Ah, Garibaldi.

Garibaldi: The first global action hero
Revolutionary, sex symbol, global celebrity – as romantic heroes go, Guiseppe Garibaldi really took the biscuit. Paul Vallely celebrates his bicentenary

LINK.

I would tend to discount the stories about predicting Lincoln’s death without good evidence

Way interesting, thanks! I know a lot of this is over my head, but I do have some bits of information from my delving into the St. Joseph and Fr. Chiniquy clues a few years ago. I came at it from the Lincoln anecdote I quoted in @33:

George Kulzer (1831-1912), a pioneer of Stearns County, Minnesota, told the following story about St. Joseph, MN: “That was an eventful year, 1865. In April, an odd thing happened in St. Joseph. Early in the morning on Wednesday, the 14th, people were horror-stricken to hear that President Lincoln had been assassinated. No one knew how the news had arrived, since we had no telegraph. Later we heard that Mr. Lincoln had indeed been assassinated, but not until late in the evening of that day. No one remembered how the news had started. Weeks later, some of the Eastern papers heard of it and tried to infer that the priest of St. Joseph knew of a Catholic plot against the government and had spread the news prematurely. This was, of course, ridiculous. Father Bruno was indignant, but some people wanted to believe it, and many years later it would still be whispered.”

A small Albany newspaper, the Stearns-Morrison Enterprise, had serialized Kulzer’s autobiography beginning in May 1976, and my Minnesota aunt had seen it and sent it to my mom with the Lincoln paragraph above highlighted — they were once related, briefly, to Kulzer by marriage, and my aunt remembered grandma seeing him on a street in St. Cloud and pointing him out to the girls as a distant relative. The binder with the newspaper xeroxes came to me years later to figure out what it was all about, and I started googling and found the Chiniquy book on line. It may be that Chiniquy is THE source of this story now, and he certainly had an anti Catholic church axe to grind. My remembrance is that Lincoln had defended him on libel charges against [a bishop?] in the 1850s, and Chiniquy was excommunicated and became a kind of rock star lecturer against the church. wikipedia has it a bit different, which is interesting because it kinda comes full circle to the original question of whether priests are employees:

In 1855, [Chiniquy] was sued by a prominent Catholic layman named Peter Spink in Kankakee, Illinois. After the fall court term, Spink applied for a change of venue to the court in Urbana. Abraham Lincoln was then hired by Chiniquy to defend him. The spring court action in Urbana was the highest profile libel suit in Lincoln’s career. [2] The case was ended in the fall court session by agreement. [3]

Charles Chiniquy clashed with the Bishop of Chicago, Anthony O’Regan, over the bishop’s treatment of Catholics in Chicago, particularly French Canadians. He declared that O’Regan was secretly backing Spink’s suit against him. Chiniquy stated that in 1856 O’Regan threatened him with excommunication if he didn’t go to a new location where the bishop wanted him. Several months later the New York Times published a pastoral letter from Bishop O’Regan in which O’Regan stated that he had suspended Charles Chiniquy and since the priest had continued in his normal duties as a priest, the bishop excommunicated him by his letter. Chiniquy vigorously disputed that he had been excommunicated, saying publicly that the Bishop was mistaken. Chiniquy left the Church in 1858.

Yet from his book (start on p. 730) he did quite a bit to substantiate the truth about St. Joseph. He had heard the story from one of the principals years after the fact and sent someone ato St. Joseph to verify it, take notarized statements. As I recall, it all originated when Rev. Conwell and Mr. Bennett, two visitors to a Catholic boarding house in St. Joseph on the afternoon of April 14, 1865, were asked by the proprietor, Mr. Linneman, if it was true that Lincoln and Seward had been assassinated. Well of course no one had heard anything about it; it hadn’t happened yet, and St. Joseph had no news source, no train, no telegraph — that would be why the proprietor was asking the visitors for news. I think people learned it that Sunday at church (by that time the news had come via St. Cloud) and that’s when they realized the anomaly. So the story.

What’s totally interesting all these years later is the Kulzer autobiography that showed up more than 100 years later in the Albany paper, which Chiniquy would have known nothing about. Kulzer was a German who had immigrated (1840s?) and found his way to the Albany area. He had married in Germany a woman who worked as a servant/cook but they didn’t have any prospects there and so to America they went. They had nothing and made their life from scratch, and I mean handmade. Amazingly hard workers, to read his autobiography you’d think he’d cut down every tree in Minnesota by the time he was done. Anyway, if he wrote the Lincoln story in his autobiography… that would be kind of something; he didn’t have Chiniquy’s axe to grind against Catholics, and he actually lived in the area at the time. When I was googling I had found his autobiography in a Washington state university library, and I sent away for a copy. Lo and behold, it’s the same story but not in the same words, and the Lincoln story isn’t in it. Apparently there are at least three versions. Kulzer wrote in German, his daughter Mary translated it into English, and (iirc) his granddaughter Romona rewrote it to fill in details and grace up the language, all over the space of many years. Mary’s plain version is the Washington state one, so it would seem the one in the Albany newspaper is Romona’s rewrite and that she put in the Lincoln story, though weird that she should get the day of the week wrong, and you wonder where she learned it, or if she restored something Mary had taken out. George’s original German manuscript might be in an Albany church– ? I’ve always been dying to know more, if the story is in the original. But what IS in both versions that I have are mentions of some of the same people who are in Chiniquy’s story. Father Bruno and the Catholic boarding house keeper Linneman and his family were well known to Kulzer.

Kulzer’s brother served in the Union army and died at Andersonville as a prisoner of war, iirc… Kulzer’s wife died sourly, and did he then marry a Jewish lady? Did his neighbors not accept her? Not sure what I’m remembering, but hell to that, off they went to Washington to start over and do it all again (1880s-90s?) (my snark :-). I find it pretty amazing, he retired to Santa Monica and died there in 1912. Lincoln wanted to go to California after his presidency–George actually made it.

So that’s Kulzer, but if you go read Chiniquy — what a story! And a lot of it checks out, from what I can see. The plot to assassinate Lincoln was hatched in a DC boarding house run by an extremely Catholic woman, Mary Surratt, whose guests were often Catholics (including priests I think, hence the possible connection to Linneman’s Catholic boarding house in St. Joseph, which put up priests from St. John’s abbey). She and other co-conspirators were tried by a military commission and hung. Her son John escaped to Canada and was harbored by… a priest one or two degrees away from the Bishop of Montreal, and then he flees to… the Vatican, where he’s a zoave under an assumed name, which is a kind of soldier in the Pope’s service (picture of John in zouave costume on wikipedia). Nice pantaloons. He moves on and eventually gets caught and extradited back to America, where he’s tried in a civilian court (because trying civilians in military commmissions had then been found unconstitutional, Ex Parte Milligan, hello!) and the jury hangs 8 innocent – 4 guilty. Is it Chiniquy who says the jury had Catholic moles on it that got him off? How could that have been arranged? Whatever, there really are a lot of Catholic connections to Lincoln’s assassination, and the big thing that’s there for anyone to see is that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday, which could say something as well about how everyone had their “premonition” on the same day.

It would be great if people had access to those newspapers of the time, because Rev. Conwell, when he realized the St. Joseph anomaly, within days of the assassination wrote a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and then wrote a followup one a week later. He says that letter was printed. Is it there? Well that’s something Chiniquy couldn’t have rigged. It would also be way interesting to see those other two newspapers in New Hampshire and New York that reportedly printed the assassination story before it happened. (Really? Can I see?) Plus, what ever happened to the physical notarized statements Chiniquy said he had and reproduced in his book? Do they still exist?

As for the Pope and the Confederacy, it sounds like they were both desperate to lean on each other and conjure divine legitimacy.

btw, my MN aunt is 93 and still pretty sharp though very frail — she’s the last sister left, and she’s a treasure. I hate to think of all that’s going to be lost. She could probably go toe to toe with you on Catholic history, that’s one of her (“grrr!”) subjects.

(Plus, can I just say what a perfect name St. Cloud is?)

I moved since then… boxes boxes ? ?

“Coughlin reasoned that although the government had assumed the right to regulate any on-air broadcasts, the First Amendment still guaranteed and protected freedom of the written press. He could still print his editorials without censorship in his own newspaper, Social Justice. However, the Roosevelt Administration stepped in again, this time revoking his mailing privileges[23] and making it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers. He had the right to publish whatever he wanted, but not the right to use the United States Post Office Department to deliver it.

Gees, where was the ACLU?”

Problem was, a guy in Germany named Joseph Goebbels was sending Coughlin money for his propaganda efforts, which included massive doses of anti-Semitism, and Coughlin was passing the stuff off as Church Teachings. FDR was hardly one of our sterling Civil Libertarians — ER, somewhat a different story. The various restrictions FDR “invented” ultimately became the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” that lived from Post War through the Reagan years as regulation of Radio. The ACLU was not at all interested in the 1930’s and 40’s in the cause of Fascism, and any “defense” of it or it’s free speech rights. They took the same position, post WWII, with regard to Stalinism and the US Communist Party. Purged all suspect Communists from ACLU Chapters and Boards. Took no cases during the 50’s and the McCarthy Era regarding real or suspect Communists and their rights. Morris Ernst, who headed ACLU in those days, was a confidential source for J. Edgar Hoover for years.

“This the same ACLU that defended the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie and also Rush Limbaugh’s right to… what, medical/medication privacy? (yep) Glad they grew some ethics. Part of the Coughlin story was that once his audience associated him with Nazi sympathies, they turned him off. Destroying the Constitution was no defense of it.”

Organizations are not static, they change to various degrees over time. To judge the ACLU of the 30’s, or the 50’s, you have to read your way into where they are coming from, meaning you have to figure out those times. ACLU no different from any other organization of its nature. ACLU for instance, did not take up the cases of the Japanese who were rounded up and put in, essentially, concentration camps during World War II, based only on their national ancestory. To understand why the ACLU stayed silent, you have to figure who were influentials, who were decision makers in its ranks in the early 40’s, and comprehend how they saw their decisions.

Between the 30’s and the 50’s the most identifiable voice of the ACLU was Morris Ernst. He thought J. Edgar Hoover was a really great guy, and he was extremely close to him, sharing letters that came into ACLU with him, talking with him about cases, and in the late 50’s, even involved with being the go-between clearing people accused of Communist Links by persuading Hoover to review files and all. But he also persuaded Hoover at times to “blacklist” some people too. Ernst was on perhaps every center left National liberal board in the US at one time or another, and he reported on other board members directly to Hoover. Many people who knew Ernst, knew exactly what he was doing, and approved of it. It was quite a different time, and you have to do the general history in order to comprehend what motivated folk in specific time periods.

In the 30’s, the cause of anti-Fascism was essentially a left wing cause, that changed considerably in late August, 1939 with the Hitler Stalin Pact, when the Communists and those they influenced became middling pro-Fascist, or at least pro Hitler-Stalin Pact. The CP lost about a third of its membership in the months after the Pact (some couldn’t swallow the change of line), but in the meantime the CP got all involved with the American First Movement and other “peace” movements. All changed again in June, 1941 with invasion by Germany of the USSR. Suddenly, we should be already at war, and mounting the second front.

The ACLU’s position at least in the late 30’s was “A Plague on Both Your Houses.” That is when they engaged in thoroughgoing political cleansing of all their Chapters and Boards.

Ah ha! (2008!!)

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, which is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” ~John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

On collision! Vivify! (injecting exclamations)

Morris Ernst, who headed ACLU in those days, was a confidential source for J. Edgar Hoover for years.

Like the SPLC was a confidential source to the FBI re Oklahoma City bombing?

transcript

Horton: Every day I turn on TV and somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center is saying that anyone who does not approve of whatever the administration is doing at any given time is basically a neo-Nazi, basically responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. … And, you know, it’s extra frustrating to me since John Doe 2 apparently was an undercover FBI informant … but it’s always somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center who is the guest, the expert guest… And so I’m kinda curious to know what evidence you have, Jesse, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was in any way involved with the neo-Nazi/cops who did the Oklahoma bombing.

Trentadue: Well it appears, and first of all, I agree with you, it’s a sad state in our country’s history where to voice an opinion means you’re attacked from one side or the other. It means you no longer discuss things as a nation or a people. That we’ve become so divided now that you’re either one side or the other or forced into one side or the other. But for the Southern Poverty Law Center, they had, and they’ve had – they had apparently informants, another level of informant, at Elohim City at the same time that Strassmeir and Carol Howe and the other government informants were there. These documents that I’ve had them produce, and not widely reported on, refer to the Southern Poverty Law Center reporting to the FBI the information it was receiving from its informants at Elohim City about the bombing.

Horton: Now do you know who those informants were?

Trentadue: I do not.

Horton: Are there any indications whether…

Trentadue: The names are blacked out. The FBI pleaded with the judge not to turn over any of the documents because they said they had guaranteed five or six people anonymity and confidentiality and it would expose them to risk of their life if their names were disclosed, and the judge said “Well, black out the names but turn the documents over.” So I have documents talking about the informants, but the informants’ names are redacted or blacked out. By their own admission they’ve had five or six there that they had promised protection.

Horton: Hmm. But I guess, are there any other… because, you know, I remember JD Cash talking about this back in the day and I forget whether he said there was any other indication as to the identities of the informants that were working with Morris Dees.

Trentadue: I suspect that Strassmeir was reporting to the Southern Poverty Law Center too.

Horton: See that was something about this, right? – was Janet Reno’s order restricting, I think this is what JD Cash told me, that there was a guideline from the Justice Department that went down that said or that in some way restricted the authority of the FBI to infiltrate groups.

Trentadue: A religious compound. I talked to JD about that and he’s absolutely right. He believed that it was a cutout operation that the FBI was, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was a straw man being run by the FBI in this operation because the FBI could not, because it was a governmental entity, invade this religious compound. And Elohim City claimed to be a right-wing Christian fundamentalist compound.

That didn’t turn out too well, and since the informers and their managers are hidden by the cloak of secrecy (above transcript discussing FOIA results, here’s one with the SPLC, see p. 2 of the PDF), we all fumble around with only the visible dots and connect them as best we funkily can. Doesn’t do anything for safety or justice or reason or the Constitution.