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Red State: Blue State

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

Disgusted by the backstabbing and double-dealing that for centuries kept the Irish from throwing out the Brits, the hero of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man barks out, “Ireland is an old sow that eats her farrow.” Like Joyce’s character, we Nebraska peace activists may be tempted to liken our “Red State” to an old farrow-eating sow. Historically though, Nebraska was a ‘peace state.’

There’s no denying that in recent history Nebraska’s sow has eaten its share of farrow. We’ve intentionally turned aside from honoring perhaps our greatest peacemaker (and — as the biography the The Godly Hero demonstrates — our most influential policymaker), William Jennings Bryan, by deliberately removing his statue at the State Capitol.

The “standpatters” in the Republican Party tried to destroy Senator George W. Norris by pitting a grocer with the same name against him in the 1930 Republican Primary election to confuse voters when they marked their ballot.

And the one Republican federal official in the state who presently speaks for majority Nebraska opinion on the war is about to be consumed by that same old Republican sow. Accused of having been insufficiently supportive of Bush and Cheney’s war, Chuck Hagel should, one supposes, have just continued to lie when he found out about the non-existent WMDs, about the torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and about the cover-up, and just called this drift to fascism ‘democracy.’

True, we are almost the reddest of red states. We like red meat, Big Red, good red wars and vote for red presidents: 65½ percent for Ronald Reagan in 1980, 62 percent for Bush in 2000, an even higher 66 percent for him in 2004 — astonishingly high percentages for emperors without clothes. Lyndon Johnson, the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Nebraska, won the vote in 1964 only after he’d won the backing of Peter Kiewit, owner of one of the nation’s largest military construction companies and the Omaha World-Herald.

Why for over half a century have we voted for these warmongering military spenders? How did it happen that in just a couple of generations we managed to abandon and repudiate our historic peacemaking roots? Finding myself recently at the Comstock Windmill Country music festival, where thousands of good old Nebraska folks came to camp and drink beer and have innocent fun, I saw no Nebraskans for Peace stickers, no other peace signs, nothing to indicate disapproval of where we are going. I saw “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbons, “America — Love It or Leave It” and the whole gamut of ‘Kill the enemy’-style stickers and shirts. I heard ‘kick ass’ talk—this from the economic class to whom the war costs go and from whom the war dead come.

It was not always so.

Among the traditional Plains tribes, the ‘peace chiefs’ were almost always stronger than the ‘war chiefs’ until the U.S. Army forced the tribes into a Spartan-style resistance. Black Elk, the holy man of the Lakota, refused to use the “soldier’s weed” to destroy his white enemy, though he learned its power in his great vision.

Few of us of European descent in the state did not have ancestors who fled here to escape the militarism and conscription of their native lands.

Nebraska has great peacemaking religious traditions — the Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren and some important Methodist and Catholic groups. Nebraska exhibited widespread opposition to the Spanish-American War. Indeed, our own state legislature voted against its continuation, the Philippine-American War, asserting it to be a colonialist war.

William Jennings Bryan, with one campaign for president already under his belt, made his own study of the Spanish- American War as a volunteer officer, and summarily rejected its premises. After his second failed presidential bid in 1900, he began to read Tolstoy’s nonviolence manifestoes, publicly declaring himself a pacifist and making a pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s home in Yasnaya Polyana in December 1903. After that visit, Bryan commonly had a photo of Tolstoy hanging in his office. In the period between 1904 and 1908, Bryan intensified his attacks on militarism, monopoly capitalism and imperialism. And in 1908, in his third and final presidential campaign, he actually ran as a pacifist — bearing Tolstoy’s endorsement for his support for the rights of workers and farmers and his attacks on militarism and capitalism.

As Wilson’s Secretary of State the “Commoner” advocated — as alternatives to war — mediation, international tribunals, non-aggression treaties. Though his nonaggression treaties designed to head off the Great War were unsuccessful, he prepared the way for a larger reliance on international authority and law. As America’s only nonviolent Secretary of State, he resigned in 1915 to protest Wilson’s “preparedness” campaign to smooth America’s entry into what George Kennan has called “history’s most useless war.” The last of Bryan’s Tolstoyan gestures was the forlorn Scopes trial where he fought the teaching of evolution — and did so as the historian of evolutionary theory, Stephen Jay Gould, demonstrates — because he feared that “Social Darwinism” would be used to justify militarism.

George Norris’s speech opposing American entry into World War I, associated the militarism of the period with Military-Industrial Complex profiteering, and came with his vote against the war. After the WWI, both Bryan and Norris supported stronger international controls on our war-fighting impulses: Bryan with some realistic alterations of Wilson’s League of Nations’ treaty that would almost certainly have gotten it passed and prevented World War II; Norris with a drastic disarmament proposal aimed at the larger militaristic countries. Norris also supported a world court with binding arbitration powers when sovereignties threaten war. Norris continually opposed militarism through the ’30s, and his Nebraska continued to have many peace organizations.

The fatal sea change that took Nebraska from a liberal blue state to conservative red one can be traced to four major cultural, political and economic developments during the 1930s-40s.

First, the filming of “The Virginian” in 1929, and the succeeding spate of Western films, propagated the notion that the true Westerner was a gun-slinging, law-creating inheritor of the military traditions of the Old South. He was not, as he historically had been, the scion of European peasants who hated the military. A new pseudo-Plains culture appeared. The localized ethnic cultures of farm and village were killed by the mass media; by the destruction of Populist rural farms and communities by the rural unsettling of 1890-1910; and by the Great Depression of the ’30s when Nebraska suffered its own “Okie” out-migration.

Second, Nebraska’s statewide newspaper of record, the Omaha World-Herald, shifted from a mildly progressive position to a very conservative one as its founder, Gilbert Hitchcock, was replaced by his sonin- law, Henry Doorly, in 1934. A little later — in 1963 — one of America’s largest military construction contractors, Peter Kiewit, owner of Peter Kiewit Sons, bought the World-Herald, making its near news monopoly the vehicle of his political vision.

Third, the siting, in Omaha in the ‘40s, of the Glenn Martin airplane factory (which made the Enola Gay that dropped the Abomb on Hiroshima) and later of the Strategic Air Command directly tied Omaha’s economy to the use of military airpower and made Omaha an emblem of “Fortress America.” Once SAC and STRATCOM were firmly on board the Pentagon gravy train, it was easy for Omaha to reach for more gravy, particularly as the old sources of economic energy, like the stockyards and other agriculturally based industries, departed to more rural sites.

Fourth, all of this was part of a larger economic and political shift that, in the terrible economic times of the 1880s-90s and again in the depressed 1930s, destroyed the culture of the small farm that gave life to visions of peace and economic justice. Nebraska went from having 50 percent of its population on farms to under five percent — in effect killing off the Jefferson’s democratic dream of independent landholders. The Farm Bureau, essentially a large farmer-insurance company combine, purported to represent the few farmers that remained. And the unions, denuded of power by what Truman called the “slave labor act” — the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 — were forced to look inward.

Though World War II was caused by the knuckleheadedness of our post World- War I failure to support a strong League of Nations and World Court in 1918, and our complicity in allowing a vindictive Versailles Treaty to go ahead, it gave us the sense that we were fighting a ‘worth it’ war. We had Nazis to stop and a “yellow peril” to contain. And though we prevented most Jewish refugees from Nazism from coming to our shores during WWII and did nothing to protest the concentration camps, after the war we told ourselves that we were fighting to prevent the genocide of the Chosen People.

We emerged from World War II proud, the world’s one superpower, the only possessor of nuclear weapons, and promptly saw the whole heroic fable we had composed about ourselves fighting Nazism and the concentration camps being re-played in our battle against Stalinism and the gulags. The World-Herald, the war-mongering spirit of SAC Commander, General Curtis LeMay, and the popular cultural productions so effectively dissected in the film “Atomic Café” galvanized us to fight with Joe McCarthy against “Communists” everywhere, especially egghead Communists.

Once the “standpatters” had organized the economy, popular culture, and the media to serve militaristic visions during the ’40s and ’50s, little remained but to count the ballots already marked in people’s heads. The peace roots of our history had gone dormant.

One could go to later Nebraska contrarian movements — the conscientious resisters of World War II; Dwight Dell’s 1952 campaign for the Senate opposing the Korean War; UNL physicist Herbert Jehle’s leadership in “Omaha Action,” only the second U.S. protest against ICBMs targeted at the Soviet Union (Herbert was a student of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a correspondent of Albert Einstein concerning what peace requires); Carl Davidson’s formulations concerning the relationship between universities and militarism while a graduate student at UNL; Rural Nebraskans for Peace’s 1968 action agenda leading into 1970s NFP; the Nebraskans active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. One could point to the work of my wife Betty as NFP State Coordinator; of Sen. Ernie Chambers and Hughes and Lela Shanks who brought civil rights and peacemaking together; of Marilyn McNabb and the other organizers of the Nuclear Freeze and NO MX movements. One could speak of Larry Zink’s groundbreaking efforts to establish a statewide NFP presence and make Nebraska a ‘peace state’ once again; of Loyal and Mary Alice Park’s Cat Lovers Against the Bomb Calendar work; Don Tilley’s Peace Park; and a host of other activities too numerous to mention.

It is my belief though that, even now, our deepest roots are not red. Our best have not favored red meat violence as the road to a good society. We now have new media tools and a new generation ready to return to our roots. We can do it. And if we again eat our farrow in 2008, what hope for us?