principal contributions to world culture, Mark Twain notwithstanding. I am thinking of ragtime, which before some reading and listening in the last couple of weeks I knew nothing about if it did not come from The Sting soundtrack; Kansas City jazz (more like swing, really, and about which I knew even less); and early rock and roll.

Admittedly, the preceding reflections were little more than an excuse to share a couple of striking YouTube videos I ran across while looking for examples to play for students in the class.

First we have “blues shouter,” proto-rocker, and KC jazz fellow traveller Big Joe Turner, doing a song I did not even recognize as “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” so terribly neutered is the familiar Bill Haley version. If anyone knows who the bopping host is in this clip, or what year it was made, do tell:

Then we have St. Louis’s own Chuck Berry doing his first hit “Maybellene,” on what seems to be some kind of British (or German?) TV show that involves a manically cheerful audience sitting on the stage in tuxes and evening gowns. This is the kind of thing the Internet is really good for:

As I may have mentioned before, I am teaching our History of Missouri course for the first time this semester, not a thrill for most I suppose but something I wanted to do because this region’s weird past was probably what first got me seriously interested in American history as a kid. Putting together my lectures I have been re-informing myself on many favorite topics and discovering some interesting items to share with the class.

For instance, I have been reminded that steamboats were possibly the most dangerous form of powered travel ever invented. Floating palaces of occasional scalding death, those things were, when they didn’t sink, run aground, or out of fuel. At any rate, I thought this page from University of Northern Iowa, “Helpful Hints For Steamboat Passengers” was fairly informative and clever. It admits to being made-up in the first few sentences but when I first found the page I missed that and thought for a while that someone had posted an unusually honest piece of 19th-century travel advice literature.

I also had to remind myself about earthquakes. I was looking up the New Madrid Earthquake 1811-1812 specifically, when “the Mississippi River ran backward.” More generally I re-ingested the fact we here in the Nation’s Doughy Midsection live in a California-esque environment, seismically speaking, only without the beaches, the Hollywood glitz, or buildings designed to withstand earthquakes. Here is a somewhat dated but informative video I found (possibly from the U.S. Geological Survey) that lays out the information without the History Channel hype. Check out the discussion of “liquefaction.” A good time will be had by all: Missouri highways already drive like they are paved over liquid.

If that is not worrisome enough, I also found a far too informative site includes a feature where you can see all the Central U.S. earthquakes detected in the last six months, week, or two hours.

Be insulted, my fellow Missourians and swing-state voters, be very insulted.

From CNN.com:

Gov. Sarah Palin will now spend two and a half days near Sedona, Arizona, to prepare for Thursday’s debate, instead of prepping in St Louis, as originally planned.

Sarah Palin will be at John McCain’s rustic creek side home outside Sedona [a.k.a. his 5-building "Sedona compound"] for what a top aide calls “debate camp.”

Gee, I went to debate camp in Emporia, Kansas and I survived. That’s where I learned that you could eat anything an institutional kitchen produced if you just added enough steak sauce. Call me a liberal elitist, but that’s how I saw it.

Actually, I suspect this has more to do with keeping Sarah away from reporters and voters, and near at hand for Daddy Mac, where she won’t be able to say anything he has to retract.