By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – “The History Detectives,” just into its sixth season on PBS, provides a cool antidote to this summer’s overheated political yack. There’s no ranting or raving, though plenty of reminders that political treachery and buffoonery are hardly modern inventions. The July 7 episode, airing at 9 p.m. New York time, opens with a segment about a flag purchased on the Internet. It’s not much to look at: a red handprint on a white background, bordered by red vertical stripes and American flags sewn on front and back corners. Its owner, a black female veteran, suspects it may have belonged to an African-American World War I infantry unit. Elyse Luray, a nice-looking blond and former Christie’s appraiser, goes in search of its origins. In the process she revisits a painful chapter in America’s long history of racial discrimination: wartime officials didn’t want blacks to rise even to the level of cannon fodder. According to the show, 700,000 blacks signed up for military service the first week of the war, proving they were patriots despite being, in many respects, second-class citizens. Some 2 million joined the military during the conflict. Yet they were largely assigned to labor details, perhaps out of fear that black combat heroes would upset notions that African-Americans could not or would not fight. Protests ensued, however, and two black divisions were created, though even then the U.S. excluded most black soldiers from combat. Instead, they were assigned to French commanders, who knew better. Luray discovers the flag was the pennant of a French general whose black unit took heavy casualties. She further reports the heroic sacrifices of black soldiers were sometimes left unrecognized until long after hostilities ceased. Cpl. Freddie Stowers, the only black soldier from World War I awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, was killed Sept 28, 1918. Congress didn’t get around to honoring him until April 24, 1991. An innocent oversight, no doubt. There’s nothing fancy about the hour-long episodes. The “detectives” simply visit experts who help them piece together their historic puzzles. If there’s a prevailing theme it’s that seemingly ordinary objects are sometimes part of a large, often troubling, mosaic. In another segment Gwendolyn Wright, a Columbia University professor of architecture, planning, preservation and history, sets out to shed some light on a ramshackle building located in Isleton, California. While the structure looks like wrecking ball bait, she eventually discovers it was home to a branch of the Bing Kong tong, headquartered in San Francisco. While tongs are routinely associated with violence and crime, Wright learns that most were simply community organizations for belabored and sometimes besieged Chinese immigrants. Some members did take part in the “vice trades” of prostitution and opium smuggling, partly because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which declared that the presence of Chinese laborers “endangers the good order of certain localities” and put many immigrants out of work. One hopes that legislative triumph doesn’t give contemporary politicians any ideas. The remaining segment traces the origins of a painting, also bought on the Internet, supposedly the work of 19th century artist Seth Eastman. The Belfast dealer let it go for a song – a bit over $300, even though some Eastman paintings have brought more than $900,000. Tukufu Zuberi, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually discovers the painting, which features a couple of Indians playing checkers, is a fake. In the process he stumbles on another example of political infamy, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which expelled all Indians who lived east of Mississippi. Eastman, he reports, was not only a painter who documented Indian life but a soldier who helped implement the expulsion policy. An apparent Renaissance man, he had a secret Indian wife with whom he had a child, a descendent of whom Zuberi tracks down. She declines an invitation to trash he famed relative, explaining she was “raised to respect” her elders. A refreshing program that reminds us “the good old days” have yet to arrive.
