In the Shadows: Part 3 - Abattoir on a Quiet Street

Fred and Edwina Rogers did not do a whole lot of socializing, nor were they close to the rest of their family.  This didn’t necessarily mean they would not be missed, however.

Edwina was a distributor for Stanley Home Products, a multilevel marketing scheme.  This meant touching bases on occasion with her sales manager.  When the manager hadn’t heard from Edwina for several days after missing a scheduled sales meeting and there was no answer when she called the Rogers home, she decided to track Edwina down.  After all, Mrs. Rogers owed her money.

The search led to Edwina’s nephew, an upright Christian gentleman living in nearby Channelview alliteratively named Marvin Martin.  Marvin wasn’t terribly concerned at first.  But after a number of unanswered phone calls, he then got in touch with Edwina’s occasional handyman.  The handyman said it had been more than a week since he had heard from Edwina.

Alarmed, Marvin drove out to 1815 Driscoll Street to check on his Aunt Ebbie.  There was no answer at the front door.  Marvin walked around the house, which was dark and quiet.  Several days’ worth of mail and newspapers had accumulated.  After deciding it was risky to be caught trying to break into the house, he found a nearby pay phone and called the Houston police. 

Two officers arrived in a patrol car.  They made their way into the Rogers house.  The house was unkempt; Fred and Edwina were indifferent housekeepers.  Perhaps looking for a bottle of soda or beer to cool off on a warm summer evening, perhaps out of idle curiosity, one of the officers opened the kitchen refrigerator.  If it was liquid refreshment he was looking for, he was disappointed.  What he saw at first was a refrigerator tightly packed with what looked like newly butchered meat (hog meat as he would later describe it).  About to shut the door, he looked down at the clear glass vegetable crisper. That is when he saw the severed head of Edwina Rogers.

The coroner would find that Edwina had been shot, and Fred had been beaten about the head with a claw hammer.  The murderer had cut both victims into pieces, disarticulating their limbs like an expert butcher.  It was a tight fit as the refrigerator was an older model.  Fred had been singled out for further mutilation; his eyes, penis, and scrotum had been cut out.  Strangely, the viscera from both victims was missing.

Marvin Martin informed detectives that Fred and Edwina shared the house with their adult son, Charles Rogers.  Charles wasn’t there.  At first, detectives were confused by the information they got from Marvin and others they talked to on the street.  Charles was loner who never left the house.  Charles was never home.  No one was sure just what Charles did for work, or if he worked at all.   

The house was a troublesome crime scene.  Fred and Edwina’s living habits weren’t just slovenly; the house was filthy and poorly maintained, the yard overgrown and trash strewn.  The family cars, a 1953 Oldsmobile missing an engine and a similarly inoperable 1954 Cadillac, were on blocks in the driveway.   Charles’ cramped bedroom offered few clues to his whereabouts.  There was plenty of evidence of slaughter in the house, even though the crime scene had been painstakingly cleaned.

These days, thanks to true crime shows and dramas such as CSI, the public assumes murderers are readily identified from physical evidence left at the scene.  It’s not so simple even today, and 1965 was well before DNA testing was available.  Fingerprint and hair evidence and blood typing were as good as it got.  Meanwhile, there were more horrors to be discovered.  A few blocks from 1815 Driscoll, folks on the corner of Vermont and Woodhead Streets noticed a foul odor hanging in the humid summer air; an examination of a nearby manhole turned up the dead couple’s discarded innards.

The police were frustrated by sparse information.  The Rogers’ low-profile lifestyle had a lot to do with it.  Detectives were able to trace Edwina’s whereabouts the last day she was seen alive, Saturday, June 13^th.  Since her car wasn’t running, she prevailed upon her part-time maid to drive her around as she ran errands.  The maid offered a troublesome tidbit about the afternoon.  One of Edwina’s stops was to speak to a mechanic about fixing her car; she told the maid she had $300 cash with her—about $2400 in today’s terms—for that purpose.  However, the maid never saw the cash, nor did she see or hear from Edwina again after leaving her at a bus stop that evening.

Questioning the neighbors didn’t glean much, either.  Neither did grilling the yardman, who hadn’t been by in a while as it was.  (It’s puzzling that despite employing a maid, a handyman, and a landscaper, the Rogers residence was a sty.)  There was a small clue, though not much to go on.  Another Stanley Home Products distributor had phoned the Rogers house the morning before the bodies were found.  A man answered.  He curtly told the caller Edwina wasn’t home and hung up. The woman told police that while she had never met Edwina’s son, she had spoken briefly with a young man on a few calls in the past and the voice was the same.  

It did not look as if any promising leads were forthcoming any time soon, and the Houston Police did the only thing they could do at this point.  They obtained a material witness warrant for Charles Frederick Rogers.       

Following an autopsy which established their respective causes of death, Fred and Edwina’s remains were placed in a single casket and buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Houston.   There was a brief graveside service.  Few attended.  For all intents and purposes, the Rogers murder investigation was at a standstill.  As the long, hot summer of ’65 faded into fall, no new revelations came to light and public interest in the Ice Box Murders cooled. 

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 2 - The Peripatetic Recluse

For someone described as a recluse, Charles Rogers got out quite a bit. 

As a geologist for Shell Oil, Charles seemed to possess a nose for valuable mineral deposits.  He was able to quickly divine the potential profitability of a tract of land.  He also had ideas as to how seismological data could be analyzed to more accurately identify oil and gas deposits which sounded good in principle, but were beyond the computing power available in the 1950s.  He was responsible for several patents; however, these were Shell’s intellectual property and Charles did not stand to profit.  He resigned from Shell in 1957, and after this his trail went cold for the next four decades save for his involvement with the crime he’s presumed to have committed.

Fortunately (or not, depending on your desire for privacy), we are a nation of recordkeepers.  A determined researcher can glean a lot of information from even scanty data.  Charles Rogers’ biography before and after his parents’ June 1965 murder was painstakingly pieced together by a pair of dogged forensic accountants named Hugh and Martha Gardenier, whose findings were the basis of their 2003 nonfiction novel The Ice Box Murders.  On first reading the story takes a lot of what look like irrelevant turns, with shifting narratives involving the Rogers, Charles’ business associates, and seemingly peripheral figures such as the handyman, until the Gardeniers tie them all together at the end with a satisfying denouement.

One question arising from commonly accepted accounts of Charles Rogers’ life is what he did after quitting Shell and before the death of his parents.  Eight years is a long time to be off the radar.  It’s probably one reason why his name was connected with some of the JFK assassination conspiracy theories mentioned in the previous post.  The Gardeniers, fortunately, pieced together a more quotidian though nonetheless interesting life.

Upon returning from the war, Charles pursued a doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin.  He also bought a house in Houston at 1815 Driscoll Street.  It was a quaint 1920s era dwelling in the quiet Hyde Park neighborhood.  Charles rented it out while working for Shell in Canada, Mexico, and in southern Texas, and it became his residence after Shell transferred him home to Houston.  He enjoyed a contented existence for a time, spending his evenings on his ham radio, contacting far-flung stations and collecting their QSL cards.

Then his parents moved in.  Edwina had sold the fleabag Rogers Hotel on Washington Avenue, and Fred had scaled back his various shady enterprises while continuing to take sports bets.  Edwina occupied herself as a Stanley Home Products distributor, though she was better at accruing inventory than selling it.  (Stanley was what would nowadays be called a multilevel marketing business.  It was a cross between Fuller Brush, which sold its products door-to-door, and Tupperware, which was once sold through hostess parties.)

Life in the Rogers home became a hell for each of its occupants.  It was probably excruciating for Charles.  He retreated into his upstairs bedroom, abandoning his own house to his feuding mother and father.  Neither was permitted to enter the room.  Ever.  When he was out of the house, he secured the door with a deadbolt lock.  Charles became a cipher, and Edwina would often say to acquaintances that she hadn’t seen her son for weeks or longer despite living under the same roof.  The neighbors seldom set eyes on any of the three, although Fred would venture out on occasion in a dark suit and fedora.

And yet Charles was quite active during his reclusive period.  He became a private pilot, and took consulting jobs.  He shared his father’s entrepreneurial trait and desire for self-enrichment, and cofounded a mining exploration company.  Mexus Minerals came into being in 1959, with the goal of developing gold mines in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in Mexico.  (Interestingly, there is a present-day company based in Nevada called Mexus.  Its business?  Gold mining in Mexico.)

This venture brought Charles Rogers into association with several individuals who would have a prominent role in his life before and after the Ice Box Murders.  The first was Harry Grebe, a prospector and businessman who had spent much of his life in Mexico.  Grebe’s father had purchased the El Tigre Mine in the Sierra Madre, which remained in the family for decades.  His initial connection with Charles isn’t clear, though they had lived nearby after Charles had bought the house on Driscoll Street.  The Gardeniers found Grebe’s business partner had been involved in one of Fred Rogers’ dubious real estate transactions and had a gambling habit Fred may have catered to. 

Another was John Mackie.  (This is the spelling used by the Gardeniers; other sources give his surname as “Mackey.”).  Mackie was a veteran of the bombing campaigns in Europe during the Second World War who floundered in civilian life but was reputed to be a skilled prospector.  Still another partner was a former police officer and wartime OSS agent named Dan O’Connor.  O’Connor had close ties to Mexican officials, and contributed his claim on an existing mine along with its dredging equipment.

Rounding out Charles’ circle of associates was a much younger man called Anthony Pitts, who was not part of the Mexus scheme.  Pitts grew up in a single-parent home in Texas’ hill and lake country.  He learned to hustle at an early age and cultivated a taste for risk.  Like Charles, Pitts was an enthusiastic pilot.  There was one more thing, the importance of which would not become evident until much later: Pitts bore a physical resemblance to Charles Rogers, their age disparity aside, which becomes a crucial plot twist down the road. 

How they met isn’t known. The first possibility is that Grebe’s company did business with the metalworking firm employing Pitts.  Another is that Charles’ travels took him to various small airports in Texas, including the one in Pitts’ hometown of Kerrville.  The when and where of their acquaintance is less important than the what of their dealings, however.

There was one other associate of Charles Rogers during this part of his life who has gone unmentioned so far.  Charles had a longtime girlfriend with whom he carried on a low-key affair.  The Gardeniers call her “Jean,” though this is most likely a pseudonym for reasons to be discussed later.  Jean had been a secretary at Shell’s Houston offices while Charles worked there.  Jean knew her boyfriend led a complicated life; Charles refused to let her meet his parents.  They met in public places and presumably in her apartment.  Little was or is known of the details.  But, as with Anthony Pitts, Jean would play a pivotal role in events to come.

The Mexus venture, begun with such bright expectations, did not thrive.  Charles Rogers and John Mackie traversed the Sierra Madre Occidental multiple times over a three-year span.  Charles was more diligent than Mackie, who began to spend more of his time drinking and womanizing.  O’Connor’s mine became a nonstarter after Mackie had the dredge dismantled and sold.  Mackie became infatuated with a local girl and got a Mexican divorce from his wife so he could remarry.  Wife #1 refused to accept this outcome, a judge concurred, and Mackie soon found himself supporting two households.

Meanwhile, Dan O’Connor, who evidently had not completely shed his ties with the intelligence community, was distracted from Mexus while playing some part in the Bay of Pigs invasion.  (That tidbit, whether true or not, ought to stir up the JFK conspiracy crowd.  There! You see! Charles Rogers really was involved in the assassination!  O’Connor was CIA, O’Connor knew Charles, who knew David Ferrie, who knew Lee Harvey Oswald…)

After the dust settled in Cuba and O’Connor found out Mackie had stolen his dredge, the partnership was doomed.  O’Connor swore out an arrest warrant against Mackie and impounded the company plane, a Cessna previously owned by Charles.  The partnership was as good as dead.

Charles, the only Mexus Minerals partner who was wholly committed to the venture, had already made his geological assessment and passed it on to Harry Grebe.  There were a few promising leads, though none were pursued.  Charles, for his part, had further sharpened his already considerable prospecting skills.

For whatever reason, Charles stayed close to Mackie, the most volatile and unreliable of the Mexus partners.  He helped Mackie with sundry business ventures and legal issues.  He introduced him to Anthony Pitts.   The three enmeshed themselves in questionable ventures in Mexico and Central America.  Treasure hunting occupied some of their efforts, others included such potentially hazardous sidelines as gunrunning.  (Pitts would later discover that drug running was quite lucrative as well.)

Although Charles didn’t shy from breaking the law when it suited him, his priority was developing his ideas for improving prospecting technology.  Criminal enterprise was a means and not an end for him.  One factor frustrating his ambition was that he had had little contact with Houston’s oil and gas industry since leaving Shell.  Harry Grebe was of some assistance in supporting Charles’ research, but could not provide the needed foot in the door.  There was also the fact that Charles had done most of his prospecting in Mexico, which nationalized its petroleum industry in the 1930s shutting out foreign companies.

Given all this activity, there may have been substantial truth to Edwina’s frequent claim that she seldom saw Charles.  But for all the trips at home and abroad, they all ended with Charles returning to 1815 Driscoll Street and his cramped little room.  Something, sometime, had to give.

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 1 - Fact, Fiction, and A Few Fables

Charles Frederick Rogers got away with an almost perfect crime.   

Rogers is the main suspect in Houston’s 1965 “Ice Box Murders.”  He is believed to have killed his elderly parents, with whom he lived, dismembering their bodies and stashing the parts in the kitchen refrigerator.  Aside from a possible sighting shortly thereafter, Rogers vanished from sight.  The executors of his estate had him declared dead in 1975. 

Described as a recluse and seldom seen by his family and their acquaintances, Charles Rogers is more shadow than substance.  We can start with a few establishing facts.  He was born in Houston in 1921, the son of Fred and Edwina.  He had an older sister, Betty, who died in a 1929 car accident. 

Charles’ childhood was nothing to write home about.  By all rights, it should have been normal.  Fred hailed from a respected family of farmers and had attended college for a time.  Edwina, the daughter of sharecroppers, sought security in marriage but didn’t get it.  Fred liked to bet on the ponies and eventually became a bookie.  He was also a heavy drinker with a violent streak, and Fred and Edwina argued constantly and bitterly.  There were numerous separations after Betty’s death.  Throughout it all, Charles frequently bore the brunt of both parents’ wrath.

Edwina eventually ended up running a seedy hotel in Houston.  Fred, who had learned the ins in outs of real estate from an early apprenticeship, became an agent and lender himself.  He specialized in acquiring houses in poor African American neighborhoods by deceiving the heirs of their deceased owners by telling them that the title history was unsettled and offering them cash up front as an alternative to probate.  Houston, then as now, famously didn’t have zoning laws.  Fred would demolish the houses and sell the land for industrial use at a profit. 

Charles was bright but unathletic.  Like lots of kids in the 1930s, he was fascinated by electronics and science fiction.  He wasn’t very social, living within his own mind, and passed through high school without making much of an impression.  The Depression notwithstanding, he was able to attain a university education.

It didn’t start out well, however.  Perhaps at his father’s insistence, Charles enrolled at Texas A & M, which was then solely a military school.  Cadet life and the hazing meted out to “fish” (new students) did not agree with him, and he dropped out after a few weeks.  He went on to finish a geology degree at the University of Houston.

By then there was a war on, and the studious young man joined the Navy for the duration.  Here is where we need to take a look at his wartime service, because the page dedicated to Charles Rogers in the Online Repository of All Knowledge makes a few dubious claims about this period in his life.  The article says that Charles was a Naval aviator during the war and subsequently worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

The official account says differently.  Unsurprisingly, Charles served as a radio operator, first on USS Barnes and then on USS Richmond.  He was at sea for 2 ½ years and finished his service as a Radioman First Class.  He was clearly good at his job and was capable of supervising junior sailors.  An honorable, though unremarkable war record.

So why the implied cloak and dagger stuff?  It seems all conspiratorial roads in Texas lead to Dallas, and this claim concerning Charles Rogers’ service is no exception.  It’s true Charles later became a private pilot to facilitate his work as a petroleum industry geologist and that a couple of planes he once owned figure in his escape / disappearance after his parents’ murder.  However, he didn’t become a licensed pilot until the late 1950s.  The Wikipedia article mentions that Charles volunteered with the Civil Air Patrol during this time and made the acquaintance of a fellow CAP pilot from New Orleans named David Ferrie.

If the name David Ferrie rings a bell, it’s because he was posthumously a leading figure in one of the most bizarre criminal trials ever mounted in American history.  If you’ve seen the Oliver Stone film JFK, you probably are aware that Orleans Parish district attorney Jim Garrison accused New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw of masterminding the Kennedy assassination.  Shaw was acquitted at his 1969 trial and remains the only individual ever prosecuted for the John F. Kennedy assassination, but Garrison’s claims have nevertheless emboldened several generations of conspiracy nuts. 

Garrison’s theory is convoluted to say the least, but the gist was that Shaw and David Ferrie worked for the overthrow of the Castro regime in Cuba.  President Kennedy was targeted by the group for his “betrayal” of the Bay of Pigs invaders.  Lee Harvey Oswald, who may or may not have belonged to Ferrie’s CAP unit for a brief spell in the late 1950s, was supposedly a member of this cabal who was unwittingly set up as the “patsy,” to use Oswald’s own words, for Kennedy’s assassination.  Oswald’s purported pro-Castro sympathies were just a cover for his true, anticommunist sentiments say the conspiracy buffs.

Where, then, does Charles F. Rogers of Houston, Texas, fit into this scheme?  I could not find any mention of him from Garrison’s accounts or in Stone’s movie.  (The Wikipedia page cites a third source.)  However, this may be where the claim Charles was in Naval intelligence comes in.  It might have been extrapolated from a theory about Lee Oswald and subsequently conflated with the allegation Rogers associated with Ferrie.

Garrison conjectured that Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union after his hardship discharge from the Marines was really part of an intelligence gathering effort.  Why else would Oswald have studied Russian while stationed in Japan?  After coming home, Oswald kept in touch with his one-time handlers.  There’s a street scene in JFK where Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, tries to link Oswald’s alleged Fair Play for Cuba Committee office on Camp Street to the nearby federal building which housed the Office of Naval Intelligence’s New Orleans offices:

          GARRISON: Lou, you were in the Marines.  What’s that little saying they have?

           IVON: Once ONI, always ONI.

           BROUSSARD: Well, he [Oswald] likes workin’ near his old pals.

Bear with me, if you will.  Charles plays a supplemental role in the Garrison theory, in which he’s found to be in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963 as one of the so-called Three Tramps.  You might recall that three transients were detained by the Dallas Police near Dealey Plaza shortly before the President’s motorcade passed through.  The names of the so-called tramps, who were just that, were conclusively established a long time ago.  But this hasn’t stopped various “experts,” not to mention numerous others who have never heard of Occam’s Razor, from weighing in on who they really were. 

Consider the well-known photo of the tramps taken after they were in custody.  The tallest of the three has been claimed to be convicted murderer Charles Harrelson (actor Woody Harrelson’s father).  Harrelson later said that during a 1980 police shootout he did say he was one of the assassins, but only out of desperation to end the confrontation.  (This disavowal has not prevented attempts to connect Harrelson with Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby.)

Even without Harrelson, there's no shortage of candidates.  A fabulist named Chauncey Holt said he was a “CIA operative” sent to deliver forged Secret Service credentials and was arrested by the police with the other two as transients. Watergate figures H. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis have been fingered as part of the trio as well.  Finally, there’s my favorite of all: During the 2016 Republican primaries Donald Trump implied that the father of one of his rivals, Texas senator Ted Cruz, was one of the Three Tramps.

And Charles Rogers?  He does bear a fleeting resemblance to the shortest of the three men.  (Charles stood 5’ 5”.)  Beyond that, the connection is flimsy even if you scrunch your eyes and look at it from an angle.  But…

Let’s connect the dots.  Charles Rogers knew David Ferrie, who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s co-conspirator whom Ferrie (and probably Rogers) met through the Civil Air Patrol.  Rogers was former ONI, and so was Oswald.  Don’t you get it? 

Neither do I.  It’s pure conspiratorial garbage, but at least it’s entertaining. 

But none of this addresses the actual life trajectory of Charles Rogers, the facts of which are just as intriguing.

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

Hey Buddy

I thought about writing a post for this year’s commencement.  I’ve settled for posting this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKnKBdpnKc

Enjoy

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar