WTC aluminum, Roger Ailes’ birthplace, and the new fight over states’ rights
by Jack Neely
I was, at first, a little taken aback that the first exhibit in the new Gay Street wing of the East Tennessee History Center, now in stage two of a three-stage expansion/renovation, was about the events of September 11, 2001. It bothered me, just a little, that the first exhibit in the new museum of regional history should be the least Tennessean exhibit in the museum’s history.
But I’ve seen the exhibit, twice, actually, and found it to be moving and worthwhile. It’s currently drawing about 3,500 people a week, making it an extraordinarily popular exhibit for any history museum. Some nearby restaurateurs say the exhibit has already made a bigger impact on downtown than has the convention center.
And it turns out that the events of September 11 were a little more local than I realized. I knew that some Knoxville-area folks had died in the attacks, and they’re the ones we justly remember. But I didn’t know that part of the World Trade Center was East Tennessean. It was built, 35 years ago, with large quantities of aluminum from Alcoa. Four million pounds of it, in fact, most of which was used for the exterior facing: except for the glass, it was the part that we saw.
I’ve heard from a former Alcoa employee that the first shipment didn’t quite make it there. After being rolled in New Jersey, a helicopter was hefting the load of aluminum across the Hudson River toward Manhattan when something went awry: the load went off balance and threatened to bring the chopper down with it. They released the load into the river, where it sank.
So, as far as we know, Alcoa’s aluminum bound for the World Trade Center is still down there, among the gangsters’ concrete galoshes on the riverbottom, likely in much better shape than the aluminum that did get delivered.
When I make an error I’m always glad to have it be a well-documented one. This one didn’t appear in Metro Pulse, but in the introduction to the first edition of my new collection of Metro Pulse stories, From the Shadow Side. This error will, I’ll bet, be one of those hallmarks by which antiquarians of the future will detect the first edition of that book. It will doubtless be valued in the high single digits.
Anyway, this error started when someone pointed out to me some years ago that Roger Ailes, the Republican advisor and prosperous hustler behind the Fox News phenomenon, was born in Knoxville. I looked it up in my most trusted source, my 1996 World Almanac & Book of Facts, to confirm it.
Maybe I ought to get a new almanac, but this one’s hanging together all right, just a little worse for the wear. Most of the information in there is still current, and I just don’t have the heart to throw it out.
Anyway, sure enough, it states that Roger Ailes was born in “Knoxville, TN” on July 3, 1940. I thought it would be a fun fact to look up for a column, find out where the Ailes family lived, and what they were up to here. See if I could find any clues about how he turned out the way he did.
But I could find no Aileses in the city directories in the early ‘40s. In fact, I looked into the McClung Collection’s extensive biographical files, and didn’t find any handy evidence that anyone named Ailes ever lived in Knoxville. So I looked into some library sources, like Current Biography. It holds that Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio—on an earlier date, May 15, 1940.
Finally I looked in a new, 2004 World Almanac. Even they’ve changed their minds about Ailes’ birthplace, now putting it in Warren.
Well, maybe it’s just some kind of weird flub on the almanac’s part—but mistakes are usually based on some sort of twisted truth. It seems unlikely that they’d make up Knoxville out of the clear blue sky, just as a prank or something. I thought it possible that maybe he at least lived here during his childhood, that maybe his parents moved here temporarily during wartime for work in the various war industries, as did the parents of Tina Turner. In Ohio, Ailes’ dad was a maintenance foreman for Packard Electric, and would likely have been employable at the Manhattan Project. Maybe that’s what happened.
Or, considering that Ailes is one of the title characters of Al Franken’s book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, maybe Ailes once found it expeditious to tell somebody he was six weeks younger than he was. And that his birthplace was more glamorous than Warren, Ohio.
Senator Frist may find it expedient to consider more profitable ways of spending the Senate year of 2004. The proposed gay-marriage-ban amendment will fail, especially in the South. That is, unless a lot of folks I know have been blowing smoke.
Like most Southerners, I grew up among people who held fiercely to the devout belief that the federal government had no business imposing moral order on the states. The Civil War, I always heard, was chiefly about states’ rights. Moral issues, even those as profound as whether human beings should be enslaved, was strictly a matter for individual states to govern.
The Confederates weren’t for slavery, we have always insisted: they were for individual states’ rights to decide what was right and wrong. It was purely the principle of the thing: The Confederates went off to fight and die for the principle that the federal government should not legislate morality on the states.
I know folks who have told me they’d go to war again over the same principle, regardless of the specific moral issue. A half-century ago, we nearly did. The states’ rights banner was unfurled again in the fight over segregation in the ’50s and early ’60s.
Once again, 140 years later, the Republican Party is considering a proposal to enforce a moral ban on the states from the federal level. It’s a little surprising that this time the willful, defiant, renegade state is Massachusetts, not South Carolina. Still, my fellow Confederate descendents will be grateful for this chance to prove they mean what we’ve been saying all these years: that the principle of states’ rights is the main thing.
March 18, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 12
© 2004 Metro Pulse
| 
