(Once again, it’s time to revisit the Dale Peck “Mary Pete” essay from July 2019, which The New Republic ran under the title, “My Mayor Pete Problem,” then almost immediately pulled. That in itself is amusing, but what’s even funnier is that other publications commenting on the TNR’s action subsequently pulled their own commentary! Fortunately we still have The Business Insider—see end—and Podsnap’s Own.)

One of the worst things I ever did happened in 1992. I was leaving the bar called The Bar (RIP) on Second Avenue and 4th Street to go to a party called Tattooed Love Child at another bar, Fez, located in the basement of Time Cafe (RIP x 2). TLC was held on Wednesdays (Thursdays?), and I often went to The Bar after work for a few hours so I wouldn’t have to go all the way home first. So it was probably 10-ish, and I know it was late winter/early spring because I was carrying a copy of the completed manuscript of my first novel Martin and John, which I’d just turned in to my publisher that very day. Which makes me 24 and old enough to know better. Or who knows, maybe this was exactly the age to learn this kind of lesson.

What happened was: I was halfway down 4th Street when I heard someone yelling. I turned to see a large fellow running after me. At first I wondered if I was getting gay-bashed. But even though this guy didn’t set off my gaydar he still didn’t seem particularly menacing. When he got closer I clocked the pleated khakis (this was the era of the ACT UP clone—Doc Martens, Levi’s tight or baggy, and activist T-shirts—which look I had embraced fully) and rust-colored Brillo hair. I love me a good ginger, but you gotta know how to style it, especially if it runs frizzy. And so anyway, this guy, whose name was Garfield but said I could call him Gar, told me he’d been in The Bar but had been too shy to talk to me and decided to try his luck on the street. As politely as I could, I told him I wasn’t interested. He asked me how I could know I wasn’t interested when I didn’t know him, which was an invitation for me to tell him that not only did he look like a potato, he dressed, talked, and ran like a potato. Alas, I chose not to indulge his masochistic invitation.

He asked where I was going and I told him. He asked if he could go with me and I told him he could go to Fez if he wanted but he shouldn’t think he was going with me. He came. I quickly learned that he’d mastered the art of speaking in questions, which put me in the awkward position of answering him or ignoring him, which made me feel rude even though I’d told him I wasn’t interested. When he found out I was a writer he got excited and said I must love the New Yorker! I told him I hated the New Yorker. He asked how I could hate the New Yorker and I told him that besides the fact that the New Yorker published shitty fiction (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), and the only gay fiction it published was assimilationist and boring, there was also the fact that an editor there (Dan Menaker, if we’re naming names) had rejected a story of mine by suggesting in his correspondence with my agent (by which I mean that he wasn’t embarrassed to write this down, let alone worried about repercussions) that psychological problems were preventing me from creating effective fiction. (By the way, fuck you, Dan.) None of which made any sense to Gar. The New Yorker was important so I must love it. I just didn’t know I loved it yet. Or something like that. At some point in this exchange I remember saying something along the lines of Look, I’m just going to apologize now, because it’s pretty clear that sooner or later I’m going to say something really offensive to you and your feelings are going to be hurt. I don’t want to do that, but you’re clearly not getting the fact that you and I don’t look at the world the same way, and you keep thinking that if you hang around long enough we’re going to find common ground, when all you’re really doing is making our differences that much clearer. He laughed at this, one of those confused/nervous/defensive laughs, and if I’d been more mature I would have been more blunt and told him to get lost. But I too was a little deluded. I thought he had to get the hint eventually. But although I understood pretty much everything else about him, I failed to reckon fully with his lack of self-respect.

I told him I hated the New Yorker.

So: we got to Fez, where I ran into my friend Patrick (Cox, I think, but it’s been a minute), who looked at me like, What are you doing with this weirdo? I wouldn’t let Gar buy me a drink and I did my best to exclude him from my conversation with Patrick but he still wouldn’t take a hint. He must have hung around for a good hour. My answers to his questions grew more and more peremptory. Bear in mind I wasn’t disagreeing with him or dismissing his opinions just to get rid of him: we really had absolutely nothing in common. But we both read the New Yorker and we were both gay and we both wore clothes to cover our nakedness so clearly we were birds of a feather. Finally he said he had to leave. He asked for my number. I remember Patrick laughing in his face, but maybe that’s just because I wanted to laugh in his face. I was like, Are you serious? And he was like, We have so much in common, we should get to know each other better! When I was fifteen years old a pedophile used that line on me in the Chicago bus station, and if I’m being honest I had more in common with the pedo, who was about 50, black, and urban, while I was a white teenager from rural Kansas, than I did with dear old Gar. I told him I wasn’t going to give him my phone number or accept his. He seemed genuinely shocked and hurt, which of course made me feel like shit, which of course made me mad, because why should I feel like shit when I’d spent all night trying to rebuff him? He asked what he would have to do to get me to go out with him. Without thinking, I said, Take a good look at yourself and your world, reject everything in it, and then get back to me. It was the kind of soul-killing line people are always delivering in movies but never comes off in real life, mostly because even the most oblivious, self-hating person usually has enough wherewithal to cut someone off before they’re fully read for filth. I believe I have indicated that Gar did not possess this level of self-awareness. His face went shapeless and blank as though the bones of his skull had melted. For one second I thought I saw a hint of anger, which might’ve been the first thing he’d done all night that I could identify with. Then he scurried away.

Now, I’ve said shitty things to people before and since, but this one’s always stuck with me, partly because, though I’m a peevish fellow, it’s rare that I speak with genuine cruelty, and when I do it’s because I’ve chosen to. This just came out of me. But mostly I remember it because I knew I’d seriously wounded this guy, which, however annoying and clueless he was, was never my intention. I was and still am a very ’90s kind of gay, which is to say that I believe in the brotherhood of homos and the strength of our community, that however different we are we’re all bound together by the nature of our desire and the experience of living in a homophobic world. When one of your brothers fucks up, you school him. Sure, you might get a little Larry Kramer about it, but you don’t go all Arya-and-the-Night-King on his ass.

I’m telling you this because it’s what popped into my head when I tried to pin down my distaste for Pete Buttigieg. Mary Pete and I are just not the same kind of gay. (For those of you wondering about “Mary Pete”: a couple of months ago I asked Facebook what the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom was, and this was the answer at which we collectively arrived.) But Mary Pete and I aren’t different in the same way that Gar and I were different. Gar and I had nothing in common. Mary Pete and I have a lot in common, but at a certain point we came to a fork in the road and I took the one less traveled and he took the one that was freshly paved and bordered by flowers and white picket fences and every house had a hybrid in the driveway and some solar panels on the ceiling, but discrete ones, nothing garish, nothing that would interfere with the traditional look of the neighborhood or the resale value of your home.

By which I mean: Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he’s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege who believes (just as Jay Inslee believes he’s done more for women’s reproductive rights than Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar) that he can make life better for all those people who are not like him, not because he knows anything about their lives but because he’s smart and nice and well-meaning, and when smart nice well-meaning people run things everything works out for the best. That’s just, you know, logical. It’s like, science. Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in “healthy capitalism,” which is a bit like saying you believe in “healthy cancer”: Yeah, you can (usually) treat it, but wouldn’t you rather be cured?

Pete and I are just not the same kind of gay.

Most of what I dislike about Mary Pete was expressed in this Current Affairsarticle, which does a good job of using his own words (mostly from, ugh, Shortest Way Home, his memoir pretending to manifesto) to damn him. Shortest Way Home conjures a young Harvard student who thinks the word “edgy” is sufficient to describe both proto-Dumpster fascist Lyndon LaRouche and Noam Chomsky. His description of Harvard Square takes in those actors who belong to the school; the homeless people who live there are invisible to him, or, even worse, not worth mentioning. He seems perfectly content to dismiss left-wing student activists as “social justice warriors” despite the fact that this phrase is paradigmatic in right-wing discourse. He speaks fondly of his time at McKinsey, a company regularly described as one of the most evil corporations in the world. He joined the military long after 9/11 could sort-of-but-not-really be invoked to justify the U.S. propensity to go to other countries and kill lots of people. By 2007 it was no longer possible to pretend that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were anything other than failed, murderous exercises in empire-building and/or revenge, but despite the fact that these were the only places he was likely to serve he signed up anyway. And though he loves to talk about the notes he left his family in case he didn’t come back, by all accounts his chances of seeing combat were as low as they could be—but boy, he sure got a lot of cute pictures in uniform out of it!

Every move is simultaneously cynical and morally oblivious. They’re the steps one takes not to learn about the world but to become a marketable political candidate (hmmm, what’s a good counter to the whole sleeps-with-men thing? I know: military service!) (side benefit: you’re surrounded by hot guys!) and if as a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar you decide not to be a captain of industry, then clearly the White House is where you belong. I mean, sure, he wants to make the world a better place. But the operative word in that sentence, just as it was with Bill Clinton, is “he,” not “world,” and “better,” for Mary Pete, is just the neoliberal variation of “make America great again,” which is to say that in Buttigieg’s version of American history the progressive ideals in the First, Thirteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, in the Civil Rights Act and Roe v. Wade and marriage equality, are the only authentically American ideas, whereas slavery and Jim Crow and border security and defense of marriage campaigns and heartbeat laws are nothing but aberrations, glitches in the code rather than yin to liberalism’s yang, warp to its weft, a set of ivory chess pieces lined up across from a set of ebony chess pieces and equally powerful.

Like Obama, Buttigieg seems always to be saying that the United States is the only place where someone like him could’ve succeeded, and that he wants everyone to enjoy the same peculiarly American successes that he’s had. But unlike Obama (whose naïveté was at least partly a pose), Buttigieg’s biography belies the idea that his success was either hard won or particularly unlikely. He’s lived the life of a comfortably middle-class white male, but he acts as if it’s his natural gifts (by which he means his intelligence and his ability to speak seven languages and play the piano, although they’re actually his whiteness and maleness and financial security) that have raised him above from the rabble. It’s right there in his “Medicare for all . . . who want it” song and dance. To Mary Pete this is simple egalitarianism and freedom of choice. If you want Medicare, you should be able to have it. And if you want private insurance you should be able to have that. It seems never to occur to him to ask why one would want to pay three or four or ten times more for health care than you have to. Could it possibly be because private insurance will get you better results than Medicare? And could private health care possibly provide better service than Medicare not because of marketplace competition but because as long as there’s a profit motive in health care medical corporations will always seek to maximize profits, and thus favor those “customers” who can pay the most? Embedded in this oblivion are both the liberal delusion that people are naturally good and the neoliberal sophistry that the market, like the tide, will raise everyone up with it.

Pete is just the neoliberal variation of “make America great again.”

Or take his response at the Democratic debate to the murder of Eric Logan by the South Bend police: “I’m not allowed to take sides until the investigation comes back.” Here is a mayor—a man—whose first allegiance isn’t to the victim or the victim’s family or the other people at risk because of a racist police force, but, at the very best, to the system, and maybe to nothing more than his own political future as a centrist Democrat. “I accept responsibility,” he told us, in the same way that the white teenaged boy who gets caught stealing a car or drunk-raping a girl says “I accept responsibility” and fully expects to let off without punishment, because boys will be boys, after all, and isn’t feeling bad punishment enough? Free education? Why, that’s unfair to the working class! They’ll end up paying for the education of all those millions and millions of billionaires’ children! What are we, czarist Russia?

You keep looking for a politics rooted in justice or history or, at the very least, empathy, but everywhere you find nothing besides a kind of idealistic pragmatism, if that’s a thing: a belief that if we only talk about nice things, only nice things will happen. If we only acknowledge our strengths, our faults will fade away. If we trust smart people to do smart things, nothing dumb will happen. Hey, José loved it when Pete answered him in Spanish, right? Education has brought us closer together!

All this makes Mary Pete different from every other left-leaning neoliberal in exactly zero ways. Because let’s face it. The only thing that distinguishes the mayor of South Bend from all those other well-educated reasonably intelligent white dudes who wanna be president is what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass, although I get a definite top-by-default vibe from him, which is to say that I bet he thinks about getting fucked but he’s too uptight to do it). So let’s dish the dish, homos. You know and I know that Mary Pete is a gay teenager. He’s a fifteen-year-old boy in a Chicago bus station wondering if it’s a good idea to go home with a fifty-year-old man so that he’ll finally understand what he is. He’s been out for, what, all of four years, and if I understand the narrative, he married the first guy he dated. And we all know what happens when gay people don’t get a real adolescence because they spent theirs in the closet: they go through it after they come out. And because they’re adults with their own incomes and no parents to rein them in they do it on steroids (often literally). If Shortest Way Home (I mean really, can you think of a more treacly title?) makes one thing clear, Mary Pete was never a teenager. But you can’t run away from that forever. Either it comes out or it eats you up inside. It can be fun, it can be messy, it can be tragic, it can be progenitive, transformative, ecstatic, or banal, but the last thing I want in the White House is a gay man staring down 40 who suddenly realizes he didn’t get to have all the fun his straight peers did when they were teenagers. I’m not saying I don’t want him to shave his chest or do Molly or try being the lucky Pierre (the timing’s trickier than it looks, but it can be fun when you work it out). These are rites of passage for a lot of gay men, and it fuels many aspects of gay culture. But like I said, I don’t want it in the White House. I want a man whose mind is on his job, not what could have been—or what he thinks he can still get away with.

So yeah. Unlike my experience with Gar, I actually want to tell Mary Pete to take a good hard look at his world, at his experiences and his view of the public good as somehow synonymous with his own success, and I want him to reject it. I want to do this not because I have any particular desire to hurt his feelings, but because I made a similar journey, or at least started out from a similar place, and I was lucky enough to realize (thank you, feminism; thank you, ACT UP) that the only place that path leads is a gay parody of heteronormative bourgeois domesticity: the “historic” home, the “tasteful” decor (no more than one nude photograph of a muscular torso per room; statuary only if they’re fair copies of Greek or Roman originals), the two- or four- or six-pack depending on how often you can get to the gym and how much you hate yourself, the theatre (always spelled with an -re) subscription, the opera subscription, the ballet subscription, the book club, the AKC-certified toy dog with at least one charming neurosis and/or dietary tic, the winter vacation to someplace “tropical,” the summer vacation to someplace “cultural,” the specialty kitchen appliances—you just have to get a sous vide machine, it changed our life! Sorry, boys, that’s not a life, it’s something you buy from a catalog. It’s a stage set you build so you can convince everyone else (or maybe just yourself) that you’re as normal as they are. Call me a hick from the sticks, but I don’t want someone who fills out his life like he fills out an AP exam serving as the country’s moral compass. And no, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.

And now here’s an immediate take from a nonexistent webpage from a now-defunct website. In case you’d like to check out the dead site at the Wayback Machine, the full URL is here: https://uspolitics.10ztalk.com/2019/07/12/dale-peck-is-the-worst-critic-of-his-generation/

CORRECTION: Actually THAT column has been deep-sixed at Wayback Machine as well, although you can still find other entries there from this defunct site: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://uspolitics.10ztalk.com*

It ran with the title, “Dale Peck Is the Worst Critic of His Generation.”

The New Republic has reached DEEP into its nostalgia file and brought us the astonishing return of Dale Peck. Before we get to the insane stuff, let’s have some fun with the opening sentences:

ONE OF THE WORST THINGS I EVER DID HAPPENED IN 1992. I WAS LEAVING THE BAR CALLED THE BAR (RIP) ON SECOND AVENUE AND 4TH STREET TO GO TO A PARTY CALLED TATTOOED LOVE CHILD AT ANOTHER BAR, FEZ, LOCATED IN THE BASEMENT OF TIME CAFE (RIP X 2). TLC WAS HELD ON WEDNESDAYS (THURSDAYS?), AND I OFTEN WENT TO THE BAR AFTER WORK FOR A FEW HOURS SO I WOULDN’T HAVE TO GO ALL THE WAY HOME FIRST. 

NYC provincialism doesn’t get much more provincial than “surely nothing could be more fascinating than the detailed itinerary of my drinking schedule on a Wednesday night thirty years ago.” Did you know that in [years in which I was in my mid-to-late-20s] New York City was alone among the world’s major urban centers in having establishments with unreliably cleaned restrooms in which one could exchange money for alcoholic beverages? Perhaps someone could finally write a novel or memoir telling this story to the broader public.

The third graf about what is nominally an article about Pete Buttigieg continues to wank on in this vein — The New Yorker sucked because it didn’t publish the right kind of fiction, i.e. fiction written by Dale Peck, and anyone who thinks otherwise is plainly an unfuckable neoliberal:

HE ASKED WHERE I WAS GOING AND I TOLD HIM. HE ASKED IF HE COULD GO WITH ME AND I TOLD HIM HE COULD GO TO FEZ IF HE WANTED BUT HE SHOULDN’T THINK HE WAS GOING WITH ME. HE CAME. I QUICKLY LEARNED THAT HE’D MASTERED THE ART OF SPEAKING IN QUESTIONS, WHICH PUT ME IN THE AWKWARD POSITION OF ANSWERING HIM OR IGNORING HIM, WHICH MADE ME FEEL RUDE EVEN THOUGH I’D TOLD HIM I WASN’T INTERESTED. WHEN HE FOUND OUT I WAS A WRITER HE GOT EXCITED AND SAID I MUST LOVE THE NEW YORKER! I TOLD HIM I HATED THE NEW YORKER. HE ASKED HOW I COULD HATE THE NEW YORKER AND I TOLD HIM THAT BESIDES THE FACT THAT THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHED SHITTY FICTION (PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE), AND THE ONLY GAY FICTION IT PUBLISHED WAS ASSIMILATIONIST AND BORING, THERE WAS ALSO THE FACT THAT AN EDITOR THERE (DAN MENAKER, IF WE’RE NAMING NAMES) HAD REJECTED A STORY OF MINE BY SUGGESTING IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH MY AGENT (BY WHICH I MEAN THAT HE WASN’T EMBARRASSED TO WRITE THIS DOWN, LET ALONE WORRIED ABOUT REPERCUSSIONS) THAT PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS WERE PREVENTING ME FROM CREATING EFFECTIVE FICTION. (BY THE WAY, FUCK YOU, DAN.) NONE OF WHICH MADE ANY SENSE TO GAR. 

I don’t think this interminable anecdote is portraying poor Gar in the light Peck thinks it is.

Anyway, these highly uninteresting tales of Dale Peck’s Manhattan youth are a prelude to an argument that Mayor Pete shouldn’t be the Dem nominee because he’s not the right kind of gay:

ALL THIS MAKES MARY PETE DIFFERENT FROM EVERY OTHER LEFT-LEANING NEOLIBERAL IN EXACTLY ZERO WAYS. BECAUSE LET’S FACE IT. THE ONLY THING THAT DISTINGUISHES THE MAYOR OF SOUTH BEND FROM ALL THOSE OTHER WELL-EDUCATED REASONABLY INTELLIGENT WHITE DUDES WHO WANNA BE PRESIDENT IS WHAT HE DOES WITH HIS DICK (AND POSSIBLY HIS ASS, ALTHOUGH I GET A DEFINITE TOP-BY-DEFAULT VIBE FROM HIM, WHICH IS TO SAY THAT I BET HE THINKS ABOUT GETTING FUCKED BUT HE’S TOO UPTIGHT TO DO IT). SO LET’S DISH THE DISH, HOMOS. YOU KNOW AND I KNOW THAT MARY PETE IS A GAY TEENAGER. HE’S A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY IN A CHICAGO BUS STATION WONDERING IF IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO GO HOME WITH A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD MAN SO THAT HE’LL FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS. HE’S BEEN OUT FOR, WHAT, ALL OF FOUR YEARS, AND IF I UNDERSTAND THE NARRATIVE, HE MARRIED THE FIRST GUY HE DATED. AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GAY PEOPLE DON’T GET A REAL ADOLESCENCE BECAUSE THEY SPENT THEIRS IN THE CLOSET: THEY GO THROUGH IT AFTER THEY COME OUT. AND BECAUSE THEY’RE ADULTS WITH THEIR OWN INCOMES AND NO PARENTS TO REIN THEM IN THEY DO IT ON STEROIDS (OFTEN LITERALLY). IF SHORTEST WAY HOME (I MEAN REALLY, CAN YOU THINK OF A MORE TREACLY TITLE?) MAKES ONE THING CLEAR, MARY PETE WAS NEVER A TEENAGER. BUT YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY FROM THAT FOREVER. EITHER IT COMES OUT OR IT EATS YOU UP INSIDE. IT CAN BE FUN, IT CAN BE MESSY, IT CAN BE TRAGIC, IT CAN BE PROGENITIVE, TRANSFORMATIVE, ECSTATIC, OR BANAL, BUT THE LAST THING I WANT IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS A GAY MAN STARING DOWN 40 WHO SUDDENLY REALIZES HE DIDN’T GET TO HAVE ALL THE FUN HIS STRAIGHT PEERS DID WHEN THEY WERE TEENAGERS. I’M NOT SAYING I DON’T WANT HIM TO SHAVE HIS CHEST OR DO MOLLY OR TRY BEING THE LUCKY PIERRE (THE TIMING’S TRICKIER THAN IT LOOKS, BUT IT CAN BE FUN WHEN YOU WORK IT OUT). THESE ARE RITES OF PASSAGE FOR A LOT OF GAY MEN, AND IT FUELS MANY ASPECTS OF GAY CULTURE. BUT LIKE I SAID, I DON’T WANT IT IN THE WHITE HOUSE. I WANT A MAN WHOSE MIND IS ON HIS JOB, NOT WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN—OR WHAT HE THINKS HE CAN STILL GET AWAY WITH.

Oh.

Anyway, excited for TNR to hire two Brooklyn “only Bernie can make anorexia great again” podcasters to launch a semi-ironic reboot of THE SPINE.

And finally, coverage from The Business Insider, miraculously still online:

The New Republic, a magazine known for its commentary on politics and the arts, published and retracted a controversial opinion essay about 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg titled “My Mayor Pete Problem” after it spawned online backlash.

While the page on The New Republic’s website has been replaced by an Editor’s Note that says it was removed “in response to criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content” and that the magazine “regret[s] its publication,” the essay can be viewed as an archive.

The piece, authored by gay novelist Dale Peck, criticized Buttigieg for what Peck perceives as his “neoliberal” politics and “idealistic pragmatism.” In what some commentators called homophobic, Peck referred to Buttigieg as “Mary Pete” throughout the article, a play on the candidate’s moniker “Mayor Pete,” to emphasize that he thinks Buttigieg is the “gay equivalent of Uncle Tom.”

In addition to Peck’s stance that Buttigieg is “just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege,” the essay also contained a passage that received the most criticism online for its graphic sexual descriptions and assertion that Buttigieg is stuck in the mindset of a “gay teenager.”

The New Republic told CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter that “The New Republic recognizes that this post crossed a line, and while it was largely intended as satire, it was inappropriate and invasive.”

While The New Republic may have intended for the piece to be satirical, Peck’s own social media posts indicate that it was not.

Read more: Pete Buttigieg has been the breakout 2020 Democratic candidate. Here’s his stunning rise in 1 chart

He shared his essay on Facebook with the caption: “So I took your all’s advice and made my view on Mary Pete public. I guess I’m not going to get a cabinet position now. Or an NEA grant. Or be honored at the Carnegie Center and get to have my Aretha moment where I drop my mink on the stage. But maybe if I’m lucky I’ll still get to make a president cry. (Entre nous: The New Republic went with the nice title. My suggestion was ‘Basic Bitch.’)”

After the post’s removal, less than 24 hours after its publication, Peck also posted “That was the shortest roller coaster ride ever!” on Facebook.

In addition to online backlash to the piece, the League of Conservation Voters, a national organization that “works to turn environmental values into national, state and local priorities,” announced it was withdrawing from a partnership with The New Republic to host a climate summit for the Democratic presidential candidates on September 23.

League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski issued a statement that “The offensive piece by this author, and the choice to run it, are inconsistent with our values and LCV is withdrawing our participation in the presidential primary candidate climate forum.”

Dale Peck did not immediately respond to INSIDER’s request for comment.

A representative for The New Republic sent INSIDER a statement from the magazine’s owner and editor-in-chief, Win McCormack, that says: “Yesterday The New Republic’s website published an opinion piece about Mayor Pete Buttigieg that should not have appeared there. As The New Republic’s owner, I want to extend our sincerest apologies to Mayor Buttigieg, as well as to our readers, for an article that was both inappropriate and offensive. It has been removed from our site.

“We have high standards at The New Republic, but sometimes we fall short. Yesterday we made a mistake, but we remain committed to honoring the tradition of high standards and journalistic integrity that have been the hallmark of The New Republic for more than 100 years. Please know that moving forward, we will do everything we can to prove that commitment to our readers and to the public. Again, my sincerest apologies, Win McCormack.”

adam parfrey facebook messages 2017-2018

Farewell then, Adam Parfrey. The details of your death are still being worked out. One hears variously that you died of a stroke or that you died of complications of a stroke.

Photo: Caffé Gelato Vero, San Diego, September 1991

I heard you had a stroke just before you were to come to the Françoise Hardy book launch in Manhattan on May 3, then I heard you had a stroke just before you died on the 10th, and elsewhere I’ve read you had a stroke on April 20. I first heard/reported that you’d died in Port Townsend, but lately the story is that you died in Seattle. Someone suggested that you died of sadness after your dog, Loki, died, but I find this a stretch since you seemed in good shape when I spoke to you a month ago.

You will be happy to know that your death occasioned an opportunity for some friends of yours to meet for the first time. (One at the NYT contacted me out of the blue.) You and I seldom spoke between 2009 and 2017. At one point I think you blocked me on Facebook. But we were still connected on another FB account. Last year, out of the blue, you messaged me, “How many Facebook aliases do you have?” You weaseled out an excuse that you were topped-up in FB friends and followers and had a backlog of 5,000 friend requests, but I felt that you were hoping to deep-six all your connections to me at once. Anyway, I checked the original account we were connected on, and you were nowhere to be seen. Apparently you’d blocked me years before. I wonder why.

When we last spoke, on phone and in Facebook messaging, you were trying to gather up steamy information on mutual acquaintances (and even on me!) for a proposed memoir.

You’re friends on Facebook

Works at Process Media and Feral House

Studied at UCSC

09/28/2017 12:09PM

You are now connected on Messenger.

[September 2017]

XXX, how many pseudonyms do you have on FB? And what are they?

09/28/2017 3:00PM

I really wouldn’t know, have forgotten most over the years.

I am alerted by FB that I can no longer have friends, that I have too many of them. It would be helpful if you could get me the names or your aliases.

Wow, 5000 friends? I’ll see if I can find some dormant accounts to free up.

and a thousand further friend requests, too

Uh huh. I shall look into this. I recall being connected with you only on this and maybe one other old acct going back to 2008 or so, however.

My error. Friends with you on this, but not on the older account.

I’m friends with you on another account

Then you’re not appearing for some reason.

What I do when pressing up against some social-media limit is, go through the Friends list and delete anyone i don’t recognize and who hasn’t posted lately. I have people in Friends who have actually been DEAD for 5 years.

10/01/2017 9:01AM

This could be right up your street. Tried to send it to you on my other account, but that of course was the one where you had BLOCKED ME. http://www.gallerynews.com/current/hugh-hefner-world-art/

Hugh Hefner and the World of Art – gallerynews.com

The death of Hugh Hefner at age 91 hurled us headlong back into recollections of the 1960s and what Playboy was supposed to be about. If you weren’t a Playboy reader in those days—and few of us alive today were, let’s face it, since that implies you were then a male between 25 and 50 years …

gallerynews.com

APR 1ST [2018], 5:02PM

Greetings, XXXX. Contacting you at this time because I’m working on a memoir now that I have reached the advance age of 60. I was thinking of Keith Stimely today. Was he the reason you and I became friends? I’ll be writing about Keith in the book, so wanted to get things right about him. Did he appear in that California Reich movie, as he claimed? How did he get connected to IHR and become an editor with the journal there? How close was he to getting a book deal for his Yockey research. I know of that other book that ransacked his material. Do you recall what Keith had to say about me? Near the end of his life he made the claim that he was working for me, though he never did except for flyers he circulated without my permission. Didn’t he pass of AIDS? He denied having it when I asked him about it. In advance, thanks much for any help you can provide… My memory is failing me, but what’s the full name of that woman we were both seeing in San Diego? Laura something?

APR 1ST, 6:44PM

Yes, we can discuss this. Thumbnail summary: You and I nearly crossed paths in Manhattan and Hoboken. When I was going with Keith in ’88, you’d been in Portland but recently moved to Baja Melrose. The Blue Boys hoax and your piece in Hustler appeared about this time. Yes, he died of AIDS, had just been diagnosed in mid-1988. We used protection of course. After me he moved onto this older woman with the Sylvia Beach guest house on the coast in Oregon. Gudrun. When I was moving to SD he put me in touch with you. I visited you, completed the move, dropped out of law school, you hooked me up with the Reader. I was going through my lesbian period, had affair with Mary Lang (still in SD area, I see), then Laura Shepherd on the rebound. I don’t know about Keith appearing in that doco, but it sounds familiar. I know nothing about him circulating flyers or saying he worked for you. I should have been closer to him then, but I had my own crises. A little later you put me in touch with Kevin Coogan for his Yockey book. For better or worse I was not cited in the book’s acknowledgements. Keith had a high regard for you, and never said anything unfavorable. Somewhere in those last years, Keith met up with Greg Johnson at Powell’s in Portland. They were browsing the same section and struck up a conversation. This was probably about 1991.

My mobile is 929-2X8-40X4 if you want to talk. I’ve got a Skype somewhere too.

Thanks much… Mary Lang! There’s another Mary Lang I know who’s married to Poison Idea vocalist Jerry Lang.

Seems like Coogan wanted to avoid being tied in too closely to Keith

I had a couple stints in Portland

APR 1ST, 9:02PM

Mary Lang is now Mary Boles Allen, and sister Laura is now Laura Neal. I see Cynthia Heimel died. Bad years toward the end. She was a Facebook friend but I can’t say I knew her.

I recall that Opincar was big on Heimel.

Didn’t Mary marry some architect?

what does Laura Neal do?

Abe and Cynthia married in 1996, but it didn’t last long. Cynthia’s first marriage was also short-lived. I suppose Cynthia and I crossed paths at SoHo Weekly News but I became aware of her via Mary Peacock’s section at the Village Voice.

what a marriage that must have been

Mary’s previous marriage, I suppose, was to a Boles, and that must have been the architect. Last I heard she was working as a secretary at Point Loma Nazarene College and engaging in amateur opera. I don’t know what Laura’s been doing but she had an Industry job when she was married to Matz and I would guess she still does.

all these married names confuse me… I remember Mary begging me to be her boyfriend… didn’t sound good to me

My own ex, Laura, is now living in Vancouver, Washington. She has visited east a couple of times, and I saw her a couple times in Seattle and Portland. I get out that way every year or so, for xc meets or conferences.

I’m now trying to find a dead squirrel that the new kitty dragged into the house

Very slowly the SD Reader is putting its archives on readable format. I came across a fantasy that you headlined ‘Pulp Novel’ in 1992. A friend has encouraged me to write the rest of it.

Isn’t Vancouver the speed dealing capitol of the country?

I wish you would improve my Reader pieces

I can well believe, though Laura would not be engaged in drugs. Your HelLA was always just the right length.

Don’t know what became of Opincar.

Opincar is a heroin addict in Tijuana

No seriously.

After Judith Moore and Heimel passed, he has no reason to live

He was straight poison, but even an ill wind sometimes blows some good.

you and me ought to find him and convince to survive

I noticed the Reader moved offices from India St to Golden Hill.

what? they’re out of that building now?

did the boss get his way banning abortion?

Wonder if Holman is still at the helm. I guess development pushed the Reader out of Little Italy. That was an area long awaiting urban renewal. Though I did love the Prince of Wales pub.

I awaited a plane crashing into the Reader building

Holman now runs Comicon

Remember having tea with Tom Metzger across the street? About May 1993, just before I got the heave-ho.

what heave-ho?

I really liked Tom Metzger, TV repairman

I got exited in 1993. This was Moore’s doing, because my presence made Opincar and Lang uncomfortable. They continued to play dirty tricks afterwards. Came across my Reader business card recently. Cultural attachée. I’ve used that title since.

business card and all!

The sole surviving bc. In a stack of cards of me as Divisional Manager for a telecoms concern in London.

part of the UK, I hear

The uck. Can’t stand that. ‘Oh you’re from the UK? Where? Londonderry? Aberdeen?’

in respect to the Reader, I’m glad I quit the job when I did… I was very tired of it

Aberdeen is in Washington state… Kurt Cobain homeland

Some real weirdoes at Reader. Colin Flaherty was wise not to hang his hat there. He’s had an interesting afterlife.

was he a columnist?

my memory eludes me

when did Moore die? In the 90s?

Wrote feature and news stories. Mainly a PR star married to, then divorced from, Congressman Lionel van Deerlin’s daughter. After the reader he ran clients out of his home office then landed a rich developer who gave him a house in Orange County. The client went belly-up, and Colin went back home to Wilmington DE to pitch in on his brother’s radio show and write books about black violence.

I did a lot of freelance work for Colin back in the day.

knew nothing of him

White Girl Bleed a Lot

Judith Moore died in 2005 or 6. Colon cancer, I think.

I found it funny when one of the Penn brothers started to date some right-wing congressman’s daughter

didn’t know

Did the Reader go dark for a year?

Don’t know…didn’t hear. What did you hear? When?

out of touch with those guys… not enough interest to spur association once again

I found it curious to be associated in some ways with Holman…. strange

Colin always called Judith Moore the Sausage Lady because of a nauseating story she wrote about visiting a sausage factory.

I don’t know that story

I guess she couldn’t arrange a Man Bites Dog story.

but she could write a Nazi bites Jew saga

If so, I missed that one. She was a small-time writer from an East Bay weekly whom Abe brought aboard because of their shared interest in the outré. Holman bought a condo in Coronado for her to live in during her extended stints as Reader managing editor. She didn’t drive, never had a license. Not that that is unusual.

that is unusual for a writer in CA

what sort of outre? bad bakeries?

Rad Bradbury didn’t drive and was strident on the issue. Bizarre. Half the weirdoes that Moore & co. brought in didn’t drive. Remember the shopping-cart man who did a two-part cover feature on living among the homeless? Opincar and Moore liked twisted people with depressing tales. Your cripple-sex piece about the people in Lemon Grove was right on target.

Ray*

It was supposed to be a cover story, but Holman almost refused to run it at all

I’m sure Moore liked it.

Now as to Lawrence Osborne…he skedaddled quickly. Think he bunks mainly in Brooklyn now.

I don’t recall which stories, but Moore told me she disliked the last few I wrote

Osborne was a Mary Lang fuck, was he not?

Osborne was definitely one of Mary’s quarries, but I don’t know the details. He came over to visit one night when I was at her place.

he writes travel books these days… a lot about Thailand

When/how did you exit the Reader?

I have Osborne’s latest. I was at Penguin Random House for a little while, took freebie copies of things.

I was still in Portland and found it increasingly difficult to do HelL.A.s

I stopped writing features, so the money was increasingly minimal… I heard rumors that my writing was increasingly disliked by Moore and Holman… My association with you was not looked on well.

I nearly moved to LA after Seattle in 97-98. Then I got invited to revisit New York, came, and got married, and have seldom left except for trips.

still in NY then? Brooklyn?

Manhattan. Near Trump Tower.

Remember when Lower East Side was trashy?

I lived on Ludlow St a few blocks below Houston

Very chic now, rather beautiful, just the thing for pedestrian culture.

also on 3rd between C & D

Know the area well. I was leading a young friend through there a week ago.

across the street from cooped up women being kept legal and unmolested

They slowly figured out that dressing up the waterfront was the way to go. Hudson River Park is beautiful. They also have a running/biking path down the East River. And ferries to Brooklyn.

I go to publishing distributor meetings down in those parts

I’m flying to NYC May 2 for a few days, including a big party for the Francoise Hardy book I just published, if you want to attend

can you read that?

APR 1ST, 11:35PM

yes

if you’re interested I can get you a pass or two

That would be nice. I have no plans to be away. Thank you.

One or two passes?

If you could get two, I’d bring my husband.

ok

they’ll be under your name

Maiden name? OK.

what name would you like it to be listed under?

Best just to leave it as xxx xxxx. As anonymous as anything.

  APR 7TH, 1:21PM

An unflattering pic of Keith and me in 1985. Though Doug Christie and Trish Katson look okay.

Is Keith on the far left there? Hard to tell. You don’t look bad at all!

That is Keith on the far left and we’re both mugging to the point of unrecognizability. I’ll send some more characteristic ones.

that would be great if you could

A face in the crowd, early Sept 1988, Portland OR.

Haranguing the crowd in Portland, Sept 1988. ‘We need more hats for the poor!’

what are these events?

We went to a Dukakis speech to heckle and spread flyers. Dukakis left and Keith scooted in.

We were a a friend’s place for my birthday in Sisters OR or someplace near there. This is Keith at the farm.

Nov 1988 in Keith’s apartment. I’ve just showered, have wet hair, but it’s around midnight and we’re going out for dinner at Hung Far Low. Check out the Apple equipment and software books. A blast from the past.

food was terrible at Hung Far Low… great pix, thanks

APR 7TH, 3:42PM

Mediocre Cantonese, like the China Dragon on University Ave in Hillcrest in SD (where I sat with Peter Navarro and others in ’92 after Peter won the mayoral nomination…Peter is still working his way to the big time).

Don’t know the guy

Mediocre is right

The Brasserie Montmartre wasn’t doing food after midnight, and Hung Far Low was the only place you could walk to from Keith’s place.

Peter Navarro: not quite famous, but getting there. http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/381803-navarro-tries-to-calm-farmers-fears-in-tariffs

Navarro tries to calm farmers’ fears in tariffs battle

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday tried to quell rising concerns among U.S. farmers by vowing that the Trump administration will protect them from harm in the global tariffs fight.

thehill.com

I liked the Brasserie

Who would ever want the Trump apologist position?

Forget your Trump issues, it’s good to have Navarro in anyone’s administration. He has a good head for tariffs and no one owns him.

No one understands tariffs

Mark Weber liked the Brasserie too, but we never crossed paths there. I think it was the first place K took me in Portland. Otherwise it was Hamburger Mary’s and Hung Far Low. We slept much of the day because he was a manic nightowl, running off to Kinko’s too print up his pasteups.

Kinko’s was still a novelty; I’d been to the original one in Isla Vista years before, then they were suddenly everywhere, the way Starbucks would be a few years later.

I had laid out books on a Mac via impossible software… Keith was impressed

Not Microsoft

Ventura Publisher? That’s what they used at IHR. Aldus Pagemaker was the desktop-publisher entry for early Macs. Then Quark of course. They used that at the SD Reader, when they were in their in-between techno stage where they were composing text and graphics with Quark and Photoshop but then pasting it up on light tables for photo offset.

Not Ventura, as I avoided PC software… I forget its name but it was solely available on MacWorld classifieds

  Sent from Messenger Chat Conversation End

Or just plain old URL: https://counter-currents.com/2024/01/how-to-ruin-a-good-kim-philby-story/

Facebook won’t allow links to American Renaissance. So here goes:

Cultural Amnesia on Sesame Street

(Something we wrote for the San Diego Reader in December 1992.)

Sinor was the last of the shaggy-dog columnists, a throwback to the gentle days of hot lead and warm Pegler, when one opened a newspaper not for titillation or a recitation of disasters but to check in with a familiar personality… Sinor’s appeal, like that of Dagwood Bumstead and Dwight D. Eisenhower, lay in his banality…

— Imaginary eulogy for John Sinor

The Best of Scribes, the Worst of Scribes

Sinor: his specialty was telling you how he’d spent the previous 48 hours.

The London funny mag Private Eye has an occasional feature called “Peter McLie, The World’s Worst Columnist.” Mr. McLie (a takeoff on some English hack) specializes in a fatuous babbling that’s more easily illustrated than described: “Have you seen the latest idea from America in the shops? They are called gloves, and they provide warmth and comfort to your hands during a cold spell. If you see a pair of these so-called gloves, I advise you strongly to snap them up, as they seem to be very thin on the ground just now.”

So much for London. Here in Sandy Eggo, some local journalists and word-watchers long maintained that we had a columnist every bit as bad as Peter McLie. His name was John Sinor, and he was a 30-year veteran of the San Diego Tribune when it folded into the Union last February.

Sinor’s specialty was to spend 500 words, every other day, telling you how he’d spent the previous 48 hours. One column he’d give you a blow-by-blow description of how he got up at two a.m. to raid the icebox; in the next he’d rattle on about how friendly school bus drivers used to be.

Then there was coffee. My collection of Sinor columns is far from complete, but it would appear that he wrote about Nature’s laxative at least once a week. Sometimes it was instant, sometimes it was spilled, sometimes it was keeping him up all night. Last January, in one of his last pieces, Sinor spent an entire column giving a recipe for making a righteous brew out of just four coffee beans.

Sinor was a poet of the commonplace but never seemed to pay much attention to headline news. Try to guess when he pecked out the following paragraph. “Whatever happened to all the gasoline anyway? Last year at this time they had so MUCH gas, stations were begging us to buy. Offering eight times the usual amount of trading stamps if we would fill up.”

That was February 1974. The height of the OPEC oil embargo. This obliviousness was honest and homespun, not an act, and it tickled Sinor’s legions of fans — and he had them, surely, else why would he have survived so long? But of course it irritated some young up-and-coming journalists who believed a hack’s first duty is to produce something called News You Can Use.

These up-and-comers entered journalism in the 1970s and 1980s and represented the first generation of journalists to regard themselves as high-class professionals (newspapermen having traditionally been a colorful but uncouth lot, drawn mostly from the same hairy-armpit castes that provide us with public-school teachers and private investigators). Knowing little about journalism’s gnarly past, these youngsters fancied that most people who wrote for a living were keen-minded, worldly wise folk who swallowed international affairs and public policy issues with their morning java. “Columnist,” to these youngsters, meant Mary McGrory and Anthony Lewis and other professional thumbsuckers who worried long and often about detente, racial inequality, abortion, and the bomb.

But Sinor’s worries seemed to come straight out of The Life of Riley: a flat tire, a son in Marine boot camp, a rec room that needed repair. Good material for a humor columnist. Perhaps if Sinor had packaged himself as a sort of male Erma Bombeck, the up-and-comers wouldn’t have hated him so much. But he wasn’t a joke-smith any more than he was a political commentator or a movie reviewer. He was an old-fashioned as-I-please monologist, in the tradition of Aleck Woollcott, Robert Ruark, the young Westbrook Pegler, and George Orwell before he got TB.

Back when we had about 17,000 dailies in this country, newspapers had more Sinor-type columns than Carter’s had pills. And the people loved ’em. But tastes change. In recent years, whenever two or more young reporters gathered in a San Diego watering hole, was a dead certainty that 20 minutes wouldn’t pass before someone started cussing out old John Sinor.

“We’ll, there’s one good thing about the Tribune folding,” seethed a 30-something reporter at a Tribune “wake” in September 1991. “Finally we’ll get rid of old Sinor and his mindless meanderings.”

There’s no room today in daily newspaper columning for the John Sinor type. His approximate successor at the merged U-T is Peter Rowe, a deadly earnest young man who cannot compose a two-sentence paragraph without reminding us that he knows everything that’s happening in the world and moreover also knows the politically correct stance to take anent each problem. One really feels for poor young Rowe: here he is, writing the “passing scene” column and striving so hard to be whimsical in the manner of the great Sinor — but producing, instead, tortured jokes that have all the gossamer gaiety of the “humor” page in The Masses, ca. 1930. One gathers that Pete is too proud to write the way old John did. People might think he was…stupid.

Sinor and Morgan:The Dueling Columnists

The young turkeys sneered at old Sinor, but the joke was on them. He was the class act of the Tribune, a newspaperman completely lacking in earnestness, intellectual pretension, and public ambition. Best of all, he refused to allow himself to become engaged in ideas. Paul Fussell, in his satirical monograph “Class,” describes this kind of intellectual apathy as an unmistakable badge of the American aristocracy. It’s only the middle classes, with their subscriptions to The New Yorker and the New Republic and National Review and their eagerness to stay up-to-date with political fashions (saying “gay” for homosexual and “African-American” for Negro), and their ludicrous belief in Getting Ahead Through Education, who yearn to be intellectually trendy. Imagining Sinor as a warrior-barbarian whose only present concern is an early-morning raid upon Thanksgiving leftovers in the refrigerator, one immediately thinks of Henry VIII (or at any rate, Charles Laughton). Where’s the other drumstick, m’love?

Morgan (1953). always got the finest pickings from the mailbag, while Sinor had to make do with the crumbs.

“A mind so fine that no idea could penetrate it.” That’s what T.S. Eliot said about the grey matter of Mr. Henry James. And people are still reading stuff that James wrote over 100 years ago. We shouldn’t be surprised if, 100 years hence, folks are still perusing the morocco-bound essays of our own John Sinor.

As luck would have it, lack of ideas was a signal trait of the Tribune’s other veteran columnist, Mr. Cornelius (“Neil”) Morgan. No coincidence there. Like Sinor, Morgan was a self-made aristocrat from humble beginnings (Sinor had been a shoe salesman, Morgan a Navy lieutenant, before each entered the hurly-burly of the fourth estate). They ought to have been friends, and at times they were. But there is something poignant and heart rending about these two solons being stationed at the same journal. It meant that Sinor had to spend most of his working career laboring in the shadow of the other.

As the senior columnist, Morgan always got the finest pickings from the mailbag, while Sinor had to make do with the crumbs. An unfortunately high percentage of these epistolary leavings were semiliterate scrawls, in Crayola and carpenter’s pencil, on the backs of four-color postcards from Quality Court motels in Truckee, California, or Sparks, Nevada.

Thus Morgan’s “Crosstown” would shine with social notes from the local glitterati — Jim Copley’s baptism, Lizabeth Scott’s coming-out party — but Sinor’s columns would go for weeks with no mail. Finally, just when John was beginning to look like the loneliest man in the world, he’d publish some random correspondence under the heading of “Dear John Letters.” Sometimes these notes would give us glimpses of secret glamor in the life of Sinor. From the early 1970s: “Dear John: On a recent visit to relatives in Phoenix, I saw a documentary film on television on the building of the railroads in the east. One of the main characters looked remarkably like you, except he had a beard. Could it be? Do you moonlight as a film star? — Mrs. C.B., La Jolla.”

“Dear Mrs. C.B.: Well, I did make the film some years ago for Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films….”

We can well imagine what sort of gentlemanly rivalry must have existed at the Tribune during those rip-roaring days of the 1960s and 1970s, between Messrs. Morgan and Sinor. Sinor the film star, Morgan the nationally known writer. It was inevitable that sooner or later one would burn with envy for the other’s laurels. Since most of the laurels went to Mr. Morgan, the green mantle usually fell to John Sinor.

If you are of a mature age, you may recall that in those far-off days, Neil Morgan had acquired for himself some repute as a social historian. He wrote many books about California and the modern American West — Westward Ho!, Decline of the West, and California Here I Come! are just a few of them, if memory serves.

Sinor used to smart when one of these new titles appeared, which they did, regular as clockwork, on the average of once every six months. And who can blame him? John Sinor was a true Westerner, raised in the shadow of Sutter’s Fort (pronounced Sooter’s Fo’t). Whereas Neil Morgan was a slicker from the East (Mt. Pilot, NC) who happened into California only because that’s where his Navy boat chanced to dock one day in 1945.

Yet it was Morgan who now was setting himself up as a latter-day H.H. Bancroft, authority on all things Californian. Can you imagine the outrage in Morgan’s little piney-woods piedmont home town if John Sinor had presumed to go to North Carolina and start telling Tarheels about then own history?

Well, sir! It’s a good thing Mr. Sinor was an even-tempered sort. He chose to bide his time and then take his own journey to Northern California and Oregon. When he filed his dispatches it became dear that Sinor was the true son of Californee, and Morgan just a lucky interloper.

Neil Morgan would never have been able to furnish us with the understated, Hemingwayesque detail that John Sinor gave us at the end of 1964:

“Farther to the north and east, in the Tahoe country, the Truckee River is brown and roily and rumbles throng the ponderosas.

“On a summer day, a boy can wade in the Truckee and catch a fine big German brown trout. A few days ago, a boy waded in the river to save his dog and the torrent drowned him.”

A man who can write like that need never fear for immortality.

For me, one of the great takeaways from the Willis Allison Carto Online Presidential Library—actually it’s https://willisacartolibrary.com/—is watching the conservative mainstream drift off into the distance while Mr. Carto pretty much stayed in the same place. Beginning in the mid-Fifties and rolling through later correspondence, is like standing in the middle of “Pangea”—the theoretical original single continent of Earth—and watching plate tectonics gradually pull the continents away from the center.

In 1955, most “conservatives” espoused pretty much the same beliefs and attitudes that Carto & Co. would still be upholding 20, 30, 40 years later. Carto didn’t leave Conservatism, Conservatism Inc. left him.

Not everyone drifted far, of course. Avery Brundage was a good solid egg who knew enough to keep a low political profile. Westbrook Pegler used his column to praise the young Carto in 1955, and a decade later, forcibly retired, was still sending him funny missives. Revilo P. Oliver always remained cordial, though his experience with “the Bircher Business” made him chary of endorsing any organization larger than himself and his wife.

Even Bill Buckley was friendly till the early Sixties…and when relations turned chilly it wasn’t because of race or segregation (the two men were on the same page there for a long time), but rather over Free Trade, with Buckley taking the libertarian “market” side, against what I should consider the true-conservative endorsement of tariffs and any other practical and necessary types of trade protection. Buckley’s stance wasn’t necessarily a sincere, deeply held belief, but it was necessary to keep the libertarian ideologues happy at National Review. In a vague way, Bill imagined NR was carrying forward the torch of Albert Jay Nock, a sometime free-market and anti-statist hero of his youth. Bill had to exile Prof. Oliver from the magazine for very different, practical, reasons but I have it on personal testimony that the Buckley family remained fond of RPO.

For Carto, one can see storm signals arise in 1958, with a curious communication from the new editor of The American Mercury, William LaVarre. LaVarre returns an ms. to Carto, apparently unread. It may have been written by, or was of interest to, Lawrence Dennis, since Dennis is copied in the correspondence chain. Anyway, LaVarre completely balks at the submission, and obliquely hints that Carto has some dodgy “West Coast associations,” and consorts with “‘lunatic’ fringe” types and others who lack “community prestige.” Carto fires back a whaaat? letter, whereupon Mercury Publisher Russell Maguire warmly apologizes to Carto for his editor’s rudeness. But the questions remain answered: who are these bad associations, and who exactly is leaning on William LaVarre?

LaVarre took the editorship in 1957, around the time that Bill Buckley declared that anyone who wrote for American Mercury could not write for National Review. LaVarre may simply have decided to follow Buckley’s example, or maybe he was just encountering the same obstacles that plagued Buckley. Basically, it was a question of distribution. Most magazines did not depend entirely, or even mostly, on mail subscriptions. They needed newsstand sales. Magazines cost fifteen cents or a quarter: pin-money impulse purchases, you’d read ’em on the commuter train or after dinner. There were only a handful of distributors, and they acted as a cartel. I remember back in the mid-Sixties you couldn’t find Mad magazine in many newsdealers around New York because William Gaines was fighting with the distributors, who retaliated by giving Mad‘s shelf-space to Cracked and Sick instead. And Cracked and Sick were pretty terrible, let me tell you.

Likewise, National Review had distributorship problems in the Fifties and early Sixties because some NR writers were essentially on a blacklist as “anti-Semites.” Bill Buckley himself, in fact, was considered dubious because he was a Professional Conservative—strike one!—while his father was well known to the ADL for trying to keep Jews out of his corner of Connecticut—strike two!

When Gore Vidal libeled the Buckley family in the September 1969 issue of Esquire, it was just old news from Arnold Forster and his ADL hate-file. Anyway, Bill had to keep people like Prof. Oliver out of National Review because RPO had suddenly become a founding member of the John Birch Society. And the JBS, in 1958 ADL ideology, was ipso facto an aunty-seemite org. (Even after a million sellouts by Robert Welch and company, some people still do believe that about the JBS, even today.)

To keep National Review alive and in distribution, Buckley had to make nice with the Mephistophelean powers that were. No RPO, no JBS, no friendly letters to Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby. And thus, after a dozen years, Buckley finally scored a nasty Time cover (1997) with a caricature by David Levine.

But bringing The American Mercury out of purdah was a different thing entirely, a hopeless effort. It would always be this fringe magazine that William F. Buckley, Jr., George Lincoln Rockwell, and William Bradford Huie (checkbook journalist on the Emmett Till trial) once worked on, or wrote for. The hapless William LaVarre was snorting fire to no practical end at all.

Myself, I only discovered the still-extant American Mercury in the early 70s because my college library had been subscribing for 50 years and its octavo-sized issues were pigeonholed right next to the similarly shaped American Opinion slot in our Periodical Reading Room. By that point the Mercury had failed so badly it was now owned by Carto’s Liberty Lobby. If you subscribed to it, you also got Liberty Lobby’s Washington Observer newsletter, a sort of thin predecessor to The Spotlight (“The Paper You Can Trust!”). Not an awful lot of advertising revenue; often just back-cover ads for The Six Million Swindle, by Prof. Austin J. App (Scranton University; LaSalle University; PhD, Catholic University of America), probably published by a Carto publishing house on the West Coast.

What’s missing from the Carto website is correspondence from sometime Richmond News-Leader editor and veteran columnist James J. Kilpatrick. That is too bad, because Kilpatrick is one of the few classic American conservatives who stayed the course until the pressures became unbearable, and they had to start paying lip-service to race-egalitarian nonsense, if they wished to keep their newspaper or syndication alive. In Kilpatrick’s case this seems to have happened around 1970. As a reward for his sellout, Kilpatrick got to become a popular television personality, trading barbs with Shana Alexander on 60 Minutes‘ “Point-Counter-Point” segment…and then being lovingly parodied by Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin during the early Michael O’Donoghue genius-era of Saturday Night Live (“Jane, you ignorant slut!”).

But Kilpatrick did not completely sell out, or  disavow his roots. There came a time when certain Washington columnists (mainly the “Washington Merry-Go-Round”‘s Drew Pearson, and his Igor/successor, Jack Anderson) decided to attack Willis Carto for having masterminded or subverted a 1968 Youth for Wallace movement. Their columns were relentless, full of cheap shots, but they had detected that the Youth for Wallace had been transformed into something called the National Youth Alliance. Pearson and Anderson wouldn’t give up. In 1969 they ran continuous exposés in their columns about how Willis A. Carto was behind the whole thing, and he was using it to push a subversive tract by Francis Parker Yockey, called Imperium.

James J. Kilpatrick treated it all as a joke. He was often used by syndicates as a substitute columnist when William F. Buckley, Jr. was on vacation, and so this column, May 29, 1969, went far and wide. “The next edition of the Liberals’ Demonology is likely to see Willis Carto elevated to the position of Number One Devil.”

Today we’ve long known that the National Youth Alliance was the early edition of the National Alliance, but in 1969-71 it was easy to frame it all as a sinister fad, something masterminded by one Willis Carto, of Washington DC, Sausalito, and points south. There was dissension in the post-Youth for Wallace movement, with one faction going for a populist-conservative movement, friendly to the YAF and NR types, and the other side going for a radical, Yockeyist point of view, calling itself the National Youth Alliance.You can decide for yourselves which side, if any, succeeded.

I have a sentimental attachment to this fracas, because it was what first brought me into some kind of vague kind Rightist movement, a few years later. National Review had run an out-of-left-field article by one C.H. (“Chris”) Simonds, attacking Willis A. Carto (September 10, 1971 issue). Shortly afterwards, advertisements began to appear (in popular magazines, not National Review), warning young people to avoid youth alliances of all sorts, particularly those promoting the sinister bible called Imperium.

“It is an actual historical fact,” says retired professor and history writer Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., “that the greatest mass murder of African Americans in United States’ [sic] history took place during the New York Draft Riots of July 1863, which were the greatest riots in American history.”

That’s what he said, this historian: “an actual historical fact.” Not only the greatest mass-murder of African Americans, but it all got to happen during the greatest riots in American history! Now, Prof. Mitcham is merely promoting his little book, The Greatest Lynching in American History: New York 1863 (Shotwell Publishing, 2020), so perhaps we should permit him some hyperbole. Still, I doubt anyone who remembers Watts or Detroit or Newark in the 1960s—or the nationwide BLM/Antifa riots of 2020—could agree with that last part. Greatest riots, truly?

As to “mass murder,” documented sources can name only about 10 negroes (as we all used to say until about 1972) who were beaten to death or lynched in New York City between 13 and 18 July 1863. Mitcham declares there must have been 200 blacks killed, on no basis other than his own fevered imagination. And even 200 isn’t that big a number in comparison with the hundreds of phantom deaths that black activists Ida M. Bell and W. E. B. DuBois used to conjure up a century or more ago, when ringing up the totals from race riots: they counted any missing negroes as lynching victims.

Mitcham’s little book is thus another entry in the genre of Lynching Porn, along with such dubious, inventive pulp-histories as Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York (Knopf, 1928) and Barnet Schecter’s The Devil’s Own Work (Walker Books, 2005), both of which Mitcham leans heavily upon for source material. Mitcham is also totally wild on the subject of how many people were killed in the riots. Careful scholarship and documentation have long since pinned that number down to a hard 119, including soldiers, police, and accidental deaths. Mitcham wants to believe it’s somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500. Those were estimates floated by the NY Metropolitan Police and the War Department in the immediate post-riot hysteria, before anyone took the time to check the records.

What’s weird about Mitcham is that, to judge by his other writings, he’s not some anti-Copperhead crackpot who wants to hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree. He’s something of a Southern patriot, in fact, as are many authors in the Shotwell Publishing imprint. I just don’t get it. Perhaps Mitcham imagined that deriding pro-Confederate New York City could be a good way of sticking it to the Yanks.

James Gordon Bennett Jr. of the NY Herald used this cartoon, depicting July 1863, for a piece honoring the New York Metropolitan Police in 1884. Constantin de Grimm was a famous European satirical illustrator.

“The Sky Was Black!”

A few years back I wrote about the burning and sacking of the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and West 43rd Street. This conflagration often figures as a gleaming centerpiece of the July 1863 “Draft Riots” narrative, in spite of the fact that no one died in that arson, nor was anyone ever prosecuted for it. Since much of the surrounding neighborhood was also put to the torch—including a hotel, a stockyard, and an ice cream parlor—local cognoscenti maintained it was all part of an urban-renewal plan. The City wanted to get rid of eyesores and low-rent tenants on City-owned plots between 42nd Street and the lush new Central Park at 59th, soon to be the most expensive real estate in the world. About the only building in that region that still stands today is St. Patrick’s Cathedral—then unfinished—along with its Tuckahoe-marble rectory and parish house: all built on private land donated to the Archdiocese.

But even more renowned than the burning of the black orphanage (which was actually a fee-paying, partly charitable boarding school) are the endless fables about innocent negroes being suddenly plucked off the streets and strung up on a tree or lamppost. “The sky was black with hanging negroes!” runs an ignorant cliché. However I have found only about a half-dozen of these documented in news reports of the time, and they mostly follow a similar pattern: negroes shoot white people, they get captured, beaten, and often hanged.

As reported in the New York World of July 14, 1863:

An intense excitement was created in the vicinity of Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue last evening [July 13], in consequence of a white citizen being shot while passing up Bleecker Street… A gentleman…was going to his home, when he was accosted by a partially intoxicated negro, who was so abusive in his language as to provoke a quarrel. Some altercation ensued from this abuse, when the negro drew a pistol and shot the white man, who soon after died. [A crowd gathered, chased the negro to the old St. John’s Cemetery on Carmine Street, beat him, hanged him, cut his throat, and built a fire beneath him.]

And in the Daily News—same day, same neighborhood:

About eight o’clock last evening four negroes were seen running down Carmine Street, with a large crowd in close pursuit. One of the negroes being overtaken, turned and fired upon his pursuer, shooting him with three bullets, and killing him instantly. The negroes then separated, each taking a different route. [The crowd] pursued the first to near the corner of Varick Street, where he was secured and very badly beaten…then hung from a tree. The field was then left to a party of boys, who amused themselves by building a fire…

Which Paper Do Ya Read?

It made a big difference which paper you read. Henry Raymond’s stridently Republican New York Times appears to have combined elements from both the above stories and added extra details, while leaving out the crucial fact that it all began when a negro shot and killed a white man. The imaginative spin is breathtaking:

There were probably not less than a dozen negroes beaten to death in different parts of the City during the day. Among the most diabolical of these outrages that have come to our knowledge is that of a negro cartman living in Carmine Street. About 8 o’clock in the evening as he was coming out of the stable, after having put up his horses, he was attacked by a crowd of about 400 men and boys, who beat him with clubs and paving-stones till he was lifeless, and then hung him to a tree opposite the burying ground. Not being yet satisfied with their devilish work, they set fire to his clothes and danced and yelled and swore their horrid oaths around his burning corpse. [July 14, 1863.]

The Times is really winging it here. “Not less than a dozen negroes beaten to death”—we don’t know where or how, but that’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Similarly, when writing up the Colored Orphan Asylum’s destruction, which happened around the same evening, the Times claimed that the school housed “600 to 800” colored children, although the true number was 230.

Then you have personal reports in letters and diaries, equally imaginative and based almost entirely on hearsay. An elderly Columbia chemistry and botany professor, John Torrey (1796-1873), saw no mob violence in the street, but he heard tales and readily believed what people told him. As Torrey wrote in a letter on July 15th:

This morning I was obliged to ride down to the office in a hired coach. A friend who rode with me had seen a poor negro hung an hour or two before. The man had, in a frenzy, shot an Irish fireman, and they immediately strung up the unhappy African. At our office there had been no disturbance in the night. Indeed the people there were “spoiling for a fight.” They had a battery of about 25 rifle barrels, carrying 3 balls each, & mounted on a gun-carriage. It could be loaded & fired with rapidity. We had also 10-inch shells, to be lighted & thrown out of the windows. Likewise quantities of SO₃, with arrangements for projecting it on the mob. Walking home we found that a large number of soldiers—infantry, artillery & cavalry are moving about, & bodies of armed citizens. The worst mobs are on the 1st & 2nd & 7th Avenues. Many have been killed there. They are very hostile to the negroes, & scarcely one of them is to be seen. A person who called at our house this afternoon saw three of them hanging together.

Professor Torrey in the 1860s.

Quite a bit to unpack here. A frenzied negro is said to have shot an “Irish fireman,” and was immediately strung up. Is the story true? And if so, how and why did he draw a bead on the “Irish fireman”? And how did Torrey’s friend know the victim was Irish? Because most firemen were? Or because that fit in with a current narrative? No matter: Torrey and friend agree the negro gunman shouldn’t have been hanged, but rather should have got off scot-free, just on general principle. Torrey seriously thinks negroes are being hanged all across the city, and readily believes a visitor who claims to have seen “three of them hanging together.”

The side note about Torrey’s office crew at the downtown Columbia campus is also amusing. They’re preparing to defend themselves with rifles at the windows, globular bombshells, and sulfur trioxide, which I take to be an early and very painful version of tear gas. Another science-professor whiz at Columbia, Richard Sears McCulloh, also liked to build gas bombs, and soon would leave New York City for Richmond, to develop such dainties for the Confederacy. So it appears this was an ongoing research interest at Columbia College.

As for that encounter between the negro and the “fireman,” the newspapers give us a “synoptic” version of the story. It appears the excitement got started when the negro shot and killed a veteran of the “Fire Zouaves” (a now-disbanded Union regiment of firemen also called the 11th New York Volunteers).

From the Daily News of July 16th:

At half after six yesterday morning a middle-aged negro, named Potter or Porter, was passing quietly down Thirty-second street, near the [Seventh?] avenue, when he was met by a fireman, an ex-Zouave, named Manney, who hailed him, asking where he was going. The negro not understanding, apparently, what was said, made no reply, and Manney, with the most kind intentions, told him that the excitement was very great, that the mobs would certainly be around today, and would doubtless kill him or severely beat him, if they should catch him. Still, apparently misapprehending Manney’s intentions, and probably misunderstanding his language, the negro drew a revolver and discharged it with fatal effect. He shot twice, certainly, each ball striking Manney full in the forehead, and entering his brain. He then started to run, but was soon overtaken by a crowd of excited and infuriated people, and by several of the firemen residing near by, who chased him a short distance, and soon overtook him. The heart sickens at the recollection of the fearful and

DREADFUL SCENE

which followed. The negro was pounded, battered, kicked, pummelled, stoned, thrown down, trampled upon, and fairly bruised into a jelly. A bloody pulp was all that was left of the mistaken murderer in a very few moments; but even this was considered slight revenge, and the mutilated mass of blood and bones and quivering flesh was carried brutally to a tree, to a limb of which it was hung, amid the cheers and jeers of the indignant crowd.

Poor Manney had the best of medical attendance, but probably for naught…

No good deed goes unpunished! West 32nd Street seems to have been a hotbed for this kind of shooting/lynching. On the evening of the same day (July 15) there was a crowd of “between four and five thousand men” gathered near the corner of Eighth Avenue, per the New York Herald. They were awaiting the arrival of Federal troops fresh from Gettysburg, and they weren’t sure whether to welcome them or take to the barricades.

But first there was a distraction. From the July 16 New York Herald:

A negro unfortunately made his appearance, when one of the men called him an opprobrious name. The negro made a similar rejoinder, and after a few words the indiscreet colored man pulled out a pistol and shot a man. With one simultaneous yell the crowd rushed on him. He was lifted high in the air by fifty stalworth [sic] arms and then dashed forcibly on the pavement. Kicks were administered by all who could get near enough. Some men then took hold of his legs and battered his head several times on the pavement. Life was now nearly extinct and a rope was called for. The desired article was in a moment produced and the black man’s body was soon after suspended from a neighboring lamppost.

There are also instances of white people being shot by negroes who manage to run away. But these accounts are much shorter, as there’s no payoff in the end, and little newsworthiness.

The ever-tasteful Thomas Nast caricatures Governor Horatio Seymour, blames him for the negro lynchings and the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum (in background).

Is There a Backstory?

Needless to say, these narratives are repetitive and maybe tiresome, apart from their stilted and amusing turns of phrase. And they leave a lot of open questions. For example, how is it that all these angry negroes happened to be “packing”? Well, one obvious answer is that in those days you could buy handguns in your local hardware store. And while I haven’t found precise documentation for this, it seems very likely that New York City negroes had been encouraged to arm themselves, both by white Abolitionists and by firebrand black preachers such as Henry Highland Garnet. The excuse presumably was that the white people in New York would soon be murdering all the blacks they saw, so you’d best prepare. (Often “white” would be euphemized as “Irish,” so as not to offend Caucasian Abolitionists. But as the majority of white people in New York were Irish—whether immigrant or first- second-, or third-generation—this was an frivolous distinction from the negro point of view.) John Brown himself, who definitely wished to arm all blacks for a bloody revolution, had close ties to New York through his local ally James Sloan Gibbons, whom he visited shortly before his Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859.

Gibbons, a financial writer by profession, was perhaps the leading Abolitionist intelligence operative in New York. Supposedly his home had been one of the major safe houses in the Underground Railroad. He was certainly an effective propagandist. He wrote the lyrics to one of the most thumpingly gleeful songs to come out of that war, “We Are Coming, Father Abra’am, 300,000 More,” an 1862  ditty that inspired a half-dozen musical compositions, including one from Stephen Foster, though Foster’s was not the best. Friends of Horace Greeley, the Gibbons family owned a marvelous five-floor townhouse on West 29th Street, then also known as Lamartine Place (a romantic 1840s dedication to the French poet and statesman). The neighborhood still exists today, as fashionable as it was in 1850.

The memory of James Gibbons is enshrined in a memoir written by his daughter, Lucy Gibbons Morse, “Personal Recollections of Draft Riots of 1863.” A not-for-profit calling itself the Riot Relief Fund gives out a little book, The Riot of the Century, to donors and well-wishers, and it contains this peculiar little essay. The writing is full of interesting biases and evasions, but it gives a flavor of Abolitionists’ self-righteousness and sentimentality. The bullying friends of terrorist John Brown are now feeling the terror of the persecuted. As “Riot Week” progresses, little Lucy and her sister hear their house is going to be attacked—they’re just a few blocks from those mobs on 32nd St.—and so they’re preparing to move out of the city. But too late! Their father is off attending strategy powwows at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on 23rd St., so he isn’t there when a mob ransacks the house and drags off their books and pots and piano. The girls watch disconsolately from a top-floor window.

Finally they’re rescued by a family friend, young celebrity lawyer (and future Ambassador to Great Britain) Joseph Choate, who takes them to his house. Lucy and her sister marvel at the “quiet restful order” of the Choate domicile:

It was beautiful—we did not know how beautiful until they told us they had five colored refugees in the kitchen!

Besides this sort of smarm, the essay is distinguished by the deceitful pose of the narrator. She is depicted as a dizzy, befuddled young girl of about nine or ten, or so I thought. It comes as a shock to discover that little Lucy Gibbons was actually born in 1839 and at the time of this tale she an adult, a 24-year-old music teacher.

In the immediate aftermath of the Riots, most press treatments dwelt were shot through with the lurid and sensational. Newspapermen seldom did on-the-spot reporting, preferring to write up incidents they didn’t witness but learned about via telegraph from the police stations and other newspapers. The telegraph was the internet of its day, with all the cop shops and pressrooms wired in to each other. And so the reading public were encouraged to believe that hundreds if not thousands of innocent negroes were being immolated and hung from lampposts, while drunken rioters looted every dry-goods shop they could find. Actually the only notable clothing store to get wrecked was Brooks Brothers on Catherine Street, and that was for a reason that went beyond theft and vandalism. Brooks Brothers was a notorious war profiteer. In 1861 it supplied the New York Volunteers with uniforms made of shoddy—fabric scraps rolled and glued together in a semblance of cloth. Running back from their Bull Run defeat in the rain, these Federals found their clothes disintegrating around them. (Zouaves kept their uniforms on, I believe; they’d used a different vendor.)

A Pause in Sensationalism

The atrocity tales were eventually forgotten by the public, and even newspaper commemorations of Riot Week turned sedate. Every July, for about 25 years after the war, the Associated Press ran a potted recap of the events, penned by Western historian J. H. Beadle. No gratuitous lynching of black men in the Beadle telling; now the victims of violence were mainly brave police and heroic militiamen. All across the country, in the Cedar Rapids Gazette or the Baldwinsville Gazette and Farmers Journal, readers could thrill year after year to the story of  how Police Superintendent John Kennedy was beaten within an inch of his life by a mob outside the draft office on East 46th St.; how doughty Colonel O’Brien was dragged and stamped to death in his own yard at 32nd St. and Second Avenue; and how the great anti-war, anti-negro agitator, Mr. Andrews of Virginia, was captured in a brothel with his colored mistress.

Sensationalism returned in the 1920s with the pulp-fiction histories of Herbert Asbury. Asbury discovered that one could cobble together spicy “true crime” stories by pillaging old newspapers at the New York Public Library. He researched an article that began as an architectural history of lower Manhattan but quickly turned into a fantasia about low dives and large harlots. After this piece was published in The American Mercury, as “Days of Wickedness,” Asbury expanded it with dubious legends of 1830s street ruffians. He called the new manuscript The Gangs of New York. To give the book extra piquancy he put in a long lurid section about the “rioters” of July 1863, and added every atrocity he could research or invent. In Asbury’s telling, most of the rioters lived in Five Points in Lower Manhattan, rather than Chelsea, Kips Bay and Midtown, as the records show. (Five Points’s heyday was actually around 1812.) And many rioters apparently were madwomen who liked to mutilate dying negroes, slice open their “quivering flesh,” fill the wounds with oil, and set them aflame. Contrary to The Gangs of New York, most people in the so-called “Draft Riots” weren’t gang members at all, just as few were protesting conscription. (Most were ineligible for the draft anyway, due to age, sex or nationality.) But this didn’t seem to matter, since Asbury was making up much of his narrative. He secured a very fine publisher, Alfred Knopf, but the book was taken to be light entertainment. No one confused it with serious history.

That was 1928. A few years later the Riots figured in a piece of fiction by Robert W. Chambers, clearly influenced by Asbury’s imaginings. The story was written as a movie treatment for a Civil War film starring that celebrated comedienne, Marion Davies (Operator 13, 1934). Alas, the New York scenes were cut.

So far as I can tell, the “Draft Riots” reentered mainstream consciousness in the 1960s as a sort of rationalization for the many race riots and civil-rights protests during that turbulent decade. It was a way of saying, “It’s okay if Negroes need to let off a little steam; in the 1800s white people (or ‘the Irish’) did it too.” That was in fact the basic pitch of James McCague’s The Second Rebellion (1967), one of the first serious attempts in modern times to treat the July 1863 events as history. Unfortunately McCague drew too much upon the Asbury version. And like Asbury, he was defeated by a mare’s nest of scattered, inconsistent, and highly politicized newspaper stories.

Some Cases of Mistaken Identity

Both Asbury and McCague introduce us to a supporting player who is almost—but not quite—totally fantastical. That is Colonel H. J. O’Brien, or perhaps Col. Henry J. O’Brien. He is a foolhardy, or maybe intoxicated, man on horseback who leads 150 raw recruits down Second Avenue to face a mob at the corner of 34th Street. It is July 14, 1863. The Colonel’s men set up howitzers in the street and, like Napoleon in 1795, offer the crowd a whiff of grapeshot. Many are wounded, some die. O’Brien fires his pistol and orders the crowd to disperse. Unfortunately he shoots and kills a woman holding a baby. Some hours later, O’Brien returns to this neighborhood with a cart—he lives a couple of blocks down the avenue—to see if the mob have looted his house. They have. He goes to his friend Mr. von Briesen’s pharmacy on the corner of 34th St. for a drink of water, or maybe something more fortifying. The crowd apprehends him when he exits, and they beat him to a pulp. The Rev. William Clowry of nearby St. Gabriel’s Church strolls by, sees O’Brien is dying, gives him Extreme Unction. O’Brien gets dragged into his own backyard, where the mob beats him again. Finally Father Clowry returns with a wheelbarrow and takes him to Bellevue Hospital, where he is pronounced dead.

That’s as clear an account as you’ll ever find. However, there is no such person as H.J. or Henry J. O’Brien who fits the time and place. There was no Col. Henry O’Brien at all. There was a Lt. Col. James O’Brien, of the 48th Massachusetts, recently killed during a heroic assault at Port Hudson on the Mississippi. Our unfortunate fellow with the horse and cart is most likely Mr. Henry F. O’Brien, 43 years of age, address 559 Second Avenue. Still a British subject, but he recently filed for naturalization. Henry F. was briefly commissioned as lieutenant, then captain, at the end of 1862, but he only lasted two months and saw no action. I hear Fredericksburg was a huge black pill for Union morale. He resigned.

Anyway, a few months later Henry F. comes up with the idea of reconstituting the 11th New York Volunteers—the Fire Zouaves! I don’t know if they were planning to wear those snazzy French-Algerian Zouave outfits. The 11th had a very poor record during their one year of existence, but if Henry F. gets enough recruits for his new regiment he can style himself a colonel!

This is right after the Union defeat Chancellorsville, and the Federals seem willing to take anyone. And thus we get the legend of Col. Henry O’Brien…a figure yet unknown to the Adjutant General and War Department.

O’Brien’s terrible, though probably deserved, death brought Henry F. a measure of international fame. Somebody in Sheffield, England read the gruesome tale and thought he recognized an old neighbor. As reported July 29th in the London Telegraph:

The correspondent of a Sheffield paper expresses his belief that the Colonel O’Brien who was lately hanged to a lamppost in New York, cut down before he was dead, and then brutally murdered by the mob, was the Colonel M. D. T. O’Brien who had been a resident in Sheffield for some time, and who was well known to many of the leading families in that quarter under the name of Thompson, his mother’s maiden name. The colonel had formerly seen some service in the Crimea, and had been in Italy with Garibaldi. In December he sailed for New York and was slightly wounded in the battle of Fredericksburg.

If only the “Colonel” could have lived to see this!