A Personal Story of Why I See Immigrants As Patriots

In May of 1775 as a set of my 4th and 5th great grandparents set sail for America from Belfast on a 350-ton brig named The Pennsylvania Farmer, they already knew what civil war was like.

But they probably hadn’t heard yet about the clash less than two weeks earlier on Lexington Green between colonial militiamen and British Army regulars.

Nor were they aware that the makings of the revolution and even after, in places such as North Carolina where they planned to settle was already more like a civil war.

Four years earlier, in the Battle of Alamance, North Carolinians fighting as colonial militia on behalf of the Royal Governor defeated North Carolinian rebels known as Regulators.

The ship my ancestors were on had meant to dock in Charleston, South Carolina.

But cross-Atlantic voyages at the time, even aboard a ship as fast and maneuverable as a two-masted brig were often blown off course and forced to land at other ports.

So on July 1, 1775 The Pennsylvania Farmer (similar to the brig shown in the image in this essay) dropped my ancestors off in Baltimore instead.

Soon Thomas and Hannah McCrory along with my 17-year-old 4th great grandfather James plus some other relatives began trekking down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on the Great Wagon Road.

They were at the tail end of the Great Migration of 200,000 Scots-Irish who immigrated here between 1717 and 1775, most settling inland along the Appalachians and western Piedmont.

They were Presbyterians of differing factions whose lowland Scottish ancestors had been transplanted to Northern Ireland by the British.  Even in religious, they understood civil war.

It is from their folk music, by the way, that country music spawned.

Initially it was successive droughts in Northern Ireland that drove them to leave.  My ancestors, though, were weavers who also left because the linen market had collapsed and British estates had cancelled the land they leased.

Shortly after passing through the relatively new Moravian settlement of Salem, North Carolina (part of present-day Winston-Salem,) they planned to cut south on the Georgia Road to their final destination Waxhaw, North Carolina.

It was an area just south of the village of Charlotte where the month after their departure from Belfast, the defiant Mecklenburg Resolves had been signed as one of the earliest declarations of Independence.

But it may have been at Salem, that one of my 4th great grandfathers, James McCrory, decided to settle 28 miles east instead at a new crossroads that had sprung up around the Guilford Courthouse the year before, while Thomas and Hannah continued a hundred miles further south to Waxhaw.

After less than a year as Americans, Thomas enlisted as a captain overseeing a company of troops in the 9th North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army commanded by Col. John P. Williams.

James also enlisted first under his father and then seemingly transferred to another company in the same regiment under Captain Ramsey.

Ironically, this is also when North Carolina purchased their old ship The Pennsylvania Farmer in New Bern and began to arm her as the centerpiece of the colony-soon-to-be-state’s Navy.

The regiment soon marched north to join General Washington in Middlebrook, NJ.  They soon engaged the British Army in battles at Brandywine and Germantown where my 5th great grandfather was apparently mortally wounded in action.

His body must have been taken home to Waxhaw because he is buried near there on Mint Hill.

James eventually served in nearly every major battle in the Southern campaign including at Guildford Courthouse before marrying after the war and heading over the mountains in 1783 into Tennessee and eventually down along the Tombigbee River.

But why leave North Carolina?  After Generals Greene and Cornwallis left the state, the nearly seven year Revolutionary War soon concluded in victory of Americans.

But in North Carolina, the vacuum meant the civil war continued to rage on between loosely organized gangs of armed men terrorized Tar Heels while presenting themselves as either revolutionaries or loyalists.

Totally undisciplined, according to the late Dr. William S. Powell in his book entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, they were more like “robbers.”

These partisan gangs “burned houses, murdered men, and attacked women indiscriminately,” terrorizing large areas of the state while taking hundreds of prisoners hostage.

Normalcy wouldn’t come to North Carolina for nearly a decade.

Powell reminds us that during this period there were almost 350,000 people living here, a quarter in bondage with no hope of freedom and a third of those who were white still loyal to Great Britain.

Even after the war, only 40% of Tar Heels were un-ambivalent about Independence.  A faction known as “conservatives” wanted a return to prewar ideals and conditions including renewal of trade with England.

Back then they even wanted to “tap the breaks” on Independence.  Another known as “radicals” or “rioters” wanted even more change.

Sound familiar?  I obviously come from a long line of moderates.  But during that time Tennessee was part of North Carolina which had been granting land their to soldiers and their families.

My McCrory ancestors were close to the family of later US President Andrew Jackson both because they lived in the same Waxhaw district but also because Jackson’s brother married a Crawford relative of James’ mother Hannah.’'

Judging by the year, Jackson, my 4th great grandparents James and Jane McCrory along with his brother Thomas, Jackson’s friend, all migrated to Tennessee together in 1783, during this period of anarchy.

But life there was anything but peaceful.

While living on land along Cripple Creek, James was fired on by Indians just north of the Cumberland River in 1792.

By 1811 when my 3rd great grandmother Sarah Ann McCrory was born, her parents had purchased land down in the recently opened Mississippi Territory, along the Tombigbee near the western border of what five years later would become Alabama.

It was a still a tense time for the young family.  A civil war soon broke out within the Creek Nation of Native Americans due to a hostile faction known as the “Red Sticks” because of of the red war clubs they used.

It soon spilled over with the massacre of settlers.  In addition, there was the threat of invasion by the British via New Orleans as war broke out again in 1812.

This in turn drew General Andrew Jackson’s troops down from Tennessee in defense, along his friend my 4th great grandfather’s brother, Col. Thomas McCrory, who had built a two story cabin in 1790 along what is now Old Hickory Blvd. in Forest Hills, Tennessee.

The cabin is now on the National Register of History Places.

When the old solider, James McCrory finally died in his 80s, my great-great-grandmother Sarah Ann headed to Illinois and then across Iowa with her family hoping to make it into my native Rockies.

She died in route, just south of Des Moines, in the harsh winter of 1847 but it is in part from her daughter Amanda, who was five at the time, that I draw my 5th generation Idaho roots.

McCrorys were late comers compared to all but a couple of lines of ancestors who immigrated to America in the 1850s and 60s.  Most had been here since the 1600s.

But uncovering their story and placing it in context makes me even more proud to be an American.

Contrasting Americans in 1943

I guess I’m not surprised that most Americans seem more exhausted and detached rather than incensed at what’s happening in Syria.  I certainly have been.  Forces that gridlock us today seem eerily similar to those following the First World War, which resulted in the creation of modern-day Syria.

For more than a decade now, Gallup polls have shown that fewer than a third of Americans think our country should build democracy abroad.  Barely half want us even to defend human rights.

These findings remind me though of another poll in the spring of 1943, barely 18 month after America had entered WWII and still two years before its conclusion.  First, some context might be useful.

In the years between the world wars, America had been gridlocked by a blend of isolationists.

This included Republicans who blocked the League of Nations and conservatives from both political parties who demonized immigrants and immigration while promoting economic segregation during a Gilded Age not unlike the one spawned over the past three decades.

This isolationist blend also featured hate groups such as the huge second coming of the Ku Klux KIan along with over 100 groups forcefully promulgating anti-Semitism, ultimately including both Holocaust enablers and deniers.

Caring Americans did not have near the intensity or energy that the vast majority who were self-centered, intolerant, inflexible and bigoted did.  Sound familiar?

In 1939, a poll of Americans was conducted by Elmo Roper, who pioneered the first scientific national opinion polls.  It was taken a few months after Nazi Germans had herded nearly 30,000 Jewish people into one of three concentration camps.

One was Dachau which my father’s U.S. Army battalion would liberate seven years later (one of his photos of a gas oven there is shown above.)

Even after news reports of this Kristallnacht spread here, the poll showed that fewer than 4-in-10 Americans felt Jews should be treated like other people and 53% believed they were different and should be “restricted.”

Ten percent even wanted them deported from America.   In May of that year, Southern Senators threatened President Roosevelt, if as indicated, he dared grant permission for a ship of Jewish refugees including many incarcerated in Dachau to dock in America.

Entry into the war chastened Americans and within a year and a half, another poll by Roper showed that three quarters felt that after the war, American should play a larger global role.

Nearly the same proportion believed America should “plan to help other nations get on their feet,” and half concurred with active involvement in an International organization with “a court and police force.”

President Roosevelt’s moral leadership was also rewarded with 7-in-10 approving of his handling of the war and 2-out-3 favoring a fourth term.  Most of the wars since then such as Vietnam and Iraq haven’t met the moral leadership test.

Some presidents even bucked public opinion to keep us out of war, such as when retired Five Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, eager to end the Korean War, brushed aside a poll showing half of all Americans willing to drop “the bomb” on what was then termed Red China.

Recently President Obama has tried to do the same while also recognizing moral imperatives.  Americans seem to have grown weary of war, even in response to moral obscenities such as those taking place in Syria.

Or maybe as Winston Churchill famously said – “…Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

In his white paper on Moral Courage, Dr. Rushworth Kidder, founder of the Institute for Global Ethics in 1990, makes the case that moral courage is as important as physical courage but it deals with intangibles, values and convictions.

A friend of mine, Ryke Longest, who heads an interdisciplinary clinic and teaches at Duke University Law School here in Durham where I live, teaches his students this “truth”

“The only fights we surely lose are those we surrender by doubting the value of courage.  Courage is not foolhardiness.  Courage is not bravado.

Courage is the notion that some things worth fighting for are worth risking everything in the battle.  The problem of our present is not unique in history, but rather a common theme recurring through the centuries.”

He goes on to a describe a cycle that repeats itself historically – “Fear creates greed for power.  Greed seeks power.  Power stifles justice.  Justice finds a champion.  Champion encourages ordinary people.  Ordinary people overthrow the greedy.”

If you never had a chance to hear professor Longest, here are two inspiring clips, one from the Wizard of Oz and the other Henry V that he uses to make this point.

I have faith that once again and soon, Americans will find their energy and intensity to stand up for their convictions.

“Liberty” Angles And Passing The Torch

The research I did for an essay earlier this week about “fairness” and the related value of “equality” was something I found particularly interesting because it shed light on much more than just differences in political ideology.

It also helps explain why family members, spouses, co-workers, neighbors and business associates so often view and practice these values from such different perspectives.

Related and just as telling, is how we think of “liberty.”  Researchers such as Dr. Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business have found that Republicans, mostly conservative, think in terms of what is called “negative liberty,”  the freedom to be left alone, freedom from interference.

Democrats who are mostly moderate with a faction that is liberal,  think in terms of what researchers call “positive liberty,” or having the power and resources to choose one’s path and fulfill one’s potential.

They believe government has to the obligation to remove or lower barriers to full political participation and to enable success.

Republicans view government as a threat, which makes them prone to be stubborn and obstinate, even about things to which they otherwise tend to be open.

The Republican view, Haidt explains, is the more traditional view of liberty.  They seek freedom from oppression and often view government as oppressive.  Democrats believe government has an obligation to remove barriers and “enable previously oppressed groups to succeed.”

As a moderate Independent, this explains a lot and helps clear away the obfuscation when “true believers” of each viewpoint tend to demonize the other.  It also explains why Republicans think I am Republican and progressives think I am a Democrat.

It also explains why my conservative father and I, despite a deep love and respect for each other, had such a difficult time understanding one another yet agreed on so many things.

It explains why, in my now-concluded career as an executive in public authorities and non-profits charged with generating economic improvement, so many were so frustrated that I wouldn’t bend the rules to tip the “playing field” in their favor or in support of their agenda.

It also explains why so many of us who came of age -in our 20s -primarily over the course of the 1970s, took such polarized viewpoints from the same set of life experiences, while others of us glean some validity from both world views. 

Some emerged from that era blaming the Vietnam War as government at its worst, others blamed government for giving up, for making what they stood for seem futile.

Some viewed new social policies such as civil rights and integration as worthy of extremes to achieve balance, others viewed the ways in which it was implemented as taking away their liberty.

Some viewed new environmental, safety and health regulations as improving quality of life and productivity, while others saw them as getting in their way and holding them back.

Some viewed run-away inflation as a reason for government intervention, while other blamed government for letting it occur and an inability to curb it.

This may all soon be moot.  Surveys and studies are revealing a new generation gap.  Millennials, the generation in their 20s and 30s today, do not buy the stale anti-government narrative that has dominated public discourse since the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In fact, they are substantially pro-government.  They are more ethnically diverse and even among those who are working class they are less susceptible to class divisions.  Even those who are conservative are less anti-government.

Overall, Millennials are much less about “them vs. us,” much more savvy about “agendas” and keen to spotting manipulation.  They are more capable than older generations of holding two seemingly contradictory values.

In a word, they tend to be more “moderate,” open to ideas across the ideological spectrum, open to what works, open to fixing government rather than bashing or starving it, and open to a balance of both views of “liberty.”

As often noted by political strategist Andrew Levison, being moderate isn’t just a “find the middle of everything centrism,” it is common sense open-mindedness based on “one hand but on the other hand” analysis.”

It is time for those of us forged by the ‘70s to give way.  The anti-government narrative has run its course with mixed results, mostly self-defeating.  It has evolved to become more a rationalization to justify divergence, corruption and special interests.

It is time to hand America over to a new generation.  It is time for a middle way, a third way, a middle-out way.  It a time for a better-not-smaller, more nimble and more robust public-interest driven government.

It is simply time to reboot.

God bless Millennials, God bless America.

So Many in the Hands of so Few

At the time my daughter was born in 1973, half of all households in America owned firearms.  By 2010, the proportion owning guns had plummeted to less than 1 in 3.  Only 1 in 5 Americans now owns a gun, down 32% since 1985.

So it is all the more alarming that in America there are 90 guns now for every 100 citizens, all concentrated in less than a third of our households and that 20% of Americans buy half of the new guns produced worldwide each year.

Even subtracting those weapons in the possession of law enforcement agencies, that is an incredible concentration of firearms in just 37 million households, a population about the size of Poland.  We may have 90 guns for every 100 residents in the US but they are all in the hands of only 20 of those residents.

Only 1 in every 4 hunters belongs to the NRA, which poured nearly $19 million, that has been disclosed so far, into last month’s election alone, much of it from those who benefit from that trade, all to elect candidates who will work to thwart policies that would better manage guns.

By comparison, three times as many hunters consider themselves conservationists and 66% of fishers and hunters believe Americans have a moral responsibility to confront climate change.

Given that only 37% of sportsmen and sportswomen believe what they call “gun rights” are the most important issue they face, if all of this lobbying is about hunters and not the gun trade, it seems that all of this lobbying should be on behalf of efforts to curb climate change.

I am not sure how many of the nearly 1,300 heavily armed, private militias operating in the US belong to NRA or how many of the 350 million firearms in America are to be found in the possession of members of these groups or among easier-to-define criminals nor do I know if legitimate game hunters understand that the need to better manage guns has nothing to do with hunting.

I’ve read and re-read the Second Amendment to the US Constitution in the few days since 20 first graders and several adults were gunned down in Sandy Hook, even returning to re-read Professor David Vandercoy’s excellent historical overview of the roots of that amendment, which date to the middle of the first century A.D. England.

I just can’t see how huge stockpiles of lethal weapons stored in the hands of a small fraction of the population is anything close to what the framers had in mind.  In fact, it seems just the opposite.

Clearly liberty and the right to bear arms go hand-in-hand and any move to better manage firearms must be in a way that meets the spirit of the Constitution while better protecting the population and this will require a lot more research.

Obviously, NRA members need to step up and be part of the solution to how we management firearms in America but new results by a Republican pollster suggests that won’t be the strategy used by those who have thwarted better management in the past.

The poll, which many have noted has had accuracy issues in the past, suggests more Americans want to address mental health and media violence than better management of firearms.  This is the kind of “false choice” that has worked so well for opponents of firearm management in the past.

Of course, the answer is “both/and,” not “either/or.”

When my passions run too strong, I often turn to statistics and historical context for relief and perspective.  As we are reminded by a blog post by Justin Peters, what happened in Newtown last Friday is not the worst school massacre in US history.

Nearly eighty-six years ago in Bath Township, Michigan, a school board official, angry over taxes, blew up an elementary school, killing 38 children and four other adults and injuring 58.  We do a much better job of managing dynamite now than we do guns.

I have a feeling 12/14 is a date I’ll always remember.

New Study Benchmarks Tree Cover and Impervious Surface

The more than 50 large trees along the banks of sensitive Erwin Creek which were clear-cut this summer by an out-of-state billboard company included large cherry, elm, maple, cedar, pear and myrtle varieties.

They had been capturing, slowing and cleaning not only storm water from the impervious surface of I-77 but along the opposite bank from over and under a site long-identified as toxic.

Caring nothing about the costs they were passing along to the citizens of Charlotte, the billboard company was only interested in becoming even more visible the now-just 1 in 12 people who in the course of a year might buy something due to the messages on the huge board while avoiding the costs it was passing along to the citizens of Charlotte.

Should the outrage of Charlotteans demanding replanting along the banks of the creek ever be given consideration, hopefully it will be more than just plopping down some twigs or saplings from a home improvement store.

Ecolotree, based in North Liberty, Iowa is doing some amazing things with phytoremediation using hybrid poplars and willows such as that being done along hog lagoons and elsewhere.

Ecolotree’s CEO notes in a recently published book by Jim Robbins that “one willow can process fifteen gallons of waste a day, and a field of a thousand trees on an acre can treat ten gallons of toxic water per minute.”

The impervious surfaces of the highway and the parking lot which covers the toxic spill which embrace each side of Erwin Creek have long been proven to create run-off that is hazardous to human health and that is why the trees were preserved when the highway was built.

A newly released study by scientists David Nowak and Eric Greenfield, based in Syracuse, NY for the National Forest Service, has quantified both the amount of tree cover and the amount of impervious surface in each state of the United States as well as in urban and community areas.

Tree cover over the conterminous US, or what we called the “lower 48” when I was in Alaska, is now estimated at 659 million acres or 34.2% of the total acreage.  When Alaska and Hawaii are included, tree cover nationwide in urban/community areas is estimated at 35.8% or 43.7 million acres.

Tree cover in North Carolina is now estimated at only 62.6%, less than New York, South Carolina and Virginia but more than Tennessee and we’re needlessly surrendering our signature asset at no cost to things such as billboards.  North Carolina’s urban and community areas are covered with urban forest canopy by 48.2% and 50.3% respectively, about 8% of the overall statewide tree cover.

By comparison, in Durham, where I live, the county as a whole has just 51% of its tree canopy remaining and only 40% remaining in the city where urban foresters are funded to plant a net increase of only 150 trees annually, after removals for disease etc., and this amount is futile in the face of the uncounted thousands clear-cut for any single development.

Impervious surface, including roads, parking lots, buildings etc., in the lower 48 is now estimated at 45.5 million acres or 2.4%.  In urban/community areas alone it is estimated at 18 million acres or nearly 15%.

While only 4.9% of North Carolina is covered with impervious surface, more than 32% of that is in urban/community areas such as that embracing Erwin Creek along I-77 in Charlotte.  Urban and community areas in North Carolina average 18.5% and 17.3% respectively.

That average is on the low side compared to many other states but for comparison, within the city limits of Durham, the fourth most populous in the state, there are 19,176 acres of impervious surface which is 27.6% of the overall land area, a proportion more typical of the average for urban areas in about half of the other states, according to the study.

Durham is the only city in a very compact county which doesn’t track impervious surface so the comparison may not be “apples to apples.” But it is clear that in a city where only 27,780 of tree cover remain to help scrub the runoff from 19,176 acres of impervious surface, a ratio of 1.4 to 1, we must do much more to fuel urban forestry than a net 150 trees a year.

Taken statewide, the ratio of trees to impervious surface is 3.3 to 1, making it even more tragic that the new legislation that legalized the atrocity along Erwin Creek does not protect trees in communities such as Charlotte or Durham contrary to what its chief sponsor verbally assured the General Assembly from the floor.

In North Carolina the percentage of tree cover is 12.7 points less in urban/community areas while and impervious surface 12 points more in urban/community areas than in rural areas.  This tells me that compared to other states in the report, we may also be deforesting and paving over rural areas.

Interestingly, in many states such as Iowa, through which I traveled on a cross country road trip last month, the urban and community areas are forested by 24% and 18.8% respectively while the state as a whole is only 10.4%.

But even in small towns, Iowans are careful to make sure they have tree canopy, as are many farmers and ranchers around their homes and barns and equipment sheds.  One huge spread I spotted along I-80 as I returned from my trip had very deliberately planted a tree every few feet around the entire border as well as mini forests along ravines.

That is why I blogged a few months ago that maybe some in our state, which has been blessed with naturally occurring hardwood and evergreen forests, have become a bit too smug.  We take our trees and the fact that we’re aided by regeneration far too much for granted.

To sustain our state’s urban growth and still retain the scenic character and quality of life (and health) so central to our state’s economic vitality, including tourism, we need to look more seriously at a more intense and holistic approach to forest management including:

• Reforestation and afforestation of not only urban areas but also rural areas.
• Higher state and community standards for tree cover in and around parking lots and along roadways.
• Manifestation by the NC Department of Transportation that it is as much in the business of managing forests for ecosystem services on behalf of the public as it is focusing attention on highways.

INFOGRAPHIC: Labor Force Ecology 1971-2010

By Francesco Franchi