A Happy Anniversary

Written on May 17, 2012

Today marks the 8th anniversary of the first same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts which began on May 17, 2004.  I was there for those first ones.  It is one of my happiest memories, and I am truly proud to have been witness to that moment in history.

When the Supreme Judicial Court announced its trailblazing Goodridge decision near the end of 2003, it was like a bomb went off in the country; Massachusetts was ground zero.  Suddenly gay marriage was all over the newspapers and therefore at the forefront of both national and local political debate, not to mention dinner tables everywhere.  2004 would eventually have disastrous consequences in the national election for supporters of marriage equality and the nation at large–the nadir before the inevitable climb upward.  But that was still half a year away.  In Massachusetts however, immediately following Goodridge the tension was palpable.

Given how liberal Massachusetts seems to outsiders, and that in the in eight years since marriage equality is now entrenched, it is easy to forget that the LGBT community nearly lost the battle.  It was scary at times.  The invective tossed at the LGBT community by (1) then-Governor Mitt Romney; (2) the conservative Democrats and the Republicans in the Legislature; and (3) the usual homophobic hate groups was astounding in its blatant viciousness.  Add in certain segments of the media, the Catholic Church (embroiled in its child sex abuse scandal, yet showing off an audacity that comes with a self-imposed moral authority), and large swaths of the electorate, and it felt like the gay community was surviving a siege.  There were days when I could not turn on the television or read the newspaper for fear that I would start crying.

The Supreme Judicial Court in Goodridge set a six month deadline for the Legislature to take action or else same-sex marriages would automatically begin.  The deadline date was May 17, 2004, a bit of symbolic timing.  I have no idea if the Court intentionally chose May 17, 2004 because it was the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, but I would like to think that the Justices knew and acted with that message in mind.

As May 17th approached, city halls around Massachusetts put out the word that they would not open early; no matter how momentous the occasion, it was business as usual.  The one exception, naturally, was the People’s Republic of Cambridge, which proclaimed that it would open up at midnight.  No one was going to out-progressive Cambridge.  On May 16th, I made the mistake of watching television, and the coverage of the political debate depressed me.  I wanted to hide in my room, but I thought to myself that I should go to Cambridge City Hall to bear witness and be a voice of support.  I felt it was the least I could do.  It did not cross my mind that other people would be there too.  After wavering back and forth a few times, around 10 at night, I took the T from my Brookline station into Cambridge.

In hindsight, I cannot believe how naive I was.  Thousands of people lined the street from Central Square to Harvard Square as Cambridge City Hall became the sight of the largest wedding party in Massachusetts.  This was about 10:30, and the crowd only increased as it got closer to midnight.  Somehow, despite the crowd, I ended up very near City Hall next to a man with a gigantic rainbow flag and a middle-aged, interracial, lesbian couple who complained that the only wedding song gay men knew was “Chapel of Love” (they were correct).

I texted two of my friends who lived in Cambridge and told them where I was.  Both of them, heterosexual men for the record, immediately left their home to join me.  One of them found me right away, but the other was missing in action for quite some time.  Thanks to the man with the gigantic rainbow flag and the magic of text messages, my missing friend was able to find us.

See, even though there were 10,000 happy, joyous celebrants, the loathsome members of the Fred Phelps clan oozed up to Cambridge to protest with their “God Hates Fags” shtick.  From atop the hill where I stood, we all noticed them, but rather than being the focus of ire, we saw them as ridiculous figures to be laughed at.  After all, there were about 50 of them and 10,000 of us.  And all 10,000 of us had better things to think about than their impotent rage and attention-seeking behavior.  My missing friend however, accidentally wandering into the Phelps protest thinking it was the celebrants.  “After all,” he said to me, “there were all these women holding hands.  What would you think?”  Bright boy that he is, he soon realized his mistake.

As midnight approached more and more videos cameras appeared from media outlets from all around the world.  Then in the distance, police officers in riot gear marched down Massachusetts Avenue.  They turned and walked up the stairs leading to City Hall.  “Wouldn’t it be awesome if they all went into City Hall and got married to each other?” my friend asked me.  Alas, they did not.  But they were the honor guard of sorts, lining the steps as those first same-sex couples went in.

One of the clerks came outside and said something about how people might want to go home because this would take a while.  “That’s okay,” shouted a man in the crowd, “we can wait.”  And then we sang yet another round of “Chapel of Love.”

When the first married couples finally came out they were pelted by showers of rice (and yes, “Chapel of Love” again).  I was standing at least six rows back from the City Hall stairs, and for the next two days I shed rice from my hair.

I did not get home until somewhere around 3 in the morning even though I had to work the next day.  Who wants to leave a party?

The next day was business as usual.  I walked to work, and made sure to pass Cambridge City Hall.  By this point town and city halls around the state had been performing marriages for four or five hours.  In Cambridge were a few supporters lying on the grass yelling congratulations at every gay or straight couple that left the building, but for the most part it was pretty quiet.  Nothing really to see.  The headline of Cambridge’s local newspaper read “The Sky Did Not Fall.”

The mundane morning may have actually been even more important (if less momentous) than the night before.  Nothing was out of the ordinary, indeed the sky had not fallen.  All that was different was that marriage was open to more loving couples.  As such, passing a constitutional amendment to prevent some of those couples from marrying would be more difficult.  It was because of this ordinariness (and the difficulties in getting the state constitution changed) that pro-equality forces eventually succeeded in beating back the proposed amendment.  Since that time, marriage equality has come to Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Iowa, Washington, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.  Maine and California had it and lost it (and will no doubt get it again).  There are encouraging signs in New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, and Rhode Island will join the club shortly.

In eight years that is an awful lot to be proud of.  And I saw the beginning.

Jason Sukeikis, Who Do You Think You Are?

Who Do You Think You Are aired its penultimate episode: Jason Sudeikis researched his paternal line trying to determine why his forefathers abandoned their families.

Before I begin writing, I have a confession to make: this episode left me rather cold.  Now much of the season has been lackluster, but unlike the lesser episodes which I railed against, there was nothing particularly egregious about this episode.  No attempts to retell history by reframing an unflattering ancestor as a hero, no dubious DNA test results, no use of bigotry as the answer for every question.  There was nothing wrong with this episode per se, it was more about gestalt.

It is something of an open secret that Who Do You Think You Are researches more celebrities than are actually filmed.  Celebrities whose stories are not interesting are handed their research before the cameras roll and are wished good luck.  There are some very infamous stories from Britain about potential guests were who considered and then rejected because the show could not make it interesting.  It’s sad but understandable; to keep a show going it must be interesting to viewers.  It also must be fresh, something that makes the story totally new or at least an old theme retold in a different way.

The vanished parent is a very familiar trope in Who Do You Think You Are, which is very sad from a  societal point of view.  It is also most likely where the most pressing genealogical questions are asked.  Nevertheless, this theme also starts to get perhaps too familiar over time.  Kim Cattrall chased down her grandfather, Susan Sarandon her grandmother.  Jerome Bettis his grandfather’s father.  There are others.  (Over in the UK, Alan Cummings also chased down a grandparent who left his family which led him to Southeast Asia.)  Both Cattrall and Sarandon discovered that their absent grandparents were also bigamists.  Both absenteeism and bigamy are also part of Jason Sudeikis’s family story.  To Jason Sudeikis this is (naturally) shocking, but this is now something I have now seen several times over so the drama has faded somewhat.  (And with the decreased time to tell a story, the overabundance of commercials, and the Ancestry and Apple plugs, Who Do You Think You Are is a bit like The Simpsons of the past decade or so–retreating into the familiar while losing its freshness.)

This show could have used some better editing.  When I watch each episode, I write down names and dates to keep things straight, but this episode got the better of me.  I wasn’t sure who was alive when and who immigrated when.  This is an editing room problem rather than a research problem (I hope), but it makes the research look slapdash.  I went on Ancestry to try to clear my confusion.  It did not help.  It also didn’t help that there were so many Lithuania names, which are very difficult to transcribe to my ears.*  Clearly I wasn’t the only one.  Sudeikis’s ancestor named his mother “Mary Gash” on a marriage certificate when her real name was Marianne (Lithuanian name that I couldn’t catch).

Sudeikis’s traces his father’s line, which I suppose is appropriate given that his mother’s family is probably familiar territory to him.  Sudeikis’s maternal uncle is George Wendt (Norm Peterson of Cheers).  According to Wikipedia, his maternal great-grandfather was Tom Howard, a famous photographer.  But Sudeikis knew nothing about his paternal grandfather Stanley Sudekis because Stanley died when Dan Sudeikis (Jason’s father) was very young.  Dan Sudeikis had no memory of his father whatsoever and was raised by his mother Edna.  All Edna ever said about Stanley was that he was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall, weighed 195 pounds, and died after falling on a sidewalk outside of a Chicago church.  So Sudeikis began his search in Chicago.

In Chicago, Sudeikis got Stanley’s death certificate, but the informant was not Edna.  It was an Anna Pukel who lived at the same address as Stanley.  Stanley did indeed die outside a church by slipping on a sidewalk and fracturing his skull.  There was a coroner’s inquest, and it turned out that Anna Pukel was Stanley’s cousin.  Stanley did not actually live with her; it appears that he was a homeless drunk who abandoned his family (which Sudeikis also learned from decree for separate maintenances–which is not a divorce–that his grandmother filed against Stanley), refused to work, and slept on park benches.  Sudeikis’s grandmother refused to appear at the inquest, saying that she hadn’t seen him in three years.  Stanley’s uncle also wanted nothing to do with him.  Alcohol was also probably involved in Stanley’s fatal fall (figuratively and literally).  And it also appeared that Stanley never ever met his son Dan.  All in all, not the kind of discovery that one would generally want to find.

Sudeikis wanted to learn how to feel sorry for Stanley, which he eventually did.  Now it’s important to recognize that Sudeikis was showing empathy rather than the hero worshiping of false idols that went on earlier in the season (most notably by Martin Sheen, Blair Underwood, and Jerome Bettis).  The reason he was able to feel empathy is because he learned that Stanley’s father (also Stanley) abandoned his wife Michaelina “Emma” (Bielskis) Sudeikis and young son in Chicago to start a whole other family in Bridgeport, Connecticut.**  Whereas Stanley Sr.’s bigamous second family thrived, his first family suffered.  (I would note that the genealogist who brought the bigamy to Sudeikis’s attention looked positively shocked at the discovery.  I wonder if this was legitimate or just acting.)  Stanley Sr. in turn also his father Joseph at an early age.  Joseph Sudeikis, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a miner in Mahanoy, Pennsylvania at a time when mining was even more dangerous than it is now.  He probably lived in a company town in which he had virtually no job security and his labor was exploited by his robber baron overlord.  And he tolerated it all so that he could provide a better life for his family.  Joseph died in a mining explosion on November 9, 1901, leaving a wife and many children including young Stanley Sr.  In Sudeikis’s mind, this is where the absentee father began, a cycle that his own father broke.

Sudeikis went home to tell his father all that he learned.  The family discussion did not appear too painful, although it is not one that I would have wanted to have to give.  The Sudeikis family took it very well.

Footnote:

* One thing that was not discussed was what exactly Lithuania is.  I mean, yes it’s a country, but at the time when Jason  Sudeikis’s ancestors came to the United States, what we know of today as Lithuania was actually a part of Russia.  Yet, as you can tell from the names, language, and the self-identification, the Lithuanian people saw themselves as a discrete and separate nation.  I know this is a story about immigration and vanished fathers, but a little Lithuanian heritage lesson might have been nice.

** This is where the show leaves me so frustrated.  In 1920, Stanley Sudeikis Sr. is married to Amelia “Mill”(Trakitis)  and has a daughter named Lillian who was a newborn.  In 1930, he has a 9-year-old daughter Julia.  While Jason Sudeikis noticed Julia, he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that there was another daughter who evidently died very young.

Edie Falco, Who Do You Think You Are?

“These people actually existed.  It makes it much more real, and it’s hard not to feel emotional about it.”

~Edie Falco

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Because I watched this episode at my parents’ house, and because they, unlike me, have a digital video recorder, I had the advantage of watching this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are without having to pay any attention to the commercials.  Apparently, to compensate for my ability to skip over advertisements, both Ancestry.com and Apple upped the ante with in-show product placements.  There was the Ancestry plug (7 minutes in), the other screenshots of Ancestry, and an iPad that Edie Falco carried around with her.  Had I bothered with commercials I wonder if I would have seen an ad informing the public that the 1940 census was at Ancestry, while the government site crashed.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again; this show would work far better on a network like the BBC or PBS.  I think it would be more fun if it were on non-commercial television too.  PBS does have its own genealogy show, Finding Your Roots.  Finding Your Roots is a better show for introducing genealogical research, but it’s like broccoli; good for you, but no fun.  At its heart though, Finding Your Roots is yet another Skip Gates vanity project.  Who Do You Think You Are may be the candy of the genealogical world, it may be nonsensical, it may be frustrating to the point where I scream at my television, but at least I want to watch it again (usually).  A non-commercial network would make what it generally an enjoyable show a great one.  (And Finding Your Roots is also big on the product placement, particularly with 23andMe, a DNA testing company that I am extremely suspicious of.)

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Edie Falco is a wonderful actress.  Ever since I saw her Carmela Soprano, I have loved her.  Nevertheless, the episode itself was not the most thrilling of the season.  It’s hard to say that because if anyone on this show understands the lure of genealogy it is Falco.  Her statement that I quoted above and her question regarding whether family tree research is merely about bloodlines or about something more (her children are adopted), it shows that she cares and that she gets it.  Nevertheless, there was something about this episode that felt slightly off.  Like there was a major story that got bypassed somehow.

In the beginning of the episode, Falco, the child of divorced parents, noted that she did not know her mother’s family well and had very little contact with her extended relatives while growing up.  Her mother however, had a beautiful handmade family tree that detailed her own mother’s (Ruth Megrath) family tree.  Ruth Megrath was the daughter of George and Florence Megrath, and on the tree was an interesting tidbit: Megrath was the maiden name of George’s mother.  His father’s name was Brown, and George’s mother left Mr. Brown and, with George, emigrated to the United States (from Wales).  Falco wanted to know why George’s mother left his father.

The first place that Falco went to was the New York Public Library where she looked at the 1920 US census.  (One wonders why she needed to go to New York just to look at the census, since all she did was use Ancestry’s collection.)  There she discovered that George was born not in Wales, but in Wisconsin.  Additionally, his mother was born in the United States and his father in England.  Falco was surprised that her family tree was wrong and set off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to discover the rest of the story.

At this point, I want to advise all amateur genealogists.  If you go on to Ancestry, there is a good possibility that you will find some unsourced tree that goes back multiple generations, possibly centuries.  You will think, “Hallelujah, the work has all been done!  Look at how many ancestors I can trace.”  Caveat emptor.  Ancestry trees are notoriously unreliable.  Unless you do the work yourself or can validate the source material of another’s tree, take nothing as truth.  It is entirely possible that someone somewhere made a mistake (or twenty), like the one that belonged to Edie Falco’s mother.

In Wisconsin, Falco went to the All Saints Episcopal Church where she found the baptismal record of her great-grandfather George Megrath, who was originally George Brown.  George’s mother was Mary Megrath Brown and his father was Charles Childs Brown.  Charles Brown was present at the baptism.

Falco found in old city directories that Charles was an apprentice at a local paper.  But Brown was not in Wisconsin for long.  In 1885, seven years after George’s birth, he was in Little Falls, Minnesota (listed as C.C. Brown).  A little further research revealed to Falco that Brown started the first paper in the nearby town of Royalton, Minnesota.  He did not stay in the area for long; Brown moved out to Duluth where he died.  An article was presented to Falco from Duluth from 1892 which said that George Megrath (now living in Albany) had died in a streetcar accident.  Like with her relative’s family tree, Falco knew that this news article was incorrect.

Looking into the Albany connection, Falco found an article about a Sister Kathryn (Catherine) Brown (Episcopal not Catholic) who died intestate in 1902 in nearby Troy, New York.  (My ears perked up.  I have great affinity for Troy.)  This was Charles’s mother, and because Charles had already died, George Megrath showed up to claim her estate.  From this information, Falco learned that George was actually the eldest of Charles Brown’s children.  Charles and Mary divorced in 1878 when George was two, and Charles remarried (and divorced) two more times and had three more children.  The researcher who informed Falco about Charles’s later life said that as a newspaper man, Charles was probably an alcoholic and also probably very difficult to live with.  (Thankfully, there was no attempts to whitewash him.  Falco accepted that he was human and flawed.)

Falco turned her attention to Sister Kathryn Brown (her 3rd great-grandmother), and from the 1900 Census, she learned that Kathryn was born at sea to English parents.  That Kathryn was born at sea interested Falco.  Rather than go to Troy, Falco went to London where Charles was born.  In London, Falco found a record of Charles’s birth; he was born to Kathryn Kindley (and William Brown, who was not mentioned in the episode, but I saw the birth certificate).  Looking for Kathryn in the 1841 UK census, Falco found that Kathryn (Kate) was living with an older woman named Childs who was probably her grandmother.  Kate’s parents were not listed.  She also learned that Kate was born in Cornwall, specifically Penzance.  And yes, Edie Falco made the appropriate Gilbert & Sullivan reference.  (This is probably where the Wales story came from; both Wales and Cornwall are peninsulas in the West of England, both have a Celtic connection, and both the Welsh and the Cornish have very thick and distinct accents.)

In Penzance, Falco discovered that Kate Kindley was the daughter of Ralph and Dorothy Childs Kindly.  Ralph was a master mariner (a sea captain), which was a good job, but it kept him at sea for long stretches at a time.  From an 1833 newspaper article, Falco learned that Dorothy Kindley died; her daughter was two.

The next researcher that Falco met took her on a ship to explain to her all about the life of a master mariner, and he suggested that Dorothy was probably used to being on a ship.  The researcher showed Falco the documents he found, one a copy of Lloyd’s List from which he was able to determine that Kate was probably born on the Lord Cochrane which was en route to New Orleans.  He also showed Falco letters of administration from the New York Surrogate’s Court from October 1840, which showed that on July 20 of that year, en route from the Coast of Africa to New York, Ralph Kindley died from a fever.  He was probably buried at sea.

And thus the episode ends with Edie Falco aboard a ship sailing on the middle of the ocean.

Next time is Rob Lowe although that won’t be for a few weeks.

[Edit:  If you are interested in the Child/Kindley family history that was researched in this episode, this site is an incredibly thorough and detailed.]

Rita Wilson, Who Do You Think You Are?

When the guest list was announced, I raised an eyebrow in curiosity when I saw that Rita Wilson was one of the celebrity guests.  I know that Wilson is an actress and has appeared on stage and screen, but because of her marriage to Tom Hanks, she is eternally overshadowed by her husband’s fame.  The conceit of Who Do You Think You Are is that the guests are “some of America’s most beloved celebrities,” and I am not sure that Rita Wilson really qualifies for that title.

Having said that, this past week I was extremely excited about her episode.  The promotional teaser looked amazing, and Wilson, being of Greek/Ottoman/Bulgarian heritage (her birth name is Margarita Ibrahimoff), brings a new geographic sphere to the show.  This episode was unique in the Who Do You Think You Are canon, because the search was entirely unlike any other in the show’s run.  I have written before about the two types of episodes in this series: the general “trace the family tree” episode and the specific “follow one ancestor” episode.  Both types of episodes have their benefits, but the common theme that both share is that the celebrity knows almost nothing about that family or the individual in question.  Wilson however knew the man whose history she was researching; it was her beloved and recently-deceased father, Allan.  Because she knew him well and loved him so much, each fact she learned about him was not about discovering a picture of him but rather reconciling the one she already had with facts he never told her.  Is it any wonder that she was emotional throughout her entire journey?*

Allan Wilson was born Hassan Halilov Ibrahimoff in Oraion, Xanthi, Greece.  Wilson found the name of his birth town on her parents’ marriage certificate which she located online.  (This was this week’s Ancestry plug.  One might ask why Wilson’s mother didn’t have it, but I suspect it had more to do with getting the plug in as all the research in this week’s episode is outside the scope of Ancestry’s holdings.)  I looked for the certificate, but I could not find it online; it’s a bait and switch that Ancestry did with the Martin Sheen episode too.  I did find the information from Rita Wilson’s birth certificate though which lists her first name as “Margarit.”

When Hassan Halilov was born, Oraio was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, and, as you can probably tell from the name, the ibrahimoffs were a Muslim family–another first for the show.  In Oraio that Wilson began her journey.  A guide took her to the house where her father was born, a home that now used as a storage house, and is otherwise vacant.  Wilson wanted to know why her father moved to Bulgaria, and her guide introduced her to her father’s cousins.  Truth be told, I could not understand what exactly they were trying to tell Wilson; it seemed a bit contradictory.  The cousins did show her a picture of her grandfather Halil Ibrahimoff, and told her that he was a funny man.  Wilson learned that her grandfather moved his family to Smolyan, Bulgaria, a town near the Greek border.

In Smolyan, Wilson learned from an archivist that the Ibrahimoff family moved to Smolyan somewhere between 1927 and 1934 (when Wilson’s father was between 7 and 14).  Wilson also learned that her father was drafted into the Bulgarian artillery in 1941 at the age of 20 because Xanthi, the province where he was born, was, in 1941, a part of Bulgaria (all persons born in Xanthi were retroactively considered Bulgarian, including Wilson’s father.)  It also meant that he fought for the Axis alongside the Nazis and Italian Fascist regime.  Wilson’s father however, was dismissed shortly into his service and sentenced to over three-and-a-half years in prison because of petty theft; he took 28 siphon bottles and five levs, an incredibly small sum. The army wanted to make an example by punishing the petty crimes disproportionately harsh.  Wilson’s father had told Wilson that he had been imprisoned in a labor camp when he was young, and Wilson wondered if labor camp was a euphemism for prison.

Wilson’s father was paroled after just over two years and he returned to Smolyan briefly but then moved out to Plodiv, and it was there that Wilson got the shock of her life–her father had been married before and had a child.  The marriage, to a woman named Alice Markayan, took place on October 26, 1945, 11 years to the day before Wilson’s birth.  The son of that marriage, Emil Hassanov was born on December 26, 1945.  Three days later Alice died.  Four months after that, Emil followed.

Is it any wonder that Allan Wilson never spoke about his past?  There was already so much pain, and more to come.  I imagine Bulgaria was a nightmare from which he could not wake up.  But 66 years after Emil died, his younger half-sister finally discovers his existence.  I was reminded of something similar in my family.  My great-grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1911.  He married my great-grandmother in 1919 and their first child was born nine months afterwards.  When I found my great-grandfather’s World War I draft card, I got a similar shock to what Wilson found.  My great-grandfather was asked is he had any dependents, and he answered that he had an 8-year-old child in Russia.  This is the only time I, my mother, or my uncles ever heard about this child, and he never mentioned the child again on any records.  I think this is something that he also kept from his own children.  It is possible that the draft card was mistaken, but between the Nazis and an archives fire in Ukraine, I am not sure I will know the truth.

There was a five year gap between the death of Alice and Emil and Wilson’s father’s marriage to her mother Dorothy.  Wilson traveled to Sofia where she discovered that her father told her the truth about the labor camp, a Soviet-style gulag with harsh conditions and the constant specter of murder.  Wilson was shown her father’s secret file, something that no doubt would only have been possible following the fall of the Bulgarian Communist regime.  Like in other Communist countries, most notably East Germany, the authorities got neighbors and friends to spy on suspect targets, and Wilson’s father was one of those suspected.  He was arrested for trying to flee to Turkey, declared a traitor, and sentenced to two different mining camps.

Although the punishment for trying to escape was death, Wilson’s father did manage to flee in the night, and on May 4, 1949, he landed in the United States.  In 1973, 26 years after the escape, he was declared an enemy of the state.  Had he ever returned to Bulgaria, he would have been rearrested.

After learning the truth about her father’s life, Wilson gets one final shock, her father’s older half-brother Fairhat was still alive (at age 96) and residing in Smolyan.  The family reunion between Wilson and her uncle was a tearjerker, for them and for me.  It turned out that Fairhat was sent to the same labor camp as his brother, but Fairhat could not escape because he had a wife and two children.  After Wilson’s father escaped, Fairhat was interrogated and beaten.  He was however, eventually released.

In 1950, Hassan Halilov sent Fairhat and their father a beautiful letter from the United States about his progress, how happy he was there, and his hope for the future.  This appears to be the last communication that he ever had with his family, and Fairhat kept the letter in case one of his brother’s children even found him.  Her brother was flown out to Bulgaria to meet his uncle and the show ended with the two Wilson siblings in tears to the (incredibly out of place) stains of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” as sung by Rita Wilson.

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What an episode!  It was almost something out of fiction.  After a patchy start, the show has finally found its ground, and the last two weeks demonstrated spectacular quality.  I hope that Edie Falco’s story is equally as interesting.

There have been some complaints about how the celebrities have stopped pretending to do the work, and that is true to an extent, but that is not a fair criticism of Rita Wilson’s episode.  It all happened in Greece and Bulgaria and in languages that Wilson did not speak.  Hiring experts is the only way that she could have learned about her father’s early life.

I have yet to see the new PBS genealogy show, the newest Henry Louis Gates project, but I will get on that as soon as I can.  I’m curious to see how the two compare.  I cannot imagine that Skip Gates’s show pack’s anywhere near the emotional punch of tonight’s Who Do You Think You Are, but I hope to be mistaken.

Footnote:

* This episode may be the likeliest to make me cry.  Part of that is the emotional content, but in large part it is because of how much it parallels my own family research.  I mention above about my great-grandfather’s possible child, but there is another story that struck me.  In a deleted scene available on the website, Wilson discovers the Oraion birth registry (of males) which has the births of her father, his older brothers (including Fairhat, who we meet during the course of the episode) and her great-grandfather.  Missing from the registry is her grandfather Halil, although the researcher who showed Wilson the book identified someone he thought was Halil, an entry that is listed as “the one whose finger is cut,” meaning he was probably missing a finger.  My great-great-grandfather Abraham, of whom I have written before, was missing his right index finger like Halil.  I never realized his finger was missing until I stared a few old pictures of him for very long periods of time.  I wonder if the missing finger was accidental or deliberate.  In Czarist Russia, Jews who were not allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement were nevertheless conscripted into the army and navy, which was a form of cultural murder and worse, a very real possibility of actual death.  To avoid that fate, there arose men called cripplers, hired thugs who mutilated Jewish boys to ensure that they would be unfit to serve.  I wonder if that was what happened to Abraham.

Helen Hunt, Who Do You Think You Are?

After the Jerome Bettis disaster from two weeks ago,* I had nearly given up on this show.  I was prepared to watch only the bootlegged UK and Australian episodes on YouTube.  I’m glad I didn’t.  If the last episode was the worst in the show’s run, this week’s episode starring Helen Hunt is one of the best.  It was so good that even the commercial breaks and two (two!) Ancestry plugs did not feel like such a big deal.

When I first saw that Helen Hunt was going to be on Who Do You Think You Are, my first thought was, “What ever happened to her?”  After the end of Mad About You and her Oscar for As Good As It Gets, she kind of vanished from the public eye.  (Fun fact:  Executive Producer Lisa Kudrow’s hit show Friends was a quasi-spin-off of Mad About You.  On Friends, Kudrow’s ditzy Phoebe Buffay had a twin sister Ursula who was also played by Kudrow.  Ursula first appeared on Mad About You.)  Her episode however, knocked my socks off.

Before I delve into the content of the episode, it is important to explain why I liked this episode so much.  The reason this episode was so good is that it focused on the history rather than on Helen Hunt.  In most episodes this season, we got one, maybe two, historical interludes to give us a sense of time and place for the story.  In this episode we got six, which is more like a British episode than an American one.  It completely makes the difference, and the story becomes far more compelling.

The episode also avoided making facile associations between Hunt and her ancestors, which is a pleasant change from most of this season.  In previous episodes, the celebrity spoke about an aspect of his or her life and sure enough, the ancestor in question had that quality (although it was often a stretch.)  This week however we were not subjected to (for example) Helen Hunt talking about how important feminism was to her prior to her journey and then discovering that her ancestor was an early feminist.  Instead, the revelations happen organically, and we feel like we are learning about the stories of interesting people from the past rather than HELEN HUNT’S ANCESTORS.

Finally, everything was documented through pictures, censuses, vital records, directories, election rolls, and newspaper articles–all very important tools in the genealogist’s toolkit.  Mercifully there was absence of speculation about what their lives must have been like or what their personalities probably were by both Hunt and the historians.  No gimmicks, no DNA tests, not secondhand recollections from decades later.  Just the facts.  The facts really do speak for themselves.

The episode started in Los Angeles with Hunt and her father.  Hunt’s paternal grandmother, Helen Roberts Hunt, was killed by a drunk driver when Hunt’s father was a little boy, and so he knew very little.  Helen Roberts was of German-Jewish descent (Yekkes), and her mother was named Florence Roberts, although the family name was originally Rothenberg.  Hunt knew little beyond that.

From a personal point of view, learning about a German-Jewish family was a novel experience.  My family is entirely made up of Eastern European Jews who arrived during the migration wave that spanned from around 1880 through 1920.  In contrast, German Jews such as Hunt’s family immigrated significantly earlier (Hunt’s great-great-grandfather William Scholle immigrated from Bavaria to New York in 1845).  By the time the Eastern European Jews started arriving, the German Jews already had deep roots, and quite a few of them were very wealthy–perhaps most famously the Gratz family.

Having said that, the importance of the German Jews in the United States has been largely overlooked.  So much of modern American culture and the Jews who helped shape it was rooted in the Eastern Europe migration, it is easy to forget that Jews had a presence in the United States from the very beginnings of the colonial era (especially the Sephardic Jews).  It is therefore good to see stories about Jewish families from places other than Eastern Europe.  It gives a tiny bit more diversity to a show that use a bit more diversifying.

Hunt learned that her great-grandmother lived in a hotel in Pasadena, and that there was some money in the family.  By looking at the 1900 Census, she learned that  her great-grandmother Florence and her husband Gustav lived in the Upper West Side of New York City with their children, including Helen.  They also had four servants who lived with them (none with last names, apparently).  Gustave died in 1900, and Florence moved her children out to California, the state of her birth.  In the 1910 Census, the Rothenberg family is living in a hotel in Pasadena, although without servants.  By 1920, Florence changed her name to Roberts.

If I had one quibble with this episode, this is it.  The episode implies that Jews who changed their surnames did so because of anti-Semitism in the United States which predated but was inflamed by a quota system that limited the number of immigrants, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe.  Yes, many Jews did change their name in the attempt to avoid anti-Semitism.  But that was not the only reason.  A lot of Jews wanted to fit in with American society so they adopted less “ethnic” names for more English sounding ones.  Nor was this a specifically Jewish phenomenon (remember Martin Sheen?).  In my family I can think of quite a few instances where people changed their first or last names (or both) to fit in, not because they were afraid of anti-Semitism, but because they wanted to be more American.  I bet you a know of a few Jews who changed their names for reasons other than anti-Semitism too.  Maybe Nathan Birnbaum?  Melvin Kaminsky?  How about Issur Danielovitch?

Racial and religious persecution is a fall back option for Who Do You Think You Are to explain things when there is a lack of evidence.  It’s incredibly lazy and misleading.  Maybe Florence Rothenberg became Florence Roberts because of anti-Semitism, but it’s also likely that she (or one of her sons) changed her last name because she wanted to fit in with her peers in upper-class Pasadena.

From Florence’s 1949 death certificate, Hunt discovered that Florence’s father was named William Scholle (formerly Wolf Scholy of Bavaria).  Scholle immigrated to New York City and worked with his brother Abraham, but during the California Gold Rush, he moved out west to San Francisco.  Still in business with Abraham and their younger brother Jacob, William Scholle became very wealthy (apparently his personal wealth was somewhere between 3 and 10 million dollars); by 1870 he and his family had three live-in servants.  Scholle rubbed elbows with Levi Strauss (another quibble, given the significance of Levi Strauss, and given that his name appeared multiple times in Scholle’s story, one would think that at least one historian would have explained who Strauss was), and they were both a part of a consortium that bought the Nevada National Bank which then merged with Wells Fargo.  Given the financial crisis of 2008 and how much I hate Wells Fargo for unrelated reasons, I wonder if I should be impressed or carry a grudge against Scholle and company.  Therefore, before she became the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, Florence was a part of the San Francisco elite.

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Closing the book on the Scholle/Rothenberg/Roberts family, Hunt turned her attention to her father’s paternal great-grandfather George Hunt who was from Portland, Maine.  George was a businessman who imported sugar from the Caribbean in exchange for wood from Maine forests.  Like Scholle, George Hunt too was very successful, but the real story came from his 1896 obituary which introduced Helen Hunt to her great-great-grandmother, George’s wife Augusta Merrill Barstow Hunt.

Augusta was a leader of her community, and deeply involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  Hearing that Augusta was in the WCTU made Hunt uneasy but immediately I thought, “Augusta was an early feminist and probably a suffragette.”  Prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which ensured women the right to vote, women were nevertheless very active in social and civil rights causes, including abolitionism, temperance, the settlement house movement, and pacifism.  In their minds, and for good reason, temperance was a women’s rights movement as alcohol often led to the brutal treatment of women and children and the decay of the family.  (There was a dark side to temperance; the movement was bound up in anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly those from Ireland and Germany.  The WCTU itself was very much a club for Protestant women, and no doubt some of its most prominent members had lineages that the Daughters of the American Revolution would envy.)

Hunt, not knowing anything about temperance except for the circus act that was Carrie Nation and the failed experiment of Prohibition was a little embarrassed, although a WCTU historian explained the truth to her, and introduced her to exactly how important Augusta was to both temperance and to the suffrage movement in Maine.  (Helen Hunt noted the bitter irony that Augusta’s granddaughter-in-law would eventually be killed by a drunk driver.)

As it turned out, Augusta was instrumental in getting a suffrage law on the Maine ballot for a referendum in 1917, which failed miserably before an all-male voting populace.  (I was reminded about how Maine voters also rejected same-sex marriage in a referendum.)  Despite that failure, Augusta was behind every pro-woman reform of her day, including day care and female prison matrons.

In the end Augusta’s work was not in vain.  She lived to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, and according to a profile of her in a newspaper from Portland, she was given the honor of being the first woman to cast a ballot in a Maine election.  It was both a stunning and moving find, and Helen Hunt seemed overwhelmed by it.

At the end of the episode, Hunt visited the grave of George and Augusta Hunt and took a charcoal rubbing of their monument for her daughter.  Charcoal rubbing is somewhat controversial and there are people who claim it damages the headstone/monument, although I confess that I made one for an ancestor whose grave was otherwise impossible to read.  It was however, an extremely poignant moment, and wisely, that was where the show ended.

Next week, Rita Wilson.

Footnotes:

As bad as this episode was, I have to shamefacedly offer a correction.  A few days after the episode aired, I found a newspaper article that indicated that Bettis’s ancestor lost his court case on appeal, and I blasted the show in a separate blog post for dishonesty.  It turns out, I was wrong in the chronology, and Bettis’s ancestor did win his court case with as far as I can tell no appeal from the railroad defendant.  I took down the blog post, but I want to set the record straight.  Mea culpa.  I’m sorry.  It does excuse how bad the Bettis episode was, but if I demand honesty, I should be honest too.

Reba McEntire, Who Do You Think You Are?

Every family has its black sheep, its scoundrels, and its horse thieves.  Sometimes they provide the most colorful stories that regale us through the generations, but more likely than not they do things that we are deeply ashamed of even if we never knew them.

In my own family, my grandmother’s grandfather Abraham was an awful human being.  His two granddaughters’ husbands referred to him as “Black Bart” because they thought of him as a villain in old Western movie.  Abraham was an abusive lout who drank too much, beat his children, and openly hated his grandchildren.  My great-great-grandmother Bessie was by accounts a sweet and much-loved woman, Abraham’s opposite in every way.  For her reward she was afflicted with multiple sclerosis while she still had a young child to care for.  As her health declined, Abraham found a mistress and had an illegitimate child with her.  I have a picture of Abraham, his mistress, and this child.  (I have not tried to track down this child; it is the one branch I have no interest in.)  About a month after Bessie died, Abraham married his mistress, scandalizing his family who thought he should have had the decency to at least wait until the mourning period ended.  Abraham eventually died alone in a nursing home in Atlantic City.  No one in his family even visited him once.  Ironically though, he is buried next to Bessie and by three of their children.

I bring up the story of Black Bart to illustrate that we all have sinners in our family, although some sins are worse than others.  As lousy a human being as Abraham was, his misdeeds were nothing compared to those who eagerly partook in America’s Original Sin: slavery.  Tonight on Who Do You Think You Are, Reba McEntire had to confront the fact that one of her ancestors was a slave owner and worse, a slave trader.  For perhaps first time, Who Do You Think You Are could not whitewash a celebrity’s ancestor.  To be fair, other celebrities had slave owner ancestors, but those celebrities were African-American; they had no feeling for or connection with their slaver-owner ancestor whom they saw (with good reason) as a rapist.  For Reba McEntire it was different because she could not dodge the connection.  Her 4th great-grandfather George Brasfield (or Brassfield, Brasfeild, or Braisfield depending on which document was used) was an eager participant in the slave trade.  Unlike Spike Lee or Lionel Ritchie (also descendants of slave owners), McEntire could not treat Brasfield as a brutal other.  We live to imagine our ancestors as virtuous people, and it is a hard blow when we learn how truly awful they were.

Because McEntire knew her father’s genealogy, she wanted to learn about the family of her maternal grandmother for whom she was named: Reba Estelle Brassfield Smith.  She also wanted to learn when her first family members came to the United States.

As a prefatory note, it is clear that the show is no longer trying to maintain the illusion of spontaneity.  The very first scene between McEntire and her mother featured the most blatant Ancestry.com plug of the season.  Then McEntire’s mother told her daughter she was going to have to go to Monroe County, Mississippi when they could not find Reba Brassfield Smith’s father in the 1900 Census.  The conceit of the show is that it is like a treasure hunt and the celebrity follows clue after clue, but usually the first journey begins with a little more subtlety.  The meeting between McEntire and her mother line was practically scripted by the show’s producers.

As per her mother’s advice, McEntire did indeed go to Monroe County (the Stars and Bars on Mississippi’s state flag were featured rather prominently).  At a local library she did the bare minimum research that she could have done by searching unsuccessfully for the obituary of her great-grandfather B.W. Brassfield.  Of course, she looked in a bound volume of obituaries that were in alphabetical order.  Then McEntire met a genealogist who gave her a seven generation family tree of the Brassfield/Brasfield family dating back to pre-Revolutionary War North Carolina.  He said it was difficult to track down information on B.W. Brassfield, and no doubt it was, but that scene illustrates the main complaint of genealogists who watch this show.  Genealogy is blood, sweat, and tears, thousands of hours of research over many years, but here the celebrity was handed a comprehensive family tree without having to do anything.  Why bother having her look for an obituary that wasn’t there if the work was already done?  (And worse of all, the show did not say a word about how the work was done.)

The earliest ancestor on McEntire’s family tree was George Brasfield, McEntire’s 4th great-grandfather who came from Wake County, North Carolina.  In Raleigh, McEntire discovered that Brasfield owned a tavern and over 1600 acres of land.  He also owned 10 slaves.  McEntire was clearly appalled by this, and looking for a bright light, she asked if Brasfield treated his slaves kindly.  Here I was afraid that Who Do You Think You Are would do its typical whitewash, but no, there was no way to make this callous man sympathetic.  Not only did he own slaves he traded slaves, included young children and babies.  McEntire looked sick and deeply ashamed.  It’s not her sin, but it is understandable (even if perhaps slightly irrational) that she feels a kind of guilt by association.

Turning her attention toward her other goal, finding out how her Brasfield ancestors came to the United States, McEntire went to Virginia where she discovered George’s grandfather, also named George.  McEntire learned that he bought 300 acres of land in exchange for a lot of tobacco.  More importantly, she discovered that he came to the Americas as nine-year-old indentured servant.  (A quick confession: I knew about indentured servants from history class, and I knew that they were treated no better than slaves although indentured servants had the hope of a better future.  What I did not know is that they started so young.  It is one of those horrifying and inconvenient truths that our history teachers don’t tell us.)  Reba, wondering how his mother could let him go so far, followed George’s path to his origin in Macclesfield, England.  Ironically, at the beginning of the show, McEntire admitted she never felt comfortable in England, unlike Scotland and Ireland where she felt at home.  In Macclesfield, she found out that George’s mother Abigail died in 1696 and his father Thomas put young George into indentured servitude two years later probably because this was the only way for him to have a better life.  Reba, rather movingly, made her peace with Thomas’s actions and ended her journey.

This episode of Who Do You Think You Are mixed the genuine and the staged rather clumsily.  On one hand, McEntire’s emotions were entirely genuine: helpless disgust she felt when she learned about her slave owner ancestor, anger that Thomas Brassfield put his son into indentured servitude, sorrow about the death of Abigail Brassfield, and finally forgiveness and understanding for why Thomas did what he did.

On the other hand, this episode seemed even more staged than the others.  The truth about Who Do You Think You Are is that the real genealogical work had been done for months if not years before the show is recorded.  The celebrity does no work whatsoever although occasionally you get scenes of some research, like Rosie O’Donnell or Susan Sarandon searching through microfilm.  The celebrities just go to the designated place where they are told about their ancestors.  Despite how unreal this is, usually this artifice is handled well. Not so this time.  Perhaps the best illustration of how the producers showed their hands was when McEntire used a database to find church records in Macclesfield and found the correct records by using a variant spelling of her family name (in this case “Brasfeild”) that had never been used before.  Lo and behold she was absolutely correct!  It’s obvious that McEntire was told what to type.  I don’t mind the artifice, and I am willing to suspend my disbelief.  I do however, mind the clumsiness.  It ruins the illusion.

Next week’s show is Jerome Bettis, whom I had never heard of before, but that is my issue not his.  Until then, happy trails to you, dear reader.

Happy Anniversary

On this day in 1969, the Stonewall Riots broke out in New York’s West Village.  This is seen as the symbolic birth of the Gay Rights Movement, and it’s the reason that Gay Pride all over the country is in June.  In honor of this anniversary and all that has been accomplished since, I recommend that you read June Thomas’s excellent series on Slate.

The truth though is that the riots could have passed into history completely forgotten.  The real birth of the movement came on the first anniversary of Stonewall when LGBT activists marched in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day parade.  That has been going on year after year, morphed into the gay pride parades we all know and are ambivalent about.

The United Nations, African Politics, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Dearest readers, I admit up front that this post is half-baked and thematically inconsistent.  I apologize for that, but it comes from a bunch of ideas that have been floating in my head and that seem connected, although I am not sure how.  For those of you who wanted another football post, there are always more coming soon.  For those of you who are sick of football, enjoy.

To my shock, the United Nations Human Rights Council finally adopted a resolution that applies human rights principles and protections to sexual orientation and gender identity.  This is a shocking first for the UN, and particularly for the ironically named Human Rights Council (can such a body truly cares about human rights includes members such as China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria, Uganda, and, until recently, Libya?)  This is a UN resolution so it is essentially meaningless except in symbolism.  Nevertheless, the votes were fascinating, and telling about LGBT rights and a changing world.

This particular resolution was spearheaded by South Africa, and was supported by 22 other countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Hungary, Japan, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States and Uruguay.  (In 2003, Brazil was the first nation to put forward such a resolution.)

Opposed to the resolutions were the following members: Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Jordan, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Russia, and Moldova.

Zambia, Burkina Faso, and China abstained, Kyrgyzstan was absent, and Libya had been suspended for obvious reasons.

The resolution was co-sponsored by the following countries:  Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Timor-Leste, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Uruguay.

There is an immediately obvious divide primarily between a Middle East/Africa/predominantly Islamic countries bloc and everyone else.  It’s not quite that universal or simple though.  Russia and Moldova are really the lone Western who voted against the resolution.  Noticeably, historically Catholic countries favored the resolution (despite the Church’s opposition to all things LGBT.)  Latin America, for example, really came through, but then again Latin American governments are trending  progressive on LGBT issues, particularly Argentina and Uruguay.  The support even extended into the East despite the opposition of the Middle East.  All the non-Muslim Asian countries (save China) voted in favor of the resolution.  And even China’s abstention is cause for curiosity.

China usually votes against LGBT protections; this abstention is something of a shock.  The real surprises however, were Mauritius, Zambia, and Burkina Faso.  For years, the whole of Africa has fallen into line, and, led by Nigeria, has voted as a bloc against LGBT rights.  That two of those nations, Burkina Faso (predominantly Muslim) and Zambia (predominantly Christian) abstained from the vote is in itself jaw-dropping.  That Mauritius actually voted in favor of the resolution is a minor miracle.  Mauritius is a tiny island country near Madagascar.  Consensual homosexuality is still illegal there.  I am curious to know above all else why exactly Mauritius voted as it did.

In my search for the answer, an answer I still do not know, I read about the government of Mauritius.  Unlike most of Africa, Mauritius has a functioning democracy with peaceful transitions of power.  It rates at the top of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which probably has something to do with why Mauritius voted in favor of the UN resolution.  The better a nation’s human rights record, the more likely it was to vote in favor of the resolution.

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The Ibrahim Index of African Governance is basically what it sounds like: it rates how well the African nations are governed.  A little background is in order.  The Index, which is researched and published by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, was intended as a way for Africans to monitor how good their governments are.  The Foundation was founded by Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born billionaire (he made his fortune through telecommunications and founded Celtel before selling it for over $3 billion), who is determined to help the Africa clean itself up, and join the world community as an equal partner.  The Foundation awards the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, a prize given to African leaders who, during the course of their reign, significantly improve their countries and then (and this is key) allow the democratic process to work by peacefully transferring power to their successors.  The prize is $5 million and then $200,000 a year for the rest of the former leader’s life.  (This has led critics to call the prize a bribe, and there is an element of truth in that.  There are legitimate questions about the purpose and efficacy of the Ibrahim Prize.)  The obvious model for such a leader is Nelson Mandela, although the Prize began well after the Great Man stepped down.  The New Yorker published a fascinating profile (subscription required) of Mo Ibrahim this past March, and I encourage you to read it if you can.

The 2010 Ibrahim Index of African Governance lists the top five nations as Mauritius, Seychelles, Botswana, Cape Verde, and South Africa.  It is probably not coincidence that three of the top five nations are islands, and thus less likely to be unsettled by disturbances in neighboring countries.  (Not all islands scored well though.  Madagascar and Comoros are in the bottom half.)  South Africa, for its many faults, has had a relatively stable government since the fall of the apartheid regime, and Botswana has been a model of good governance and economic growth for decades.  Unsurprisingly, one of the (only two) recipients of the Ibrahim Prize was Festus Mogae, the former President of Botswana.  The prize was not awarded in either 2009 or 2010, which is a rather telling and sad fact about governance in a continent of over 50 nations.

Admittedly, using the Ibrahim Index is a very faulty of determining whether a nation is well-governed.  The criteria are somewhat suspect, and good governance is a subjective and nebulous concept, more ideal than quantifiable.  Good governance is also, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder.  The brilliant Cape Verdean singer Mayra Andrade sings a song excoriating the corruption and the failed promises of her nation’s democracy yet the Ibrahim Index ranks Cape Verde near the top.  Sometimes, the Ibrahim Index just quantifies the obvious.  Things in Somalia are very, very bad, which is why it is at the bottom of the list with 8 points out of a total 100.  In comparison, the next worst governed country is Chad with 31 points.  This is pretty compelling numerical evidence that Somalia is indeed hell on Earth.

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In the New Yorker profile of Ibrahim, there was a question of who the next possible Ibrahim Prize winner would be, and sadly there were no contenders on the immediate horizon.  The one possibility is the President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.  Johnson Sirleaf is an interesting case.  A former World Bank economist, she is the first woman to be elected the head of an African state, and thus far the only one.  She is extremely popular abroad, although I am not a Liberian and cannot vouch for her popularity at home.  Supposedly, she is not quite so loved in her own country.  (The true test will be whether she is reelected this fall.)  Her presidency followed the horrific and destructive dictatorships of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor and years of civil war, which included, among other horrors, the use of children as soldiers.

Johnson Sirleaf’s Liberia is not exactly a success story.  There are many, many problems, and the country has a very long way to go.  To her credit, Johnson Sirleaf acknowledges this.  The most recent Ibrahim Index tells an interesting story though.  Liberia is ranked 36th of 53, but that number alone is deceiving.  Liberia’s score have gone up significantly between 2004-05 and 2008-09.  Scores in specific areas have also significantly improved.  These areas include Safety and Rule of Law, Participation and Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity (where the score is still near the bottom), and even a bit in Human Development (health and social services), where  Liberia is woefully lacking.

None of this is to say that Liberia is good.  The Index hints however, that Liberia is on the right track.  Nevertheless, that statement is highly debatable.  Charges of corruption have been thrown at Johnson Sirleaf and her government.  In fairness, it is difficult to discern what is truth and what is propaganda.

I would like to think that Johnson Sirleaf is succeeding, if for no other reason than because the modern world has yet to produce a truly great female leader (although British Tories would probably disagree with my assessment.)  More importantly, the people of Liberia have suffered tremendously, and only a great leader can even start to turn around their nation.  It may well be impossible for one person to fix horrors that evolved over decades.  But a great leader may be able to stem the tide and put the nation on the right path.  Time will tell if that person is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Nothing New Under The Sun: Part MCDLXIV

I just found out that HBO is planning to remake I, Claudius.  Unless you absolutely despise any kind of costume drama, I heavily recommend the original.  For those not in the know, I, Claudius is a miniseries based on two historical novels (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) by Robert Graves.  The BBC adapted the novels into a 13-part miniseries and cast brilliant actors and actresses including Derek Jaccobi in the title role, Patrick Stewart as Sejanus, and John Hurt as a crazy, crazy, monstrous Caligula.  And then there is Siân Phillips’s Livia, possibly the greatest villain ever to appear on television.  Every scene in which Livia appears, she owns.  Every scene that she’s not in, her presence overshadows all else (at least while Livia is alive; the miniseries spans a century.)

Neither the BBC miniseries nor Graves’s novels have a completely solid basis in fact.  Graves heavily relied on the Roman historian Seutonius, who never found a piece of gossip that he didn’t like.  Seutonius put plenty of unfounded rumors into his book The Twelve Caesars.  Despite this, or more likely because of it, I, Claudius is tremendously entertaining.  And let me tell, even after a Roman history class, I could not keep any of those people straight until I saw I, Claudius.

Nevertheless, I dread an HBO remake.  Certainly it will have a much larger budget than the original, whose production costs were notoriously low.  It is also guaranteed to be far more sexually graphic than the BBC version.  One can imagine the orgy scenes being just slightly more restrained than a pornographic movie.  And probably there will be more violence and gore too, which the BBC miniseries tended to shy away from.

Still, an absence of a big budget is not necessarily a fault.  Because of the more restrained nature of the original (and I hasten to add that it was not exactly puritanical), the focus on story and character: i.e., good writing and good acting.  In general, remakes and sequels, particularly those with much higher budgets than their originals, are notorious for being of far lesser quality than their cheaper predecessors.

Taking on I, Claudius is not an easy task.  HBO’s former series Rome was set before the events of I, Claudius, yet the two were still compared to one another.  As good as Rome was, it could not hold up.

Find the original.  It’s worth the watch.  Just remember: don’t eat the figs.

On Pele

For years, if you asked an average American who was generally unfamiliar with world football to name one soccer player, more likely than not he would say Pele (pronouncing the name PAY-lay.)  Although perhaps now he knows of David Beckham, I imagine that to the uninitiated, Pele is still the most recognizable name, so much so that Pele, who had been retired for decades, could feature in a commercial with the teenaged American player Freddy Adu.

In America, Brazil, and most of the English-speaking world Pele is generally considered the greatest player to ever kick a ball.  However, that is a highly contentious claim.  Of course Brazilians would say that Pele is the greatest.  However, excluding the UK, in the most prominent English-speaking nations, football (soccer) is a niche sport, fanatically worshiped by the few and largely ignored by the masses.  Therefore, familiarity with other great players is limited.  It is a testament to Pele’s skill as both a player and a self-promoter that although he has not played a competitive match in almost three and a half decades, he still garners such universal esteem and even awe.

It is impossible to determine whether Pele was the greatest player of all time although the argument never ends.  Certainly Diego Maradona can (and does) dispute that.  But football is not short of players (or their devotees) who could claim be the greatest ever; Alfredo Di Stefano, Garrincha, Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini, Franz Beckenbauer, and most recently Lionel Messi are just a few of the most prominent names.  That is by no means an exhaustive list.

Undoubtedly Pele was one of history’s greatest players even if he was not the greatest ever.  He is the only player in history to have won three World Cup titles (although his contributions to the 1962 effort were limited by injury, and that tournament was dominated by Garrincha.)  In the early 1960′s, along with his club Santos, Pele dominated South America and bested the top European clubs and players.  Although YouTube can make any journeyman look like a world beater, in Pele’s case old video excerpts only just begin to tell the tale.  He is one of history’s top goal scorers, although his stated tally of 1281 goals is somewhat dubious.  Because of Pele, it is a high honor (and often tremendous pressure) when a player wears the squad number 10 for club or country.

All of this however overlooks Pele’s other amazing ability, his genius for marketing himself–an arena where he is utterly without peer.  To understand how and why this talent emerged, one must go back to Pele’s beginnings in a poverty-stricken city in the state of São Paulo.  Pele grew up under the shadow of two tragedies that shaped his personal and footballing identity.  The first was the Maracanazo, the Brazilian national team’s loss to Uruguay at the 1950 World Cup, a loss that shattered the nation’s collective psyche.  The second, a far more personal tragedy, was the end his father’s promising football career because of injury and the resulting impoverishment of the family.

In some ways, Pele was the right person in the right place at the right time.  He was the emergent star of the 1958 Brazilian World Cup arguably the greatest national side of all time.  Pele also benefited tremendously by the growing popularity of television throughout his career.  There were great players before him, but television showed a gawky, sweet teenager who scored goals like this and then collapsed into tears when his team finally exorcised the ghosts of 1950.  Pele became the symbol of his nation’s football redemption in Brazil and the epitome of o jogo bonoito to the rest of the world.  He was his sport’s first international superstar and across the world his image, that of a smiling, samba-dancing, football genius, is indelible.

The way Pele created and controlled that image was a direct result of growing up in extreme poverty.  Pele’s business since he achieved worldwide fame has been his own brand, so much so that it is as much a truth to speak of Pele, Inc. as the man himself.  Pele was much more aware of the power of his image than the rest of his 1958 teammates.  He got an agent and became obsessive about money.  This is not to say however that he spent his money wisely or trusted the right people.

After the mid-1960′s, Santos became the football version of the Harlem Globetrotters rather than an actual competitor just to pay Pele’s salary.  The New York Cosmos too built a wildly successful brand around Pele’s star power even though he had retired from football and was long past his best days.*   In comparison, Pele’s great Brazilian teammate Garrincha–the joy of the people, the angel with bent legs–died in a haze of alcoholism and poverty.

After Pele has finished playing completely, he found a role in world football that is truly unique.  Some former greats go into coaching, others become part of their club’s hierarchy, and a rare few go into FIFA or other political positions.  Still others disappear entirely or, like Garrincha, follow the path of self-destruction.  Pele has done some of that, but mostly he has made himself football’s ambassador to the world, the living avatar of a sport.  As such, the football powers-that-be turn to him for their own relevance.

Because Pele is professionally the Greatest Ever, he has fashioned himself into the authoritative voice on all things football and greatness.  But because there can only be one greatest ever, Pele has to protect his brand.  Therefore, since retiring, Pele’s full-job has been to jealously guard his own legacy.**

Pele knows himself to be the greatest player in history, and never thinks otherwise.  Although he may tell worldwide audiences that so-and-so is the greatest player he ever saw (name that country, and that’s whose hero is the greatest player he ever saw), but it is all smoke and mirrors.  Unlike Maradona who (often to his detriment) speaks his perceived version of the truth, Pele tells people what they want to hear.  Yet by propping others up, Pele actually cements his own status as the greatest ever.  For example, if Pele were to go to Northern Ireland and tells an audience that George Best was the most talented player he ever saw, the sports pages in Belfast the next day will say the following: “Pele, the greatest player in the world, called our own George Best the most talented player he ever saw.”  Pele has named so many different most talented players he ever saw that one would think anyone who kicked a ball is a world beater.  Despite setting himself as the football sage, he is really a snake oil salesman.

This is not to say that he cannot recognize talent.  You can tell when Pele feels his legacy is threatened, because that is when the knives come out.  His running feud with Maradona reached the point of embarrassment years ago, and now it is just ridiculous.  Recently, Pele has seen a new threat on the horizon, and he is alarmed.  Messi scares him.  More accurately, the accolades that Messi merits terrify Pele.  Two years ago when Barcelona won the Sextuple and entered the “greatest ever” conversation (along with his own 1970 World Cup squad), Pele piped up to say that without sustained brilliance they could not be considered.

Now Messi is being feted by many as the greatest ever, and Pele cannot have that.  Whereas Maradona has embraced Messi as “the new Maradona”, Pele trashes the young Argentine to the press.  Prior to the Champions League final, Pele claimed that Javier Hernandez, United’s Mexican striker could be the next Messi.  Hernandez has the making of a great player, but the next Messi he is not.  Pele is not so much propping up Hernandez though as tearing down Messi–if a contemporary could reach Messi’s level, then Messi’s level is not so great as Pele’s.

The other claim that Pele makes about Messi (and expect more of this following Barcelona’s Champions League victory) is that he does not play well for the Argentinian national team.  This claim is not true although it has a surprising durability.  Messi plays brilliantly for the Albiceleste.  He did not score at the World Cup, but he was the force behind most of Argentina’s goals.  Additionally, football is a team sport; no one does it alone.  Messi was surrounded by a decent offense, a middling defense, and a terrible manager.  Had Messi played for Spain, he would have his World Cup, and Pele would say that Messi would need to win another two before he could be considered the greatest ever.

Pele has done this before, usually with Brazilians (Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, etc.)  When they are a real threat, Pele subtly puts them down–and smiles when they fail.  When they have no chance of surpassing him or can make him look good (such as when they come out of Santos), then he props them up.  If Neymar lives up to the hype, expect to hear from a happy Pele.  If Neymar exceeds the hype, expect to hear from a defensive Pele.

This is not to put down Pele; he is a legend of the game.  He is however, far more complex than his media image.  It is important to recognize exactly what is true and what is false.  And to always question what he says.

 

Footnotes:

*  The Cosmos are still trying to recapture that magic in 2011.  They have named Pele an honorary president and are using him to promote their entry into MLS–all without actually having a team.

**  FIFA in particular needs Pele to be recognized as the greatest ever because of his compliance to work with FIFA.  When awarding a “Greatest Player of the Century”, FIFA foolishly turned the voting over to the general public via the Internet assuming Pele would get the nod.  The general public chose Diego Maradona, a player who (unike Pele) most of the voters saw play in his prime.  Alarmed by the result, FIFA created a panel of experts to award a second Greatest Ever title to Pele.  This only disgraced everyone involved.