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[ten-in-one]

Samuel J. Tilden: The Man Who Would Be President

“A truce – not a compromise, but a chance for high-toned gentlemen to retire gracefully from their very civil declarations of war.” So read the caption of a Harper’s Weekly political cartoon on February 17, 1877, depicting a hand holding down another, placed on a revolver atop a broadside reading, “Tilden or Blood.”  In just over two weeks time, Samuel J. Tilden’s opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, would be inaugurated in secret in the Red Room of the White House. A couple days later, they’d recreate the ceremony for the American public on the steps of the capitol, but they knew they needed to get it on the books quickly to try to calm the storm surrounding the most controversial presidential appointment in the history of the United States.

The American people, you see, chose Samuel J. Tilden. That much has never been in doubt. For the first (and only) time, a presidential candidate would lose an election having won a majority (not just a plurality, as several others have managed) of the popular vote while losing the election. But that’s just the beginning of the story. When the votes were initially counted, Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes' 165, just one shy of the number he’d need to win the election outright, with 20 electors in four states left to be assigned, as both parties claimed victory in those polls.

To decide those last 20 electoral votes, a 15 member Electoral Commission was gathered, with 5 members each from the House and Senate and 5 Supreme Court justices comprising an 8-7 Republican majority. Unsurprisingly, the vote was cleanly divided along political lines, awarding Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes all 20 disputed electoral votes and therefore a win of the presidency by the narrowest possible margin of a single electoral vote. In order to assuage the anger of the Democratic party (and the majority of Americans who voted for Tilden), The Compromise of 1877 was drawn up, a concession that withdrew all troops from the former confederacy, effectively ending Reconstruction and allowing southern states to “deal with blacks without northern interference.”

It’s hard to say what a Tilden presidency would have meant to Black Americans, many of whom had won their freedom just a scant eleven years earlier with the end of the American Civil War, but there is little doubt that this compromise was a disastrous one, creating an environment in which Jim Crow laws would arise and continue the oppression that many had fought and sacrificed their lives to end.

Tilden, while a member of the same Democratic Party that found this result to be a sufficient salve to the wound of losing an election that seemed well in hand, was himself a northerner with a reputation for reform, a New York Governor who had fought the corruption of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine. In fact, Tilden was a protégé of Martin Van Buren and had helped launch his 1848 presidential campaign, in which he ran as an anti-slavery third party candidate.

In the following 1880 and 1884 elections, many Americans expected Tilden to be a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination once again, having come so close to winning the presidency and with Hayes having made a one-term promise as part of his bid for the presidency, but failing health and revelations of corruption on the part of Democrats in the 1876 election to try to secure Tilden’s victory resulted in a fading political career that left him as a reclusive bachelor for his final years leading up to his death in 1886.

His tombstone bears the epitaph "I Still Trust The People." I wish I could say the same.

[ten-in-one]

Spirituality & Salmonella: The Curious Case of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon

In 1981, the 64,000 acre property known as Big Muddy Ranch near Antelope, Oregon was purchased by a group of followers of Indian Guru Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain and also known as Acharya Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and later Osho), a controversial philosopher and mystic who challenged societal norms on religious, moral, and political fronts. The property was renamed Rancho Rajneesh, and later Rajneeshpuram, a commune that attempted to incorporate as a city after members were thwarted in their attempt to overtake nearby Antelope by the small town of 60 disincorporating rather than be overrun by Rajneeshees, as they came to be called.

Battles followed the community almost from the beginning, with threats both real and perceived blowing up (sometimes quite literally, as in the case of the 1983 bombing of Portland’s Hotel Rajneesh by Islamic militant group Jamaat ul-Fuqra) between Rajneeshpuram and the surrounding communities. Petitions, leaflets, and legal battles were abound, the most notable and threatening to the community being a challenge brought by Oregon Attorney General David B. Frohnmayer on the grounds that Rajneeshpuram’s incorporation violated statutes establishing separation of church and state.

Rajneesh himself refrained from public appearances and speaking for much of this period, delivering messages via video to his followers while cloistered in a trailer next to a covered swimming pool. In addition to these video communications, he would conduct ‘drive-by’ ceremonies from one of his vast collection of Rolls-Royce automobiles. In his absence, his spokesperson and secretary Ma Anand Sheela became the practical leader of the commune, herself becoming embroiled in all manner of hostilities before fleeing to Europe in September of 1985 along with several other senior members of the community. Three days after their departure, Rajneesh called a press conference, accusing Sheela and her collaborators of turning Rajneeshpuram “Into a fascist concentration camp,” stealing $55 million dollars, and oh yeah... intentionally poisoning residents of the surrounding communities with salmonella!

This charge wasn’t entirely new, as Congressman James H. Weaver had publicly accused the Rajneeshees of “sprinkling salmonella culture on salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants" before the House of Representatives in February of that same year, but with this seeming confirmation, a task force was assembled including Oregon State Police and FBI investigators, executing search warrants on the compound and recovering samples that matched the bacteria that had sickened residents of The Dalles, Oregon. The investigation uncovered numerous other crimes, including wiretapping, assault, arson, and the attempted murder of Rajneesh’s physician. As the investigation proceeded, an assassination plot was uncovered to take out US Attorney Charles Turner, one of the heads of the proceedings, resulting in the eventual conviction of 8 of 9 conspirators (with the other having pled guilty in order to escape indictment) including Ma Anand Sheela.

There remains some controversy over how much knowledge and participation Rajneesh had in these criminal activities, but after the firestorm surrounding them and his own guilty plea on immigration violations forcing him to leave the country, Rajneeshpuram was soon disbanded, with a later ruling against them on the separation of church and state going uncontested, however later it was overturned on appeal by the Oregon Supreme Court, leaving the original basis for all that furor having been invalid as the incorporation had not violated state law after all.

Further Reading/Listening:

The Secret's in the Sauce: Bioterror at the Salsa Bar (via Slate) Kick Ass Oregon History: The Dalles Salad Bar

[ten-in-one]

Why Naut?

Upon reading an article about a Chinese effort to land on the far side of the moon (often mistakenly referred to as the “dark side,” as it sees just as much light as it’s Earth-facing sibling) and speculation about subsequent manned voyages that may be partaken, I was taken by a term I’d never heard before. The article speaks of these would-be travellers as “taikonauts,” which got me to thinking about why, if one exits terra firma from the United States, they are referred to as an astronaut, while the same occupation from Russia is called a cosmonaut, and apparently one from China is a taikonaut. I’d been thinking of starting this journey into an illustrated collection of the arcane for some time, and I figured this was as good a place to start as any so here I began, and so, dear reader, may you.

The term “astronaut” or “astronautics” seems to have first been invented by the Belgian science fiction and romance author Joseph-Henri-Honore Boex, writing under the pseudonym J.J. Rosny, in 1926. The charming origins of the portmanteau are the Greek words “astron” (meaning star) and “nautes” (meaning sailor), making the term astronaut mean “A sailor among the stars.”

As the world geared up to send these sailors to the stars–or at least into the void that contains said stars–the scientific community had some debate as to what they should be called, with NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan advocating for “astronauts” and his Deputy Administrator, Dr. Hugh Dryden, preferring "cosmonaut," as the term cosmos means “near space,” a more accurate description of their destination than the stars.

Ultimately, NASA settled on “astronaut,” while the Soviet (and later Russian) Federal Space Agency chose to use “kosmonavt,” anglicized as “cosmonaut” to refer to their space travellers, including First Man in Space Yuri Gagarin. The term “kosmonavt” itself is attributed to Soviet Aerospace Engineer and Spacecraft Design and Rocketry Pioneer Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov, namesake of the Tikhonravov Crater on Mars. Upon his March 1995 participation in the Russian Mir-18 mission, American Scientist and Astronaut Norman Earl Thagard became the first American cosmonaut, a proposition that would have been thought oxymoronic just four years earlier, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.

This brings us all the way back to “taikonaut,” the term that got me thinking about what we call our star sailors in the first place. Taikonaut is actually not used in an official capacity by the Chinese space program (they prefer the romanceless "Yǔ háng yuán" which translates as "Space-universe navigating personnel") but rather by english-language news media when referring to Chinese space travellers, with the root word “taikong” meaning “space.”

The planned terminology for passengers on commercial space flights is the even more colorless “spaceflight participant,” which we can only hope a modern-day J.J. Rosny can dream up a suitable alternative to before we are all sucked out of the hatches of our internet terminals of choice into a boundless void of vapidity from which we may never return.