Whig Hill

Feeling soulful yesterday

Here's the playlist for yesterday's show.

(And here is a list of all my playsists. Notice my clever, hip, ironic dj name?)

Work

So, Orange County’s favorite Jacksonian, Ernie Dollar, has been advertising around the neighborhood for folks to come watch him do roof work on his house. His ploy is clear to any clear-minded member of the electorate: Portray himself as a common working-man to solicit the votes of the honorable people of this County in his campaign for the legislature. Bah! The most exertion his lily-white paws have seen is the wielding of the lash and the counting of lucre. Everyone knows that.

But his latest foray into campaigning reminded me of this passage from Robert Kenzer’s Kinship and Community, on one Antebellum politician’s efforts to cynically adopt the style of plain folk to gain electoral favor:

When William A. Graham started his campaign to represent Orange County in the North Carolina State Senate in 1854, the former governor, United States Senator, and secretary of the U.S. Navy was observed to have “put aside his long worn dignity…donned a straw hat, the first he has worn in 30 years, flax pants, & spotted calico coat…”

Graham won, but very likely owing to his reputation as a trustworthy politician rather than his clumsy campaign ploy. He needn’t have tried so hard. Elites like Graham, and his wealthy neighbors the Camerons, Kirklands, and Ruffins could easily earn an honorable reputation among the self-working majority by the demonstration of respect for the labor values of common farmers, and by exhibiting genuine tendencies toward hard work themselves, whatever their vocation.

For various reasons, antebellum southerners earned a reputation as either dainty plantation-owners content to let others work for them, or lazy roustabouts content to do no work at all. I’ve just read an invigorating article by Carl Osthaus (“The Work Ethic of Plain Folk: Labor and Religion in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History, 70 (November 2004): 745-782; reprinted here) on the work ethic of common Southerners in the pre-war south. In that agricultural society, people preached and practiced an intensely grueling work ethic that valued toil and aesthetic living over idleness and vanity. Osthaus is not the first to conclude this, but his work is a bracing assertion of the thesis in the midst of a historiographical debate over the nature of common southerners.

Hard, dawn to dusk, work was a family affair. While men and boys plowed and tended to crops (including the small-scale slave-owners alongside their bondsmen), women and girls slogged through endless housework including cooking, cleaning, cultivating the garden, washing clothes, sewing clothes, and caring for children. In most cases among common southerners, women contributed to the household economy by undertaking a home industry: perhaps mending clothes, weaving cloth, raising extra poultry, or teaching in an old field school.  This widespread work ethic bound people (well, whites) across class lines in the antebellum south.

Historians of southern women have debated what the Civil War did to their notions of work and labor. It is well known that during the war, women went outside the home for the first time to earn money to support the family while the men were away. This might have been a novel concept (either exciting or deflating) for some nearing the upper classes (See Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention). For the poorest women, those outside the expectations of mainstream society—work in the form of illicit trade was common in the antebellum and common during the war. No one cared all that much. (See Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women). For the women in the middle—the wives and daughters of soldiers—the family of the self-working farmers who crowded the ranks, their place in the world of work changed, but not all that much. They had always worked hard, every day, as the matrons of households and the force behind the income of home industry. Now, during the war, they simply continued that position, but theirs was now the primary source of income for the family.  Setting a hand to making clothing for children and setting a hand to making uniforms for a government contractor was not that much of a transformation.

Anyhow, I’m just trying to focus my thoughts on this theme and writing it out helps.

But one thing is already clear. The honorable people of Orange County will conclude that Dollar is a laughingstock, and send him down to defeat at the polls. Again. 

Whig Hill Policy Statement

South Carolina: I'm against it.

Do you people know what turns me on?

Do you even care? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.

When I'm searching through the 1860 Census and find women who listed their occupation as "laborer". I have been elbow deep in the 1860 Census for twenty years and I have never, ever seen that before.

And when I discover one of my old seamstresses making uniforms for the N.C. Quartermaster and find her daughter's occupation listed as "prostitute." I'm getting an expansive view of the seamstress occupation: all the way from these lowly poor women on up to the sewing machine-weilding business women.

And when I find a family (Royster) with their children named Virginia, Indiana, Iowa, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Vermont, and Oregon.

These sorts of things make me feel alive.

Now you know.

Just another day in the dirty dirty

Computer problems. Ok. So I’m wanting to get some photographs off my camera and I discover that iPhoto has disappeared from my hard drive. I reckon this happened when I had to erase and reinstall the HD a few months back. I’ve looked all over for a place to download iPhoto 4.0 (everything afterwards is just an update, iThink) and can’t find it. And, to pour salt… when I plug in the camera, the Cannon software isn’t recognizing it. Argh. I’ve some pictures to accompany this post.

And the battery to the laptop is so dead the computer shuts down when I unplug it from the wall. Any suggestions on refurbishing it or replacing it without having to take out a bank loan would be greatly appreciated.

Whatever.

Don’t worry, I’m here to help. I’ve just completed the Community Emergency Response Team course. This is an introduction on how to respond to disasters like hurricanes, floods, fires, dirty bombs, etc. I learned how to assess a situation, do triage on casualties, identify and begin treating victims of the killers; airway obstruction, excessive bleeding, and shock, how to do light search and rescue, turn off gas and water, that sort of thing. The gave me a nifty pack with a hard hat, reflective vest, tools, and a completely inadequate first aid kit (I can spot that now.)

I also completed the FEMA course “National Incident Management System, an introduction.” I am now officially familiar with the structure of emergency response used by local, state, and federal authorities. I know the lingo.

I’m doing all this because I’m on the NCMC disaster planning committee, and if we need to enter a disaster area to assist museums in recovery, the Incident Commander and the Incident Command System will be aware that we’re serious. Plus, I got that hard hat and reflective vest.

Lisa distracted me with this, which lead me to this…that you’d understand if I could post friggin photographs of what I have done to my facial hair. Argh.

Around town. Yesterday, while Lizzielita and I were at the Latino-fest in the park, some plain clothed police raided the house across the street from the house where the Dollar family lives (and right behind the house where Kacey now lives). The people in that place have been notorious drug dealers for a while (and ran a prostitution ring before that). The police had the occupants cuffed in the yard all afternoon and eight or nine cop cars lined the road into the evening. They found forty pounds of maryjane and some automatic weapons. I wonder if the owner will now rent it cheap because I’m tired of my slumlord and want another.

Now I’m sitting in Charlie’s on 9th Street writing this out on paper—because, really…a laptop in Charlie’s? I don’t think so. The laundry is drying a few doors down and the race is on t.v.

Ahhhhh. Durham. 

Yes, it's true

Lizzie has thunderphobia. Otherewise, I expect her to be cited as the canine ideal on Lisa's new blog, dog-li-ness.

Some things I've done since we last spoke

1. A whole lotta nuthin’.

2. I’ve been volunteering as a dj at WXDU. I have shifts at ungodly hours; most of you are not awake. As expected; I’ve copied some great music onto my laptop from the station music library, I’ve played far too much twang for a playlist show, played some really unexpected stuff—for me, and expanded my musical horizons not all that much. It’s fun, but good-god I hope to get a better shift on the next schedule.

3. Lizzie slipped a disc in her neck back in March. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a one-time thing. Fortunately, it’s easily treated with painkillers and rest. Because of it, we haven’t had any monumental adventures in the country, yet. But we’ll get back to that. She’s had one or two minor relapses and one major one where I took her to the vet. She feels fine now. I’m thinking about doggy chiropractic for her.

4. I decided to move to Raleigh. Then I decided against it. Then I decided to go ahead and do it. Then I decided against it. But then I really decided to do it. Then I decided to stay here in Durham. Then I decided to go ahead and do it. Then I decided…

5. I’ve taken up car-pooling with Mrs. Pants again.

6. I’ve watched homeboy Scott Riggs Kick. Ass. in NASCAR.

7. I’m now working in the home office of North Carolina Historic Sites. I’m doing some minor projects for them but they’ve been generous enough to let me work on my quartermaster project. So, the Civil War has been on my mind again.

8. I have not dated, I’ve been chronically impoverished, I've gained weight, and I’m letting my beard grow out real ugly again. Wait. It’s always ugly.

9. I watched all five seasons (currently available on DVD) of The Sopranos. I liked it a whole lot more than I thought I would. Now I'm watching the whole available run of Six Feet Under. I don't like that show as much--but I'm all into the characters and whatnot, so I'll keep watching it.

10. And some things I’m not telling you.

Return of Whig Hill

Hey,

Instead of completely restarting with a new design, software, etc., I'm just going to mostly replicate the old Whig Hill. So, here it is...even has the same URL as the last one.

The only thing I want to say about the past is that when it all broke out in January, Ernie told me that I would learn who was really my friend and who was not. Boy, he was right. More right than I ever expected. And it didn't necessarily fall out the way you might imagine. Some people really stepped up and you have my eternal gratitude, wether you want it or not. Thank you.

As for the future, I've got to get back into the habit of blogging again. I missed it when I quit several months ago, but I don't miss it so much anymore. Imagine that. But I wouldn't be doing it again if I thought it wasn't worth it overall. Wish me luck.