The Battle of Piestewa Peak

The name of Squaw Peak in north-central Phoenix was changed to Piestewa Peak last year to honor Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa, the first female American Indian soldier to be killed in combat. Piestewa, a Hopi mother of two, was killed last March 23rd, when her company was ambushed near Nasiriyah, Iraq.

Now there appears to be an effort in the Arizona legislature to reverse the name change, presumably because Gov. Janet Napolitano strong-armed the State Board on Geographic and Historic Names into bypassing normal procedures.

As reported by E.J. Montini in The Arizona Republic:

[O]ne of the first things Arizona legislators hope to accomplish this year involves finding a way for state government to once again sanction the word “squaw.”

In particular, a large group of Republican legislators is very interested in returning Spc. Lori Piestewa to the status of squaw by restoring the name of the Phoenix mountain that was changed last year in her honor.

The legislative effort is led by Rep. Phil Hansen of Peoria, Arizona.

Hansen is a fifth-generation Arizonan who has had long and honorable careers in both the private sector and the military.

“Those people who give the final sacrifice for their country I hold in the highest regard,” he said. “But I don’t hold Lori Piestewa in any higher regard than any other person from Arizona who died for their country. And the fact that she may be the first American Indian woman to die in the service of the United States to me is immaterial. To me she’s still a soldier and should have no more recognition than any other person that that happened to.”

Perhaps we honor all of our lost soldiers when we honor any one. After all, we would not say that naming Luke Air Force Base after one man did a disservice to the others from Arizona who gave their lives over foreign skies, would we? Besides, if we change the name of Piestewa Peak now, it means going back to squaw, which would be like going back about 100 years to a time when calling a native woman such a thing was acceptable. Would anyone do it now? Would Hansen?

“For the first part of my life I rarely came face to face with an Indian,” said Hansen, who’s 71. “They were very reclusive. You’d see them on the street in Phoenix selling baskets or pottery or whatever. More recently I don’t know that the subject has ever come up. I have a dictionary that has a date of 1977 on it. I looked up squaw and it doesn’t say anything about it being derogatory.”

He said he wouldn’t use the term to describe a Native American woman now, but not because it was insulting. Only because it wasn’t contemporary and had a more “historical quality” to it. Perhaps like those historical words we once used to describe African-Americans. If the governor were asked to approve one of those words for a landmark I’d hope she would do what she should do if a “Squaw Peak” bill lands on her desk. Veto it.

Read the entire Montini column.

The great escape

This from an article on Squaw Peak in The Arizona Republic last spring:

In December 1944, during World War II, 25 German soldiers escaped from a POW camp set up in Papago Park [Phoenix]. Some of the escapees intended to float a boat down the Salt River, which they had seen only on maps. They were sorely disappointed when they discovered that the river was dry. All the prisoners were quickly captured, except for their leader, a U-boat captain, who hid for a month in a cave on Squaw Peak before he was recaptured.

Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat

Joseph Ellis likes David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing:

David Hackett Fischer’s new book, ”Washington’s Crossing,” is a highly realistic and wonderfully readable narrative of the same moment that corrects all the inaccuracies in the [Emmanuel] Leutze painting but preserves the overarching sense of drama.

The centerpiece of Fischer’s story is the daring attack across the Delaware by 2,400 soldiers in the Continental Army, who routed the Hessian garrison at Trenton, then fought two additional battles at Trenton and Princeton the following week. Though the sizes of the armies were small compared with the numbers that fought at later battles like Gettysburg or Normandy, Fischer argues convincingly that the actions at Trenton and Princeton were the most consequential in American history, for these stunning victories rescued the American cause from what appeared to be certain defeat and thereby transformed the improbability of American independence into a distinct possibility, eventually an inevitability….

For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment. More than any other book, ”Washington’s Crossing” provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both ”Patton” and ”Saving Private Ryan,” starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it’s all true.

Read the entire review.

Remember The Maine

On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and helped propel the United States into a war with Spain. The USS Maine was in Cuba, officially, on a mission of friendly courtesy and, incidentally, to protect American lives and property in the event that Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain might escalate into full-blown warfare. “Yet,” writes author Tom Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”

On board the Maine that sultry Tuesday night were 350 crew and officers. Shortly after 9 p.m. the ship’s bugler, C. H. Newton, blew taps. The ship bobbed listlessly, its imposing 100-yard length visible from stem to stern. “At 9:40 p.m.,” writes Miller, “the ship’s forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water. Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption–this one deafening and massive–splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air…. In all, 266 of the 350 men aboard the Maine were killed.”

The American press was quick to point to an external explosion–a mine or torpedo–as the cause of the tragedy. An official U.S. investigation agreed. On April 25, 1898, Congress formally declared war on Spain. By summer’s end, Spain had ceded Cuba, along with the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, to the United States.

In 1976, Adm. Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted yet another investigation into the cause of the Maine disaster. His team of experts found that the ship’s demise was self- inflicted–likely the result of a coal bunker fire. There are those, however, who still maintain that an external blast was to blame. Some people, it seems, just won’t let you forget the Maine.

–Source: Smithsonian Magazine, February 1998.

Susan B. Anthony…

was born on this date in 1820. As The New York Times said in her obituary in 1906, “Susan Brownell Anthony was a pioneer leader of the cause of woman suffrage, and her energy was tireless in working for what she considered to be the best interests of womankind.”

Harold Arlen…

was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905.

A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
Come Rain Or Come Shine
Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
Hooray For Love
It’s Only A Paper Moon
I’ve Got the World on A String
One For My Baby
Over The Rainbow
Stormy Weather
That Old Black Magic

Matt Groening…

was born in Portland, Oregon, 50 years ago today. The Writer’s Almanac has this biographical essay on the creator of The Simpsons.

[Matt Groening] hated grade school, because his teachers were always confiscating his notebook drawings and tearing them up. He began keeping a diary when he was in fifth grade, vowing that he would never forget the injustice he suffered.

He drew cartoons for his high school newspaper and once ran for class president as a joke. In his campaign, he said he was the founding member of “Teenagers for Decency.” He was shocked when he got elected. He tried, unsuccessfully, to rewrite the school’s constitution to make himself absolute dictator.

Groening decided to move to Los Angeles after college to try to make it as a writer. He lived in a neighborhood full of drug dealers and thieves, and got a job ghostwriting the memoirs of an 88-year-old filmmaker. After that, he worked at a convalescent home, a waste treatment plant, and a graveyard. He started writing a comic strip based on his daily troubles called “Life in Hell.” The main character was a miserable rabbit named Binky. He made the comics into booklets and mailed them off to everyone he knew. He started to sell the booklets in record stores, and the Los Angeles Reader eventually began to run the strip. Within a few years “Life in Hell” was syndicated in weekly newspapers across the country. Groening said, “I had no idea I was going to make cartooning a career. I was doing it merely to assuage my profound sense of self-pity at being stuck in this scummy little apartment in Hollywood.”

When a TV producer asked Groening to created a TV show, Groening decided to invent a cartoon family that would be the exact opposite of all the fictional families that had ever been on American television. He named the parents after his own parents, Homer and Marge, and he named the two sisters after his own sisters, Lisa and Maggie. He chose the name Bart for the only son because it was an anagram of the word “brat.”

The Simpsons has gone on to become the most popular and longest running sitcom in America. Groening no longer writes for the show, but he gave it its basic premise, which is that authority figures are generally mean and stupid. He said, “Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians—for the Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.”