Confederate flag over South Carolina + photos

I originally wrote this article in the summer of the weird year 2000--remember the computer glitches that were supposed to happen but didn't and the 5 to 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that put George W. Bush in the White House, and numerous nutty events in between, including this flag issue?--and I submitted it to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from my city of residence at the time, Columbia, SC.  The version below is one I submitted to 'em again in June 2010 for use in their Sunday editorial section--different editor by then--and again, no response.  With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in progress, I'll probably try again with a new version of this article. 

[Update July 1, 2020, twenty years after the flag came down from atop the dome of the SC State House: See South Carolina State House entry on Wikipedia for updated flag placement history. It does not, however, mention civil rights activist Bree Newsome's climbing the 30-foot flagpole and pulling the flag down on June 27, 2015, ten days after Dylann Roof's murder of nine members of the  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.]

Ten years ago I was walking across the arbor-like grounds of the South Carolina state capitol when I was stopped by a man wearing a denim shirt, blue jeans, well-used cowboy boots, and a battered cowboy hat.   He was about my age, 40-something, and resembled some farmers and farmhands I knew when I was growing up in Southeast Arkansas.  The large creases around his eyes told of years spent working in the sun

He nodded toward a patch of cleared ground and asked, “Is this where they’re gonna put that thing from Africa?”

In my Birkenstocks and wire-frame glasses, I may have looked like a New York liberal.   Being instead an Arkansas-bred liberal, I chose to interpret his derogatory reference to the African-American History monument as a good old boy’s request for factual information. My own history told me that responding indignantly—like a New York liberal—would have been merely rising to take the bait.

Although I knew the groundbreaking ceremony had occurred, I wasn’t sure where the monument would be constructed.    I glanced at the circular patch of dirt and said, “It looks like they’re gonna put something there.”

A moment passed.  I began walking off.  I heard him make a comment about “a 30-foot pole,” but he wasn’t speaking directly to me.  A woman was with him, his wife apparently, and she provided the necessary audience.  I kept walking.

     High above this brief encounter, on the single flagpole atop the capitol dome, two flags flew where three had been flying only a few weeks earlier.  The missing flag was the Confederate battle flag, which had flown above the capitol since 1962.  It was and is clear to most people that a Confederate flag does not belong on a flagpole on the grounds of any statehouse in the United States.  But the honor and glory of a defeated South can cloud some people’s thinking, especially in South Carolina, and especially after a viewing of Gone With the Wind, which was re-released in 1961, the Centennial of the beginning of the Civil War.

     When the rectangular Confederate flag atop the capitol dome came down on July 1, 2000, a slightly different Confederate battle flag—the “Southern Cross,” square with a white border, like the one shown flying above the panorama of dying and wounded Confederate soldiers in the Atlanta train depot scene in Gone With the Wind—was raised on a new flagpole on the north side of the capitol grounds.  It still flies there, next to the Confederate soldiers’ memorial monument “erected by the women of South Carolina” in 1879.  [Updates:  2015, 2018]

     The last bit of legislative compromise in the South Carolina statehouse that resulted in this rather meaningless change of location and pedigree for the Confederate flag concerned how tall the new flagpole should be.  One side said 20 feet, the other side said 30 feet.  I thought a compromise would have logically resulted in a 25-foot pole, but wasn’t sure and couldn’t tell by looking when I passed by it on that Sunday in July ten years ago.

I’d been walking across the capitol grounds that day on one of my frequent treks to the Capitol News Stand on Main Street. After I made my purchase and came out of the store, there was my “thing from Africa” acquaintance with his apparent wife. If he’d thought I was a New York liberal before, he now had evidence. I was carrying a copy of The New York Times.     

   I smiled a friendly smile—people in South Carolina, black and white, often smile and speak when passing one another on the street—and then a thought occurred to me. It was my turn to question him. Nodding toward the Confederate monument I said, “Is that a 30-foot flagpole?”

He answered in the affirmative, and then seized the moment he’d let pass earlier.  “But the flag oughta be up there—,” he turned and pointed toward the copper dome of the capitol, “on the top, where it belongs!”   I had seen and felt the antagonism of the “Keep It Flying” fanatics on the capitol grounds the day the flag on the dome came down and the other Confederate flag simultaneously went up next to the monument.

       There was no honor or glory in their rowdy behavior, or in the way they draped themselves in the Confederate flag.  It was merely more foolishness, like the foolishness of an all-white legislature that had resulted in the flag being placed atop the capitol dome 38 years earlier.  The only moment of truth I witnessed that day was the singing of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” written by Robbie Robertson, a Canadian who learned about the South by spending time in Arkansas with Levon Helm and his parents.  The song in no way suggests the South should have been the winning side in the Civil War.

My response to the man’s opinion that the Confederate flag should be on top of the capitol, flying beneath the United States flag and the South Carolina state flag, was to say “Some people don’t agree with that,” and then head on down the sidewalk.

As it turned out, the spot he asked me about is where the African-American History monument now stands.  The monument fits in well with its surrounding environment, pays tribute to both suffering and accomplishment, and is a long overdue testament to historical accuracy.

     None of these attributes applies to a Confederate flag officially sanctioned by the South Carolina legislature to fly on the statehouse grounds.  Thanks to a majority of South Carolina legislators, past and present, the flag has unfortunately become more of a racist symbol than it would have been otherwise.  Its proper place is in a museum along with the lesser known flags of the Confederacy, such as the “Stars and Bars” flag.  The 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War next year would be a good time for the flag to be put in its proper place. 

See the Wikipedia article on Flags of the Confederacy, which includes mention of the South Carolina controversy.

Einstein, relative rest, and invariance in physics

Well, my 21st century writing about relativity finally did get published, on the "Voices" page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, on November 3, 2007, almost exactly seven years after I started working on it and tried to interest the NY Times and Harper's magazine, without success. Publication on the Voices page meant there was no payment involved. It was really just a long letter to the editor labeled a "Guest Column." Here it is, slightly edited for clarity that was lacking in the published version:


Once upon a time, in the fall of 1977, I had the perfect job. I was a night watchman at the Old State House, usually working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. My job was to make rounds through the building every hour. The job was perfect because I was a full-time student at UALR, and making a round took only ten minutes. In theory, I had 50 minutes out of each hour for studying.

In practice, I tended to read whatever interested me and to put off working on my homework as long as possible. I also had the luxury of being able to explore the Old State House all by myself whenever I felt like it. Procrastination, of course, is not an uncommon activity among college students. My happy situation was that I was getting paid for it—with a portion of your Arkansas tax dollar.

Or maybe it was your parents’ or grandparents’ dollar. Whatever the case may be, I’d like to now offer a little in the way of a return on that 30-year investment. I’d like to pass along a little bit of scientific knowledge.

During the fall of 1977, I was taking a beginning class in relativity and quantum mechanics. A good deal of my extracurricular reading during the evenings at the Old State House involved those subjects. Among other things, I was trying to find out if relativity really should be associated with the saying “It’s all relative.” I’d read that statement in a newspaper article about the virtuoso violinist and former child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin, who was asked what he’d learned from his acquaintance with Albert Einstein. Menuhin claimed to have learned from Einstein the same thing everyone else had learned, namely that “everything is relative.”

What I’ve learned over the years is that Einstein’s theory means the opposite of what it sounds like it means. When I started teaching physics about ten years ago, I came up with a way of paraphrasing the usual textbook description of the two ideas Einstein used in creating his theory. The ideas, or postulates, can be stated as 1) the laws of physics are not relative, and 2) the speed of light is not relative.

Those are the requirements that went into relativity. In actually finding equations for laws that satisfy these ideas, Einstein rewrote Newton’s laws of motion, simplified the laws of electricity and magnetism, and discovered several new laws, the most well known of which is the equivalence of energy and mass, E = mc².

Besides the laws themselves, other mathematical entities are invariant in relativity. In particular, space, time, and the speed of light combine together in a simple equation for an invariant quantity called “proper time.” (This is a mistranslation from the French word propre, meaning “own”.) Proper time is the time you read on your own watch. Since you and your watch never move relative to each other, you never observe your own watch to speed up or slow down--contrary to the popular misconception of time slowing down the faster you travel. The slowing down of time is only valid when you compare your time to the time of the clocks in another rest frame, such as the one you left when you went moving off on your own. "Moving on your own," however, is just like not moving at all. That is the real message of relativity.

Relativity is not the name Einstein chose for his theory. He would have preferred it to be called the theory of invariants. This misnaming can be blamed on several of Einstein’s older contemporaries, including the French mathematician Henrí Poincaré and the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein unfortunately in his first relativity paper in 1905 used the accepted terminology of the time and called his first postulate "the principle of relativity". He later objected to his entire theory being called relativity, but he acquiesced to common usage among physicists in 1915 when he named his theory of gravity the general theory of relativity.

Gerald Holton, the grand old man of Einstein studies and an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard, wrote something of an off-the-beaten-path book published in 1996 called “Einstein, History and Other Passions.” Holton neatly summarizes the relative/relativity name confusion: “The cliché became, erroneously, ‘everything is relative’; whereas the point is that out of the vast flux one can distill the very opposite: ‘some things are invariant.’”

So, “everything is relative” may be a balm of hurt minds, but physicists are looking for those things in the universe that are invariant. Invariance, by the way, is related to symmetry, but you’ll have to look that up for yourself.

Update March 14, 2012, Einstein’s 133^rd birth anniversary:

Relativity is more about relative rest than relative motion. The question is, can you put yourself in any situation where you can actually say you're NOT at rest? In other words, can you do experiments that will show you are moving?

Constant velocity, with which we are all quite familiar, is just like not being in motion, and so is constant acceleration, as long as it’s either  straight line acceleration or centripetal acceleration (such as going around a curve in a car, or being on an orbiting planet or, in your imagination, on an orbiting electron). The forces we feel during either type of acceleration are, in general relativity, attributable to an equivalent acceleration due to a gravitational field.

There is one type of motion that can’t be considered equivalent to being at rest.  If you had the proper equipment you could do measurements right now that would tell you you’re moving. Yes, being “at rest” on the surface of the earth is the exact type of motion that can’t be considered rest, because Earth is rotating. Earth’s revolving around the sun is relative motion, but earth’s rotation isn’t.  It can be measured by a Foucalt pendulum.  (The large pendulums you see in some science museums are Foucalt pendulums—okay, you could say “pendula” if you insist. They swing in one plane of motion while the earth rotates under them.  Their pivots must be as friction-free as possible to keep them swinging with the same amplitude for a long time.)

Some physicists think (and write and calculate) that even rotation is covered by general relativity as a case of being at rest. I’ll have to get back to you on that, due to my relative ignorance on the subject.

Huey Long Spends a Night in Pine Bluff

“Kingfish” Huey Long Spends the Night

At 4006 Cherry Street in Pine Bluff

By David Trulock

Senators Huey P. Long of Louisiana and Hattie W. Caraway of Arkansas spent the first day of August in 1932 speaking in five south Arkansas cities on the first leg of an eight-day campaign to promote Mrs. Caraway’s re-election. Pine Bluff was their final stop on that hot August day that had turned to evening by the time they spoke to a large crowd at the Missouri Pacific Park on East Sixth Avenue.

After giving their speeches, both Caraway and Long repaired to the Hotel Pines.  In those days, even a venerable establishment like the Pines was still dependent on ceiling fans and oscillating fans for cooling.  Mrs. Caraway presumably spent the night there, along with others traveling in the political caravan.  According to the next day’s newspapers, however, one of Huey Long’s supporters offered him a better deal—a cooler place to sleep—and he accepted.

Pre-history of 1932 Campaign

Hattie Caraway had only recently been appointed to fill the Senate seat of her husband, Thaddeus Caraway, who’d died unexpectedly on November 6, 1931.  The appointment also involved a special election.  An article written some fifty years later by Patrick Kelly, a freelance journalist from Magnolia, described the nature of the election: [i]

Governor Harvey Parnell appointed Mrs. Caraway to take his [Mr. Caraway’s] seat in the Senate, pending a special election in January 1932.  Custom dictated, however, that the governor’s appointee be given the Democratic nomination (hence, victory) for that election.  After some infighting among the Democrats, Mrs. Caraway was nominated in December, and on January 12, 1932, she was elected against token opposition.

Then, very unexpectedly, Hattie Caraway decided to run against real opposition in the real election, or what amounted to the real election, the Democratic primary of August 9, 1932.  She and Huey Long had seats next to each other in the senate chamber, and were in agreement on most issues, but, according to Caraway’s published diary, Silent Hattie Speaks, she was initially not a fan of his loud, long-winded oratory.  Nevertheless, when Long offered to help her on what became a statewide whirlwind campaign —“the first Arkansas had ever seen,” according to Patrick Kelly—she could hardly refuse.

Caraway and Long in Pine Bluff

Long, of course, was doing most of the speaking on the tour.  He and his entourage also introduced into the campaign a portable public address system known as the sound truck, of which he had two.  While one truck was amplifying sound (recorded music was used prior to the speeches), the other would travel to the next town on the schedule and be ready when Long and Caraway arrived.  Long also provided thousands of campaign leaflets carried in two vans that followed the same leapfrog pattern as the trucks.

On that first day of August, when the caravan made stops in Magnolia, El Dorado, Camden, Fordyce and Pine Bluff, the temperature had reached 103, according to the next morning’s Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, which opened its banner-headlined article about Long and Caraway’s visit to the city by discussing the fast-paced nature of the campaign tour, while also giving a nod to the heat at the end of the second paragraph:

Kingfish Huey P. Long of Louisiana roared into Pine Bluff on a tailwind last night to climax the first day of his joint stumping tour with Mrs. T. H. Caraway, telling an enormous crowd of southeast Arkansas residents that “the classes are trying to destroy this little woman who is the friend of the masses.”

For nearly an hour the fiery Louisiana senator, who dropped eight other campaigns in which he is interested in various parts of the south to pick up the standard of the nation’s first woman senator, roared appeals in her behalf to a sweating but thoroughly interested audience.

Long used the “little woman” epithet to refer to Hattie Caraway throughout the campaign.  That would not be acceptable today, even though it was literally true in Caraway’s case.  On the other hand, Long’s catchphrases regarding the classes versus the masses are very much in harmony with today’s discussions of income inequality, except no one today could match Long in his fervent use of Biblical quotations to support the cause.

The Pine Bluff Commercial, the afternoon paper, opened its August 2^nd article about the Caraway-Long campaign tour with a report on Long’s speech given that morning in Stuttgart.  The news of the previous night’s speeches in Pine Bluff, having been reported by the Graphic that morning and thus being old news by afternoon, was relegated to the middle of the article.

But perhaps there was another reason the Commercial was less effusive than the Graphic about the presence of  Huey Long in Pine Bluff. The editor of the Graphic, Edgar B. Chestnutt, was responsible—or at least claimed responsibility—for bringing Long to Pine Bluff.  In a page-one sidebar to the main article about Long’s and Caraway’s speeches, the Graphic reported that Chestnutt, “at whose invitation the Kingfish visited here,” made a presentation to Long after the speeches were over, saying:  “Senator … you have a nickname that never has been formally and officially given to you … we usurp the authority somewhere to formally and officially name you ‘the Kingfish.’”

The article continues:  “Wherewith he [Long] was presented with a beautiful floral design of a large fish, wearing a gold crown, the idea of Ben A. Pearson of the Pearson Flower and Garden Shop.”

Where Huey Long Spent the Night

Despite the differences in their coverage of the Caraway-Long political speeches, both the Graphic and the Commercial ended their articles with a few paragraphs on where Long spent the night of August 1^st.

The Commercial:

At the conclusion of his speech he retired to the Hotel Pines here and from there went to the home of Clarence Philpot.

He became acquainted with Mr. Philpot while the paving contractor was engaged in work on Louisiana highways, and appeared in Mr. Philpot’s behalf after paving equipment had been damaged by dynamite explosion on a Louisiana job, getting help for Mr. Philpot in the form of a state appropriation to partially cover the damage.

The Graphic:

Immediately after the speaking, Sen. Long returned to the Pines Hotel, where he had been making headquarters, shook hands with many of his friends, and went out to be the guest for the night of C. E. Philpot, Pine Bluff contractor, whose equipment was dynamited by radicals in Louisiana and for whom Sen. Long personally appeared before the legislature and obtained financial restitution for Mr. Philpot.

“Have you got a sleeping porch, Mr. Philpot?” asked the senator when extended an invitation to be his house guest.

“Yes, a nice cool one,” replied the host.

“Let’s go,” answered the Kingfish, and he pushed through the crowd in his room and disappeared.

Huey P. Long apparently had a knack for disappearing right after his speeches.  The Graphic concluded its sidebar about Long being presented the “Kingfish” floral bouquet with this description of his response:  “‘Thank you, put it in the car and let’s take it to the hotel,’ the Kingfish said, elbowing his way through the crowd.”

Addendum

Clarence Philpot lived at 4006 Cherry Street in 1932, in the house my family later lived in (1963-2007).  For a photo showing the sleeping porch see “When We Moved To Pine Bluff,” in the Spring 2014 issue of the Quarterly.  The caption on the photo referred to the sleeping porch as a sunroom, to Huey Long as being Louisiana’s governor when he was “rumored” to have slept there, and to Clarence Philpot as a former Jefferson county judge.  [In this web version of the article, the photo is shown below. It was taken in August or September of 1963 by my dad, Walter Trulock III.]

In the present article, each of these misidentifications has been corrected except the last:  Clarence’s older brother Charles M. Philpot was the Jefferson County judge, not Clarence.  As county judge from 1910 through 1916, Charles was involved with the construction of the Dollarway in 1913-14.

Charles Philpot died at his daughter’s home in Birmingham, Alabama in 1935[ii], the same year Huey Long was assassinated by the son a political rival.  Clarence Philpot died in the house at 4006 Cherry Street on August 14, 1937, at age 71, of a heart attack brought on by injuries he sustained when hit by a car in Moscow (Arkansas) in late 1936.[iii]

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[i] “Whirlwind Campaign Sent Caraway to Senate,” Arkansas Gazette, December 19, 1982, page 1C.

[ii] “Judge Philpot Dies at Home of His Daughter,” Pine Bluff Commercial, March 30, 1935, page 1.

[iii] “C. E. Philpot Dies of Heart Attack Today,” ibid, August 14, 1937, page 1.