'We can fight like the world depends on us.'

Nancy MacLean

     "I got DOGE'd today," said an academic sitting next to me last week at the opening session of the Organization of American Historians. Meaning, the National Endowment for the Humanities NEH grant funding her job had been axed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, part of the general dismantling of our government, like a house being torn down with the family still living inside.
     With higher education and honest American history also under siege, I decided to attend the OAH's plenary session, "Historians and the Attacks on Education."
     David W. Blight, of Yale, president of OAH, opened the evening.
     "We as historians perhaps never have faced this kind of assault that we are facing now," he said. "We are a have to figure out: How do we defend ourselves? Do we know how? We're not terrific at leading social movements. We're terrific at research about social movements."
     Four panelists expressed themselves well enough. Then Nancy MacLean, of Duke University, author of "Democracy in Chains," got up and briefly explained how we got here. I don't often hand my column over to someone else, but will do so now, editing her remarks for space.
     MacLean said:
     "The carnival of cruelty enabled by 47’s reelection has very deep roots. Three key groups have been: 1) predatory capitalists; 2) white supremacists; and 3) religious conservatives, led by conservative Protestants oblivious to the actual ethics of Jesus.
     "Their combined political power has waxed and waned over more than two centuries. It surged in the run-up to the Civil War, as enslavers and their allies aimed to hold power at any cost, including treason. It was subdued for a time by Reconstruction, then rose again after its members violently defeated America’s first taste of multiracial democracy.
     "During the Great Depression, that coalition’s partners were routed by mass working-class movements and new federal policy, only to resurge with the Red Scare after World War II, then be beaten back by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, despite what was proudly called 'massive resistance.'
     "Out of that 'massive resistance' came much more intentional coalition building over the last 50 years, building toward today’s bloody-minded determination and unified national power not seen since the 1850s.
     "Why so venomous and hell-bent now on revolutionizing America, no matter the toll? Because all three coalition partners are desperate. They see this as their last chance to impose their agenda. They know they won’t have another. Hence, the frenzy to act fast and break things.
     "Since the 1990s, predatory capitalists — above all from the fossil fuel sector — have seen their trillions in investments and expected future profits imperiled by social movements and international government action. So they have cultivated partners.
     "White supremacists who had never accepted civil rights victories then panicked at the election of Barack Obama in 2008, because they rightly saw the imminent end of white numerical and cultural dominance in a multiracial democracy.

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An apology

   So ... you may know I wrote a book about my dad. "Don't Give Up the Ship." Twenty years ago. I thought it was a loving book, but after it was published, he didn't talk to me for six months. Maybe closer to a year.
     It was not my intent to hurt my dad. I love my dad, and was glad we went on our adventure together.
     But hurt he was.
     And I had begged him, "Don't be too dumb to be proud, dad. Can't you say 'My son wrote a book about me. He took me to Venice. He put me up in the Gritti Palace'? Do you have to focus on me calling you a prick on page 203?"
    And the answer was yes, in fact, he did.
     That is the downside of being a writer who isn't simply rhapsodizing birds or explaining the Treaty of Ghent, but regularly shares his own interior life, such as it is. Sometimes you string your wet laundry out to dry and other people run into it and get tangled. You dampen their spirits, even deliver injuries, when you don't mean to.
     I thought Sunday's blog post was about an obscure, neurotic writer, aka me, at the American Organization of Historians conference, reeling from booth to booth, publisher to publisher, trying to be noticed. I did not consider what I wrote a misogynistic screed mocking powerless publishing employees, nor a sincere complaint about any particular organization.
     Particularly hurtful, I am told, were some reader comments which, honestly, I hadn't read, but waved in because they were from regular contributors. Had I read them — and I should have — I would never have posted them. 

      I don't have many writing rules, but one important rule is: don't shit where you live. Which I have done here, big time. So I have deleted the offending comments, and. trimmed the original post to excise elements that the prudent man — not me, obviously —would have never included in the first place.     

     Plus, I'd like to apologize to all university press employees everywhere who were hurt by my words. This is a difficult business in the best of years, and now, with ignorance triumphant and a carnival of cruelty being played out globally, it is even more so. We who care about words and meanings and facts and knowledge ought to stick together, not claw at one another. I know how painful life can be on the sunniest day, and don't want to be the cause of anyone feeling badly about themselves or what we do. Academic publishing has been good to me, and I did not mean to seem either critical or ungrateful. I always thought I was too careful to stumble into one of these pits. Clearly I was mistaken.

'Grandma, were you afraid to die?'

Maida Mangiameli with granddaughter Sloane in 2020.

     Happy birthday Sloane! Eight years old, tomorrow. Sorry about being early, but my column doesn't run on Tuesdays, and in my profession — newspapering; ask your grandmother about it — a day early is far better than a day late.
     We've never met. But your grandmother is a reader. She contacted me in October, wanting me to write something, and after patiently waiting for ... gee ... six months, told me the story about how your birth saved her life and how you inspire her every day.
     Which struck me as the sort of story a little girl should hear: how she saved a life, just by showing up. Because if you can do that, without even trying, imagine what else you may do someday.
     Your grandmother, Maida Mangiameli, lives — thanks to you — in Hawthorn Woods. When your mom, Kate, was pregnant with you, she did something many new mothers do — try to make the world as welcoming a place as she could for you.
     There isn't much that can be done about, say, the nation sliding toward totalitarianism. But she could make sure her daughter's grandmother wasn't smoking like a chimney.
     "I was a heavy smoker my entire adult life," Mangiameli said. "When my daughter and son-in-law told us we're going to be grandparents, they asked one thing: Could I please quit smoking?"
     Smoking is a terrible addiction — an addiction is when something is very bad for you, but you do it anyway, because you can't stop. Mangiameli had attempted quitting before.
     "I tried for my own two girls," she said. "But for that baby ..."
     It took a full year. But Mangiameli, now 75, gave up smoking. Which is when her troubles really started.
     "Within a day of that last cigarette, incessant coughing began," she said. "I went to Immediate Care for a chest x-ray. The doctor called me the next day and told me it was lung cancer."
     Around 90% of people who get lung cancer are smokers. Making the bad news worse: the thought that she'd brought it on herself.

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Assembling the IKEA cabinet of happiness

 

 
     So I went to the opening plenary at the Organization of American Historians at the Sheraton Thursday. It was a brisk walk across the Loop from Madison Street to North Water and Columbus Drive, and it put me in, shall we say, maximum high spirits, seeing the people, the buildings parallaxing by.
     I got there about 4:10 p.m., checked in for my press credentials.
    "I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times," I said. "Or what's left of it."
     Which is very on-brand for me — acknowledge the elephant in the room, say the unsaid thing, spill more of my business than is purely necessary. Shutting up, as I often also say, is an art form I struggle to master. Still.
     There was 20 minutes before I was supposed to meet a reader who is a member of the organization — her email lured me there — and there was a concourse filled with booths from book publishers. Why not plunge in?
     Here I did an unthinking thing. Regular readers know that in 2009 I took a trip out west with the boys, then 12 and 13. When it was over, I wrote a book about it, pieces of which pop up here from time to time, like dead fish floating to the surface of a poisoned pond. It was supposed to be a keepsake for them, but for that to happen someone would have to publish the thing. So I'd have something tangible to hand them someday. Otherwise its a bunch of electrons that could wink out of existence with a hard drive crash. And look, here were these publishers, all around me.
     So I blundered up to one after another who might in theory be interested. There was the University of Illinois Press, which I'd actually sent the manuscript to, years ago. They rejected it with a sniff of "Not an Illinois book," ("But it begins in Illinois!" I'd objected. "And ends there! And involves three Illinoisans on an adventure!" No dice).   
      To my credit, I did try to browse the spreads of new books — but honestly, while the covers were well-designed and they were all in English, the subjects didn't interest me. If I'd been encouraged to take whatever volumes I wanted home with me, I don't think I'd have snagged one.  The subjects were obscure, rococo and uninviting. 
     The only book I actually flipped through was "Food Autonomy in Chicago" by Pancho McFarland, published by the University of Georgia Press. Years ago I'd been to the The 70th Street Farm in East Englewood with Sarah Stegner, then chef at the Ritz, to check on her tomato plants, and somehow imagined that a book with that title might connect me to similar stories related to food autonomy. Stuff I could put in the paper.

     But honestly, I couldn't make sense of the table of contents — the words slid off the page. I didn't take notes on the chapters, and the media at the University of Georgia Press didn't respond to a request for the table of contents. But two paragraphs describing the book from the publisher might give a sense of the thing:

     This examination of a sector of the food autonomy movement in Chicago provides important new ways of understanding race relations, gender, sexuality, spirituality, pedagogy, identity, and their importance to the dynamics of social movements. Additionally, the book explores how revolutionary culture, principles, and organization of American Indigenous, diasporan Africans, anarchist Mexicans and others have been adopted, adapted, or rejected in our food movement.
     In this autoethnography of the food movement, McFarland argues that at our best we work to establish a new society like that theorized and enacted by Indigenous and Black anarchists. However, the forces of Wetiko (colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy) make the work of BIPOC food warriors difficult. Wetiko’s conceptual categories—including race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—influence our worldviews and affect our behaviors.

     Are you beginning to see what a book on three guys getting lost in Yellowstone Park might not find an eager publisher? I am. 
     Though not on the spot. I presented myself to several editors at several publishers, whose reaction could be best described as a sort of numb disinterest. Being with the Sun-Times meant nothing. Being a published author meant nothing.  I meant nothing.

     What did I expect? Them to leap up and embrace me. "Comrade!" 

     Eventually it came time to go upstairs for the talk — I plan to write about that Wednesday. Afterward, still not grasping the situation, I returned to the publishers' concourse to resume raking my fingers against the brick wall. 

     "We're looking for books about Native-Americans," said an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, when I finally paused for breath and could register the plea in her eyes, which said, in essence, "Please go away now."

      Suddenly I saw myself as if from afar. A gray-haired man, spewing nonsense. Really, had I been a bum, whoops, unhoused person, living on Lower Wacker Drive, and wandered up, with my layers of jackets and shiny pants and red ruined face and went from booth to booth, asking for a chaw of tobacco, I don't think my reception would have been much different. 

     Feeling quite eviscerated I collected what little remained of my pride the way a person who had actually been slashed across the abdomen by the razor of book publishing circa 2025 might collect his guts in both hands, and waddled out the door, trying not to step on his dragging entrails.

     I rode the train home, grim, and came home. grim, my mouth set, my wife's attempts to boost the mood water off a duck's ass. I grimly made myself  a plain dinner. Cashews. Cheese. A simple salad. Stuff that wouldn't boost my blood sugar. 

     Sometimes the only thing to do is go to bed and hope it makes sense in the morning. 

     And you know what? It did make sense in the morning. I blinked into the world, had one taste of stale grimness, a kind of mental drymouth, spat that out, and starting thinking, belatedly. 

     Looking back on the night before, I realized my mistake. Not right away. For maybe an hour I puzzled over it, like a guy trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet, holding a sheet of instructions in one hand and pawing through an unpromising mess of shiny metal screws and wooden dowels and plastic spacers in the other.

     But eventually an idea took shape, an that idea was this:

     It was my fault. 

     I should have parked my ego at the door. Shut up about the damned book already. I should have asked each publisher what their favorite new book was. Should have asked them about their visit to Chicago. Asked them anything. It's not all about me, obviously. I went in there hot, talking about myself, and should have resisted that and done my damn job. I had set myself up, dropped my guard. 

     How many times have I quoted that damn T.S. Eliot line about humility? It doesn't mean jack shit if you are not yourself humble. Which I'm not. But can be. With work. I've done. On occasion. It takes effort. You can sure as hell try. Harder than I thought to try Wednesday night.

     Not just try, as Yoda says. Do.  There is no try.

     But no shame there either. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you — that isn't T.S. Eliot, but also true. Realizing that it was my fault was very liberating, oddly. The world is the world. Every loser and headcase has a grievance. Certainly a better takeaway than, "You're a loser who can't get his books published." Today is a new chance, a bright shiny span of hours to use as I please. Learn from yesterday's sorrow then fling it away.

     There is an expression in Norwegian, "Du er din egen lykkesmed," which Google Translate puts into English as "You are the master of your own luck." Though my Norwegian friend Gry says it scans to locals as, "You are your own source of happiness." It's too easy, when something makes you unhappy to let it sit in your craw, festering, to accept it on face value, blame others — "Wah, those publishers were indifferent to me!" — when you can also spit it out, rinse, learn something. You have X days to live, and then you wink out forever. How many days, how many hours, are you willing to lose to unhappiness based on things beyond your control? Are you going to be happy? Or not? Your call. Don't look for outside validation. Your own happiness is always within you, though often hiding. You need to flush it out.

Works in progress: Andy Shaw

      I've been doing this columnist/blogger thing for so long that it's possible for me to forget that for many years I was a general assignment newspaper reporter, standing around courtrooms and government offices, waiting for various stories to unfold. And often political reporter Andy Shaw was there too, alongside in the media scrum. 
     We both moved on, me to whatever it is I'm doing here, he to the Better Government Association for a decade and, now, Substack. I've read the piece he links to, and if you'd like to discuss it below, feel free — I don't want to color the conversation, but let him sink, or swim, on his own merits.

     When he asked me to ballyhoo his latest endeavor I said, in essence, "Do it yourself." So take it away, Andy Shaw:

Andy Shaw

     I’ve been writing op ed columns for Chicago newspapers for years—occasionally while I was still covering politics at ABC 7, more frequently when I led the Better Government Association, and now as a good government nonprofit board member and semi-retired observer of the local scene. But I noticed that newspaper layoffs and buyouts prompted many columnists to migrate to Substack, which also appeared to be an increasingly viable option for me since local newspapers don’t pay for content and have become increasingly picky about what they do and don’t want. So voila—here I am!

Diversity more important than ever

John Jones

     The Organization of American Historians is meeting in Chicago this weekend. So if you don't mind, allow me to talk shop with 1,676 scholars and teachers.
     Can I put in a plug for DEI? Someone should. When President Trump roots out efforts to reflect the diversity of this country, he paints the idea of inclusion as some kind of undeserved sop.
     That isn't how I see it.
     Let me explain how diversity is reflected in my work. The 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was in 2021. I volunteered to write the newspaper's stemwinder article about the fire. Because I'm crazy.
     Kidding. Because I was writing a book of Chicago history, and stumbled upon an approach I thought could make the story sing. A huge peril of teaching history is boredom. When everybody knows a familiar story, or thinks they know: Mrs. O'Leary's cow, a lantern, and the reader drifts off.
     I had one fresh fact, pulled out of Carl Smith's book, "Chicago's Great Fire": Mary Todd Lincoln was living here at the time of the fire. This floored me. I had no idea. Smith tucked that in as an aside on Page 48.
     To me, it was fresh and fantastic. Lincoln's widow! In Chicago! One guideline I use is, if I don't know something, nobody knows. If a fact excites me, I can use it to excite others.
     I began the tale with how the summer of 1871 was terrible for Mrs. Lincoln — her beloved son Tad died, she sank further into mental illness. And then the city burned down around her.
     That start gave me my structure. I would hand the narrative from one witness to the next — the maligned O'Learys, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, the night watchman, a fireman. It wasn't a story about flames. But about people.
     The form gave me flexibility — I could include anybody who encountered the fire. Some fell into my lap — a seamstress, Mary Jones, who would be radicalized by the fire and become Mother Jones, an important labor figure.

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Good day in the city

     This space skews toward the negative — concerns about the national health, complaints about this or that, criticism of various and sundry, the constant airing of problems and worrisome situations.
     Even with occasional joyful forays into birds, food and etymology, happiness gets the short shrift.
     Though I am not — not not not — a complaining, querulous person. I hope. Rather I am, I believe, a generally happy person. Though you wouldn't know it, reading this blog.
     Why? Perhaps because happiness is so fleeting, or banal, or private. It feels uninteresting and gets overlooked, making me seem gloomier than I actually am, a suspicion that hit me suddenly standing on the Washington bridge Wednesday afternoon.
     Granted, I had just enjoyed an unusually restful, social day. Taking the 7:43 train downtown with my wife. Making phone calls in the Great Hall of Union Station, where I noticed a man photographing a stuffed toy frog. I ran over and interviewed him — that'll be in the paper eventually. I walked away buoyant, his life story tucked in my pocket like a $20 bill snagged from the sidewalk. Do I have a great job or what?

      Then to Lou Mitchell's — and how well does that perk up a day? A spinach and mozzarella omelet, well done. Thick toast. With a historian participating in the big conclave of the Organization of American Historians in Chicago this weekend. I'm going there Thursday afternoon.

      That lasted a couple hours. Just as we stepped out of Lou's into the rain, a cab pulled up and dropped someone off. So we cabbed over to River North, where I hung out at a Starbucks, then walked over to Gene & Georgetti to meet a pair of former colleagues, both retired. We spent another couple hours happily jawboning away, until we finally got up, with hugs and handshakes and promises to meet together soon.

     There was nothing to do but go home. Firing up a primo Rocky Patel Vintage 1990 brought along for just such a purpose, I walked it down Wacker Drive, the rain finally ended, the sun out, the afternoon waning.

     Crossing the Washington bridge, I glanced north, and saw the yellow Water Taxi steaming toward me. I love the water taxi. It's just a beautiful boat. And a sweet ride. Back when it cost $2, it was an astounding bargain, and now that it costs $5 it still is. I try to catch it whenever I can from the foot of Madison Street to the Wrigley Building. It's like taking a little vacation.

      Pulling out my phone, I took three shots, and then lowered the camera just in time to catch the eye of the water taxi operator, a bearded fellow. I raised my thumb and smiled. He raised his thumb in reply and smiled back.

     Bingo. That was it, happiness. And I realized happiness can be caused by many things, but connection to other people is key — whether talking for hours in a restaurant, or flashing a quick thumbs up to a guy you've never seen before and will never see again, but for a single second, shared a moment of optimism. Isn't everything great? Yes, everything is great. Right now, right here. 

     I paused at the Daily News Plaza, took up my usual position just north of the Madison Bridge, puffing away, looking at the river and the Civic Opera Building. I checked my email. There was a phone message from a reader, 88, who was unhappy. She has been a subscriber for as long as I had been alive, enjoyed my column mightily until recently. Because I had taken the Lord's name in vain — a trio of interjections of "Jesus!" — and she is a Christian. So she's scrapping her subscription, renouncing the folly of my column.

     I phoned her back — I told myself I shouldn't, but that doing so would spoil my mood. These calls never go well. But it was that very good mood that prodded me onward. Her daughter put her on the phone. She explained how she enjoys my writing about my boys, and loved watching them grow up in the newspaper, but she can't cotton having her Lord's name tossed about as an exclamation. I took a deep breath, then told her that I'm sorry; being Jewish, sometimes I miss the significance of such things, and that I apologize, renounce the sin, and hope that, being Christian, she could find it in her heart to forgive me.

     "It'll never happen again," I said, and she seemed satisfied, and I ended the call confident that I kept one reader from defecting from the fold. Sometimes that's all a person needs, to have their concerns heard and be treated with respect. We all need to be seen by each other, every now and then. It makes us happy.