Hi folks,
I received some news yesterday that was not unexpected: the 2020 Western History Association Conference will be conducted entirely online. The good news here is that the entire conference (including both of my panels) will be held digitally, and all panels will be recorded and uploaded for future viewing. It will also be free to all WHA members, so if you’re interested in checking out what the Western History Association does . . . why not kick a few bucks their way to support historical scholarship on the American West and join? You’ll get a quarterly journal and a really nice tote bag (I have a collection of them from past conferences). Anyway, given the number of conferences canceled over the spring (including another one I was supposed to do in Michigan), I am relieved that the WHA 2020 will be a sure thing this fall.

Of course, that’s the good news. The bad news is that none of us will be meeting in Albuquerque this October, or for that matter probably leaving our houses. No evening drinks with old friends and colleagues. No New Mexican-style food or dinner at Papa Felipe’s (which in my opinion is the best regional cuisine in the United States . . . no contest). No annual UCLA alumni brunch. No face-to-face networking. No chance encounters with world renowned scholars. And no book launch parties, complete with warm brie and autographed copies of my new book.

Conferences are an integral part of any academic book launch. Attendees usually hang out in “the book room,” which is a large gallery of various publishers and other groups who set up tables containing the latest and greatest books in our field. During my first few years going to conferences, they were a place for me to chat with editors and senior historians. During the last few years, they’ve become a place to bump into friends I’ve made over the years, while still making time to catch up with various editors and others. And this year, I was looking forward to seeing my own book on the table, and possibly taking some time to “officially” launch it. Conference-goers get a hefty discount on all the books there, and people attending my panels would no doubt learn about my book once I start to talk.

However, like the WHA Conference itself, I will not let COVID-19 get in the way of me celebrating the publication of my book, which was the result of a lot of hard work on my part and the publisher’s. So, to that end, I am exploring some alternative possibilities for getting a bit more exposure, including the possibility of a “virtual” book launch. Do YOU have any ideas for what I can or should do? Please leave me a comment or some other suggestion!

One thing I will do, starting right now, is begin planning an online exhibition of some of my Nebraska and Great Plains photography. Since my book will not have any full color photos, I will include those photos that I have taken here in color, along with a little bit of narration about the photo and what I was doing or where I was when I took it. I am also doing this because I am canceling my planned flight to Nebraska to take and document a “Horse Thief Road Trip” through some of my favorite sites in Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. I was really looking forward to the journey, and to being able to fly my drone around the Plains . . . but, alas, it would not be safe, advisable, or even kosher at the moment to make such a gratuitous trip. But I do have a ton of photos from my previous trips to the Plains, and a place to showcase them. I will begin making these posts in September, in advance of the book coming out, but in the meantime here is one of my favorites:

This is a photo of the towering Buffalo Bill cutout at Fort Cody, a tourist attraction glorified gift shop along Interstate 80 in North Platte, Nebraska. It’s worth a visit if you’re ever passing through the area . . . that’s where I bought my dad a roll of John Wayne toilet paper. But they have more than just souvenirs, including a miniature, animatronic Wild West show with a cast of thousands of individual pieces. It’s a cool thing to see, especially after driving across the Plains for several hours.

Anyway, this shot isn’t my best (e.g., it does not follow the rule of thirds), but to be fair this cutout is absolutely enormous. It towers over the parking lot, much like how the man it depicts towers over Western culture and the Western genre itself. And I love the bright blue sky behind it . . . imagine that slightly marshmallowy azure extending toward the horizon in every direction, above a grassy and barely peopled land, and you can imagine yourself in the Great Plains.

Hopefully enough people buy the book so that there will be a paperback edition to hawk, thus giving me another legitimate, professional excuse to visit this surreal, sublime place. And if that happens, then next time it will be the book launching me . . . perhaps back to North Platte, or to some other place under that endless sapphire Nebraska sky.

Good news: the Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains has just won a Midwest Book Award for Best General History. I’m honored and privileged to have had the opportunity to submit a chapter to this exemplary collection, which was edited by Jon K. Lauck. The whole book is wonderful, start to finish, and if you have any interest in the Midwest or the Great Plains it is worth a read.

You can get it on Amazon, or you can give Jeff Bezo’s share directly to the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University, which published the book: http://www.augie.edu/center-western-studies/shop/interior-borderlands-regional-identity-midwest-and-great-plains.

Congratulations, Jon!

I’ve been reluctant to write about the relationship between my research and recent debates over police reform. That’s in part because, as I’ve said earlier, I think it’s important that the microphone be given to people who are usually unheard. But the other reason is that I have spent so much of my research time lately working on the Grandpa’s Letters project that I have not done as thorough of a job as I would have liked since finishing Never Caught Twice keeping up with the history of law enforcement literature. I have been meaning to do some historiographical literature catching-up over the summer, and since it is always better to focus one’s reading in a specific direction than to cast a wide net and hope for the best, I think I’ll take a cue from recent events and work on that.

That being said, the book itself deals heavily with the history of policing and its relationship to the wider horse stealing phenomenon. And while I do not take any stance on whether or not police should be “defunded” or demilitarized in the book, I did notice several things while conducting my research that I think will shed some additional light on how police institutions themselves developed in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Overall, I believe that a better understanding of police history is critical for both supporters and opponents of police defunding, as it will echo not only a lot of the problems we face with police agencies today, but also a lot of what made early policing agencies more efficient and in some ways more successful than their current counterparts.

So, here are three quick hits from my research to think about when engaging with police reform as a historical subject and as a contemporary issue.

Since these were hurriedly composed and written mostly without reference to my books or notes, I will welcome any corrections or questions in the comments section below.

The police were not always monolith

Today we tend to think about “the police” as a singular institution, even when they are not. Municipal police forces, county sheriffs’ offices, state highway patrols and investigative offices, plus the seemingly limitless alphabet soup of various federal agencies are all different institutions with different agendas. Movies and television shows frequently depict tensions between these different agencies as they quibble over cases, budgets, and jurisdictions. However, there are fewer identifiable contrasts between these organizations now than there were before. After all, if someone pulls you over, it hardly matters whether or not they are highway patrol or the local sheriff. On a macro level, however, interagency cooperation and the blurred lines between legal and geographic jurisdictions mean that in practice people are less likely to parse the differences between these different agencies.

Conversely, one characteristic shared by many, if not most, late-nineteenth century police departments was that they were operationally stratified. In Nebraska, sheriffs departments handled most of the felony offenses, while also servicing civil court documents like subpoenas. These roles kept them busy, so sheriffs did not do much patrolling, particularly at night. Thus, some towns like North Platte and Sidney, Nebraska created small police departments, which handled less serious offenders, like tramps, prostitutes, and drunks. North Platte even had its own “police court,” which adjudicated these offenses. Notably, North Platte also hired a night watchman, whose role was distinct from and independent of the police. Especially serious offenses could invite the involvement of a federal marshal.

This motley assembly of different law enforcement roles and organizations suggests that the public did not see law enforcement as a state-monopolized monolith, but as a spectrum of various officers and offices, ranging from night watchmen to federal marshals, who looked after their own specific niches. There was no police monolith, and, as NYPD detective Andre Davis (played by Chadwick Boseman) puts it in 21 Bridges when he wants to send thousands of police into Manhattan to search for two cop killers, no way to “flood the island with blue.”

The police were underfunded and paraprofessional

Almost across the board, various law enforcement agents and agencies in late-nineteenth century Nebraska were underfunded and understaffed. The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department’s budget was comprised almost entirely of user fees, for instance, which were charged upon serving warrants, subpoenas, and other official legal papers. This offered few resources for things like horses, weapons, and deputy salaries. There was no other recourse, however. Much of the land in Lincoln County was owned by the Union Pacific Railroad, and thanks to the federal government’s transcontinental funding model it did not have to pay taxes on that land. Starved of revenue, the County found creative alternatives. North Platte eventually hired a city marshal and, later, a municipal police force, but even these organizations paled in comparison to their contemporary equivalents.

Of course, this lack of funding was to some degree immaterial, since late-nineteenth century police had few if any of the technologies available to them then that they have now. Law enforcers had no tanks, no tear gas grenades, no cruisers or SUVs, no body armor or cameras, no computers, no cell phones . . . the Western meme of a disaffected sheriff’s deputy handing in his badge and gun and then walking off into the sunset was not too far away from the truth. The gun was his equipment, and the badge his uniform.

Because of the comparatively shallow learning curve for new law enforcers, the work itself was mostly paraprofessional – meaning that while law enforcers were empowered by the state to carry out their duties, they seldom received professional training or vetting through background checks. Virtually anyone could become – and did become – sheriff, including convicted criminals. Police science was not yet a thing, and while today the FBI is considered by many to represent the gold standard in professionalized and competent law enforcement and investigative competency, in the late-nineteenth century a private police force could have made a similar claim: the Pinkertons.

The logics of late-nineteenth century policing are consistent in this regard. Officers did not need much training because their roles were limited and there were few technologies at their disposal to master. Police departments did not need massive budgets because there was little hardware to purchase.

However, the limitations of this sort of policing were visible to everyone, and therefore few were satisfied with the results.

State-sponsored law enforcement was only marginally capable of protecting private property

This is where my horse stealing research comes into play, since one of the questions I had throughout the project was why so many people both today and during that time period believed that horse thieves needed to be hanged.

The answer seems obvious: horses were important, so hanging a horse thief was a powerful disincentive for anyone considering that line of work. But it isn’t quite that simple. In Nebraska, out of fifty-eight total documented lynchings statewide, vigilantes only killed nine men for stealing horses, and three of those murders occurred before the Civil War. The others were part of larger vigilante movements in the Niobrara Valley and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the vast majority of horse thieves either escaped or, if they were less lucky, spent a few years behind bars. However, by reading the newspapers in Nebraska from the late nineteenth century, one could certainly think that vigilante killings were a daily part of life in Nebraska. Threats to hang horse thieves were especially common, and even memoirs such as Mari Sandoz’s Old Jules overstate the role vigilantism played in keeping horse thieves in check.

As it turns out, vigilante threats were a more effective tool than vigilante violence. For one, threats were cheap – just a few posters and a couple of short blurbs in the county paper about a new anti-horse thief association could frighten prospective thieves from stealing. More importantly, the threats themselves did not threaten the fragile place already occupied by law enforcement in frontier communities, which according to some recent studies were already hotbeds of violence. For law enforcement to be functional, it could not spend all of its time and resources protecting private property. Nevertheless, someone had to protect peoples’ horses, which were quite possibly the most expensive AND essential things they owned.

Law enforcement did not have the training, resources, or personnel to proactively fight theft, so other things filled the vacuum. As a result, vigilante violence, threats of violence, and detective societies were some of the options used by farmers who did not have the money and the means employed by bigger firms and businesses. Those larger enterprises, like ranches, could mobilize their ranch hands and cowboys to pursue thieves, and stockmen associations helped organize and augment these efforts, for instance by hiring brand detectives to monitor cattle shipped via train. The railroad companies themselves hired their own detectives, and Union Pacific police were a common presence along the railroad in western Nebraska. Elsewhere in the country, business and factory owners could hire police to do their bidding, as if they were private mercenaries. In one especially notorious instance, Andrew Carnegie sent an army of Pinkertons into Homestead, Pennsylvania, to break a steel workers’ strike there in 1892.

These multiple and divergent institutions responsible for law enforcement and private property protection all coexisted with one another. But by the early twentieth-century, public police began to overtake private police forces as it became cheaper for firms to rely on the police, whose swelling budgets, professionalizing talent, and growing technological sophistication led to more police and better tools. New inventions, from telephones to street lamps, made it easier to surveil with fewer people and report back in record time. And as the police continue to justify growing budgets, they embraced more and bigger responsibilities, including private property protection.

It would be difficult to continue this discussion without both getting political and leaving my immediate field of expertise, although I will note that there is a significant and growing literature concerning the role between state-sponsored policing and its relationship to slavery and systemic racism throughout history. I don’t really tumble down these rabbit holes in the book, either, although I do suggest that horse stealing be used as a jumping off place for discussions over the history of state violence being used to protect private property, the use of law enforcement in facilitating and perpetrating racist violence, and, more generally, America’s continuing fascination with both policing and vigilantism.

But regardless of what your feelings are about or your politics on the subject, we all need to establish and unpack some central premises in the history of policing if we are to have any kind of rational, thoughtful discussion on the matter. Understanding how law enforcement institutions evolved over time is critical to evaluating their efficacy in the present. After all, as the above paragraphs show, police and policing are not static, unchanging concepts. They constantly evolve, shift, adapt, and morph as the communities they serve change around them. Right now a majority of Americans agree that policing in America needs to change its trajectory and adapt once again, this time to scarcer resources, more limited roles, and public demands for greater accountability. I hope that by thoughtfully embracing some of the very good work that has been done on the history of policing in the United States we can all eventually come to a consensus that will eliminate racially and geographically biased policing while still keeping all Americans – and their private property – safe. I’ll work on putting together a list sometime this summer.

Hi folks,
I apologize, but I don’t have anything for you today. My September 1944 post is not ready for prime time, nor are any of my other planned Grandpa’s Letters posts. I’m also writing a few posts on the history of policing, but I’m sticking mostly with what I discuss in my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska.

Policing is a prominent subject in that book – not by itself, naturally, but as one of the many institutions that simply could not keep up with the demands of the citizenry with respect to finding and apprehending horse thieves. Yet it was in part due to disappointments over policing’s failure to protect private property that made private property protection a major area of emphasis when law enforcement institutions began to professionalize in the early twentieth-century.

Also, at some point we will address the question I am mostly commonly asked, which is whether or not horse thieves were hanged. There is a lot to unpack there, but needless to say there are parallels between that and other facets of American crime and punishment as well.

Beyond that, it’s the first week of teaching three six-week online courses while also taking another on the side, so I’ll get myself together this weekend and have some fresh material for you on Monday.

Now my kid is crying . . . it’s been that kind of week. Got to run!

Elmer ended up spending over a month in Australia. Once his leave ended at the end of the month, he was ordered to hang out in Sydney and wait for his transportation back to the Mink. In the interim, he stayed in the Naval Barracks in town and worked for the Shore Patrol. During the day he guarded one of the government buildings in town, but the nights were his. He spent most of them with with his Aussie girlfriend, Lorraine “Rae” Henry.

Rae was a Red Cross volunteer who worked the information desk at one of the clubs Elmer frequented. Originally from Perth, she had only been in town a few months when Elmer arrived. She did not smoke or drink, but as Elmer told Rose the following month, “I drank enough for the both of us.” Rae and Elmer usually doubled up with Lloyd Hill, one of his shipmates on the Mink, and one of her friends, and then they would go to the movies, attend dances, go out to dinner, and check out the local sights. Rae also invited Elmer over to dinner with her parents a couple of times, and she wrote a nice letter to Elmer’s mother on August 4th. “I met Elmer a few weeks back and have seen him every day since,” she wrote, “[but] he has been a very good boy. I have taken care of that for you.” Her return address was in Bondi, a neighborhood near the iconic Sydney beach. On July 30th they had a picnic there on the sand.

Almost every letter Elmer wrote contained some variation of “this has been a marvelous vacation.” But the vacation was starting to run a little long by the middle of the month. Although Elmer was having a great time, he had nearly exhausted his money. “Wonderful vacation down here,” he wrote on the 9th, “but expensive. I’m down to the last of my money now.” He borrowed $10 from Lloyd, knowing that once they got back to the ship he would be flush with cash again. But even that only went so far, especially with his prolific social life. “Of course, we can borrow from the Red Cross if necessary,” he wrote, “But I don’t like to borrow money. [But I] think I can make it with the funds I have now.” Yet the days rolled on without a ride back to the Mink, and by the 16th he was down to his last few pounds. Then his luck changed. “Several of us fellows were drinking beer at the Navy club one night last week, and I decided to try my luck at a slot machine. We call them ‘one-eyed bandits.’ Anyway I was lucky and hit the jackpot for about twenty dollars in our money. Not bad, eh what?” That was enough to tide him over until the end of the trip.

However, money was not the only thing waiting for him back at the Mink. He was not receiving any of his mail down in Australia, as it was all being delivered to his ship. As a result he began to worry. “I’m extremely anxious to get a hold of my mail,” he wrote his parents on the 29th. Despite not getting any letters from his parents or Shirley, he resolved to write them both twice a week. But now that the shoe was on the other foot Elmer got a small taste of what his parents had to deal with earlier that year while he was transiting the Pacific. “Mom, dear, I feel a little uneasy because I can’t get my letters from you until we reach the ship. I’ll be glad to see your letters again and know all is well.”

Elmer and his shipmates were able to finally go back to their ship during the last week of the month. “We shoved off in rather a hurry after all our wait for transportation” he wrote on the 26th while en route to the Mink. Before he left Rae made Elmer promise to write her regularly once he made it back to his post. She also told him she would knit him a turtleneck and ship it to him once it was done. Meanwhile, he had another long journey ahead of him as he shuttled north towards New Guinea. “Not a bad life as a passenger,” he mused on the 29th, “but we are all anxious to get back ‘home.'” He also heard an important – and exciting – piece of news while on the boat back. “The Allies have Paris now. Hot dog!”

Elmer was back on the Mink by the 31st. His bunk, his job, his friends, two months worth of pay, and fifty letters awaited him. “Opening and reading my mail was just like a Christmas occasion,” he gushed. Nine were from his parents, while Shirley wrote eleven. Rose sent him a letter as well. Answering them all would be a job in and of itself, but there was not much else to do in New Guinea at any rate.

Today is Memorial Day, and it is an even more somber holiday than usual: instead of attending backyard barbecues and opening swimming pools, many Americans continue to reel from the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Times yesterday published a heart-stopping front page with the names of 1,000 people who have died from the disease in the past two months, and even as much of the country begins to reopen there are growing hotspots in various sections of the nation and the world. Although Memorial Day is about the countless Americans who have given their lives in the service of their country, our thoughts are not far from those who have recently fallen victim to this awful illness.

In any case, today I want to take the opportunity to highlight two men I have only recently started researching and writing about, not on here but in my actual Grandpa’s Letters manuscript draft: S2c Mathew Agola and F3c Clarence Wise. Both men were sailors aboard Elmer Luckett’s first ship, the Chew. Both men were from Saint Louis, Missouri. Both men knew my grandpa, as well as most of the other men aboard the ship. And both men died on the morning of December 7, 1941 during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Although the Chew was not hit that morning, both Agola and Wise had spent the previous night off ship. When the attack started, the men were effectively stranded ashore with no way of getting back to the destroyer. But instead of seeking safety elsewhere, they rushed towards the USS Pennsylvania, which was in dry dock and a sitting duck to Japanese dive bombers. They joined the small crew there as it worked furiously to put out several large fires. Tragically, however, Agola and Wise died when a bomb hit her deck.

Like thousands of others that day, Wise and Agola didn’t not wake up that morning thinking they were at war. In fact, it had only been just over a year since Clarence Alvin Wise passed the news that he was activated along to his parents, Robert and Virginia. Wise enlisted earlier than most of his shipmates: he swore his oath on March 16, 1939, the day after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Yet despite the disastrous failure of France and Great Britain’s appeasement policy toward Adolf Hitler that Spring, war seemed a long way off for America, if not necessarily Europe. Back at home, Robert worked at Hobusch Cleaners on Big Bend Boulevard in Maplewood, while Virginia was a machine operator in a tobacco factory. The Wise family had recently moved out of their home on Blaine Avenue near Tower Grove Park and into Maplewood, a suburb just west of the Saint Louis City limits. Their new residence, three-bedroom wooden frame house on a quiet suburban street, afforded Robert, Virginia, Clarence, and Robert’s father Frederick some additional space. Although Wise did not continue his schooling past the ninth grade, on his enlistment application he stated that he was a mechanic. Before leaving for active duty, Clarence married his sweetheart, Margaret Sutton. Within a week he, Mathew, Elmer, and hundreds of other activated Saint Louisans were on a train heading west.

Unlike Clarence, who already had a job and a wife before getting called up, Mathew Agola was only 18. In fact, he was barely 17 when he signed up on July 20, 1940. His father, automotive machinist Peter Agola, authorized his son’s enlistment papers – a fact that evidently caused a rift between him and his wife, Rose. Like many members of his generation, Mathew represented the first generation of his family to be born in the United States. Both of his parents came from Italy. Mathew, however, was born in Saint Louis. Before his enlistment he attended school at St. Paul’s in Pine Lawn, which is near what is now Lambert International Airport west of the city.

After the Navy called Mathew up for active duty, the Agolas fretted over their son’s sudden departure and his – and the world’s – uncertain future. By August, his parents were at their wits end. Peter and Rose did not believe that Mathew would be away for so long. Frustrated, Peter wrote to Admiral Chester Nimitz – then the Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation – in August 1941 and implored him to send Mathew home on leave. “At that time [when I authorized his enlistment papers] I didn’t realize that he would be called for so long a period,” he wrote in his letter to the Admiral. “Since my son has been gone (since last December) my wife has been a nervous wreck and is always fussing with me, saying it is my fault that he is away from home. If this keeps on I believe I will be a nervous wreck myself.” His favor was for Mathew to be sent home “for awhile. I believe this will make my wife feel happier and better, and it would take me out of the doghouse. I will gladly pay his fare home from San Diego.” Despite Peter’s pleas, however, Nimitz sent a form letter back, suggesting that Mathew submit an official request for leave.

On December 17th, less than four months after Peter wrote his letter, and after ten interminably long days had passed since the Pearl Harbor attack, Mathew’s fate was finally known:

Mathew Agola would not make the trip back to Saint Louis until 1947, when his remains were transported to Jefferson Barracks Memorial Cemetery for burial. Meanwhile, Clarence Wise’s body was never found. Weeks later, and after a mountain of paperwork, his disappearance was officially ruled a death.

As I stated above, I’ve only recently begun researching these two men, and there is a great deal to say about both of them: their stories, their sacrifices, and the loved ones they left behind. But for now, here are two names to think about as we remember and honor the fallen on this Memorial Day.

Stay healthy, friends, and thanks as always for reading.

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