Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their island.

Attu woman and child, 1941.  She'd never see another summer on her home island again. By Malcolm Greany - https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/2667001144/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17118121

On June 7, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army landed on Attu Island, ferried there, of course, by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Attu is part of the Aluetians.  It's 344 square miles in size.  For comparison's sake, that's a little bigger than Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, and a little smaller than Kauai.  

It's relatively large, in real terms, 35 miles by 20.

It has an Aleutian climate, with average temperatures below 60F in the summer and in the mid 20s in the depth of winter.  It's coldest temperature ever was -17F, in 1902, and the hottest temperature ever, 77F in 1925.

The island has been inhabited since antiquity, and it's estimated that prior to contact with Europeans, the island had a native population between 2,000 and 5,000 souls.  Archeologists believe that settlement came from the east, not the west, even though it's the closest of the Aleutians to Asia and very distant, today, from the nearest Alaskan settlement of any kind.

It's one of the "Near Islands", as its near Asia.

Attu, along with the other Near Islands, seems to have first had settlements about 3,000 years ago, surprisingly late if it's considered that the arriving populations had spread throughout North America far before that.

The first contact with  Europeans came from Russian fur hunters in 1745, when they actually went to Attu after being confronted by a large body of armed natives on the first island they attempted to land at.  The first Russian contact on Attu violent, withe Russians taking an old woman and a boy hostage, oddly keeping the boy as an interpreter, although it has to be presumed he spoke no Russian.

A few weeks after that, the Russians raided an Attu village and killed fifteen men, with the purpose of the raid to take Attu women as sex slaves.  The location has ever since born the name Massacre Bay.

In 1750, the Russians introduced Arctic Fox to the island.

The Russian presence caused the decline of the local fauna rapidly, a devastating event for the natives, and the Russians also introduced disease, playing out a story that is often associated with the European conquest of North America. By 1762 the population was estimated at about 100 natives, which would mean that the population decline had been unbelievably massive in just a twenty or so year span.

The decline in fortunes for the Russians on the island meant that it thereafter largely skipped the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, to the extent it could be called that, and it remained free of Russian economic control.  The Russians reappeared in the early 19th Century, and the Attu population remained very small.

Christianity was introduced at least as early as 1758, but a chapel was not built until 1825, with a Russian Orthodox Priest being assigned to it, along with other island churches in 1828.  He made his first visit to the island in 1831.  By 1860 the native population had rebounded to 227 plus an additional 21 individuals who were "Creole", i.e., of mixed heritage.  When Alaska was sold to the US in 1867, services to the island dropped off massively, and by 1880 the population had declined by half.  Nonetheless, visitors to the island in the early 20th Century, who were few, were impressed by how happy the residents were and how clean the two villages were.  In the 1920s the sod structures were replaced by the natives with wooden ones, with imported wood, which included building a wooden Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and a school, without a teacher, in the 1932.  The teacher first appeared in 1940.

In the 19th and 20th Centuries, and indeed before, the men worked as trappers part of the year and moved to the hinterlands to do that.  Again, in the 20th Century, visitors were uniformly impressed by how happy the people living on the island were. And why not? Free of the chaos of the outside world, living a natural life, and with a Christian world view, they were as close to living in a paradise on earth as any people could be.

And then the Japanese came on June 7, 1942.

The Japanese removed all of the Attuans and kept them on Hokkaido.  By the war's end, half of them had died.  The US retook the island itself in May 1943.

The survivors wished to return to their homes when the war ended, but the US government did not allow them, garrisoning the island instead for a long range navigation site.  Truly, the government really did not have an existential right to deprive the Attuans of their home, but it did so.

The U.S. Coast Guard left in 2010.

In 2018 the descendants of the dispossessed Attuans were allowed to visit Attu.

Blog Mirror: The Cornerstone Speech

The Cornerstone Speech

Quite a remarkable blog entry.

It amazes me how even now some will argue that the South didn't attempt to leave over race based slavery.  

That's what it was all about.

Wednesday, March 4, 1942. Counterstrikes

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1942: Two Japanese H8K flying boats bomb Pearl Harbor—no damage. Aircraft from USS Enterprise strike Marcus Island in South Pacific.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

If you were fighting the war, of course, it was a horrible day. . . if fighting was going on, which it was all over the world. But in terms of huge events, well, it was just another day in the war in some ways.

Operation K, the flying boat raid, had significant aspirations but was a flop.  It didn't do much, other than to remind everyone that Hawaii was still within Japanese air range.

H8K.  This one was in its last moments later in the war, just before the U.S. Navy, which took this photo, shot it down.

The round trip flight engaged in by the two Japanese aircraft from the Marshall Islands was nearly 5,000 miles in extent.

Marcus Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago and is extremely isolated.   The US bombed it repeatedly during 1942 and 1943, but never occupied it.

The remote island was first discovered by the Portuguese in 1694.  They didn't make a specific recordation of the location of the island, however, and it was not sighted again until British/Australian mariner Bourn Russell spotted it in 1830, noting that it was not on his charts, which of course it was not.  It was next sighted by an American evangelical mission to the Hawaiian islands in 1864. The first effort to occupy it commenced by a private Japanese expedition in 1886.

The United States and Japan both claimed the island early on, and in 1902 the US dispatched a warship to enforce its claims, but withdrew when it found the island occupied by the Japanese and a Japanese warship patrolling nearby.  The Japanese withdrew the civilian population in 1933 and made the island a military installation with a weather station and an airstrip.

The island was transferred to the United States in 1952, but in 1968 the US gave it back but continued to occupy it, having a substantial radio station there, whose antenna can be seen in the photo posted above from 1987.  The Coast Guard occupied the island until 1993, and then it was transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Force.

Friday, December 12, 1941. The spreading of disaster.

The Struma when she was new in 1867.

With the United States now in the war, Hitler announced in a meeting in the Reich Chancellery that a full scale effort to exterminate European Jews would commence.  This was noted in our item on Today In Wyoming's History: December 12:

Adolf Hitler announces extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.

The meeting was held behind closed doors and no official records of it exist, but at least two of the participants noted what was to occur.  Goebbels noted the following in his diary entry for the day:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.   

Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

Hitler was referring to an earlier speech of his in which he'd stated that if the Jews caused a second World War, they'd be annihilated.  Of course, the Jews hadn't caused either WWI or WWII.  The first and the second statements show the warped way in which Hitler imagined Jews to be in control of things around the globe, as a bizarre view still held by some today.

This conference is often noted as one of the stepping stones to the German "Final Solution".  The Germans were, of course, already killing Jews en massse in the East so what exactly this meant in real terms is a bit difficult to discern.  All throughout 1941 murder repression had been a constant feature of German policy towards Jews withing their territorial control, and murder certainly had been since the invasion of the Soviet Union.  Things were getting worse for the Jews by the day prior to December 7.

Indeed, on this day:

Germans begin house-by-house search for Jews in Paris.  

Also, on this day the Struma, a cargo ship, left Romania with over 700 Jewish passengers fleeing Europe.  Turkish authorities would not allow it to allow the passengers of the disabled vessel to disembark at Istanbul as it feared they'd be given certificates to travel to Palestine by the British.  The British for their part did not, and urged the Turks to return the vessel to Romania.  Ultimately, Turkey towed the vessel into the Black Sea, where it was sunk by a Russian submarine.

Jews in Germany were forbidden on this day to use telephones.

The wide-ranging Japanese offensive in the Pacific kept on expanding.

1941 British decide to abandon northern Malaya. 

Japanese abandon their first attempt to capture Wake. 

Japanese complete the occupation of southern Thailand. 

Japanese invade Burma. 

Japanese troops land at Legaspi, southeastern Luzon and advance from Vigan and Aparri. 

Filipino pilots engaged Japanese pilots over Batangas Field. They were successful in the air action, in spite of flying obsolete P26 fighters, sustaining one loss.

Naval Air Transport Service is established  

The Navy, going into the war, was extremely short of transport aircraft.  After the war the NATS woudl be ultimately folded into the Military Airlift Command.

U.S. Navy takes control of the ocean liner Normandie while it is docked at New York City.   

UK declares war on Bulgaria.

 Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States. India declares war on Japan.  

Haiti, El Salvador and Panama declared war in Germany and Italy.

1941   The Wyoming Township, Michigan, Police Department founded.

Director Frank Capra joined the U.S. Army.

In other news from the entertainment industry, the move The Wolf Man was released.

Gatherings were happening at college campuses across the US. like this one in Wisconsin.

Campus Reacts to WWII

These members of the Salvation Army were photographed in Australia.

Australian Salvation Army officers, December 12, 1941.

Diana Barrymore sat for a series of portraits in the studios of the famed black and white portrait photographer Arnold Genthe, who was approaching his final months.  

She was the daughter of actor John Barrymore and died of undetermined causes in 1960 at age 38.  Her short life was troubled and her career produced a limited number of appearances.

An American Story?

This goes to post on July 4, 2021, rather obviously.

But it's about events in the 1860s and 70s.  And maybe about today as well.

Just recently I ran across an article about an African American woman who was researching her family's history.  She was aware that she had white ancestors, and indeed nearly every African American whose family is traced back to the 19th Century does.  By the same token, while its rarely mentioned, nearly every white Southern American whose family can be traced back to the 19th Century in that region also does, making all the fighting and whatnot from 1865 forward over race really odd.  

There's a lot of interpretations on what this means, of course, with the word "rape" commonly appearing in such discussions.  This isn't gong to go into things like that.

Rather, what the article revealed is an oddly human story that probably ought to just cause everyone to pause and ponder it.

It dealt with a  man who came from a slaveholding, relatively well off, plantation owning family.  Not a massively wealthy, Gone With The Wind type situation, but relatively well off.  Not so well off that, when the Civil War came, he entered the Confederate army as an officer, however.

He did enter it, was wounded, convalesced at home, and then reenlisted and fought again.

Now, the cause of the South, anyway you look at it, was slavery. That's what the war was about.

And in his household among the slaves was a young female slave.  

When he was home convalescing.  Something happened.  Nobody noticed until he'd gone back into the Confederate army.  She was pregnant.

He was the father.

He returned from the war alive, and this story doesn't go in the direction you'd suppose.  Interracial marriage was illegal in the South (and often elsewhere as well) but he did not abandon her, or their child.  In fact, in the early 1870s when there was very briefly a brake in the prohibition on interracial marriage, they married, and they lived the rest of their lives as a married couple.

That couldn't have been easy. They lived in the South, and they must have been outcasts.  But they carried on anyhow.  When he died, he was buried in an all white cemetery. When she died some years later, she was buried in an all black cemetery.  That shows, I suppose, the attitudes of those around them.

I suppose the fact that their descendants today are regarded as African Americans also does. The half white, half back, children of that union were black under the strange American "one drop of blood" viewpoint, and they must have slipped into the black community where they lived.

It's an interesting story, however.  A son of a planter and a Confederate soldier develops a relationship with a black slave owned by his family, during the war, and later marries her.

Postscript.

Oddly enough, on the same day I posted this, I ran back across this being linked into one of my cousins' Facebook feeds.  A very powerful essay.

You want a Confederate Monument?  My Body is a Confederate Monument.

Juneteenth. What the new Federal Holiday Commemorates

Today is a Federal Holiday.  And for the first time.

Emancipation Day celebration, Richmond Virginia, 1905.

The holiday is Juneteenth.

The creation of the holiday is certainly proof that the Federal Government can in fact act quickly.  The bills on this were very recently introduced and this just passed Congress earlier this week and was signed into law yesterday, giving Federal employees the day off today. On Monday, they weren't expecting a day off.

So what is it?

The day basically celebrates the end of slavery, but in a bit of an unusual way. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862.  Juneteenth, however, marks the calendar date of June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, after the end of the war, and issued proclamations voiding acts of the Texas legislature during the war and proclaiming the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.  His General Order No. 3 was read aloud in the streets. Hence, June 19 became recognized, regionally, as the day that the Emancipation Proclamation reached the most distant outposts of the slave states, bringing slavery finally to an end.

Band for Texas Emancipation Day celebration, 1900.

Celebration of the day in Texas started almost immediately, being first observed just one year later, by the state's freed African American population.  Interestingly, the day was generally known as Emancipation Day.  However, the revival of segregation in the South in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century caused the day to suffer a decline, until it began to be revived in the 1950s.  Upon revival, the name Juneteenth began to apply to it.  It was made a state holiday in Texas in 1979.  The day received recognition in 47 of the states since then, with North and South Dakota and Hawaii being the only ones that had not up until now.

Talk of making it a Federal holiday has existed at least since the 1980s.  Generally there's been very broad support for the move, but it obviously has taken years to accomplish, if we regard 1979 as the onset.  It's interestingly been an example of states largely being out in front of the Federal Government on a holiday, and not surprisingly the various ways that states have recognized it have not been consistent.

Gen. Gordon, who brought news to African Americans in Texas that they'd been freed two years prior.

There's been next to no opposition to the holiday being created which is interesting, in part, as the current times have been very oddly polarized in all sorts of ways.  The measure had bipartisan support, although fourteen Republican members of Congress voted against it.  One interestingly voted against it as he thought the official name confusing, Juneteenth National Independence Day, which in fact it somewhat is.  That individual wanted to use the original name, Emancipation Day, which is a view I somewhat sympathize with.

It'll be interesting to see what the public reaction is given that this happened seemingly so quickly.  By and large people who are aware of it seem pleased, although Candace Owens, the African American conservative columnists and quasi gadfly, predictably wasn't.  It'll probably be next year until there's widespread national recognition of the day.

In very real ways, what it commemorates is the suffering of one of the most American of all American demographics, the African Americans, who have been in the country since its founding, but who still were the victims of legal discrimination all the way into the 1960s and whose economic plight remains marked.

Juneteenth

This passed Congress earlier this week, and was signed into law today.  Unusually, the impact is truly immediate.

For those who might not know, Juneteenth commemorates the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaching Texas, which would have been the Confederacies most distant territorial assertion. 

Governor Gordon Responds to Federal Recognition of Juneteenth Holiday

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Today, President Biden signed a law creating a federal holiday recognizing Juneteenth. Governor Gordon has also signed a proclamation recognizing the significance of the day, which commemorates the end of slavery, while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Wyoming has recognized the Juneteenth holiday since 2003, when the state legislature passed a bill establishing the holiday on the third Saturday of the month.

Because of the President's action, Friday June 18, 2021 is a holiday for most federal employees per the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In Wyoming the Legislature has set State Holidays. While tomorrow will not be a state holiday, the Governor will work with lawmakers to consider this option for future years. 

“Freedom is always a cause for celebration and this is a momentous day in our nation’s history. I encourage people to observe this commemoration of the full enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, which embodies the values of all Americans,” Governor Gordon said.

--END--

May 21, 1921. Funeral of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White.

United States Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White's funeral was held on this day in 1921.

He was from Louisiana and had died two days earlier.  He was a surprise nomination to the Supreme Court by Grover Cleveland who had twice attempted to nominate New Yorkers before him.  

White was Jesuit educated and therefore not surprisingly a Catholic.  He's served in the Confederate forces during the Civil War, but in a capacity that's now hopelessly vague.  He was taken prisoner near the end of the war.  Due to his Confederate service, a statute in Washington D.C. was the subject of protests in August, 2020, even though very little is actually known about his wartime service.

Wonder Bread went on the market on this day in 1941.  Personally, I've never been really keen on it, but its an undoubted commercial success.

The American System

You know that you are listening to PBS News Hour when one of the commentators is enthusiastic about the Biden infrastructure proposal as he finds it comparable to the Whigs' American System economic policy.

Henry Clay, one of the founders of the Whig Party and the chief spokesman for its American System.

I had to look that up.

It turns out that I was slightly, and I do mean slightly, familiar with the American System, but not by that name and mostly in the form of its lingering influence on the GOP during the 1860s, 70s and 80s. And I really know nothing about Henry Clay, its chief proponent, other than that he was well known at the time. According to the Congressional website on such topics:

Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."

Clay delivered a famous speech on the topic, which we won't set out here as its of epic length. You can read it, however, here:  The American System.

The American System was the main economic platform of the Whigs and it was ardently, and now ironically, opposed by the Democrats.  The Democrats were pretty much a laissez-faire party at the time and opposed to government having much of any kid of role in the economy.

The Congressional summation of the American System doesn't appear to be a fair one. The breadth of Whig support for a government role in the economy was pretty wide.  For instance, it reached down to supporting public primary education, something that wasn't universal at the time.

It was ultimately the economic policies, and the overarching issue of slavery, that did the Whigs in, causing them to collapse in the 1850s. By that time the Southern faction of the party was no longer supportive of an expansive Federal role in the economy, where as the northern "National Republican" faction was.  Slavery, of course, became a massive issue in the party.  By the mid 1850s the party was flying apart and a collection of new parties rose up to contest for its former members.  In the north the Republican Party soon emerged.  In the South, Whigs remained without a structure, but opposed succession and then went on to loosely start to form an emerging party in the Southern Congress that never fully formed due to the war ending before that could occur.  The Confederacy was, of course, nearly a one party state.

People often discuss the legacy of the Whigs, but one early legacy was that the GOP was, initially, pretty proactive in using Federal money and Federal assets in the economy. The most prominent example of that was the Transcontinental Railroad which would not have come about without a degree of government planning, favoritism, spending and intervention.  So, PBS isn't out to a left wing lunch when its commentator makes this comparison.

It's interesting too, in that may in fact be a much closer analogy to what Biden is attempting to do than the New Deal.

That doesn't mean its a good idea, or that all of it is.  But it's a very interesting historical analogy.

Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.: 

Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Sgt. Toy receiving the Medal of Honor in 1891.  Sgt. Toy was cited for "bravery while shooting Indians" at Wounded Knee.  He is known to have shot two during the engagement, which is about all that his citations and the supporting material relates.

 Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Revoked.

While this isn't a Wyoming item per se, the Battle of Wounded Knee has been noted here before, as its a regional one.

It would likely surprise most readers here that twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers who participated in the actions at Wounded Knee.  The odd thing is that I was under the impression that the Army had rescinded these medals long ago, and I'm not completely certain that they haven't.  Having said that, I can't find that they were, so my presumption must have been in error.

To put this in context, the medals that were rescinded, if any were, weren't rescinded because Wounded Knee was a massacre.  They were rescinded because they didn't meet the post April 1917 criteria for receiving the award.

The Medal of Honor was first authorized in 1861 by the Navy, not the Army, following the retirement of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was adamantly opposed to the awarding of medals to servicemen, which he regarded as a European practice, not an American one.  The award was authorized by Congress that year, at the Navy's request.  The Army followed in 1862 in the same fashion.  The medals actually vary by appearance, to this day, depending upon which service issues them, and they've varied somewhat in design over time.

During the Civil War the award was generally issued for extraordinary heroism, but not necessarily of the same degree for which it is today.  Because of this, a fairly large number of Medals of Honor were conferred after the Civil War to servicemen who retroactively sought them, so awards continued for Civil War service for decades following the war.  New awards were also issued, of course, for acts of heroism in the remaining decades of the 19th Century, with Army awards usually being related to service in the Indian Wars.  Navy awards, in contrast, tended to be issued for heroic acts in lifesaving, a non combat issuance of the award that could not occur today.  Indeed, a fairly large number were issued to sailors who went over the sides of ships to save the lives, or attempt to, of drowning individuals, often with tragic results to the sailors.

At any rate, the period following the war and the method by which it was retroactively issued may have acclimated the Army to issuing awards as there are a surprising number of them that were issued for frontier battles.  This does not mean that there were not genuine acts of heroism that took place in those battles, it's just surprising how many there were and its clear that the criteria was substantially lower than that which would apply for most of the 20th Century.

Indeed, in the 20th Century the Army began to significantly tighten up requirements to hold the medal. This came into full fruition during World War One during which the Army made it plain that it was only a combat medal, while the Navy continued to issue the medal for peacetime heroism.  In 1917 the Army took the position that the medal could only be issued for combat acts of heroism at the risk of life to the recipient, and in 1918 that change became official.  Prior to the 1918 change the Army commissioned a review board on past issuance of the medal and struck 911 instances of them having been issued.  I'd thought the Wounded Knee medals had been stricken, but my presumption must be in error.

Frontier era Medals of Honor, as well as those issued to Civil War era soldiers after the Civil War, tend to be remarkably lacking in information as to why they were conferred.  This has presented a problem for the Army looking back on them in general.

Indeed, the Wounded Knee medals have this character.  They don't say much, and what they do say isn't all that useful to really know much about what lead them to be awarded.  There is a peculiar aspect to them, however, in that they don't reflect what we generally know about the battle historically.  

Wikipedia has summarized the twenty awards and what they were awarded for, and this illustrates this problem.  The Wounded Knee Wikipedia page summarizes this as follows

·         Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Joshua Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

·         Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

·         Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

·         Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy;

·         Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

·         First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

·         Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

·         Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

·         First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery;

·         Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

For quite a few of these, we're left without a clue as to what the basis of the award was, at least based on this summation. But for some, it would suggest a pitched real battle.  A couple of the awards are for rescuing wounded comrades under fire.  Others are for combat actions that we can recognize.

Indeed, one historian that I know, and probably only because I know him, has noted the citations in support for "it was a real battle", taking the controversial, albeit private, position that Wounded Knee was a real, pitched, engagement, not simply a slaughter.  This isn't the popular view at all, of course, and its frankly not all that well supported by the evidence either.  But what of that evidence.

A popular thesis that's sometimes presented is that Wounded Knee was the 7th Cavalry's revenge for the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Perhaps this is so, but if it is so, it's would be somewhat odd in that it would presume an institutional desire for revenge rather than a personal one, for the most part.  Wounded Knee was twenty four years after Little Big Horn and most of the men who had served at Little Big Horn were long since out of the service.  Indeed, some of the men who received awards would have been two young for service in 1890, and while I haven't looked up all of their biographies, some of them were not likely to have even been born at the time.  Maybe revenge was it, but if that's the case, it would demonstrate a 19th Century retention of institutional memories that vastly exceed the 20th and 21st Century ones.  Of course, the 7th Cavalry remains famous to this day for Little Big Horn, so perhaps that indeed is it.

Or perhaps what it reflects is that things went badly wrong at Wounded Knee and the massacre became a massively one sided battle featuring a slaughter, something that the Sioux on location would have been well within their rights to engage in. That is, once the things went wrong and the Army overreacted, as it certainly is well established that it did, the Sioux with recourse to arms would have been justified in acting in self defense.  That there were some actions in self defense which would have had the character of combat doesn't mean it wasn't combat.

And that raises the sticky moral issues of the Congressional efforts to rescind the medals.  Some of these medals are so poorly supported that the Army could likely simply rescind them on their own, as they have many others, and indeed, I thought they had.  Some seem quite unlikely to meet the modern criteria for the medal no matter what, and therefore under the practices established in 1917, they could be rescinded even if they were regarded as heroic at the time.  Cpl. Weinert's for example, unless there was more to it, would probably just merit a letter of commendation today.

Indeed, save for two examples that reference rescuing wounded comrades, I don't know that any of these would meet the modern criteria. They don't appear to.  So once again, most of these would appear to be subject to proper unilateral Army downgrading or rescission all on their own with no Congressional action.

But what of Congressional action, which has been proposed. The Army hasn't rescinded these awards and they certainly stand out as awards that should receive attention.  If Congress is to act, the best act likely would be to require the Army to review overall its pre 1917 awards once again.  If over 900 were weeded out the first time, at least a few would be today, and I suspect all of these would.

To simply rescind them, however, is problematic, as it will tend to be based neither on the criteria for award today, or the criteria of the award in 1890, but on the gigantic moral problem that is the Battle of Wounded Knee itself.  That is, these awards are proposed to be removed as we regard Wounded Knee as a genocidal act over all, which it does indeed appear to be.

The problem with that is that even if it is a genocidal act in chief, individual acts during it may or may not be. So, rushing forwards to rescue a wounded comrade might truly be heroic, even if done in the middle of an act of barbarism.  Other acts, such as simply shooting somebody, would seem to be participating in that barbarism, but here too you still have the situation of individual soldiers suddenly committed to action and not, in every instance, knowing what is going on.  It's now too late to know in most cases.  Were they acting like William Calley or just as a regular confused soldier?

Indeed, if medals can be stricken because we now abhor what they were fighting for (and in regard to Wounded Knee, it was questioned nearly immediately, which may be why the Army felt compelled to issue medals to those participating in it, to suggest it was a battle more than it was), what do we do with other problematic wars?

Eighty six men, for example, received the Medal of Honor for the Philippine Insurrection.  In retrospect, that was a pure colonial war we'd not condone in any fashion today, and it was controversial at the time.  Theodore Roosevelt very belatedly received the Medal of Honor for leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill during the Spanish American War, and he no doubt met the modern criterial, but the Spanish American War itself is morally dubious at best.  

Of course, none of these awards are associated with an act of genocide, which takes us back to Wounded Knee.  As noted above, maybe so many awards were issued there as the Army wanted to to convert a massacre into a battle, and conferring awards for bravery was a way to attempt to do that.

Certainly the number of awards for Wounded Knee is very outsized.  It's been noted that as many awards have been issued for heroism at Wounded Knee as have been for some gigantic Civil War battles.  Was the Army really more heroic at Wounded Knee than Antietam?  That seems unlikely.

Anyway a person looks at it, this is one of those topics that it seems clear would be best served by Army action.  The Army has looked at the topic of pre 1917 awards before, and it removed a fair number of them.  There's no reason that it can't do so again. It was regarded as harsh the last time it occurred, and some will complain now as well, but the Army simply did it last time.   That would honor the medal and acknowledge the history, and it really shouldn't be confined to just Wounded Knee.

Dead men and horses at Wounded Knee following the conflict.

The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946

Patrons of a bar and grill in Washington D.C. in 1943.  The man on the left is drinking a glass of beer, and it appears the woman is as well.  Also, fwiw, the man on the left is a Technician with a Corporal's grade, which during World War Two was an E3 grade, as opposed to Specialist and Corporals today, which hold an E4 grade.  The man on the right is an officer, so this is frankly likely a posed photograph.  All three people are smoking cigarettes.

Alcohol and the United States Army would make for an interesting small book  in no small part because the United States itself has had a love/hate relationship with alcohol.

Beer can, perhaps, be regarded as the American alcoholic beverage of choice, reflecting both the climate and geography of the nation, as well as the English founding of the country.  While not to put too fine of point on it, the English were armed Germanic immigrants in the 5th Century and some cultural things go way back.  Everywhere north of some line in modern France, if you consider Western Europe, beer is the alcoholic beverage.  South of that, it's wine.  All the Mediterranean people of the ancient world drank wine and in those areas of that region which are not now Islamic, they still do.  North of that line, at some point, they drank beer, although you can easily find beers going back to the ancient Egypt as well, although frankly the Egyptian climate was somewhat different at the time.

In the Medieval world, north of the beer line, beer was a staple.  South of it, wine was.  This isn't necessarily good, but basically the ills associated with any sort of alcohol were lower than those associated with plain water.  I'm not going to go into that, as its a bit more complicated than it might seem, but that's the case.

Before I move on. . . yes, there's hard alcohol and every region of the globe seems to produce some.  Whiskey is a Celtic thing and it goes way back in its own right.  But there are few people and were few people who simply drink hard alcohol routinely in the Western world, and in those regions were it is routinely consumed, it's destructive.  So, with that, we'll move on.

In the early Colonial era there was no big temperance movement of a wide societal basis.  Indeed, one of the oddities of history is that religious denominations that today argue against alcohol and which trace their origin to the Puritans, and not all make that trace, don't reflect back what the Puritans believed at all.  The Puritans were against a lot of things, to be sure, but they were fans of beer (and [marital] sex), so people remember them inaccurately.  But one did start to arise in North America by the mid 1700s in the form of Native American groups who urged it given the devastation that alcohol was causing in their cultures.  Indeed, they'd organized a temperance organization as early as 1737.  Coupled with this the popularity of gin in the early Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, which was a gross booze which could be manufactured cheaply, caused the movement to come about there as well.  

The early United States, however, was simply awash with alcohol and this, over time, gave force to the temperance movement, and by the mid 19th Century it was growing strong.

Issuing an alcohol ration is a strong military tradition in many armies, but reflecting the unique history of alcohol in the US, the tradition is much weaker in the U.S.  The American Navy, following the tradition of the Royal Navy, issued a Rum Ration, with Rum simply being any available hard alcohol, but in 1862 it abolished it.  In 1914, during the era in which Prohibition was coming on strong, the Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels completely banned alcohol in ships, meaning that the U.S. Navy went into World War One escort duties dry.  

The Army had an alcohol ration very early on.  Starting in 1775 Congress authorized soldiers an alcohol ration, and the ration was whiskey, in part reflecting a disruption of alcohol constituents that had been imported.  The is ration continued until 1832.  There was a separate spirts ration for military surveyors that continued on until the 1840s, but then it was also discontinued.

Since that time I don't know that there's ever been an alcohol ration in any branch of the military.  Indeed, the British discontinued their famous naval rum ration in the 1970s, so its likely disappeared or much less what it was everywhere.  The problem of obtaining clean water isn't what it once was, and its never been as big of problem in North America.  From the 1830s on soldiers could buy beer at post suttlers stores, but they were restricted in the amount they could buy.  I can't recall the restriction, but it was far below the amount you could drink and get drunk, which no doubt was the goal.  Of course, off base you could buy as much of anything as you might wish to, which is partially why saloons were a feature of every location with a frontier post.  Indeed, it was noted in the 19th Century that one of the problems of not having something like an Enlisted Man's Club, such as was later done, is that off post saloons were real dens of vice of all sorts.  Apparently this wasn't enough to motivate a change, but it was noted.  No alcohol ration was provided at any point through Prohibition.

This brings us to World War Two and this interesting item below, by Gary Gillman, a Toronto based beer blogger with an excellent blog entitled Beer, Et Seq.

U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946 (Part I)

U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946 (Part II)

U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946 (Part III)

I frankly don't know what was done beer wise from our point of entering the Second World War up through the end of the Vietnam War.  What is clear is that beer seems to have been provided on at least an ad hoc basis and therefore was a type of ration, even if on a somewhat informal basis.  Cigarettes had become one too, which had not been the case in World War One. The though likely was that you simply couldn't have that many people in uniform and not address such things, least they be addressed by the men themselves, which of course they also did.  Beer seems to have been provided on some basis in the Korean War and the Vietnam War as well, but not since then.  Indeed, recent wars in Islamic countries have been "dry", so to speak.

Anyhow, and interesting look at the US actually undertaking to brew beer during World War Two for servicemen's consumption.

Resolution from the House of Representatives to President of the United States, 1/10/1866

 

2020 Election Post Mortem XI. The Post Insurrection Administration and Congress.

Actions and words, we're told, have consequences. And we're told that because they do.

During Trump's rise to power and during his administration his biggest ally in the press has been Fox News, which for the most part has reliably been on Trump's side.  That started to come apart after the election during which Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to deny the reality of his loss grew, but even then they still supported him when they could conscience it.

A couple of days ago a Fox commentator, Ainsley Earhardt made this observation on her show Fox & Friends:

There are 75 million people that voted for President Trump. And they are scared. They are worried about what the future of this country looks like. They are confused and heartbroken that their candidate didn't win and they don't want to be forgotten.

She was pretty rapidly shouted down in the media.

That doesn't mean that Earhardt isn't right.  Indeed, she largely is, although the 75,000,000 figure for the brokenhearted and scared isn't correct.  Donald Trump did receive 75,000,000 votes, but some of those votes were from lukewarm supporters who won't cry over his departure now.  Quite a few conservative voters felt that Trump was the only option they had, which doesn't mean that they otherwise were his fans.  Catholic and other Apostolic Christian voters often felt they had to vote for him as, ironically, his Catholic opponent seems to stand for principals that are deeply contrary to their moral beliefs, but quite a few of them otherwise found the President to be repulsive.  And Donald Trump's actions following his November defeat have turned quite a few of his former supporters definitively away from him.

That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't have a lot of support.  The down ballot results for the GOP show that the populist wing of the Republican Party definitely had a lot of support going into the November election, although it lost some in formerly Republican Georgia as a result of Trump's behavior.  It's no doubt lost more now.

Still, Earhardt has a point.

Populist and conservative voters, and the two may overlap but are not the same, have a real reason to be scared, worried, confused and heartbroken.

And the reason for that is that Donald Trump's post election behavior has brought in a united Democratic government that's not only united by party, but united against Trumpism, and licensed for radicalism to a large degree.

In other words, since the election, Donald Trump has machinated for reasons that are difficult to discern, but which seem rooted in narcissism, to bring about the very situation which he claimed to be the one who was protecting against it.

Early after the election we did a series of "post mortems" on where it appeared things were headed, but we did note that the Georgia election would determine a lot of that.  What we didn't see was an insurrection and an administrative support for it that has caused some overseas to regard it as an attempted coup.  

And that changes everything. . . probably.

We really only have three examples of something like this, with one so old as to be probably not worth really discussing in this context. The three would be the post Revolution government of the United States, the second the post Civil War, and the third being the post Watergate.  

The post Watergate is the most analogous.

We don't remember very much of what occurred in the US after the American Congress won the war against the United Kingdom.  What we do tend to recall is the prolonged effort to work out a form of government, which was messy and which involved a lot of infighting.  We won't go into it in detail, but it's worth noting that we commonly hear about the American Revolution was that it was a "conservative revolution".

It wasn't.

The American Revolution was a radical revolution based on the concept, by its end, if the people being sovereign.  It was framed, however, by a largely common culture that had largely shared values and a preexisting governmental structure.  It's overall thesis; monarchs meant nothing and the rights of individuals as expressed through legislators was radical.  The country rejected the concept of monarchy and the rights of monarchs entirely.  It also adopted a type of nationalism that is prior sovereign had not expressed and would not for many years.  It went so far as to see the severance of the dominant church, the Church of England, which claimed apostolic succession, from its acknowledged head, an act of near schism that went along with the Revolution.

Following the Revolution the country did adopt an orderly form of democracy that we retain, with modifications, today.  But it also expelled Loyalist through community action and kept them out through legal process after the war, turning large numbers of Americans into refugees simply because they took loyalty to the legitimate government seriously.  It's not well remembered now, even though it was a dramatic hostile act at the time, and it formed the real origins of Canada, through loyalist refugee communities.

Tory Refugees by Howard Pyle for Harpers, 1901.

Following the Civil War, in contrast, the nation rejected the guidance of the Radical Republicans.  The Radical Republicans would have reformed the South by dispossessing the rebellious large property owners, vested the land in the former slaves, and would have tried significant rebels for treason.  It's often believed that President Lincoln's kindly view of his defeated countrymen kept this from happening, but I frankly doubt it.  Had Lincoln lived the shrewd lawyer and politician likely would have adopted some of the radical desired policies and indeed, the nation should have.  

Most of the Radical's policies were not, however adopted and by the 1870s, a very short time after the war, the nation was giving up on Reconstruction in general. The Compromise of 1877, which has been in the news again, was a result of that as the election of 1876, expressed its final end.  From 1865, or even earlier in some instances, the victorious Union did attempt some reforms in the South, but gaps in their enforcement caused a beaten population to revive, combined with Congress quickly readmitting the recently defeated Southern representatives to Congress.  This had resulted in a tight election in 1876 and the Southern Congressmen, writing the script for which we just witnessed again in 2021, attempted to hold up certification of the results.  

In 1876/77 the effort was much more successful than the one which was just experienced in 2021 and the Republicans compromised by promising, unofficially, to end Reconstruction and withdraw troops from the South.  During the 1865 to 1876 period real progress had actually been made on advancing the rights of blacks and poor Southerners, but it all evaporated over the coming decades and it wasn't until the 1960s that real progress would return.

There are a couple of real lessons from the post Civil War era that should be instructive here.  One is that a victorious side in a real dispute was essentially lead by those only committed in concept to a principal, that being restoration of the Union, and who were only weakly committed to the remainder of what had been fought for.  That is, while the war was over slavery, commitment to reconstruction the South was only barely there a decade after the traumatic event that brought it about.  In 1865-70 the will to really remake things was strong, but by 1871-76 that will had faded.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the failure to really overhaul the South after the Civil War is, in spite of how it might be remembered now, one of the nation's great historical failures.  From 1876 to 1900 the nation crept back into a type of virulent racism that disenfranchised blacks whose legal rights had only barely been established.  The entire civil rights movement of the 1960s would really have been completed during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century had that not occurred, and the disastrous result of the failure to remake the nation in the late 1860s is something we are still living with today.  Indeed, had we handed the post Civil War reconstruction correctly, we might have avoided what occurred last week.

The bloody flag of treason which has spread in recent years throughout the country.

The final example we have, and the most analogous one, is the Watergate scandal.  And is lessons are the ones that should worry conservatives and populist now.

The entire Watergate break-in episode was a wholly avoidable example of stupidity by overzeals paranoids.  The nation was going to support Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972 and the Democratic Party lurching to the left in the wake of 1968 and all that had occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s was going nowhere.  But the break-in followed by Nixon's complicity in trying to cover it up brought him down and the Republicans with him.  It also swept into power Democrats who were far to the left of their predecessors.

They were there already, but they weren't in control of the overall party.  The Watergate scandal changed that.  Following Nixon's downfall Democrats swept into control of Congress, although ironically the Presidential candidate whom they chose to run in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was really a middle of the road politician.  Carter likely saved the country from going deep hard left in the 1976-1980 time frame, both by the fact that he wasn't a radical, and by the fact that he was a pretty ineffectual President.  Four years of Carter were enough to allow the Republicans to reorganize and come back with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and it also started the formation of the modern Republican Party and its bipolar personality.  Reagan was a conservative, but he stoked the flames of populism and the GOP further abandoned a long standing support of strong civil rights so that it could make headway with Southern voters who remained deeply resentful of changes brought about in their region in the 1960s and 70s.  An ineffectual management of the economy, moreover, by Nixon, Ford and Carter aided in Carter's downfall.

President Carter with Roslyn Carter and Hyman Rickover.

What that lesson tells us is that in a very brief amount of time real left wing Democrats were able to make major inroads into Government.  Some of them still remain there today.  Their period in control was actually surprisingly brief, but it was preceded by an advance in their fortunes during the 1960s and was made real by the collapse of a center right President due to scandal.  Voters were disgusted with Republicans and punished them at the ballot box in 1976.  They got over a lot of it by 1980, which is really amazing in context.

Nixon had his supporters right to the end, and even after, and even today.  But much of that support was lost pretty quickly and Gerald Ford's actions in pardoning Nixon wrecked his chances at reelection.  Democrats in Congress who were mad at what occurred lurched left.  Even during President Ford's administration he didn't attempt to stop that direction as it was unstoppable.

And that's where I suspect we are right now.

Joe Biden goes all the way back to that era, but he's really an East Cost centrist Democrat, just as Jimmy Carter was a Southern centrist Democrat.  Like Carter, however, Biden is going into office with a now invigorated Democratic left.  Right now, while he has a unified government, it's only barely so, but a lot of Republicans, just like Republicans in 1973, have become disgusted with their President.

Moreover, Donald Trump has actually managed to make Richard Nixon look good.  Nixon was paranoid but he didn't attempt to retain power and actually resigned, rather than be impeached and convicted.  He didn't have the support of his party at that time, of course, and he knew it, but Trump has rapidly lost much of his support in Congress as well and doesn't seem to acknowledge that other than to lash out at those who have left him.  Nixon's GOP, however, remained largely intact in 1976 and reorganized, with an insurgent wing that still remains, by 1980.  That new party, part establishment and part populist, just ripped apart and is only barely a single party.  There's a good chance that it will split into two.  

So, here's what I think follows.

At this point, Biden has no reason not to go as left as he wants to and there will be no real hindrance to him going as far in that direction save his own inclinations and those of Democrats who are really in tightly contested regions.  All the warnings and crises about "Socialism" and the like mean utterly nothing whatsoever right now, and they won't for the rest of the year.  Ironically, therefore, Donald Trump has brought about the very situation which he used to stoke the flames of his support.

Moreover, Biden is beholding to his party's left and has now lost the argument he had for not giving it much of what it wants.  He can't maintain that a divided government forces him to play ball with the GOP in the same way he could have before last week.  He can still make that argument, but it's much weakened as the Democrats can get their legislation through unless they themselves do not support it.

And this means that we're going to get a lot of pent up Democratic legislation. There will be new environmental regulation and it will go much further than anything prior to it. There will be gun control.  Policies favoring abortion and new categories of sexual identity are going forward.  The courts are now going to take a giant leap to the left in terms of new appointments.

The country isn't going to be completely made over, but much of it is.  And the people the country can thank or blame for that are those who stormed Congress last week.

2020 Election Post Mortem Part X. What do you do with an act of sedition, and who has committed it, and how can the country get over it.

The flag of treason.  It's been flying everywhere.

Sedition.

We've been seeing a lot of it, in a lot of places, and by people who should, and frankly do, know better, those people seeing the citizens of the United States as ignorant dupes.

What exactly, you may wonder, is sedition?  Well, under the current law, it is defined as follows:

18 U.S § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

So, the elements are:

1.  Two ore more people who;

2.  Conspire to:

• overthrow; or
• put down; or
• destroy by force.

the Government of the United States; or

• to levy war against it;
• or oppose by force the the authority thereof
• or by force prevent, hinder or delay

the execution of the law; or

• by force seize, take or possess any property of the United States contrary to law.

There's no question that the Insurrection of January 6, 2021 was sedition by those who participated in it.  They are guilty of a lot of other things as well, but sedition is one of them.

But what about the political leader, the President of the United States, who urged them into the act?

Well, let's consider he not only did that, but he also made a telephone call, with his confederates, trying to pressure Georgia officials into throwing the election for him.

Sedition?

Well, I suppose it depends on what he meant.  During his impeachment trial it was maintained that things he said in his telephone call with the leader of the Ukraine could have meant more than one thing.  Perhaps that's the case here as well.  But a jury could decide either way here. . . and not just on the statements, but also by the collective acts of pressuring and then urging here and there.

And what about local leaders who backed this farce.  The GOP in more than one location, through its state organizations, has been backing the fantasy that the President won the election.  Is that sedition?  Probably not.  But its not very honorable.

But going further, what about legislators who know, or should know better, and who argue that Senators and Congressmen who are not going along with this should be brought before the state legislator to be held into account. Sedition?  No, but again, distressing.*

And this all matters enormously.

Twice in this country's history the nation has let those who committed grave offenses against the democracy of the nation get away with it; once following the Civil War when it did not try the guilty and punish them under the law, and once in the 1970s when an effort to steal an election through actual theft was covered up by the person it was intended to benefit.**  In both of those instances a national act of mercy was misbegotten and lead to further crimes and errors.  The Reagan administration barely got away with unlawful arms sales, for example.  And now Donald Trump has tried to steal an election, wrecked the conservatives party he belongs to, and put the nation in a state of insurrection.

This time, the guilty must be punished. The act is too brazen, the crime too great, and the implications too vast not to do so.  An insurrection has happened. The capitol has been vandalized for the first time since the War of 1812, when at least it was the British, not rebellious Americans, who did it.*** If we do not, we will pay for it as a nation.

So, the first thing that must be done is to try the insurrectionist.  The penalty is clear, and they should get the full measure of the law.

And those seditionist otherwise involved in this sorry scene should pay as well, including Donald Trump.  The soul of the nation depends on it, and the future of the Republican Party.  Republicans should demand it.  And immediately.

And those politicians urging fantasies upon the people, both great and small? Well, they can't be tried, but it's lawful not to seat them.  

Urging an illegal overthrowal of the elected head of state simply because you disagree with him, and deluding others into the idea that the election was tainted, is the end state of democracies.  Not addressing it puts us on the path trod by Mexico in 1910, Russia in 1917,Germany in 1932, and Italy and Spain prior to that.  The choices are stark but the lessons of the failure to act are clear.

Choices have consequences, including bad and deluded ones.  Unfortunately, they have consequences for everyone, not just the person making them.

________________________________________________________________________________

*What about sinful?  At least one of the individuals doing this is my co-religious. Telling lies can be a pretty serious sin from the Catholic prospective. A public official telling them must not only confess his sins, but arguably must rectify the misdeed to the extent he can, which would be a public recanting of his statement.

This assumes knowledge, of course.  A person can't seriously sin if they don't know what they're doing is sinful, from the Catholic prospective. But blinding yourself to the truth may be a factor, perhaps.

And what about the pulpit.  If there's a parishioner in the pews telling lies is there a pastoral duty to correct?  Maybe.

**And in this act of Richard Nixon, it might be noted, there was the irony that his campaign had no need to do this.  Therefore, just as Donald Trump has thrown his party under the bus needless, so had Richard Nixon.

***The Capitol was not even touched during the Civil War, although mostly because the rebellious Southern states didn't have the capacity to do it.