"Times They Are a Changin'" -- Not

 By G. Jefferson Price III

Fifty-three years ago, in the winter of 1963,  William Devereux Zantzinger , a 24-year-old white tobacco farmer from Charles County in Southern Maryland, appeared drunk at a socialite dance in a Baltimore hotel where he launched into a torrent of racist profanity and lashed several black hotel employees with a carnival-style cane he was carrying.

     One waitress whom he had caned several times, a 51-year-old mother of 11 named Hattie Carroll, slumped against the bar and gasped to her fellow employees, “This man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill.” Later that night she died at a hospital a couple of blocks from the hotel where she had been thrashed by  Zantzinger.

    This horrific moment of shame in Baltimore and American history came to mind last week when it was announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Dylan memorialized the incident in a song titled “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” in his 1964 album “The Times They Are A Changin’”

         Dylan has been criticized for liberties he took with the facts of the Hattie Carroll case in his lyrics writing in the first verse:

“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’ . . . “

    Zantzinger, whose name Dylan misspelled, was originally charged with homicide but ultimately was convicted of manslaughter on evidence that Carroll  suffered from other longstanding health issues that were factors in her death, including an enlarged heart and hypertension. The Baltimore medical examiner ruled she had died of a brain hemorrhage.

    In another part of the lyric, Dylan incorrectly called Carroll the mother of ten rather than eleven, apparently because eleven didn’t fit the meter he wanted.

    Zantzinger, who also was also charged with assaulting two other black hotel employees with his cane, was fined $500 and sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence he served working in the kitchen at the Washington county jail in Western Maryland rather than the jail in Baltimore, where it was feared he would have been killed by local inmates, the majority of whom were black. The trial had been moved to Western Maryland from Baltimore where racial tensions had been running high even before the beatings of Hattie Carroll and her fellow employees.

 The court also showed its concern for Zantzinger’s economic wellbeing by allowing him to remain out on bail for two weeks between conviction and sentencing so he could harvest the tobacco crop at his 630-acre farm in Southern Maryland.

     The death of Hattie Carroll was in 1963, mind you; not 1863, but Zantzinger was of a mindset that never stopped yearning for the past when the white race was the master race, and the black race existed to serve it and to endure physical abuse and, yes, even death, in service to the white man.

   Other stories appearing in The Baltimore Sun alongside the June 20. 1963 report of Zantzinger’s trial offer up a good picture of where Maryland stood in the civil rights struggle. One article headlined “Prison Dining Integrated” reported “Negro and white inmates dined together without incident today as state prison officials went ahead with plans to integrate the Maryland Institute for Men.” Another article reported the owners of a Baltimore area amusement park  “declined an invitation from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations . . . to discuss the park’s segregation policy.”

    Five years later huge swathes of the city were in flames and the National Guard was trying to enforce martial law as protests following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King tore at the city’s economic and social fabric.

     Zantzinger’s  caning of blacks serving in the Emerson Hotel ballroom accompanied tongue-lashings filled with the vilest racist epithets. His appearance with his wife, Jane,  at the Spinster’s Ball, a charity event staged by Baltimore’s social prominenti of the day was preceded by similar behavior at a Baltimore restaurant where Zantzinger threw down double martinis and his wife loaded up on five double scotches, according to court testimony. The evidence that they were both utterly drunk seems to have been a factor in the court’s leniency.

    Nothing much was heard from or about Zantzinger until a quarter century later in 1991 when a local newspaper exposed the fact that he was continuing to collect rent -- more than $60,000 over a five-year period -- from poor blacks living in run-down shacks in a southern Maryland property he had once owned but which had long before been seized by Charles County for failure to pay taxes. These dwellings had no plumbing and did not even have outhouses.

    At a trial, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to more than four dozen charges related to the phony landlord actions. According to news reports of the time, he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison which apparently he served only at night.

    A Washington Post reporter went down to Charles County in 1991 to talk to people who knew Zantzinger. One friend, the late Michael Sprague, then representing Charles County in the Maryland House of Delegates, described Zantzinger as “a regular old Southern Maryland boy. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.”

    The old mindset still hadn’t changed much. And one can just imagine which candidate for president would have been supported in this year’s election by Sprague and his good ole boy friend, William Devereux Zantzinger if they were alive today.

    Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009, 17 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. Wherever he went in the afterlife one can only hope Hattie Carroll was there to make sure he didn’t get into her neighborhood.

    The Baltimore Sun obituary by Jacques Kelly and Frederick N. Rasmussen, noted: “For years, Zantzinger declined to answer questions about Dylan’s song, but he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes in 2001: ‘He’s just a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie.’”

    Sound familiar?

    G. Jefferson Price III worked at the Baltimore Sun from 1969 to 2004 as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist.

    

     

         

    

    

    

  

THE SEMI-FASCIST CANDIDATE

THE SEMI-FASCIST CANDIDATE
The Rev. James Cascioti, SJ, pastor of St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore where my family worshipped when we lived in Maryland, has shared a strong message about the forthcoming election with his congregation which is about as diverse as any in the land, including the poorest to the wealthiest, liberals and conservatives and just about everything in between and beyond the fringes.

"Looking Toward November," Fr. Cascioti reports in his latest pastoral message, "Peter Steinfels, co-founder of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and a former editor of Commonweal, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced article entitled "The Semi-Fascist Candidate."I share a bit of it because so many parishioners of whatever party are among the "elites" - intellectual, religious, cultural, economic, and political - [whom] Mr. Steinfels calls to sober reflection. I am by no means suggesting who anyone should vote for. I am merely reminding us of our duty to form our consciences thoughtfully and with discernment in the coming months. (In the message, Fr. Cascioti does not name Donald Trump, though the Steinfels article does):

    

         " . . . He has built a political movement on a populist nationalism that scapegoats enemy groups both within and without. He will expel or bar alien intruders. He plays relentlessly on a sense of national humiliation, victimization, grievance, and decline. He asserts that the nation faces an emergency that justifies torture and murdering the wives and children of our terrorist enemies, even briefly suggesting that as Commander in Chief he could order the military to violate the laws of war. Unlike full-fledged fascists, he is not explicitly anti-parliamentarian, an idea perhaps too complex for him (or perhaps too multisyllabic); instead he scorns virtually the entire political class as “stupid” or “without a clue,” i.e., unable to make a deal. He takes no note of Congressional procedures and Constitutional limits. He is indifferent to civil liberties except for gun rights, and has spoken ominously about reining in the press. When asked about compromise, he replies by vaunting his own “flexibility,” as though compromise were nothing more than a personal skill rather than an appreciation for distinctive outlooks and interests. If none of that rings an alarm bell, you haven’t read enough about Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. 

. . .  I deliberately choose semi-fascist for its historical resonance. It calls to mind a critical period in the last century. We continue to judge the public figures of that time by the political and moral choices they made regarding a fresh form of venomous politics.

     Fascisms, often inchoate in early stages, have never come to power without the acquiescence or connivance of elites.  American voters, yes, but especially American elites, intellectual, religious, cultural, and above all economic and political, now face a moment of profound choice. . . "
     Everyone: Please read the full article: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/semi-fascist-candidate):

The Wisdom of H. L. Mencken (Cont'd)

“Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged… Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill — that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?

Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start… But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest… They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty.

In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes. They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho. Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves. The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.”

From a Mencken Chrestomathy

Trump scorned by GOP fat cats

One big GOP donor's view of Donald Trump:

"He's an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-fundraising.html?_r=0

Michael K. Vlock, quoted in a Sunday New York Times article about traditional Republican big donors who cannot bring themselves to support Donald Trump, their preferred party's presumptive nominee for president .In the article, Mr. Vlock is identified as a Connecticut investor who has given nearly $5 million to Republicans at the federal level since 2014.

Mark Twain on party loyalty

"Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction . . . "

Mark Twain, "The Character of Man," 1906. 

How Congress Works, Or Doesn't

     "Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees."
           Will Rogers, American humorist 1879 to 1935

Boobus Americanus

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.”

  Damn! A Book of Calumny.

  H. L. Mencken, 1918