Broken Hearts at Wounded Knee

With the close of the Revolutionary War, waves of European settlers pressed against the western American frontier seeking room to pursue their agrarian lifestyle. Vast quantities of cleared land were required. Therefore justified by belief in their Manifest Destiny to settle America from coast to coast, these settlers set out to make history from east to west. The history of resistance by the indigenous population was made in the opposite direction.

One hundred and twenty-two years ago this week, their two histories collided for the final time astride Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Arguably the saddest chapter was written in the struggle of two nations to live independent of each other in the same country.

This is that story.

At one time the Sioux nation in confederation with the Cheyennes and Arapahos controlled the area from the Rockies on the west to the Missouri River in the central Dakotas on the east and from the Yellowstone River on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. Through this vast area streamed wagon trains and railroads during the last half of the 19^th century. While many settlers and adventurers were headed to destinations west of Sioux territory, more than a few settled, prospected, trapped, and hunted on Sioux land. Their frequent clashes brought death to both sides and disease to the Indian population who lacked the immunity the whites had developed from centuries of urban living.

Numbering an estimated 26,000 even after two centuries of European encroachment, the seven main tribes of the Sioux nation created the plains horse culture which enabled them to control their large domain. Thousands of horses and millions of buffalo made the Sioux the richest and largest Indian nation in North America and certainly the wildest, living as they did on the buffalo plains.

The period from 1860 to 1890, however, became the Gotterdammerung of the Sioux culture. In 1868 the aim of US frontier policy was to bring all of the plains Indians under the control of the federal government. Accordingly a treaty was negotiated with the Sioux living west of the Missouri – i.e. west of the central Dakotas – to renounce the claims to most of their 450,000 square mile territory and live on a 16,000 square mile reservation comprising South Dakota west of the Missouri River – about half of the state. Agents were appointed and agencies were established for their governance. Military posts were positioned to create an archipelago of armed forces in the territory. Railroads were to be allowed to cross the reservation. The promise of annuity payments, food rations, cows, physicians, farmers, teachers, and other inducements were to help these prairie dwellers and hunters transition to the white man’s civilization. Thus in one stroke the Sioux were reduced from a free nation to dependent wards of a foreign government.

Even though it was less than what they previously possessed, the land set aside for the Sioux would probably have been sufficient for their numbers if the buffalo had remained and the white man kept away. But times changed rapidly. The railroads enabled tens of thousands of hunters and emigrants to invade the plains on which the Sioux were given exclusive hunting rights beyond their reservation. In a few years the buffalo and native game were hunted by skinners to virtual extinction, eliminating the major food supply of the Sioux. When gold was discovered by illegal prospecting in the Black Hills – property within the reservation boundaries – thousands of miners and law-breakers steamed in despite their treaty violation and Indian protests. The Sioux were forced to renegotiate their land treaty, losing a third of their reservation, including the Black Hills.

Broken treaties and the loss of their last hunting grounds precipitated the Custer wars, which culminated with the massacre of almost the entire 7^th Cavalry Regiment in 1876. Six years later, the Sioux were told their reservation would be further broken up into five smaller reservations – Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brulé, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock – mostly non-contiguous. In the process, the Sioux lost the Bad Lands, a 60-mile strip which separated the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations on the south from the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations on the north.

Within eight years of the Little Big Horn battle, the buffalo were entirely gone and the Sioux were dependent on government beef rations. Their lives, which for centuries had been organized around plains hunting, now became lives of idleness on the reservation and humiliating dependency. Between 1886 and 1889 Congress cut the Pine Ridge beef ration from eight million pounds to four million pounds and substituted Texas beef herds, which would lose 200 pounds of body flesh during the Dakota winters, instead of the agreed upon northern beef herds, which wintered better. Similar reductions were made on the other reservations.

However, unknown to the eastern Sioux tribes of Dakota, a hopeful great awakening was developing in the west among the Paiute tribe in the territories of Oregon and Washington. Their principal medicine man foretold an Indian millennium in which the Indian ancestors of all tribes and nations would be resurrected, the game and buffalo would be restored, Indians would be forever young, and the Europeans would be driven from Indian ancestral lands.

The apocalyptic Paiute who received this revelation from God, the Great Father, was called Wovoka, a man who alternately referred to himself as the Messiah and the Christ. He claimed to have originally come to earth to bring the white man to repentance from his evil ways, but Wovoka the Messiah had been rejected and indeed crucified by the whites, causing him to return to God. He would now be the Messiah to Indians only. He preached a non-violent lifestyle, exhorting Indians to live peaceful lives, abjure from lying, theft, and alcohol. God, Wovoka prophesied, would eliminate the white man in a flood whose precursor would be an earthquake, signaling Indians to climb to the tops of mountains until the flood recessed.

In order to bring about his apocalyptic millennium, Wovoka instructed all Indians to perform a Ghost Dance in accordance with a method he demonstrated to his early disciples. At the center of the dance circle a sacred pole would be erected. Four being a sacred number in Indian culture, they were to dance continuously throughout four nights and four days, repeating this ritual often in order to hurry the resurrection of their ancestors. The Dance of the Ghosts would also enable them to see some of their dead ancestors even before the final Indian eschaton. Wovoka prophesied that would occur in 1891 with the greening of the spring grasses on the prairie. Indeed other Paiute medicine men claimed to see ancestral ghosts at the edge of the dance circle when the Ghost Dance was performed, and entranced dancers told of encounters with long dead relatives after completing a dance.

Predictably, the news of the Ghost Dance religion spread across the country from tribe to tribe until it reached the ears of Sitting Bull, the most prestigious Sioux medicine man, and Red Cloud, their most famous chief. To confirm the veracity of the Ghost Dance religion, its prophet Wovoka, and to learn the dance ritual, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and other chiefs selected a legation of minor chiefs from several reservations and sent them west to find the Messiah. Remarkably, the delegates traveled west by train and were met at the terminus by Indians who said they were expecting them. Their hosts took them to the base of the Sierras where after two nights of waiting, they met Wovoka around a night camp fire. He told them he had seen them coming in a dream, in fact he claimed he had called them to come. The Sioux visitors saw the scars of crucifixion on his wrists but since he wore moccasins, they couldn’t see his feet. Throughout their visit to Wovoka, the Sioux delegation saw other representatives from many tribes who came and went after confirming the existence of the Messiah and learning his Ghost Dance.

The Sioux remained with Wovoka’s Paiutes through the winter. When Wovoka bade them goodbye in the spring he told them that on their return trip they would encounter a buffalo herd – something that would have been almost unheard of at that time. They were to kill one animal, leaving its head, tail, and feet on the prairie so the buffalo could come to life again. Not only did they encounter a rare herd, but also following Wovoka’s instructions to leave parts of the animal, they claimed to have seen a restored buffalo and the parts were gone.

Moreover, on their return trip, the Sioux delegates claimed to have encountered warriors who had been killed in the Indian wars as long ago as 40 years.

All of these wondrous things were reported to Sitting Bull and Red Cloud upon their return in April 1890. The delegates said Wovoka made the animals speak and made distant objects appear near. A traveler who wearied of his journey would wake up closer to his destination than he had been when he fell asleep the previous night. Their individual accounts of all they had seen were consistent, and having been selected for their character and reputations, they had no motive to collaborate in a lie.

Two of the delegates, however, Short Bull and Kicking Bear, were Sioux conservatives opposed to the white’s policy to civilize them and force abandonment of Indian ways. They supported the Ghost Dance religion and belief in its apocalyptic Indian millennium but not its philosophy of non-violence. They introduced into the dance special Ghost Shirt which, they claimed, would make the wearers impervious to the bullets of whites. Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, conservatives themselves, agreed with the innovations and ordered the dances to begin among all of the Sioux on each reservation.

Local white residents of South Dakota who witnessed the frenzied Dance of the Ghosts as performed by the Sioux became alarmed that it was a prelude to an outbreak of violence. They insisted that the agents stop its practice. Fatefully, after four Republican administrations Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, had been elected president in 1885 – about the time the Ghost Dance religion began to sweep the Indian tribes. Experienced Indian agents appointed and retained by Republican presidents had almost entirely been replaced by Cleveland with inexperienced agents. Not only were those agents alarmed by the Ghost Dance, especially among the Sioux, but also they had no relationship with the chiefs, medicine men, and sub-chiefs as their predecessors had which would have avoided a confrontation. One of the experienced ex-agents called the Ghost Dance religion “absurd.” The inexperienced current agents called for military intervention.

A list of Indian conservatives was compiled with recommendations that they be arrested and removed to military prisons to prevent their support of the Ghost Dance movement. Sitting Bull was among the names on that list. Every reservation had an all-Indian police force under the command of the Indian agent for the reservation. Sitting Bull lived on the Standing Rock reservation and its agent ordered the Indian police to arrest him under the cover of darkness.

When the police arrived at this cabin before dawn on December 15 and awoke him, Sitting Bull initially agreed to go with them after he dressed. But stepping outside, a crowd of supporters had converged and Sitting Bull changed his mind. When the police attempted to force him to mount his horse, one warrior in the angry crowd shot the police officer in charge, who in turn shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Another of the police shot Sitting Bull in the head and was himself shot. A close quarters gun fight erupted resulting in the deaths of Sitting Bull and seven supporters including his 17-year old son, six police, and two horses. The two police who killed Sitting Bull died in the hospital later.

Spotted Elk, who was called by soldiers the derogatory name of Big Foot, was chief of the Miniconjou Lakota Sioux. Hearing that Sitting Bull had been killed, he led his tribe off of the Cheyenne River reservation to join Red Cloud on the Pine Ridge reservation. Fearing that the intervention of the military would provoke widespread slaughter of the Sioux, their plan was to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the unrest the Ghost Dance had caused. However, before they could join forces, the military launched a search of the Black Hills with orders to arrest Big Foot. The unit assigned to find and arrest the Miniconjou chief was a battalion of the reconstituted 7^th Cavalry. Some of the battalion troopers were veterans of the 1876 Sioux uprising which wiped out most of their Regiment.

Major Whitside, the battalion commander, came upon Big Foot and his followers on December 28, 1890 in their encampment about 30 miles from Pine Ridge. They offered no resistance and put up a white flag asking for a parley. Whitside refused and demanded unconditional surrender, which was immediately given. The chief was seriously ill with pneumonia and was coughing blood. Unable to sit astride a horse, he had been transferred to a wagon. Surrounded by cavalry troops, Big Foot’s company was moved to Wounded Knee Creek to encamp for the night.

Additional troops arrived during the night commanded by Colonel Forsyth, swelling the military presence to 470 men to guard 106 warriors in Big Foot’s band plus about 230 women and children – all hungry, tired, and cold. Forsyth assumed overall command and stationed a cordon of troopers to surround the Indian teepees encamped around a pole on which the Indians had hoisted a white flag as a sign of peace and hope for safety. This cordon targeted the teepees with four Hotchkiss rotating cannons – a precursor to the heavy machine gun – each capable of firing a two-pound explosive projectile at a rate of nearly 50 rounds per minute. Forsyth’s massive show of military strength was a disaster in the making, especially since some of the Custer veterans hated the Sioux.

The next morning, December 29, began with preparations to disarm Big Foot’s band before they decamped. The first 20 warriors to emerge from teepees were told to surrender their weapons, but retreating to their teepees and assembling again in front of them, only two old rifles were produced. The cordon was tightened to within 20 paces of the warriors, all of whom had come out of their teepees by this time, including Big Foot who was seated on a bench in front of his. Troopers were dispatched to search the teepees, which agitated the warriors and their families as personal effects were thrown about in the search. About 40 more weapons were found, mostly old hunting rifles and muskets.

A soldier snatched the blanket off of a warrior named Black Coyote who was deaf, revealing a rifle which he refused to surrender because of the amount he had paid for it. The soldier’s demand for the rifle literally fell on deaf ears, and in the ensuing struggle for the weapon, it fired. Hearing rather than seeing what happened, the cordon troopers released a sheet of fire killing about half the warriors at point blank range. The surviving warriors threw off their blankets and fought the soldiers with knives, pistols, and war clubs. Because the Indians were poorly armed, the struggle was hand to hand and therefore especially bloody. Seeing the melee from their positions on a surrounding knoll, the Hotchkiss guns opened fire raking the teepee assembly area. Teepees set afire by exploding shells collapsed on their wounded inhabitants burning them alive. Within minutes 200 Indian men, women, and children lay dead among 60 troopers killed by friendly fire. Big Foot died in front of his teepee.

The Indian survivors of this holocaust raced for a dry ravine behind their encampment and were chased by enraged soldiers firing indiscriminately as Sioux fled unarmed. The Hotchkiss guns were brought up to deliver withering fire into the ditch. Bodies of women and children – obvious non-combatants – were scattered over two miles from the site of the initial confrontation, dispelling any argument that the butchery was not a massacre.

The slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek effectively ended the Ghost Dance religious movement and marked the close of the Indian wars against white domination. The Sioux nation effectively ceased to be a culture.

As the army on the scene began to clear the “battlefield” of bodies, a blizzard blew in from the north which lasted three days. The effort to remove corpses had to be suspended. When the blizzard subsided, the bodies had frozen into grotesque shapes. Civilian contractors were hired to remove and bury the Sioux in a mass grave atop the knoll where the deadly Hotchkiss guns had been placed. Remarkably, four infants were found alive in the human debris, wrapped in their deceased mothers' shawls.

The senior commander in the field, General Nelson Miles, severely criticized Colonel Forsyth’s handling of the capture of Big Foot and blamed him for the Wounded Knee slaughter. Miles relieved Forsyth of command and convened an Army Court of Inquiry to investigate him for his tactical dispositions. Forsyth was exonerated of responsibility for the massacre and later rose to the rank of Major General before retiring from the Army.

Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded by the US Army to troopers who fought in the Wounded Knee massacre. Throughout most of the 122 years that have followed, critics have repeatedly petitioned the federal government to rescind those medals. As yet, the government has refused.

The Gift of the Magi

If ever there was a story that portrayed the spirit of Christmas it is The Gift of the Magi, William Sidney Porter’s short story about a poor and very young couple who had little more than their love to give each other. Still, each managed to buy and give a sacrificial gift and that is the theme of the story.

The nom de plum of William S. Porter was O. Henry, and using it for reasons I’ll shortly give, he perfected the genre of short stories. Perhaps his ability to tell a poignant tale derived from a life that was itself filled with poignancy. Born near Greensboro North Carolina in the second year of the Civil War, Porter received no formal education except what he got from an aunt who taught at a local country school along with access to her books. As a young man, he moved to Texas for his health in the 1880s where he held odd jobs herding sheep and drawing survey maps before settling in Austin to become a teller for the First National Bank of Austin.

Though Porter had left the bank to dabble in writing, a shortage of bank funds was traced back to the time of his employment with First National. He had married by then and had a small daughter. It’s unlikely that Porter was actually guilty of embezzlement because the bank was badly managed, but rather than confront the charges, he left his sickly wife and daughter and fled to New Orleans and then Honduras. His wife’s failing health forced his return and she shortly died of tuberculosis, a common killer in those years. In 1898 he was found guilty of the embezzlement charges and sentenced to five years in an Ohio prison.

During his imprisonment, Porter wrote fourteen short stories – mostly under the pseudonym O. Henry in order to hide his prison record. All were published.

As a young man in North Carolina, Porter had learned the practice of pharmacy from his uncle who was himself a pharmacist. Although he was a licensed pharmacist, Porter never practiced until he was imprisoned. Setting up shop, Porter became the prison’s pharmacist, presumably never spending time in a cell block. He was released for good behavior within three years.

Rejoining his daughter, who was then 11, Porter married his childhood sweetheart and moved to New York where he could be close to his publishers. His published oeuvre grew to 300 works and he was famous by any definition. Yet he began to drink heavily. As his work suffered, his wife left him.

Porter died in 1910 in New York City of cirrhosis and complications from diabetes. He was then penniless and only 47 years old. He is buried in Asheville North Carolina. His daughter would live only 17 more years herself and was buried next to her father.

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O. Henry wrote The Gift of the Magi in 1906. I hope this tale of Jim and Della and their memorable Christmas blesses your Christmas …

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."

The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."

"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.

"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."

Down rippled the brown cascade.

"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand.

"Give it to me quick," said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"

At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice -- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."

"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"

Jim looked about the room curiously.

"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jeweled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."

The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house.

But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

A Nation of Takers

The issue of welfare is the issue of dependency. It is different from poverty. To be poor is an objective condition; to be dependent, a subjective one as well. That the two circumstances interact is evident enough, and it is no secret that they are frequently combined. Yet a distinction must be made. Being poor is often combined with a considerable personal qualities; being dependent rarely so. That is not to say that dependent people are not brave, resourceful, admirable but simply that their situation is never enviable, and rarely admired. It is an incomplete state of life: normal in a child, abnormal in an adult. In a world where completed men and women stand on their own feet, persons who are dependent – as the buried imagery of the word denotes – hang.

Thus begins Nicholas Eberstadt’s small tome (134 pages), A Nation of Takers, with a quotation of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan – the intellectual force behind Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Moynihan later worked in the Nixon administration attempting to pass the concept of the “guaranteed annual income” into law. It failed. When Republicans were swept into power in 1994, then Democrat Senator Moynihan agreed with critics that the welfare entitlement program was out of control, concluding "The Republicans are saying we have a helluva’ problem, and we do."

If the Founders were shown the product of their genius today, they would scarce believe that the country for which they risked life and fortune to create had become an entitlement engine – because no other national purpose consumes as much energy from the machine of state as welfare in its various manifestations. Almost one in five dollars received as personal income by American citizens today is a transfer payment for which no service is performed. During the most recent year for which data has been published, i.e. 2010, a staggering $2.2 trillion in money, goods, and services was transferred to people from the owners of that wealth. That’s an average entitlement burden of $29,000 for a family of four.

Since the year I graduated from college, the amount of money that government takes from productive citizens laboring in the workforce and transferred to non-productive citizens has grown 100-fold – a compound growth rate of 9.5% over the past 50 years. To put that in perspective, if I’d been given a savings account with a $1,000 balance as a college graduation gift to which was added $1,000 annually, a 9.5% yield compounded would make the $50,000 paid in worth almost a million dollars today.

How far has government drifted from the Founder’s purpose for it? The year I graduated from college, the central purpose of government was, well, to govern. Thus the feds spent to provide a national defense, public services, and infrastructure. Entitlement spending was less than a third of government outlays in 1960. In 2010, entitlement spending was two-thirds of government spending. Think about that. In the years since I entered the workforce, the purpose of government has inverted. Entitlements, which are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, have relegated the role of government, as expressly stated in the Constitution, to a minor task based on the way tax receipts and borrowing is spent. Continuing on this road will make government a redistribution processor that happens to have an army and navy.

However noble its original motives, government spending for the “needy” becomes government spending for the “wanting” and that morphs quickly into a right, which is called an entitlement in welfare-speak. Entitlement spending is poured into six buckets: income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and other entitlements. The first two are poverty safety net entitlements, the next two are old age entitlements, and the last two are unemployment entitlements. The year I graduated from college, Medicare and Medicaid did not exist. They would not become the brainchild of Lyndon Johnson and Moynihan until I was five years into my career. Voters were assured at the time that these programs would consume a minor fraction of tax receipts. In 2010 they cost $900 billion.

FDR, the father of unsustainable Social Security, Lyndon Johnson, the father of unsustainable Medicare and Medicaid, and Obama, the father of unsustainable ObamaCare, are of course Democrats, which has been called the party of entitlements. But surprisingly the growth of entitlement spending has been greater under Republican presidents than Democrat presidents by the healthy margin of 8%. The biggest spenders were Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George Bush 43. Moreover, rural counties, which tend toward political conservatism, are more dependent on government entitlement spending than urban counties, and the counties at the front of entitlement line are more often in red states rather than blue. Two-thirds of the most dependent counties in the US voted Republican in the 2008 Presidential election. Led by Republican presidents, however, both parties have collaborated to create the entitlement explosion over past decades. Votes, you know.

American society’s conversion into Tin Cup Nation happened relatively recently. When Alex de Tocqueville visited the US in the early 1830s, he was struck by how self-reliant Americans were compared to Europeans. His impressions were described in Democracy in American, in which he elaborated the concept of American exceptionalism (repudiated by Obama) noting that Americans were not only fiercely independent, but also politically informed, practiced in social cooperation on a large scale as evidenced by their social and voluntary associations, and possessing of accountability for their situation in an environment of unbridled opportunity – an attitude unlike that found on the European continent of his time.

Above all, de Tocqueville found Americans disdainful of a mendicant mentality, contemptuous of dependency and unearned charity, and disapproving of people who accepted the dole. Being poor was, for most early Americans, a common experience at some point in their lives through which they passed before industry lifted them and their families out of it. Handouts were refused as an affront to their dignity and independence. This attitude prevailed until well after World War II when the rising tide of post-war economic expansion lifted all ships. Families who had lived through the deprivations of the Depression, among them my parents and grandparents, were dismissive of “Mr. Roosevelt’s” efforts to make them dependent on government. Around my childhood’s dinner table, government versus church-based charity was a frequent topic of conversation. Even poor families like my parents, living in a rented row house with my maternal grandparents whose economic well-being was little better, steadfastly protected their pride.

As recently as my generation, the cultural aversion to government entitlements was deep-rooted and difficult to overcome. Arguably, Social Security only established a beachhead in American society through “Mr. Roosevelt’s” trickery. The generations following mine have softened in their resistance to the entitlement lifestyle, such that half of today’s households receive at least one government transfer payment, and many receive multiple payments. In 98% of the households with a 65-year old resident among its members one entitlement payment (usually Social Security) is received, and 95% of the households receive two (usually Medicare.) Shockingly, 35% of the households with no 65-year old member receive at least one entitlement benefit.

Perhaps more shocking: entitlements include free cell phones and service. Medicaid for the sick, shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry … cell phones for the unconnected? How far we’ve come … 73% of the people living in poverty now have cell phones with free or subsidized wireless service enjoyed by 1.4 million people – mission creep at its finest.

No longer are recipients of government assistance stigmatized as they had been in previous self-reliant generations. The transformation of society’s norms concerning handouts was changed by an over-generous government, and several presidents helped grease the skids. Since food stamps did not look like cash, their demeaning use was replaced by a plastic electronic benefits transfer (EBT) card that looked very much like a debit or credit card. One of the last things George Bush 43 did before vacating the White House was to strike the stigmata of “food stamps” and “coupons” from the federal lexicon in his last Supplemental Farm Bill. Conveniently ignored in this charade is the fact that almost half of the individuals receiving food stamp assistance have been “dependent” of it for nearly nine years. Obama’s vision of the America he intends to transform us into was on unabashed display in his caricature of Julia, whose cradle to the grave entitlements made the government her de facto husband.

The adaptation of lives dependent on government has now metastasized to second and third generations. The under-18 age cohort is the largest beneficiary of non-cash government benefits (usually food and housing assistance), recently standing at a mind-boggling 45% of households that have a member in this cohort. (See Table 543.) The same data table gives the ethnic breakdown of those receiving government assistance: 53% Hispanic, 51% black, 28% Asians, and 20% white. These figures make it hard to argue away the corrupting evidence of dependency’s natural outcome.

And this trend continues to rise. Notwithstanding the ebb and flow of employment and unemployment rates, the percentage of people living in households receiving government entitlements moves irresistibly upward. The number of people recently receiving poverty-related benefits is three times as high as the poverty rate. As inexplicable as this seems, it is because the expansive coverage provisions are hidden in the laws establishing the entitlements. For example, a family of four earning 400% of the federal poverty level – i.e. $88,000 – will receive $5,000 in ObamaCare subsidies to purchase insurance in 2016. A family earning $88,000 hardly seems “needy.” But it explains how the current growth rate of entitlements makes it only a matter of time before a majority of Americans will be slopping at the anti-poverty benefit trough regardless of their wealth and employment. When he finally got anti-entitlement religion, Moynihan warned that “It cannot too often be stated that the issue of welfare in not what it costs those who provide it, but what it cost those who receive it.”

When government perfidy succeeded not only in removing the social stigma of accepting government assistance but also established it as a civil right, then, as Shakespeare’s McDuff observed, “Confusion hath made its masterpiece” – or as might be said in today’s vernacular, society began to unravel.

In his 1984 book, Losing Ground, author Charles Murray carefully documented the flaws in the welfare state that was launched in the 1960s, growing like kudzu in the following years and creating a variety of disincentives for people who might otherwise have been compelled to improve their lives. Shorn of self-respect, mothers on welfare were paid additional assistance benefits when another child was born, even if out of wedlock, thereby encouraging more illegitimate births. One welfare mother in San Francisco, the capital of Moocher Nation, announced to its mayor, “I’ve got six kids and each has a different daddy. It’s my job to have kids, and your job, Mr. Mayor, to take care of them.” The City by the Bay spends three times as much on social services as it does its police and fire departments.

Unemployment and income maintenance entitlements compete so effectively with income levels earned by those working that an increasing number of recipient poor choose to stay home.  Even in economic boom years, more than a million healthy, working-aged males who were not students did not work a single day during the course of the year along with a few million others who could barely be considered employed since they were so frequently in and out of the workforce. Murray notes in his book that by lowering the punishment for criminal activity (which advocates argue was society's fault rather than the perpetrator aka the real “victim”) more criminal activity with longer criminal records is the predictable consequence. What you reward, you get more of – a fact apparently hidden from welfare architects.

In time, Murray’s compelling evidence, along with arguments of many others, led to welfare reform which, though initially resisted by Bill Clinton, was finally signed by him in 1996. Welfare reform quickly removed almost half the people from the public dole – as Murray predicted would happen. This year Obama essentially gutted the work requirements specified to qualify for taxpayer-funded federal government assistance. Now the program is an unvarnished handout to able-bodied recipients.

Before entitlements became endemic in society, self-reliance and a strong work ethic motivated the acceptable ideal of manliness in America. Because they lacked the means, college for my parents and their parents was out of the question. Therefore, upon graduating from high school men like my father and grandfathers went to work and later married when they could afford it. In their day, men who were able-bodied but didn’t work were shamed by their communities and considered “shiftless.” Only during World War II did women enter the workforce, often replacing the men who had left to fight the war. Although women continued to work in large numbers after the war, society’s expectations for them to do so was never the same as men, nor is it today.

Notwithstanding, female participation in the workforce grew in the post-war years from about 30% to 60% in recent years. Over the same interval the labor force participation by men declined from about 90% in 1948 to 73% recently. The workforce participation rates for men and women are converging – not because of the inflow of women into the workforce but because of the outflow of men from it. The approach of retirement age explains only a quarter of the decline in working men. Nor can economic recessions explain a decline that has persisted over more than 60 years. The problem is not a dearth of jobs for men, it’s their not wanting one. There are fewer 30-year old men working in America than in Greece.

How has an opt-out of this magnitude been possible? Transfer payments for early retirement, supplemental income maintenance, and unemployment insurance now extending for two years are the prime movers in making it possible for more men to be unemployed than at any time since the Great Depression. When work becomes neither a necessity nor a norm in society, it becomes an option. More and more men who are otherwise able to work have exercised that option – corrupted by our entitlement society. In my lifetime men, once the protectors of society, have in large numbers become its exploiters.

One hyper-noxious means for this exploitation is our disability insurance system. Comprehending the arcana of this grab-bag of benefits requires more than the space remaining in this blog. I will devote the next blog to it since it is as big a threat to bankrupting the nation as any of our constellation of entitlements. Suffice it to say here that it’s not surprising that some Americans would turn their ingenuity to maximizing their take from an overly generous entitlement system, but theft by chiseling disability benefits was never intended to be an entitlement. Yet millions of people who otherwise consider themselves law abiding citizens feign impairment to work with impunity. The year I graduated from college 455,000 former working people were receiving disability payments. In 2010 the number had risen to 8.2 million. Either we as a nation are becoming a perverse Lake Wobegon, where all the people are below average in accident and injury prevention or something is amiss with the payment of disabilities.

In a society in which lifespans are extending, jobs have been transformed from danger-prone physical work in factories to no-risk knowledge work in offices. Even then mettlesome regulation protects workers in every facet of their work lives. Yet Americans are finding more and more ways to injure themselves, and doing so at younger ages. They are also getting more creative – more than half of today’s disability payments are made for “mood disorders” and injuries to the musculoskeletal system or connective tissue for which fraud is almost impossible to prove. It seems likely that a growing number of Americans are choosing disability as a career path as evidenced by the fact that the number of people receiving some form of disability payment almost equals those who don’t among industrial workers – 73 versus 100. Entitlements are corrupting our morality.

Combine these abuses with those I spelled out in a previous blog describing the unblushing plunder by Congress of incomes belonging to unborn generations. In order to pander current voters to retain them in office, Congress enriches Social Security benefits for current beneficiaries who didn’t pay for them requiring that they are paid (or stolen from) generations still working or unborn.

The preamble of the Constitution sets forth the purpose of government:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Two years ago, the government was spending three times more for entitlements, about which the Constitution is silent, than for defense, about which the Constitutional is quite outspoken in Article 8, Section I – the famous “Enumerated Powers” of Congress. Yet Obama’s 2012 budget slashed in the coming decade half trillion dollars from previous official spending plans in order to increase domestic spending. Entitlement spending is gutting our ability to defend ourselves

Now Obama and the Republicans are squabbling in a game of chicken over spending cuts versus tax increases on the “rich” – i.e. those people who pay most of the money underpinning entitlements. If a deal is not forthcoming by year end, another half trillion will be cut from defense just as Iran is flexing its muscles by shooting down one of our drones over international waters and North Korea, whose leader is a child, has fired a missile ostensibly to place a weather satellite in orbit. All but fools know Korea’s missile shoot was to display its load lifting capacity. Hillary’s response to Korea was to arrange as many multi-syllabic words in a sentence as needed to confuse their diplo-speak meaning.

Without an army and navy that may soon be the best she can muster to threaten aggression by our enemies.