Enjoyed NOLA column
Editor,
Love your article about New Orleans “Who dat say New Orleans ain’t back?” I moved here from Mississippi in March of this year and miss being so close to NOLA. I also respect the plug about the Gulf Coast. We were completely overlooked and most of the country/world still doesn’t know.
The main thing I love about NOLA is the music. There’s nowhere like it in the world. However, you said New Orleans was the birthplace of American music, which is completely false. Mississippi is in fact the birthplace of America’s music.
Add it to the list of things MS is overlooked on, but Mississippians are finally wising up and using this to draw tourism dollars from all over the world (birthplaceofamericanmusic.blogspot.com)
Definitely worth looking into and maybe adding to your road trip next time you head to NOLA.
Again really enjoyed your article, you nailed it on Frenchmen Street. Keep up the good work.
Joseph Short
Teddy Roosevelt = Hitler!
Editor,
Regarding your recent editorial praising Teddy Roosevelt and his environmental concern (“Sacrificing the Ogeechee”):
There is another imperialist, expansionist environmentalist you might want to praise while you’re at it: Adolf Hitler, who was also a vegetarian, an avid gardener and a lover of children (some children, I dare say).
The trouble with environmentalists is that many of them are more concerned with the state of the “environment” than they are with the people who live in it. Saying nice things about the environment is now close to sanctifying yourself, and others may not notice what exactly you mean by it, or how deep it really goes.
So–called environmental concerns have been used to accuse countries of misuse of their own land (the American Indians were so accused) in hoped it will sound good enough to excuse a takeover of it by those “better equipped” to care for it!
And as for Roosevelt himself, Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States tells us that Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the U.S. should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was “rather a good thing” and told her he had said as much at dinner with “various dago diplomats.”
In the spring of 1903, 75,000 textile workers were on strike. Of this number, 10,000 were little children. The workers were striking for better wages and shorter hours. The children were in pitiful condition, some with hands or fingers missing from the accidents with machinery. They were thin and undersized.
They marched through New Jersey and New York and down to Oyster Bay to try and see President Roosevelt. He refused to see them.
From 1901–1921 the presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Woodrow Wilson, and whether Democrat or Republican, these leaders watched blacks being lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statesboro, Ga., Brownsville, Texas, and Atlanta and did nothing.
Thomas Middleton Marks
