It's THE Week for Golf in Georgia

Augusta, Georgia is front and center this week as the golf infamous and elite arrive to play the much heralded course at August National.

President Eisenhower loved August National…..this post relates a little about his experiences there, and there are a couple of links at the end to other posts I’ve written concerning the course.

David Eisenhower became a member of the August National Club in 1948. Prior to becoming president he managed to visit the course five different times.

Ike loved golf. Estimations go as high as 800 regarding the number of rounds of golf Eisenhower played during his eight years in office visiting various courses. Some of those rounds were played during the 29 visits he made to Augusta National. a Golf Digest article advises President Eisenhower loved golf so much he installed a putting green on the south lawn of the White House and during inclement weather he hit long irons into a net in the basement.

With the help of donations from club members a cabin was built for Eisenhower on the grounds of Augusta National in 1953 for a cost of $70,000. However, your idea of a cabin, my idea of a cabin, and Augusta National’s idea of cabin are totally different things. The Eisenhower cabin is a house as seen in the image here. The cabin was built to the specifications of the Secret Service and has an entire lower floor where agents resided when Eisenhower visited Augusta. The cabin served as the first real home President Eisenhower had known since graduating form West Point in 1915 and entering the army. When the President wasn’t visiting the cabin, it was used by other club members.

Accommodations were also made for the President to complete his business affairs----the business of the nation---in an office that was provided for him over the club’s pro shop. In fact, it has been reported that the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” where America announced it would use force in the Middle East, was announced within a fairway wood of the first tee. Today Eisenhower’s own cracker barrel sits in the Augusta National Pro Shop. The wood used for the barrel was once part of the White House roof.

Sadly it was impossible for President Eisenhower to attend a Masters Tournament while he was president. It would have been too disruptive. However, he would usually show up on the following Monday to play a round with the winner. The same Golf Digest article I referenced above states Arnold Palmer remembered Ike as “a regular guy on the golf course and a regular guy period.”

Palmer also remembered Ike was a fierce competitor who fought for a $1 nassau bet as if he were hitting a beach in France. “When somebody conceded him a putt,” Palmer recalls, “there was no discussion. He picked up his ball and moved on fast.”

At least once during the coverage for the Masters Tournament you will hear a reporter mention the Eisenhower Pine. The tree in question is a Loblolly Pine that stands 65 feet tall and is estimated to be at least 100 years old. It is located on the 17th hole, and is 210 yards from the Master’s tee.

The tree and Eisenhower had quite a contentious relationship. The pine had a bad habit of getting in the President’s way. At a 1956 club meeting Eisenhower addressed the members in attendance and suggested the tree should be cut down. The Augusta National Club website advises that club president, Clifford Roberts, adjourned the meeting immediately instead of offending the President by rejecting his request outright. Citing Roberts Rules the club president ruled the President of the United States out of order.

Some of the changes to the Augusta National property President Eisenhower proposed were more positive, however. At one point Eisenhower mentioned he had found a perfect place to build a dam in order to form a fish pond. Today the dam is exactly where the President suggested, and the pond is referred to as Ike’s Pond.

One of the best stories concerning President Eisenhower at Augusta National is the time when the press corps was allowed to follow him on a full round of the course. At Rae’s Creek Ike hit two balls into the water. The President of the United States immediately stripped of his shoes and went after the errant golf balls. The reporters had a very rare moment on their hands, unfortunately I have yet to find a photograph of this moment online.

This article first appeared at American Presidents Blog in April, 2008

Over at Georgia on My Mind I discuss Ike’s special church pew in Augusta and at History Is Elementary I discuss the history of the land where Augusta National is today.

Pactomania, Brinkmanship, and Covert Ops...Oh My!

When I was a little girl my mother always shopped for the week’s groceries at the same location – the Kroger grocery store located in the Jamestown Shopping Center in College Park, Georgia. Mother was a slow and methodical shopper and inevitably she’d see someone she knew and would stand in the middle of the aisle talking for what seemed to me to be forever. The topics didn’t interest me at the time…..who was sick, who was well, who had divorced, the next impending PTA project, a church social….blah, blah, blah.

I hated those trips….I was always attempting to find something to occupy my time. I would mosey over to the front corner of store where the plywood magazine rack was located. Someone had painted it Columbia blue so it was easy on the eyes, and the bottom area of the shelf was deep enough for a young kid like me to actually sit on a stack of magazines and lean against the side of the rack perusing issues of Archie comics, Disney Digest, and later on a few issues of Tiger Beat, Seventeen, Glamour and the more racy Cosmopolitan.

Prior to wading into the sea of magazines and comics at the front of the store, I always performed a quick walk thru the produce department. My goal was a Chiquita banana sticker. Once I located a sticker I promptly removed it and placed it on my forehead or cheek where it would stay for an undetermined length of time.

Why?

I don’t know…it just seemed like the thing to do, and it seemed to agitate my mother to no end, so…..

Fastforward several years and it’s just another day in my fifth grade classroom. Students are at lunch and I have a few scant minutes to look over my afternoon lesson plans, slurp down a cup of soup and visit the restroom for the first time since six a.m. that morning. Yes, that twenty minutes of “lunch” that was bestowed upon me was jammed with more than eating and it was precious time for me.

As I rushed out to pick up my class I grabbed a simple envelope I had crammed with homemade stickers the night before.

Yes, you guessed it….Chiquita banana stickers. I had found the design online and using a Xyron sticker machine I had created a Chiquita label for each and every student, and of course, one for me.

Now think about it…I’m dedicated to my job. I’m dedicated to drawing kids into a lesson , but there was no way I was going to wade through the entire bin of bananas at my local Kroger and pull off every sticker I could find until I had enough for my kids. I didn’t think the produce manager would appreciate me stealing 28-30 stickers either.

As the kids put their tray up and got in line I stopped and visited with each one as was my normal custom…..chit-chatting along the way, reminding those with retainers to make sure they didn’t throw them away, and keeping the more unruly kids from losing total control of their gangly arms and legs that seemed to always make contact with another student “by accident.”
This day as I advanced down the line I asked each child, “Forehead or cheek?” As they answered I used the palm of my hand to jam a sticker in the indicated spot. When the last child had been “stickered” I went to the front of the line and placed a sticker on my forehead as well, and we began the trek back to our classroom.

We stopped along the way to visit the restrooms and as they waited some of the kids peppered me with questions about the stickers, others examined the sticker on their friend’s cheek or forehead. I merely smiled and kept my finger to my lips as a reminder to students that we don’t talk in the hallway.

Once we were all back in the classroom I took my place at the front of the room and began to relate my childhood affection for Chiquita banana stickers and told students ElementaryHistoryTeacher never does anything without a purpose and there was a purpose behind the stickers.

Chiquita Brands, the company that brings us Chiquita bananas began in 1899 as United Fruit Company, an American company, that not only traded in bananas but pineapples, too. Through the 1900s, United Fruit became very powerful in third world countries…..mainly in Latin America….where they operated huge plantations, held huge tracts of undeveloped land, and owned the very roads and railroads that moved their produce to the ports. In most areas United Fruit contained such a tight hold on the banana market it had the ear of local and national governments. From this the term Banana Republic was born….

O. Henry ( William Sydney Porter ), first referred to Latin American countries as Banana Republics in his collection of stories titled Cabbages and Kings, …… Yes, in case you are wondering that is the same O. Henry we remember as the master of the ironic twist from literature class.

O. Henry had fled to Honduras for one year in 1896 regarding a pesky charge of embezzlement by United States Federal authorities. O. Henry was concerned by the “servile dictatorship” that existed due to a corrupt relationship between foreign companies like United Fruit and the government of Latin American nations.

Now hold on because we are fast-forwarding again to the 1950s….the time of Eisenhower and the time period my fifth graders were exploring. The fabulous fifties….the perfect family, rock and roll, the Slinky, and Pactomania.

Yes, Pactomania. Hold on….I’ll explain that in a bit.

….and the fabulous Fifties was the time when the CIA began to use covert operations sanctioned by the White House to manipulate the world into a landscape that fit America’s position in the Cold War.

In March, 1951 Jacabo Arbenz Guzmin came to power in Guatemala in what was touted to be the second-ever universal suffrage election for the small nation and the first peaceful transition of power in their history. His campaign promises included making Guatemala economically independent and he wanted to extend voting and labor rights. Guzmin pushed for Decree 900, a law that would expropriate (eminent domain), uncultivated land belonging to large plantations transferring it to the people for their use.

Unfortunately, Guzmin’s promises were seen as threats by the elite population and by those that controlled foreign business interests like United Fruit. Guzman’s promises were also seen as threats to American interests by the Eisenhower administration. It also didn’t help that Guzmin seemed to have tolerance and sympathies with Guatemalan’s Party of Labour.

Suddenly the Eisenhower administration was taking a long hard look at Guzmin and events surrounding the country because it appeared that the situation there was sliding down the Communist slope rather quickly.

John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, acted aggressively against Communism and saw it as a real threat to the American way of life calling it “godless terrorism”. Under his watch he built up NATO and was a pioneer of massive retaliation and brinkmanship – the willingness to go to war in order to force the other side to back down – a very dangerous game of chicken. Dulles also argued that it was easy for Latin American countries to succumb to Communist influence since the lower classes in those countries blamed European imperialism and American capitalism for their problems. He also engaged in what has been termed Pactomania. During his tenure as Secretary of State he secured alliances with 42 separate nations and had treaty relations with over 100 nations.

The Secretary of State’s brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the CIA and a former member of the Board of Directors for United Fruit Company.

Because it seemed that Guzmin had Communist sympathies and because the Dulles brothers were so hell bent on ousting Guzmin, President Eisenhower gave approval for the very first clandestine military action in Latin America by the CIA. Their operation received the codename PBSUCCESS, and its goal was to depose Guzmin in favor of a politician selected by the Eisenhower administration…someone more amiable to the wants and desires of the United States. A side goal to Operation PBSUCCESS was to send a message to the Soviets that the American government would not tolerate the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.
Since Eisenhower would not supply directly involve the U.S. military the CIA trained an opposition army at secret camps in Nicaragua and Honduras

The CIA also masterminded an extensive propaganda campaign in Guatemala to convince citizens the opposition army was a force to be reckoned with as well as a psychological campaign against Guzmin supporters. Threatening calls were made in the middle of the night promising bodily harm and even death.

United Fruit also began a propaganda campaign of their own conducted by Edward Louis Bernays, the father of the public relations concept. It was Bernay’s job to smear Guzmin in the American press as a Communist. Bernays relied on the concept of “engineered consent” – the belief that the American public is generally undisciplined, ignorant, and has no moral principles and could therefore be manipulated by linking products and ideas to their unconscious desires.

Hmmmm……

Ten days after opposition forces crossed the border into Guatemala on June 18, 1954 Guzmin resigned and fled to Mexico.

Days later Allen Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, along with met with President Eisenhower to provide an assessment of the situation in Guatemala. Unfortunately, the President was not given the entire story. He was told one man had been killed when it had actually been 48. From that point on covert operations were accepted as an inexpensive and safe method of fighting Communisim in Latin America.

It was also within a few days of the coup d’ etat the CIA began Operation PBHISTORY which was an attempt to secure of 150,000 documents from the Guzmin administration. Subsequent examination of those documents found no links between Guzmin and independent Communist within the borders of Guatemala.

Guatemala has remained unstable and prone to civil war ever since, and it can be argued the whole episode was for naught.

…..and I bet you thought I was going to open my lesson with that cheesy Chiquita Banana Song, didn’t you?

Shows what YOU know…..ElementaryHistoryTeacher doesn’t DO Carmen Miranda, but it would be a spectacular show! :)

Past, Present, Future: Augusta National

This past weekend it was all about the Masters Tournament around here. I love to watch it, and my husband loves to live through it making each swing and putt with his favorite players. Since he wasn’t in attendance for this year’s action, I forgave him for pulling his Blackberry out to check the tournament results as we exited our church sanctuary following Sunday night’s service. Shhhh….dont’ tell! :)

You have to admit… golf is a game with great history, and the Masters Tournament has a history that can stand alone. It is said that when Georgia’s own favorite son, Bobby Jones, came across the piece of land that would become August National Club he said, “Perfect! And to think this ground has been lying here all these years waiting for someone to come along and lay a golf course upon it.”

Well, the land hadn’t just been laying there. Believe it or not it had a history before August National. Prior to Jones and his partners acquiring the land, it had served as an indigo plantation owned by Dennis Redmond. The building that serves as the Augusta National Clubhouse was built in 1854 to serve as the Redmond home, and is believed to be the first home in the South to be built of concrete. The walls are 18 inches thick, but following the Charleston earthquake in the late 1800s a few cracks were noted. The current clubhouse has had a few major additions, however, since the plantation days.

In 1857, the property was purchased by Belgian Baron Louis Mathieu Edouard Berckmans. Whew! That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Berckmans’ hobby was horticulture while his son, Prosper Julius Alphonse, dabbled in horticulture, but he was also an agronomist. Father and son began Fruitland Nurseries covering 365 acres. They imported many trees and plants from countries all over the world. This explains why there are so many varieties of trees and flowering plants on the property today. In fact, the row of 61 magnolias that line Magnolia Lane were planted prior to the Civil War. Many of the pine trees that spot the course are over 150 years old. The Masters Tournament is known for the beautiful azaleas that blanket the course which Prosper is credited with making them an extremely popular addition to gardens in the South.

While there are many aspects of the Augusta National course that have their own little stories to tell I’m going to focus today on two aspects of the course that involve the presidency of the United States----the Eisenhower cabin and the Eisenhower Pine. So, pack up your belongings and join me over at American Presidents where I’ll explain the rest of the story…..