The story I’m about to tell is a remarkable case study on an investigation one man did using publicly available fire records. The two-hour interview I did with him was one of the most compelling I did in my career. His story is a primer on doing an investigation and persevering when the odds are huge against finding the truth.

In telling this story, I tip my patrol cap to him and to KD, a long-time friend of mine and a retired fireman. He and others like him go into burning buildings and save lives when others flee. And I also tip my cap to AB and MB, two emergency room nurses. AB, a pretty brunette girl of French Canadian blood who went to school with me, was kind to others and was especially kind to one of my elderly relatives when he was a patient of hers in the last months of his life. MB, a redheaded Irishwoman who was a former girlfriend of mine, consoled my sister, who worked hard but unsuccessfully in trying to resuscitate our Mom on the day of her death.  MB has reported for duty in Eternity. 

Let’s go back to the first week of July in 1944. When the circus comes to town this week in Hartford, Connecticut, World War Two is in full swing. Our GIs are pushing east across France, north through Italy, and westward through the Pacific Islands. This very week, Americans liberate Saipan (reportedly only a couple of weeks too late to save aviatrix Amelia Earhart from being beheaded by a Jap swordsman).

Many women and children, whose husbands and daddies are away fighting the war, go to see the show under the big top in Hartford on July 6 – maybe to get away from worrying about their loved ones for just a little while.

But they are soon caught in a spectacle almost as dramatic and terrible as the war itself. The circus tent catches fire, and the 7000 or so spectators and circus people have to flee for their lives. Sadly, 168 people don’t make it.

One of the faces of the tragedy was Emmett Kelly, the sad-faced hobo clown. He was drinking a beer outside the big top waiting to perform when the fire broke out. Kelly rushed over with a pail of water to fight the flames, then he rushed into the blazing tent and calmly directed many frightened women and children to safety. The tragedy overwhelmed him after he led the women and children to safety. The sad-faced hero broke down and wept. Kelly would paint a tear on his face for the victims — his fans — in years to come.

Another face of the tragedy was an eight-year-old girl whom authorities could never identify. Perhaps she was a neighborhood girl who tagged along with friends to the circus; perhaps she was a runaway; perhaps she had just wandered in to see the show; perhaps she and all her family perished in the flames. Perhaps she was a refugee child from war-torn Europe. But no parents ever come forward to say their little girl was gone. The young girl lays unclaimed, and on her toe the coroners put the tag 1565. She was laid to rest under a stone with the sad label “Little Miss 1565.”

Her picture – the girl without a name – haunted many. The police officers who ran the makeshift morgue and tried to identify the dead decorated her little grave several times a year the rest of their lives. Even a convicted burglar doing time in a Massachusetts pen regularly sent money for flowers for the little girl’s grave.

(Even the caliber of criminal was higher back in the day. Now a Massachusetts inmate might get the ACLU to help him get his verdict overturned on a technicality or get sex change surgery.)

Many years later, a picture of the young girl touched the heart of Rick Davey, a Hartford Fire Department investigator. In 1982, he began reviewing records of the fire. He developed leads from these records, and he interviewed people connected with the case in any way. By March 1991, he had solved the mystery of who the little girl was. He publicly identified Little Miss 1565 as Eleanor Cook.

How did he do it? When I interviewed Davey in 1995, he said the Connecticut state police did not release any of their records on the case until the 1980s, and many of these records were not available to the public. Some other records — including hospital records he checked — were not available to the public. Much of the work he did on the case, he said, was specialized work only a fire investigator or other law enforcement investigator could do. He said he got help from others because he was a lawman.

Davey told me there were obstacles to his investigation because of the laws on the books and the state of forensic science in 1944. He said no fire investigator had been in on the case, so the investigation wasn’t done as thoroughly as fire investigators can do them today. He also said the laws involving claiming bodies were laxer back then. He said all it took to claim a body was to identify a piece of the deceased’s clothing. “It was difficult to go to the morgue and not come back and have closure in the family,” he said. Some of them, he said, “needed something to bury.” He had to check on the possibility the wrong people claimed some victims’ bodies and buried their remains, mistakenly thinking they were burying their own loved ones.

Davey still ran into his share of dead ends despite his lawman’s connections. But the public record — and his ability to interpret it — was able to help him out. A Life magazine reporter, commenting on Davey’s sleuthing, noted a hospital archivist suggested he go to the Connecticut State Library. When he did, he found 20 boxes of materials the state police had purged from their files years earlier. In the boxes were a photo of a little girl named Eleanor Cook when she was alive, a lab report on samples of her hair, and many other documents pertinent to the investigation. These provided him with other leads. These records also provided the state librarian with 20,000 quarters — one for every page Davey copied on the library’s photocopier. The money came from his own pocket.

Davey said Little Miss 1565 was one of nine unidentified victims. Davey told me the girl was burned but actually died of blunt trauma not long after the fire. In other words, he said, she had been trampled to death in the general panic. He had the names of some of the unaccounted-for victims, and he tried to account for as many as he could. This meant he had to interview fire survivors and victims’ loved ones for leads and for eliminating false leads. Of the nine victims who were unidentified, two were girls. Davey eliminated a false lead by talking with a family suspected of burying the wrong girl. Davey also compared Eleanor Cook’s picture with the picture of the dead little girl in the morgue. He even took calipers to both pictures to measure distances between features on each girl’s face. In his analysis, they matched. Little Miss 1565 was Eleanor Cook.

Davey then worked to close the circle. Davey’s toughest job was one any one of us could have done if we had Davey’s determination. To find Eleanor Cook’s loved ones, Davey wrote Cooks throughout the Northeast for a year and a half … and asked them if they knew of any Cook who went to the circus the day the terrible fire struck it. Finally, Davey told me, he found a brother of Eleanor’s who had survived the fire. Donald Cook, he said, identified Little Miss 1565, the girl in the morgue photo, as his sister Eleanor. Little Miss 1565 had her name back.

Davey told me one of Eleanor’s brothers also died in the circus fire, and her mother was burned over 90 percent of her body in the terrible tragedy. He said Eleanor’s mother was in the hospital for several months, so the children’s aunt had to go to the morgue to identify her niece and nephew. The aunt identified her nephew among the dead, but she could not positively identify her niece. Eleanor’s body was buried four days later under the stone with the melancholy nickname “Little Miss 1565.”

Using clues from the files, Rick Davey also identified a possible arsonist. Transcripts of phone calls the Connecticut state police commissioner had taped after the fire and other documents pointed to a man who evidently confessed to setting the blaze, but was never prosecuted. The suspect Davey identified was a 14-year-old circus worker at the time of the Hartford circus fire. He was a suspect in a series of fires later.

Why wasn’t the confessed arsonist prosecuted in Connecticut? The Life article’s author said the Connecticut state police commissioner in 1950 may have tried to “torpedo” the suspect’s confession. He said the suspect, Robert Segee, confessed after several circus officials had served time in prison for involuntary manslaughter and other circus officials had paid millions of dollars to the families of the dead and injured. He strongly implied the state police had botched the original fire investigation.

Segee caught the attention of Ohio authorities in 1950, after a string of fires in the Buckeye State. They forced Segee into the state asylum for the criminally insane for a spell, because someone with authority deemed him in need of mental health treatment. They let him out when he was “cured.” Segee admitted starting the Hartford circus fire when he was in the state insane asylum, but recanted after he was able to gain release by convincing shrinks he was “all better now.” An admission of guilt could lead to life imprisonment or execution; Segee wasn’t that crazy.

Davey tracked down Robert Segee, whom he found in Ohio in 1991, and interviewed him. Segee (61 years old when Davey talked with him) denied setting the Hartford circus fire. However, because of info they had on Segee, and because of Davey’s painstaking work, Connecticut authorities in 1991 considered re-opening the case. Why? There is no statute of limitations for murder.

Sadly, Connecticut officials never made anyone stand charges for setting the fire which caused all those people to lose their lives. Davey, his voice hurting with disappointment, told me the state officials re-examined the results of the old investigation (the old one was done without the help of a fire investigator), and “ignored my finding. They chose to call it (the cause of the fire) ‘undetermined.’ It was the politically safe way to get out from under it.”

A detective from the office of the Connecticut State Fire Marshal told me the agents of his office concluded their investigation in the early 1990s and decided the cause of the fire was undetermined. He told me he thought the original listed cause of the fire — a discarded cigarette butt — was not the cause of the fire. In this, he agreed with Davey. Likewise, an agent with the Connecticut State’s Attorney’s Office told me no one – including Segee (who died in 1997) – was ever prosecuted for starting the fire. This doesn’t imply any wrongdoing or negligence on the agents’ part, or any off-center stridency on Davey’s part. What it says is all of these men — presumably honest men interested only in solving crime and protecting the public — could not agree on what the evidence said. It also says sadly that no one has ever been brought to justice for killing all of those people — at least not in this life.

Some have criticized Davey’s findings. But there was no way any of these Monday morning quarterbacks or anyone else could dare criticize Davey’s effort or his heart.

Even though no suspect has been brought to justice for killing all those people, Davey’s determination is still monumental. What caused him to do what he did?

“I fell in love with her photograph,” Davey said of Eleanor Cook. “I knew she and Miss 1565 were the same person. I had to do it now, or the witnesses (most were at the time at least 65) would all die. It rubbed me the wrong way … a girl was given a name 59 years ago, and it was taken away from her. It was so wrong.” Davey, who said he was sure of the identities of three other unidentified victims, but couldn’t prove it, added, “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it (provide identification beyond the shadow of a doubt) for the rest. I’m sorry I couldn’t erase the numbers we put on their names.”

Davey said basically the same things to a reporter when he made Eleanor’s identification public in 1991. “These (fire victims), ” he said, “even in death, have a right to expect that the truth be known.”

IN CLOSING ….

The records police, fire, and paramedic agencies keep, because of the people and situations they cover, can help you keep your family safe and expose wrongdoing or otherwise discover the truth. Your money pays for public records. You have the right to see them. There is nothing stopping you from being as wide-ranging a digger as me or as relentless a digger as Rick Davey and making the truth known yourself.

Politicians who make it hard for the public to get the truth for themselves make it easy for criminals to break the law. Treat these obstructionists like you would treat criminals.

And remember it is the peace officers, firemen, paramedics, and nurses who are real homeland defenders against external enemies, criminals and other internal enemies, fires and explosions, injuries from accidents, and diseases of all sorts. These dedicated men and women also serve in the war against terror and the war against pestilence. In an age when too many politicians welcome into the country carriers of lethal and dangerous diseases, and in an age when sexually transmitted diseases have political status, the peace officers, firemen, paramedics, and nurses face Ebola, AIDS, and many other threats to their health and safety besides the weapons of assailants, the igniters of arsonists, and the explosives of bombers.

These are the people who are on guard at all hours of the day and night. They are the people who risk their lives for all of us. These are the people who save so many in danger. These are the people who pull many a sufferer through his or her miseries. These are the people who console and help and stand watch over many a poor soul about to die, in the light of day, or in the darkness of the night. The records of their daily lives contain stories of tragedy, looking evil and death in the eye, and triumph of the human spirit. Please pray for them, for their safety, their good character and judgment, and that they always try honestly to fulfill the missions of protection their oaths require of them.

SHERLOCK JUSTICE

WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.

END NOTES

The story of Little Miss 1565 comes from an article in the 4/21/1991 issue of Newsweek, an 8/10/1993 Hartford Courant article, a connecticuthistory.org article on the fire (this site is at least partially state supported), an article in Life in November 1991, a 7/4/1950 article in the Lewiston, ME Daily Sun, and from my interview with Rick Davey in 1995. If you want to read something that will tear your heart open, read “The Little Girl in Grave 1565,” by Gary Smith, that Life article about Eleanor Cook, her mother, and all the other victims of that terrible tragedy … and keep a hanky nearby. It’s easily one of the saddest things you’ll ever read.

The latest leftist manufactured crisis is the surge of illegals, many of whom are gang members and drugrunners and jihadists, trying to get into the United States. Most of these people will be burdens to American workers, who will see their taxes and insurance premiums rise if the illegals are admitted. Others will rob, rape, and/or murder Americans. Some of these illegals will work off the books, costing American laborers their jobs and costing payroll taxes because neither hirers nor illegals will pay them.

Leftists want the illegals in the country because they can vote (illegally) and be clients for social services that government employees (mostly Democrats) need to dole out to justify their jobs. Leftists are so sure of getting most working Americans who are black or Hispanic or white laborers to vote for them they are okay with abandoning these peoples’ interests to cater to the illegals and to substandard legal immigrants.

How does this intersect with How To Be Your Own Detective?

DOXING — WHAT IT IS, AND HOW TO FIGHT IT

Some of the leftists are “doxing” agents of the Department of Homeland Security to scare them into shirking their duties. They are going on line, using terms like “linkedin” and “Homeland Security” or “ICE” or “Border Patrol” or “Coast Guard.”

Then they are finding the names of people who identify themselves as members of these groups and other groups within the Department of Homeland Security. They are also using the Internet to look up companies who are contractors for DHS and are getting their key people’s names. They are also trawling Facebook and other social media sites for employees of DHS and contractor companies.

Scum on parade outside Kirstjen Nielsen’s home. Photo by Washington Post.

Then they are stalking these people, or threatening them. Recently a mob of leftist shitheels surrounded the home of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

(For the record, the actual names of some of the key divisions of the Department of Homeland Security are the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the United States Coast Guard (USCG).)

“Doxing” means “search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.”

It’s OK to truthfully slam government people when they commit crimes or otherwise underachieve. Likewise for other crooked people. It’s not a good thing to try to incite unstable people to harm them.

Leftists are also doxing non-leftist politicians and government agents and are displaying their faces, addresses, and info about their family members on the Web. Some leftists have made threats against members of Congress and federal agency chiefs credible enough, based on their knowledge of the victims’ and their family members’ jobs or activities or schools or interests, that police have had to arrest them.

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Over the years, many people have made many comments and complaints about immigration to America during the Ellis Island era. Since there are public histories and public records on the facts, we’ll discuss how many of these were true and how many were lies that got good PR.

(The “How to be Your Own Detective” angle — I wrote two books about Ellis Island using public records like government papers and newspaper articles. I also interviewed those in the know and submitted my work for subject expert review to a left-leaning expert and a right leaning expert. Any one of you readers could have done likewise, as my sources were open records.)

TRUTH, LIE, OR URBAN LEGEND?

“We came to America packed in like sardines, in filthy quarters, with little food and with many sick people.”

That all too often was true until into the 1900s.

Steerage passengers were almost pure profit for steamship companies. Officers and employees of these companies sold cheap tickets to people, and fed them very little and provided them with very little in the way of sanitary facilities. They advertised all over Europe to lure poor people to buy tickets, and they were greedy enough to transport people who were sick, handicapped, or otherwise unfit to gain entry to America. They figured enough of these unfit people would somehow get by the inspectors and get into America.

American officials put laws with teeth in them into effect, and this pressure forced the steamship companies to do better. American officials started fining steamship companies for bringing in undesirables. They made steamship companies pay to feed, shelter, and provide medical treatment for aliens detained at Ellis Island or elsewhere in America, and they made steamship companies take rejected people back to Europe for free. They also quarantined ships in harbors and made steamship companies pay for related medical, feeding, lodging, and sanitation costs.

The more astute steamship company officials got the point. In the ports of Britain and Germany, the two greatest European maritime powers, there were fairly well-organized facilities for immigrants to clean themselves and undergo some medical screening. In some of the other countries, officials likewise upgraded their standards when they figured out America meant business.

Immigrants bound for America aboard the German ship “Patricia”

American immigration officials wanted to save American taxpayers from having to bear the burden of caring for and sending back people they didn’t want to admit to America. They also wanted to save would-be immigrants the expense and shattering experience of being turned back from America. So they made the standards known and prompted the steamship companies to follow them or lose money.

Irish girl and her dolly photobomb picture of this desirable Irish lass aboard the “Baltic.” The Colleen was one of about 1000 unaccompanied single young women aboard the British ship coming to New York in 1907. Word got out to the papers in New York about the precious cargo of Irish, Scottish, English and Scandinavian cuties aboard the vessel while it was still at sea. This resulted in a good-natured bachelor “riot” for the favor of these lovelies in the sidewalks of New York. Even Michigan government officials approached the young women, looking for Scandinavian farm girls to make Michigan warmer. “When you and I were young, Maggie ….”

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(Continued from “Ellis Island not Gilligan’s Island, Part One”)

Our current immigration mess did not happen overnight. Like many societal ailments this nation has today, its germs came from the 1960s.

On the TV in the mid 1960s was a dumb but harmless sitcom called “Gilligan’s Island.” It was about a group of people who survived a tourist boat wreck and landed on an uninhabited island. It had some nice eye candy in Dawn Wells and Tina Louise, but the focus of the show was on Bob Denver’s character Gilligan, the poor stooge who was the butt of everyone else’s jokes because of his dumb ideas which he expressed dumbly.

Gilligan’s bumbling would be an apt metaphor for the nation’s immigration policy from that time forward to today. What is considered the “modern era” of immigration began during the administration of Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s, while “Gilligan’s Island” was a popular show. Johnson and his Congress produced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which introduced daisy-chaining of families of aliens into this country as federal immigration policy. In a way it is fitting, because Johnson owed his seat in the Senate (and his subsequent career which put him in the White House when he and the Deep State arranged the murder of John Kennedy) to illegal votes attributed to Mexican nationals in South Texas.

(In today’s post, and over the next post or two, I am going to review immigration for you in an era when America did it right. I researched and published the book “When America Did Immigration Right” in 2010. I did the work using US laws and public record and interviews with subject experts. When you are done reading these, you will know more about immigration than almost all of our members of Congress and all of the liars in the media.)

It is easy and irresponsible to criticize the majority of immigration agents at Ellis Island and elsewhere from the safety of today. The truth is no other country welcomed immigrants like the United States did, and as a nation the United States was barely 100 years old itself when Ellis Island opened for business. In that time, the United States grew from an Atlantic Seaboard country into a country roughly as large as Europe, and had withstood a terrible Civil War.

There was no federal immigrant inspection law until 1891.Until that time, state officials had admitted immigrants to the United States. Federal authorities had federalized immigrant processing in New York City’s harbor in 1890, and they federalized immigrant processing in the rest of the country in 1891.

This chapter continues to look at how American officials screened immigrants coming through Ellis Island. We focus on Ellis Island for a very simple reason – volume. From when the U.S. government first started screening immigrants in New York in 1890 until the end of the great waves of immigration in 1924, federal agents on Ellis Island and elsewhere in the harbor facilities of New York City processed about 70% of all immigrants seeking to gain entry into the United States.

LEGAL INSPECTION OR PRIMARY INSPECTION

If an immigrant passed the in-line medical exam and no doctor decided he or she was diseased, crippled, or mentally defective, and no matron decided she was a prostitute, they would route him or her to the Registry Room, a huge auditorium-sized room that occupied the center of the second floor of the Main Building of Ellis Island.

In the Registry Room, she or he would undergo the legal inspection. (People pulled out of line for closer medical or mental evaluations who passed these evaluations would also then undergo the legal inspection in the Registry Room.) Ellis Island agents also called this inspection the “primary inspection.”

Italian man awaits primary inspection. Photo by Augustus Sherman, courtesy NYPL

During this inspection, the inspectors questioned the immigrants to account for them and to verify the information about them on the ship’s manifest. They also were looking for potential “problem children” that they would have to bar from entering the United States.

Continue Reading →

Our current immigration mess did not happen overnight. Like many societal ailments this nation has today, its germs came from the 1960s.

On the TV in the mid 1960s was a dumb but harmless sitcom called “Gilligan’s Island.” It was about a group of people who survived a tourist boat wreck and landed on an uninhabited island. It had some nice eye candy in Dawn Wells and Tina Louise, but the focus of the show was on Bob Denver’s character Gilligan, the poor stooge who was the butt of everyone else’s jokes because of his dumb ideas which he expressed dumbly.

Gilligan’s bumbling would be an apt metaphor for the nation’s immigration policy from that time forward to today. What is considered the “modern era” of immigration began during the administration of Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s, while “Gilligan’s Island” was a popular show. Johnson and his Congress produced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which introduced daisy-chaining of families of aliens into this country as federal immigration policy. In a way it is fitting, because Johnson owed his seat in the Senate (and his subsequent career which put him in the White House when he and the Deep State arranged the murder of John Kennedy) to illegal votes attributed to Mexican nationals in South Texas.

(In today’s post, and over the next few posts, I am going to review immigration for you in an era when America did it right. I researched and published the book “When America Did Immigration Right” in 2010. I did the work using US laws and public record and interviews with subject experts. When you are done reading these, you will know more about immigration than almost all of our members of Congress and all of the liars in the media.)

It is easy and irresponsible to criticize the majority of immigration agents at Ellis Island and elsewhere from the safety of today. The truth is no other country welcomed immigrants like the United States did, and as a nation the United States was barely 100 years old itself when Ellis Island opened for business. In that time, the United States grew from an Atlantic Seaboard country into a country roughly as large as Europe, and had withstood a terrible Civil War.

There was no federal immigrant inspection law until 1891.Until that time, state officials had admitted immigrants to the United States. Federal authorities had federalized immigrant processing in New York City’s harbor in 1890, and they federalized immigrant processing in the rest of the country in 1891.

This chapter looks at how American officials screened immigrants coming through Ellis Island. We focus on Ellis Island for a very simple reason – volume. From when the U.S. government first started screening immigrants in New York in 1890 until the end of the great waves of immigration in 1924, federal agents on Ellis Island and elsewhere in the harbor facilities of New York City processed about 70% of all immigrants seeking to gain entry into the United States.

EVENTS THAT LED TO THE ELLIS ISLAND PROCESS

Since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which tied the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River, New York City was the dominant seaport of the United States. Therefore most immigrants came in steerage through New York City’s port. They simply got off the ships when they landed, and settled in New York or went elsewhere.

The first formal immigration station in New York City was at Castle Garden on Manhattan Island. New York state officials processed immigrants at Castle Garden starting in 1855 to protect immigrants from being ripped off by New York sharpies and other vermin in Gotham. However, the ongoing corruption of New York officials and other state officials in the immigrant processing business led the Feds to take over processing immigrants in the early 1890s. Federal officials started processing immigrants at the Barge Office on Manhattan Island in 1890 until Ellis Island opened for business in 1892. (After the fire destroyed the wooden structures on Ellis Island in 1897, federal agents processed immigrants at the Barge Office again until the new brick facilities on Ellis Island were ready in 1900.)

Castle Garden is the kidney-shaped building with the turret on the roof in the foreground. You can see the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor, and Ellis Island, the low island with the big building surrounded by ships, to Liberty Island’s right. Photo taken 1902.

Ellis Island and the other federal immigration stations had a more thorough mission … screening immigrants as well as protecting them. Processing of immigrants was supposed to screen out those deemed a detriment to the United States. The immigration officials proceeded on the reasonable standard that immigration should benefit the United States instead of benefiting only the immigrants.

As immigration officials learned their jobs and learned what to look for when inspecting would-be immigrants, they adjusted the inspection process to improve it.

The advance of science brought better medical techniques and public health practices. This allowed inspectors to screen out would-be immigrants with medical problems that forbade them from coming into the United States. This also allowed immigration officials to disinfect immigrants to prevent the spread of disease and allowed the immigration service’s doctors and nurses to treat and cure many sick immigrants.

The advance of science brought better communication. The “wireless” radio telegraph joined the telegraph and the telephone as a means of rapid communication. This meant immigration officials could quickly get tips on unsavory individuals trying to enter the country, so they could detain them, arrest them, and deport them.

The advance of science also advanced industry. Industrial innovations included quantifiable standards, the discipline of quality control, and time and motion studies to improve products and production. Government officials – many who came from the private sector and after a few years went back, instead of too many of the careerists of today – applied these ideas to systematically organize the processing of immigrants.

There was at least one other factor which contributed to the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island and other immigration stations – the growing participation of reformers in public life.

Labor unions were very controversial in the 1890s. That decade saw the bloody Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania, several miners’ strikes in the West that involved bloodshed, and the Pullman Car strike in Illinois, which escalated into a nationwide railroad workers’ strike that soldiers broke with gunfire. It wouldn’t be until Theodore Roosevelt that there was a president who was openly sympathetic with strikers when their strike was just. However, more and more people who were not manual laborers began to see the appalling conditions of many job sites and the abysmally low wages for the jobs many workers performed were unjust.

Likewise, the blatantly crooked people who ran city, state, and federal governments inspired the outrage of many people. Since the people of the late 1800s were much more prone to react to corruption than we are now, there were politicians, publishers, and others who realized they could harness this anger to make reforms. Some politicians and writers decided to become reformers on principle; others did so to further their political careers or sell more newspapers.

Some of the best reformers in that era were women. Women as a rule could not work as white-collar employees in the corporations of the time, and they were by and large discouraged from being doctors or lawyers as well. As a class, about the only women executives in the United States were Catholic nuns who ran hospitals and school systems. As a class, about the only women who could shape public opinion were writers. Novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Helen Hunt Jackson (the author of A Century of Dishonor and Ramona) changed many people’s hearts and minds on the evils of slavery and the treatment of American Indians. Print media women Nellie Bly (who uncovered abuses at a mental institution by deliberately getting committed) and Ida Tarbell (the muckraker who wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company) had more impact than most male journalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Women had the right to vote in some states, but did not win the right to vote nationwide until after World War One. However, women still had the right to act. Women like Jane Addams (the foundress of Hull House in Chicago) and Mother Cabrini (a Catholic nun — an immigrant from Italy herself — foundress of many orphanages and schools) helped the poor and inspired others to do so.

More and more women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Many of them worked with the working poor – the many families who needed Papa’s wage, Mama’s wage, and some of the children’s pennies to eke out a living. Some of the women in these professions agitated for government officials to ensure the working poor got more decent treatment. The work of these women aided the work of some men of the day in trying to put government power to use to ensure fairer treatment for people.

The desire of many Americans for more humanitarian use of authority aided the people who processed immigrants at Ellis Island and elsewhere in doing their jobs more efficiently and humanely.

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I was not brought up to think of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors as crooked scumbags. Nor were most of us.

Both of my grandfathers were Chicago policemen who were wounded in the line of duty. A criminal shot Grandpa Leo in the back, and he carried that bullet with him to his grave. The Krauts, a little earlier in World War One, gassed him, and they would eventually cost him most of his eyesight.

Grandpa Charlie also served in World War One, but never left the country. He suffered life threatening injuries in a car wreck while on police duty in the late 1920s. Grandpa Charlie, whose picture is the main picture for this website, arrested Jack McGurn, the mastermind behind the Valentines Day Massacre. McGurn (true name Vincenzo Gebardi) imported German-American gangsters from St. Louis to wear cop uniforms and shoot Bugs Moran’s gang.

Grandpa Charlie advised the producers of “The Untouchables” TV show starring Robert Stack as T-man Eliot Ness. Grandpa Charlie had arrested a number of the men portrayed in the show, and he knew a lot about them. Grandpa and my Dad, a tough stud of a man who looked like Robert Stack, also admired Frank Wilson, the bespectacled IRS agent whose number crunching made the tax case against Al Capone that sent Scarface to Alcatraz. Wilson had the stones to tell Capone where to go despite Capone threatening him and his family.

We also grew up with “The FBI” – a show starring World War Two veteran Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. – the star of “77 Sunset Strip” and the father of Stephanie Zimbalist of “Remington Steele” fame. Zimbalist and the other actors who played FBI agents underwent background checks like FBI agents had to do. Zimbalist admired the G-men and wanted to portray them in the best light. Like Jack Webb’s “Dragnet” used real LAPD cases as bases for shows, the FBI shows based upon real FBI cases.

Grandpa Charlie was leery, not of the agents, but of the top men of the FBI. He said they could have prevented JFK’s murder, but did not do so. Grandpa Charlie, an Illinois delegate to the 1960 Democratic Party convention,  was a JFK man who blamed President Kennedy’s murder on Lyndon Johnson, who like the Clintons, was not averse to having people inconvenient to him die.

Grandpa quit the Democrats when LBJ took over. He hated murderers.

History repeats itself. The IG report confirms the FBI is nakedly guilty of trying to engineer the election of Hillary Clinton, and of illegal spying upon the people of Donald Trump in an attempt to stop his election, and to cause his removal from office.

The inspector general report, released on Trump’s birthday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, one of the few nationally known Democrats who is not a known criminal or scumbag, is a work by committee whose people seemingly couldn’t agree, if you listen to the media.

The 14 pages of the “executive summary” of the IG report is not getting great praise. Leftists are less unhappy with it than others, because it gives them some wiggle room in defending Hillary.

Since it is now a public record, you can read it for yourself if you find it on the Net. Or, since I have found it, click on this link below to read it and download it for yourself.

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I read the executive summary and parts of the full report and concluded there was some sugarcoating in the summary, but enough iron in it to mean trouble for failed fired FBI chief James Comey. It also means trouble for Peter Strzok (the FBI counterintelligence official who ran the Hillary e-mails investigation and the alleged Russia collusion with Trump campaign investigation) and his partner in adultery FBI lawyer Lisa Page. There is also trouble for other FBI agents, and for former AG Loretta Lynch and former DOJ high official Sally Yates.

FBI adulterous lovebirds Peter Strozk and Lisa Page

The writer of the executive summary noted the investigators said Comey was insubordinate and overreaching in releasing info about Hillary before the Democratic Convention that showed she broke a bunch of laws but was ignorant, not culpable.

Rod Rosenstein fired Comey in May 2017, for essentially the same reasons – insubordination and overreaching in the Hillary scandal. (President Trump wanted Comey gone because of his many problems.) Rosenstein then hired Comey’s buddy Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Donald Trump and his people not only for the Russia snipe hunt, but for anything else Gestapo Mueller could fabricate.

The writer also said the investigators found Comey was insubordinate and overreaching in releasing info about Hillary and Anthony Weiner’s laptop days before the general election that showed she FBI re-opened the investigation on her due to Weiner’s laptop but didn’t find anything new.

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I am not much of a TV watcher.

My favorites are shows that ran when I was a kid. Perry Mason, The Untouchables. Gunsmoke, Bonanza. Mission Impossible, Dragnet. Petticoat Junction, Here Come the Brides. The Avengers, and The Saint.

“The Saint” was Roger Moore’s vehicle before he replaced Sean Connery as James Bond. He played roguish investigator Simon Templar, or “The Saint” for Templar’s initials. He was a lady’s man, but he was able to slug it out with the criminals who menaced decent people. He put on a devil-may-care façade, but he was a knight errant who was willing to risk his life fighting for justice. In many of the shows, a weak person overcomes his or her fallen nature to do something courageous to help The Saint.

Roger Moore as “The Saint”

The Saint was a good spy and break-in man, but he only used such powers to help victims.

In “The Saint,” like the rest of the shows named above, good wins and evil loses.

Sadly, that’s not how it is in real life.

Leftist news sources are touting that someone hacked the cellphone of President Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly in 2016. This is somehow in their twisted minds supposed to show Trump and his people are careless or are in collusion with the Russians.

The leftist media are not calling for anyone’s arrest over the alleged hacking.

They are also silent on the fact the FBI and likely the CIA used taxpayer dollars to put spies into the Trump campaign to help Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the many upper income traitors in the government whose political futures and careers were tied to Obama and Hillary.

They are also silent on Chinese spies gaining access to defense secrets.

Some military people will sell our secrets for money. Others do so because they are objectively disordered like Bradley/Chelsea/Fruitcake Manning, the jailed soldier he turned she/it who leaked thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, and whose freak surgery we taxpayers paid for. Obama commuted his/her/its sentence and he/she/it is now running to be a Democrat senator from Maryland. He/she/it has not dropped out of the race even after a potential suicide alarm.

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“John Dillinger robbed here first.”

A few days ago, 99 and I were on the road for a project. We drove into a little town in Ohio named New Carlisle. It is near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base northeast of Dayton, and is about an hour’s drive west of Columbus.

The sharp-eyed 99 saw a little plaque on a building that housed a curio shop. The plaque noted the building once housed a bank, and the bank was the first bank John Dillinger ever robbed.

Photo by Author. Where John Dillinger Robbed First?

So I looked into the claim.

John Dillinger, a native of Indianapolis, grew up in Mooresville, Indiana. He was bright and hard-working, but bored. He stole a car, then enlisted in the Navy to avoid capture. He jumped ship, married a 16-year-old girl in 1924 when he was 21, and moved her from Mooresville, Indiana to Indianapolis.

He and a hood with a criminal record named Ed Singleton tried to rob a store in Mooresville, but the police caught them. Singleton hired a lawyer, lied, and pleaded innocent. Singleton was found guilty, and got a two-year sentence. Dillinger, on the advice of his father, owned up to the crime, showed up without a lawyer after the local prosecutor promised an easy sentence, and drew a 2 to 14 year sentence and another 10 to 20 year sentence for his honesty. Dillinger did 8-1/2 years in an Indiana prison; state officials paroled him in 1933. His wife divorced him before his parole.

THE  FBI’S LINE ON DILLINGER

According to the FBI website, this is what followed:

“His (Dillinger’s) period of infamy began on May 10, 1933, when he was paroled from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years of his sentence. Almost immediately, Dillinger robbed a bank in Bluffton, Ohio. Dayton (Ohio) police arrested him on September 22, and he was lodged in the county jail in Lima, Ohio to await trial.

(The government employee who wrote this forgot to note Bluffton and Lima are both in Allen County, Ohio. This would explain why cops jailed him there because it is the county seat, and the location of the county jail.)

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Memorial Day is a sad day on the nation’s calendar, as it is supposed to be a day of honoring those military people who died fighting to protect our nation and our way of life.

General John Logan, the leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, picked May 30 as the day Union war veterans and the public would honor the dead in the Civil War. The first Memorial Day in the Union states was May 30, 1868.

Robert E. Lee had to surrender what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia to U.S. Grant at Appomattox. He did so April 9, 1865. General Joseph Johnston, who had tried in vain to link up with Lee’s men near the North Carolina/Virginia border, surrendered his army and Rebels still under arms in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina to General William Tecumseh Sherman on April 26, 1865.

Rugged William Sherman (L) and crafty Joseph Johnston (R).

They became friends after the Civil War. 

Many Southerners viewed April 26 as the effective end of the Civil War. So families of Southern dead started decorating Rebel soldiers’ graves on that day. Other Southerners chose June 3, which was Jefferson Davis’ birthday, as a Decoration Day.

After World War One, when millions of Southerners and Northerners fought together under the American flag again, most Southerners started using May 30 to honor America’s war dead. They retained April 26 or June 3 for specifically honoring Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War.

Those who attack Southern memorials today (except those for Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jeff Davis) are almost all scum. They are also conveniently ignorant of the truth that it was a war that drew almost full participation of the men of the South. Of the six million white people in the South, three million were males. Of these, 1.5 million mustered into the Confederacy’s armed services. This means virtually able bodied man from 16 to 40 served in the war. So Silent Sam is Everyman to Southerners whose ancestors were in the South during the Civil War.

The Rebels served a bad cause, but were courageous in the attempt. It took two of my relatives and 2.8 million other men who mustered for the Union to beat the Southerners. One had hard time in the Army of the Potomac. The other served under General Sherman.

By comparison, Americans suffered fewer deaths and beat the Germans and the Japanese in less time in World War Two. United Americans can do damn near anything.

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson and the Congress decided to make Memorial Day a Monday holiday for a three day weekend. LBJ, who helped in the murder of war hero John Kennedy, did more to demoralize the military of this nation than any other president. His inept and dishonest leadership of the military led to needless losses of American lives and failure in a winnable war.

Self satisfied college punks and their worthless profs fomented hatred against soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. Leftist politicians like the Clintons and the vast majority of Democrats since the Carter Administration fed the hatred for the military.

LBJ died in 1973. The eternal flames marking his resting place are the fires of Hell.

My Memorial Day is still May 30. I’ll explain why a little later.

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Harvey Weinstein faces rape and other sex offense charges in New York City.  A Manhattan judge a few days ago arraigned Weinstein to inform him of charges against him. Weinstein posted $1 million in bail, surrendered his passport, and waddled out of court.

Earlier this year social justice bedwetters whined because the New York Police Department Special Victims’ Unit boss Michael Osgood, who went after Weinstein, donated more than $2000 to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Many of them want Osgood fired.

While Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and other prominent leftists were committing rape, Trump as a businessman donated thousands of dollars to the NYPD so they could pay for posters identifying wanted rapists.

Sex offender Harvey Weinstein and woman beating sexual predator Eric Schneiderman

It’s up to you, New York, New York.

Osgood is an innovator in the policing of sex offense cases, and is responsible for the convictions of thousands of rapists, despite having to work with prosecutors in New York City who are leftist vermin.

Osgood’s men brought Harvey Weinstein in for questioning in 2015 after he tried to rape an Italian model named Ambra Battilana. Weinstein threatened the officers like the entitled pig that he is. Then his lawyer got ahold of the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. (the son of Cyrus Vance the failed Secretary of State for the failed Jimmy Carter) and his minions in the Manhattan (New York County) District Attorney’s Office.

Per New York Magazine 3/19/2018, this:

“He (Weinstein) retained two lawyers with ties to the district attorney’s office, including Elkan Abramowitz, Vance’s former law partner and a donor to his campaign. To cement their access to Vance’s office, the lawyers hired Linda Fairstein, the former head of the DA’s Sex Crimes Unit and a close friend of Bashford’s.” (Martha Bashford is a chief sex crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney.)

(How to be Your Own Detective teaching point: The writer looked up the backgrounds of the lawyers in the DA’s Office and their fellow obstructors of justice on Team Weinstein. Then the writer checked databases for donations Weinstein and his shysters made to the DA shysters and their political allies. The writer found out any relationships between Team Weinstein and the prosecutors. This is what you and I should do, and can. Especially follow the money and relationships trails when there are odd government official actions that fly in the face of justice.)

The DA’s people were so hateful to Miss Battilana (they essentially spied on her and asked her roommates if she was a prostitute) that Osgood and his men had to hide her out for several days from the leftist punks of the highly politicized Manhattan DA’s Office.

“Five days after he and his team sequestered Ambra Battilana in a hotel room to protect her from Vance’s office, she agreed to meet with Martha Bashford, the head of the DA’s sex crimes unit. Bashford didn’t inform the SVD, but Battilana’s lawyer did, and Osgood’s investigative team showed up at the attorney’s office before Bashford arrived.”

“During the meeting, according to Bock (a NYPD officer), Bashford grilled Battilana about her personal life — including one of the infamous sex parties thrown by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi that she had attended. Battilana told Bashford that she and her friends had left as soon as the sex started. “The questioning was aggressive and accusatory,” Bock recalls. “Again, the victim was upset. She felt like she was under attack.”

Days later, Dem DA Vance and his pussy hat wearing prosecutor shysters decided not to prosecute Harvey Weinstein.

Osgood did not fold. Before and after actress Rose McGowan came forward against Harvey Weinstein late last year, he continued the investigation against the movie mogul perv. Since Ms. McGowan came forward, Osgood has investigated the cases of more than a dozen women who have come forward against Weinstein. (New York Magazine, 3/19/2018)

The social justice bedwetters remain silent about their leftist politicians. Vance and Ms. Bashford still have jobs, which the taxpayers of New York pay for. The social justice bedwetters, to include cop hater New York mayor De Blasio, are too busy attacking Donald Trump.

In fact, the social justice bedwetters were OK with former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman aka Eric Shysterman. According to a 5/7/2018 New Yorker article, one of his several victims was told to swallow it by other women she thought were her friends because they liked it that Schneiderman was also abusing his prosecutor powers to orchestrate multi-state lawsuits by crooked Democrat state attorneys-general against President Trump. Another of his victims kept quiet about the abuse because she also liked what he did as a politician.

How much is being said about Shysterman now? Crickets.

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