Southern Bookman

LSU historian Robert Mann's "Kingfish U" tells engrossing story of Huey Long's crushing love for LSU

LSU's band, football team and academic prestige rose under Huey Long's autocratic control of Louisiana during the dark years of the Depression.

After Long's assassination in 1935, the "Ole War Skule's" golden era crashed in scandal, leading to the imprisonment of LSU President James Monroe Smith and other university officials for a range of fraudulent schemes.

The wide-ranging federal and state investigations also led to the conviction of Gov. Richard Leche, for whom the university's law school had been named. His name was abruptly removed from the school's monumental building.

Long as governor and U.S. senator who still controlled the state embraced LSU like a smothering sugar daddy. He lavished money on school buildings, launched a medical school, and outrageously championed the school's band and football team.

LSU professor and noted historian Robert Mann entertainingly tells the story of Long and his proudest achievement in "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU," published by LSU Press.

An outlandish political showman, Long took trainloads of LSU students to football games in Nashville and Houston, leading the band on parades through the cities' downtowns. He also enjoyed giving pep talks to the football team, although Coach Biff Jones banned "the Kingfish" from the locker room before Long fired the former Army officer.

Rapidly increasing its student body and constructing new buildings after a move from downtown Baton Rouge to a bucolic new campus that had once been a plantation on the Mississippi River, LSU attracted nationally recognized professors, most prominently Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the university's prestigious and ground=breaking Southern Review.

As Mann relates, Long generally kept his hands off academic matters. But he brought his beloved university national comdemnation for attempting to censor the Daily Reveille, the school's student newspaper, after it published a letter criticizing his iron-fisted control of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Smith's expulsion of seven Reveille journalists brought an investigation by the Southern Association of  Colleges and Secondary Schools. The organization placed LSU on probation, then dropped its investigation when the school affirmed its commitment to academic independence following Long's death.

But Long's meddling with the LSU Law School led to censure by the Association of American Law Schools, a minor part of a ballooning scandal that engulfed the university and Long's machine following his assassination in a hallway of his soaring state Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge.

Mann gives a complete account of the scandals, especially the involvement of Leche, Smith and a number of LSU officials who used LSU material and state funds for personal projects.

Smith, who led the university's flourishing during the Depression and originated the Southern Review, ended up serving six years in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Long, one of the most divisive leaders in American history, gave his poverty-stricken state modern roads, schools and hospitals and propelled a small state university to national prominence.

Mocked by national writers for his clownish behavior and accumulation of power, Long before his death gained a national following for his "share our wealth" programs, which still appear radical.

Mann gives a balanced picture of a politician beloved by Louisiana's long-exploited poor. As Mann details, blacks gained little from his programs.

The book contains wonderful vintage photographs of Long, decked out in three-piece suits and fedoras, acting as chief cheerleader. He's shown with the band and students, or huddling with cronies. One picture shows Smith with several cows; rural students during the Depression could pay for their tuition with livestock or crops.

While Mann praises Long's accomplishments, he presents a disturbing picture of Long's schemes to acquire more power.

Long's flamboyant career was in the end tragic, as Robert Penn Warren mined in his classic novel"All the King's Men."

Warren found in Baton Rouge "a world of a sick yearning for elegance."

Louisiana's dreams of greatness come mixed with corruption and buffoonery.

 

 

 

 

Doris Kearns Goodwin renews 1960s vision for Atlanta History Center audience

Doris Kearns Goodwin's "An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s" also speaks for the generation that came of age during that turbulent decade.

Those who were young in the 1960s strongly remember the events for which the 81-year-old presidential historian gives inside views, based on the archives and recollections of her late husband, Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy.

Goodwin's book is based on her late husband's memorabilia that was stored in multiple boxes at their  home in Concord, Mass. Before his death, Richard and Doris Kearns Goodwin examined the massive amount of material, sharing their experiences as White House insiders.

The memoir tells of the exciting early days of the Kennedy presidency, Richard Goodwin's work for Johnson and his split with him over the Vietnam War and Goodwin's service to the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy after Johnson decided not to seek re-election in 1968.

Doris Kearns Goodwin gives warm views of Johnson, who led passage of landmark civil rights legislation after JFK's assassination. She served on Johnson's White House staff and frequently visited the former president during his later years, helping him write him memoirs.

An aging crowd of 700 recently packed the Atlanta History Center ballroom for a discussion between Goodwin and Valerie Jackson, former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson's widow.

As Goodwin remembered her love for her husband and presented anecdootes about their public service careers, members of the audience sat rapt as if reliving the promising days of their youths. Many no doubt felt regret about the failures of 1960s idealism.

Goodwin assured the group that the the 1960s vision of freedom and justice is a also an unfinished love story that still can be fulfilled.

 

Washington Post critic Michael Dirda's "An Open Book" a Proustian memoir

Michael Dirda when growing up often had his nose in a book, upsetting his steel-mill worker father, Michael Dirda Sr.

Dirda's blue-collar upbringing in industrial Lorain, Ohio, gave him little preparation for a literary career, as recounted in his engaging 2003 memoir "An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland."

In its wealth of details and memorable characters, Dirda's book recalls "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust, one of the many writers he mentions along the way. He also loved as a child paperback adventure stories, fantasy and science fiction and comic books, along with 1950s-era TV westerns.

The Washington Post's acclaimed book critic, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize, recalls a childhood marred by his father's anger and sense of failure and bolstered by his mother's stoic devotion to her son and his three younger sisters.

Dirda recalls his painful relationship with his father with a mixture of regret, compassion and sad humor.

Exacerbating his irritation at Dirda's bookishness, his father erupted in anger at his son when he enlisted his help on ambitious home construction projects that often went awry. A benevolent uncle, his mother's brother, often was enlisted to salvage the disastrous work.

Along with his abusive behavior, Dirda's father displays moments of rough love for his son, including frequent trips to the public library and dispensing folksy advice.

Dirda's Slovakian mother, Christine Burkl Dirda, is portrayed as an exuberant personality who showers her children with affection along with strict discipline. She holds on to her positive spirit, countering her husband's dark moods.

The introverted, nearsighted and unathletic Dirda feels isolated from Lorain, an ethnically diverse industrial city on Lake Erie near Cleveland.

Yet he also expresses affection for Lorain's parks, colorful characters and interesting stores and shopping centers, sharing his mother's pleasure at finding bargains. Dirda also fondly remembers visits to his family's many relatives of eastern European descent.

In contrast to more privileged intellectuals, Dirda eventually worked in hazardous jobs at his father's plant and as a construction worker installing aluminum siding.

Despite his love for reading, Dirda struggles academically until the end of high school. Eventually, he enjoys teen adventures with a close circle of friends and begins to excel in the classroom under the guidance of inspiring teachers.

Accepted to Oberlin College, a progressive liberal arts school near his home, Dirda slowly discovers his literary calling.

After initially struggling with Oberlin's demanding academic regimen, he at his father's life-changing encouragement studies harder and excels. He also finds his first serious girlfriend, a young woman from Nashville, Tenn.

Vietnam protests stir the campus, although Dirda mainly stays on sidelines He's more devoted to literature and classical music.

Dirda finds the model for his literary career when he meets the writer and translator Robert Phelps on his first visit to New York City before an expansive trip to Europe in the revolutionary summer of 1968.

Phelps, the father of one of Dirda's roommates, gives Dirda a decisive glimpse of the bookish life, inviting him to his crammed Greenwich Village study, where Dirda enjoys martinis and sees his first page proofs.

The book closes with Dirda's Oberlin-sponsored trip to idyllic Aix en Provence and Paris, still smoldering from the revolutionary turmoil of May, 1968.

Dirda also enjoys a passionate romantic encounter with a young women he meets at the opera. They take a hitch-hiking trip to Florence, then say farewell forever.

Exciting moments in Aix and Paris glow in his memory, yet Lorain and his childhood shine brighter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gainesville, Ga., square shows contrasts between tradition, new economy

A Confederate monument rises in the center of Gainesville's tree-shaded town square, surviving efforts in recent years to remove the gray-tinged remnant of the Lost Cause.

Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909, the 28-foot-tall statue of a Confederate soldier called Old Joe stares with weary eyes at a lively restaurant, shopping and entertainment scene.

Hall County, which owns the plot of land where Old Joe stands, a few years ago entered negotiations with the UDC to remove the statue to a "more suitable location." The Confederate daughters hold a lease on the spot for a few more years, and Ole Joe remains.

Near Old Joe, a plaque remembers Franklin D. Roosevelt's visit to the city in 1936 following two devastating tornadoes. Roosevelt often stayed at nearby Warm Springs, Ga., seeking relief from his crippling polio in its healing waters.

On a visit to Gainesville for a couple of days last week, I explored a traditional Southern small town undergoing rapid change and population growth, revealing striking contrasts between the past and future. Everyone I encountered was very friendly, a welcome Southern tradition.

Gainesville's square pulses with the city's thriving economy, based on the poultry industry and a few high-tech ventures, law firms carrying out legal work at the Hall and federal courthouses, and shops catering to homeowners on nearby Lake Lanier.

Along with high-ticket interior-design stores, the square is home to gritty retail businesses like Moe's Records, loaded with bins of used vinyl albums. I was tempted at a live album of the jazz pianist and vocalist Mose Allison, a favorite of my wild youth in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

While the restaurants were packed, the expensive home-furnishing stores had few customers. At one store whose merchandise included pillows with biblical messages, a hymn praising Jesus played. 

Brenau University, with three locations in the city, is a major economic generator. The university's students fill the streets surrounding the square, swarming the bars and pizza restaurants. Local residents, the men wearing beards and baseball caps and the women summer dresses, join the crowd.

Ninth District Congressman Andrew Clyde, an ultra-right wing ally of Marjorie Taylor Green who voted against legislation authorizing aid for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, runs an office on Washington Street adjoining the square. A few blocks away is the headquarters of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, closed on Friday afternoon.

Along with pizza places and Avocados, a popular spot serving tacos, sandwiches and brunch dishes, the square offers fancy dining at the excellent Italian restaurant Cotto and old-style steaks and seafood at The Stag - Chophouse.

On a walk down a desolate street outside of the square, I discovered the ultramodern Hall County Library, with a huge collection of books, a well-stocked children's section and computers and printers. An impressive local history room provides archives for family genealogists and other researchers. I read the informative Gainesville Times, glad to see the local paper still putting out a daily print edition.

Leaving, I was amused at a communal jig saw puzzle sitting unfinished on a table. Library patrons can pause and help complete the puzzle.

Hall County's politics and economy are also challenging to piece together.

In the 2020 election, Donald Trump received 70 percent of the vote in Hall County. Yet the country's poultry-based economy depends on immigration.

While disapproval of President Biden and inflation runs deep, every restaurant on the square had waiting lists of up to 40 minutes Friday night.

 

Memories of a Presbyterian boyhood

When my father picked us up after Sunday school at First Presbyterian, he sometimes drove us to the levee, where he enjoyed watching the Mississippi.

We always encountered an old black man who wore a white robe and cotton-cloth cap. The preacher carried a cross of two crooked tree branches tied with a white cloth. He said he performed baptisms in the river, although I never saw him carry out one.

My father would give the black preacher a dollar and send him away. For a few moments, my father, saying nothing, looked at the dark brown Mississippi flowing toward the gulf. Tugboats pushed bigger cargo ships up the river, its banks in my memory lined with trees in flower. After a few moments, Daddy would turn and say “let’s go,” and we’d head home, where Mama cooked Sunday dinner.

My mother’s father and mother came to visit us every Sunday afternoon, my grandfather still wearing a tie and starched white shirt and my grandmother the nice dress she’d worn to church. They were Presbyterians, as was my mother. My father had been raised Catholic, but had to leave the church because of his marriage outside the faith.

My sisters and I were raised Presbyterian, going to Sunday school from early childhood. After “confirmation,” a significant childhood occasion, we studied the “shorter Catechism,” which detailed John Wesley’s Predestination doctrine. Some would be saved, others condemned.

After Sunday school, we sometimes went to church with our mother, especially on communion Sundays, when ushers passed out round silver trays with specially cut holes that held the small glasses of grape juice. The holes ringed the outer circumfrence of the trays, tiny suns in a symbolic cosmos.

The sanctuary’s dark wooden walls and abstract stained glass windows contrasted with the flowery dresses of the women and girls. The husbands, their hair combed back with hair tonic, wore business suits, their shoes buffed to a brilliant shine. A full choir in red robes with gray sashes sang the soaring Protestant hymns, the congregation joining in.

Before and after church, people congregated on the plaza at the foot of the concrete steps that rose to the sanctuary’s heavy wooden doors. The couples chatted with each other, their children running back and forth, the girls in black patent leather shoes with straps and the boys in nice pants and shirts, hair slicked back like their fathers’,

Daddy was never comfortable with the forced bonhomie of Protestant Christian Fellowship. He didn’t care for the sermons of our minister, Dr. Melton, especially when they appeared lifted from Reader’s Digest.

Over the years, my mentally unstable father attended church a few times, usually seated with me in the gallery, where we whispered about football. He came to church on the Sunday after John F. Kennedy’s assasination, his eyes red with sadness although we had gone to Tiger Stadium for the LSU-Tulane game the day before.

Vacation Bible School gave me my favorite church memories. On hot and humid weekday mornings, my mother would drive us to the church on North Boulevard in downtown Baton Rouge and drop us off. We’d hurry to a clasroom behind the sanctuary, where mothers younger than ours taught us the stories and heroes of the Old and New Testaments, especially the teachings of Jesus, pictured as pink-cheeked and golden haired in a cheap poster hanging on the wall. The women wore shorts, their tan and shapely legs stirring passions I didn’t understand.

Sunday school continued through high school. Classes moved from the sanctuary basement to the “rec center,” equipped with classrooms and a basketball court where Sunday night “youth fellowship” commenced. My Uncle Mac, my mother’s older brother, taught a class on the Reformation, which although tilted toward the Protestant side gave a good foundation in early modern European history.

A youth minister named George Klett stirred my religious faith in my impressionable early teen years.

Mr. Klett was a young man with dark, slicked back hair, who wore thick black glasses. The old minister, Dr. Melton, rarely allowed Mr. Klett to give a Sunday seromon, and he was a dull speaker with a monotonous Southern drawl. His duty was to develop our youth program, a mission he carried out diligently.

One Easter, he organized a love feast to commemorate Christ’s Last Supper. We gathered in a room in the rec center. Perhaps each person brought a dish, or the church staff prepared the meal. In subdued light, we teens and Mr. Klett recalled Jesus’ final meal with his disciples.

To prepare for the banquet. Mr. Klett led an Easter contemplation group, which met on Wednesday nights for several weeks. After one session on Peter’s denial of Jesus and the savior’s passion, I and a young woman with long brown hair and sky-blue eyes engaged in an intense conversation on the rec center steps, a streetlight illuminating the sidewalk. Despite our sharing of deep feelings, the relationship advanced no further.

In a year or two, Mr. Klett left for another church, or perhaps he suffered a crisis of faith, or was embroiled in a scandal. I’d pretty much lost my religious belief by then and instead of going to Sunday school walked down to the newsstand at the end of North Boulevard to look at issues of the Sporting News and the Village Voice.

The burden of those years was church youth retreats. Boys and girls gathered for entire weekends for the church's campaign to keep us from drugs, sex and rock and roll. The speakers aspired to hipness, to speak in our teenage language. I spent those sessions in a fog of confusion. 

Once I roomed with a boy from church whose mother was eternally pregnant, leading to overheard snatches of gossip whenever she appeared in her maternity dress. The family
bore eight children. This family member, a boy of 16 or so, assaulted me for hours with filthy stories. A chaste lad, I felt my neck, ears and face burn as he kept the filth coming. That was in Gulfport, Miss., where later I played a high school football game, one of the few in which I satisfied the coaches.

In one daylong restreat, we rode a bus, or different cars, to a church in Clinton, La., a small city north of Baton Rouge that hadn’t developed much from its ante-bellum plantation days. We met in a small library with a vending machine that dispensed free soft drinks. The preacher who spoke to us chain-smoked cigarettes. A nervous man, he wore a black shirt and white collar in the day’s heat and somnolence.

After the talks, we saw Kirk Douglas play Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.” I wasn’t sure and remain unenlightened about what Vincent’s cutting off his ear had to do with the Christian message. On the way home, the ladies gossiped about the preacher, finding his smoking unseemly for a man of the cloth.

Although I attemded LSU, its campus just a few miles from First Presbyterian, I stopped
going to church. After my father devoted Sunday mornings to fishing, and bought a camp
on the Atchafalaya Swamp, my mother felt compelled to join him, leaving the church she’d loved since childhood.

As I was swept away by the cults of rock and roll and radical politics, religion’s roots proved shallow after all of those years of indoctrination.

Now that I am an old man, my memories of First Presbyterian show how deeply they were
implanted. In quiet moments, I hear Mr. Klett’s voice intoning “well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Andre Dubus III displays narrative brilliance in the essay collection "Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin"

Andre Dubus III's essays in his new collection "Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin" read like deeply imagined short stories.

Dubus explores his rough childhood raised by a single mother after his parents' divorce, his efforts to overcome his violent past, his relationships with women and the joys and challenges of fatherhood.

Reflecting upon his early attempts at writing and his growth into a man of peace and compassion, Dubus impressively displays fictional techniques. His captivating first-person narrative voice reveals him as a sensitive, perceptive observer. His encounters with a series of finely portrayed characters unfold in story-like plots.

Revisiting the territory of his excellent memoir "Townie," Dubus looks back on his childhood, when his financially strapped single mother frequently moved Dubus and his brothers and sisters from apartment to apartment, each cheaper than the last, in a losing battle to find affordable rents.

Bullied as a child when he entered new schools, Dubus as a teen began working out and learning how to fight, eventually beating up those who had tormented him. He laments that most of those with whom he fought are now dead.

Recognizing the self-destructiveness of his violent behavior, and developing tolerance for others as he goes to his desk each morning to learn to write, he understands that true masculinity is defined by caring for others.

A frequent presence is his father, the noted short story writer Andre Dubus II, who spent his last years in a wheelchair after a horrible accident. Attempting to help a motorist whose vehicle had broken down on an interstate highway, the elder Dubus was struck by a car, crushing both of his legs, one of which was amputated below the knee.

Dubus III pictures his father as optimistic and joyful despite his agonizing disability. In a memorable piece, Dubus describes the meeting of his father and the terminally ill Raymond Carver at an American Society of Arts and Letters awards ceremony. Having never previously met, but admiring each other's work, the two master short story writers immediately reach a deep friendship.

Although he grew up in small Massachusetts towns in industrial decline, Dubus has deep Louisiana roots. Both his mother and father grew up in a small Louisiana community, moving to New England after eloping.

Dubus III in traveling with his mother back to Louisiana finds a sense of home among her family. He casts his Massachusetts upbringing as one of exile, although he knows it formed him.

The acclaimed author of novels like "House of Sand and Fog"and "Such Kindness," Dubus in "Ghost Dogs" shows that he's a deep spiritual thinker as well as one of America's finest writers.

 

John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" still calls to us

I've been contemplating John Donne's meditation "No Man Is an Island."

The prose poem, published 400 years ago as part of Donne's "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in My Sickness," tells us that we are part of humanity, and must care for each other.

Donne famously warns us "never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

The metaphysical poet and Anglican cleric wrote the meditations in December 1623 after recovering from a near fatal illness. The composition was published in January 1624, one of only seven works attributed to Donne published during his lifetime, according to Wikipedia.

"Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" is divided into 23 parts, consisting of "the meditation," "the expostulation" and a prayer. Chronologically ordered, each chapter covers Donne's thoughts and reflections on a single day of his illness. "No Man Is An Island" is the 17th devotion.

Donne's message rings through the years. The soaring death toll in Gaza and Ukraine, alarming climate change news and threats to American democracy make his words even more urgent. 

Here is a modern version of the devotion:

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
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North Carolina Press's "A New History of the American South" gives updated view of region's past

The University of North Carolina's comprehensive "A New History of the American South" encompasses the complex views of the region that have emerged in recent years. 

Edited by UNC history professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the collection gathers essays from an impressive group of academic historians, detailing the region's often perilous history from prehistoric times before 1600 to today.

The encyclopedic book was published under the UNC Press's Marcie Cohen Ferris and William R. Ferris Imprint. Princeton professor Laura F. Edwards and University of Florida historian Jon F. Sensbach served as associate editors and also contributed essays.

Seeking to counter long-held perceptions of the region as politically, culturally and economically backward, the essays uncover the region's diversity with recently discovered information, compelling insights and little known but significant historical figures.

Yet the South's racism, violence and poverty still hold a prominent place in the historians' perceptions.

The early chapters examine the extent and sophistication of the Indian cultures that ruled the region before the arrival of European settlers. The tragic destruction of the Indian nations from disease, tribal warfare and European domination comes forth with searing details. Several of the tribes also owned black slaves.

University of Sydney professor Michael A. McDonnell concludes the book's first section on the region's early history with a revealing overview of how the South figured in the Revolutionary Era.

Southern involvement in the Revolutionary War is also covered at the start of the book's second section, titled "The Long Nineteenth Century," which lasts from the antebellum rule of slave-owning planters to the Civil War and its aftermath.

The section begins with three contributions from women scholars: Edwards' "The South and the New Nation: 1783-1820," Johns Hopkins scholar Martha S. Jones' "The Age of Emancipation" and Northwestern University professor Kate Masur's "The South and the Nation: 1840-1860."

Taking contrasting views of the same fraught period, Gregory P. Downs of the University of California describes the South's complex regions in "The Southern Nations, 1860-1880" and Scott Reynolds Nelson of the University of Georgia unearths the postwar restoration of white supremacy in "The Bourbon South."

The book concludes with "The Twentieth Century," a distressing indictment of the South's benighted ruling class and the economic and social devastation of Jim Crow laws.

A highlight is North Carolina professor Peter A. Coclanis' sardonic account of the region's often disastrous economic development from antebellum days through modern times.

Coclanis provocatively defines the region's "long 20th century" as beginning before the Civil War, and asserts that slavery's destructive effects have persisted until today.

While Southern "Sun Belt" governors have touted the region's pro-business ethos, Coclanis shows that such polices have often led to the proliferation of low-paying, low-skill industries, particularly in states like Mississippi.

UNC's Kenneth R. Janken concludes the book with an in-depth history of the civil rights era, "The Post World War II Freedom Struggle."

"A New History of the American South" with its authoritative analyses deserves widespread use as a college text, countering growing efforts to sanitize the region's past.

 

 

 

Violence of "The Illiad" unbearable, despite excellence of Emily Wilson's translation

I was excited when the Fulton Country Library informed me that my hold on Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's "The Illiad" had arrived.  

Soon after receiving the "pickup-notice," I headed toward the library, driving down congested Roswell Road through what I affectionately think of as "the imperial kingdom of Sandy Springs."

Anticipating my pleasure at again reading the ancient epic, I listened to songs from my youth on satellite radio's 1960s channel.

The stop and go of commercial vehicles, SUVs, pickup trucks, MARTA buses, school buses and passenger cars pushed through a suburban dreamscape of Mexican restaurants, strip shopping centers, ice rinks, sex shops, fast-food chains and high-rise apartment complexes.

As I crossed the I-285 Perimeter into the heart of Sandy Springs, I was again surprised by the city's diversity. The sidewalks are always crowded with people headed to a retail job, hurrying to catch the bus, walking their dogs or just sauntering by listening to music on headphones.

The former Republican enclave has evolved into a dynamic cultural center. An impressive theater and dazzling fountain shine as the centerpieces of the city hall complex on Roswell Road.  On the other side of Roswell from the city government building, workers recently completed a plaza honoring the nation's veterans .

Turning right at the corner of Roswell and Mount Vernon roads at the flag-decorated plaza, I head to the high-tech Sandy Springs Library, where I happily found my brand-new copy of Wilson's translation under my initials on the "holds" shelf.

Checking out my treasure at the automated machine that requires no librarian's assistance, I hurried across the parking lot and headed home.

As I drove down Roswell Road toward the Atlanta city limits, the traffic was as usual backed up at the I-285 entrance.A few storefronts remain vacant, along with a couple of empty restaurant spaces, but on the whole business appeared good. At the liquor store on the corner of Wieuca, I turned toward my neighborhood.

Sitting in my living room rocking chair as the bright December sunshine cast a rainbow spectrum across the floor, I opened Wilson's book. Her in-depth introduction conveyed how old the epic is, how long people have been living in this battered world.

Yet, I was upset by the story of masculine rage, the enslavement of women and the slaughter of war, still raging thousands of years after the Greek and Trojan heroes met their fates.

Despite the excellence of Wilson's translation, the story was too sad for me to continue.

 

 

 

Julian Jackson's "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain" examines democratic perils

In one of France's worst moments, World War I hero Philippe Petain shook hands with German dictator Adolph Hitler on Oct. 24, 1940.

Addressing the French nation a few days later, Marshal Petain exclaimed "I enter today down the road of collaboration."

Petain, who had witnessed the surrender of Germany to end World War I, was chosen by Hitler's Nazi regime to lead France's puppet Vichy government, which ostensibly ruled a part of France not occupied by the Germans.

After Hitler's downfall and the end of World War II, liberated France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle tried the 89-year-old Petain and other Vichy collaborators on charges of treason.

British historian Julian Jackson's critically acclaimed "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain" examines the trial, in which Petain was sentenced to death. De Gaulle, his former close friend, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Petain was held prisoner on a small island, where he died in 1951.

As the title indicates, Jackson's book explores how Petain's collaboration with Germany implicated the entire country. After the war's end, France's resistance movement began a wave of harsh punishment for collaborators, including killings.

Petain claimed that he was a "shield" for France, saving it from the more extreme Nazi occupation suffered by Poland and other countries.

The Vichy regime repealed France's liberal laws, restoring a pro-Catholic conservatism. France's right-wing political groups until recently extolled Petain as a national hero.

Under Petain, French Jewish citizens were captured and sent to Nazi camps, although at a lower percentage than in other countries, likely because of the success of the resistance movement in protecting Jews. Jackson documents that the Vichy government independently acted against Jewish citizens as much as from German coercion.

Jackson has written a series of definitive histories of France's World War II experience and its aftermath, including a highly praised biography of de Gaulle ,who led France after World War II and returned to power as head of the Fifth Republic from the late 1950s through 1969.

"France on Trial," published by Harvard University Press in August, is a major work that holds deep lessons for the United States and its imperiled democracy.

LSU professor Robert Mann resigns after right-wing agitator Jeff Landry elected as Louisiana's governor

LSU journalism professor Robert Mann will resign after the election of right-wing firebrand Jeff Landry as Louisiana's governor.

“My reasons are simple,” Mann said in a Sunday tweet. “The person who will be governor in January has already asked LSU to fire me. And I have no confidence the leadership of this university would protect the Manship School against a governor’s efforts to punish me and other faculty members.”

A professor at LSU's Manship School of Mass Communications for 18 years, Mann is an outspoken critic of the state's support for football and other sports to the detriment of academics.

Mann, who has previously clashed with Louisiana's attorney general, said he made the decision in anticipation that Landry will seek his removal. In response, the school's administration issued a statement asserting its support of freedom of speech and academic independence.

The tenured holder of the Manship Chair in Journalism, Mann said that he took the action because of his deep love for the university and that he wanted to spare the school and faculty members from possible political retribution.

Endorsed by former President Donald Trump, Landry won the governorship Saturday, surprising political observers by receiving 52 percent of the vote in the state's "jungle primary" to avoid a runoff.

As the state's attorney general for two terms, Landry fought Covid vaccine mandates, supported the state's harsh anti-abortion legislation and bans against gender care for trans youth, and joined a lawsuit in support of Trump's false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He frequently fought Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who is stepping down after eight years because of the state's term limit.

The professor battled Landry in December 2021 when Mann sponsored a resolution before the LSU faculty Senate calling for the university to follow Covid mandates for the testing of students.

An incensed Landry dispatched Assistant Attorney General Lauryn Sudduth to the governing body to read a letter opposing the mandates.

When Mann in a Twitter tweet assailed Landry for sending "a flunky" to the school, Landry demanded that LSU President William F. Tate IV take punitive action against Mann.

Tate relatedly issued a statement supporting Mann and academic freedom, but Mann considered it tentative, faulting Tate for not calling him directly to assure him that the administration "had his back."

Before coming to LSU, Mann served as an aide to Sens. John Breaux and Russell Long and Gov. Kathleen Blanco. A former reporter, Mann is a noted historian and political scientist who has written several well-regarded books.

He understands well the state's history of governors meddling with the university. Last year, LSU Press published Mann's "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU," which disclosed how Long sought to control the university and used the football team and band for his political advantage

As publisher of the Baton Rouge State Times and Morning Advocate, the Manship family opposed Long's regime, winning an important First Amendment ruling against the Kingfish in the U.S. Supreme Court. The benefactors of the LSU journalism school also stood out in the South for their support of integration.

Mann, who as a columnist for the then Times Picayune blasted former Gov. Bobby Jindal for severely cutting LSU's funding and who recently assailed the state's Legislature for refusing to fund a sorely needed new library, vows to keep speaking out when he leaves the university.

Louisiana needs his voice as Landry plans to turn the state into an even more repressive right-wing bastion.