Ganging Up On The Women

 

Back in 1973, when men wanted something in New Hampshire, they got more than just a little bit testy when a woman stood in their way.

When Aristotle Onassis faced loss of control of his shipping business because Arabian oil giants controlled 40% of all world shipping and were moving in on his empire, he decided the best way to counter that was to go into the oil business himself and he hit on a plan to ship crude oil to the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire Coast, to convert those islands into a massive fuel dump, to pipe the crude underwater by pipelines to Rye and then up the coast to the Great Bay at Durham point, where he would build the world's most massive oil refinery, bigger by orders of magnitude than anything then in existence.

Sweeps her right off her feet, that cigarette

The governor of New Hampshire, Meldrin Thompson, heard this plan, and not being awfully bright and not inclined to ask too many questions, he said it was a terrific idea: There was an Arab oil embargo and gas lines were snarling America's mobility,  putting a crimp into the free wheeling American way of life  and someone (we can imagine who) said a refinery on the Great Bay would mean:

1. Huge bucks for New Hampshire, somehow; just exactly how was unclear since you could not tax oil refineries with local taxation.

2. An end to worries about where the next tank of gas or heating oil was coming from, which was not clear because gas for automobiles isn't what they pump out of oil refineries. 

3. Money, money, money, at least some of which would find it's way toward his office and perhaps to his own coffers.

Thompson was appalled that anyone, let alone a woman, would stand in the way of this gift from "one of the great men in the world."

The Georgia Peach

Thompson, of course, was just a puppet on the string hand of the editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, who had put Thompson in office and who thought of himself as the real power behind the throne. 

Loeb was, by all accounts, an intensely strange human being, although, in his time, his special form of pathology was not thought particularly strange. But let us say, his interactions with women might well have been the inspiration for Hitchcock's famous movie, "Psycho." He lived with his mother a very long time and Mad Dog is not entirely sure if she was found strapped to a rocking chair at the end of his life. One thing we do know is his mother sued him to get back the money she lent him to start his paper and then he sued his mother's estate after she died. So their relationship was, shall we say, fraught. 

He married out of college but later, when he was in his 40's divorced to marry a 28 year old woman but that marriage ended in divorce and he married an heiress. The big question is, what were these women thinking? 

Maybe it was that pistol he carried under his arm in the shoulder holster--women cannot resist an armed man.

Mamma's Best Boy

When Dudley Dudley, a freshman member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, rose to oppose the oil refinery in her town of Durham, at Durham Point, Loeb became apoplectic.  

Here is what Loeb had to say about "Mrs. Dudley" in his newspaper (capital letters are his, not mine.)

Women, 50 years ago

"We are dealing here with arrogant know-nothings, educated beyond the capacity of their intelligence."

[Loeb was acutely aware of his own educational deficiencies and carried a life long grudge against people he who thought considered him their intellectual inferior.]

"Of course, you understand that these people would not do any of this work themselves. They would be the FIRST to scream if their television sets did not work, their electric toothbrushes didn't run, or if they couldn't get warm simply by turning on the thermostat."

Representative Dudley Dudley

[Republicans have long strummed that chord: These overeducated Democrats think they're smart but they can't do what electricians, HVAC, plumbers or carpenters can. Mr. Loeb did real work, mind you, writing stuff for his newspaper. He had men for electrical wiring for his TV and toothbrush.]

"BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE SO STUPID AND SO ARROGANT, THEY DON'T DRAW THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE OIL REFINERY AND THEIR OWN LIVES OF COMFORT. THEY THINK THEY CAN HAVE ALL THE GOODIES OF LIFE WITHOUT THE REFINERY OR ANY OF THE OTHER INDUSTRIAL WONDERS OF THE MODERN WORLD."

Of course, as Ms. Dudley pointed out, her constituents had all those wonders already without a refinery leaking 8,000 gallons of oil a year into the Great Bay.

"What these people fear," Loeb stormed, "Is in actuality a very tastefully designed (italics mine) refinery, which would not injure the atmosphere of the Town of Durham, but which would quietly send forth a live-giving [sic] stream of oil to take care of the needs of all the residents of New Hampshire, as well as a good section of New England, while providing immense tax returns in the town of Durham."

Scares the Hell out of Mr. Loeb

[Each of these claims proved demonstrably false, and were debunked one by one by Ms. Dudley and by Phyllis Bennett of the newspaper "Publick Occurrences" and by Nancy Sandberg, the local activist who started a community resistance organization "Save Our Shores."

Loeb concluded: "ALAS WE HAVE EDUCATED A CERTAIN TYPE OF JACKASS IN THIS COUNTRY TO BE SO ARTICULATE THAT HIS BRAYING OFTEN DROWNS OUT COMMON SENSE AND LOGIC!"

Loeb really did return, time and again, to the idea that university educated people are arrogant, think themselves better than the hardworking tradesmen who built New Hampshire and had no business in government making life difficult for the businessmen who profited from things like oil refineries.

When Aristotle Onassis offered to build an anti-pollution laboratory at the University of New Hampshire located near the refinery, Ms. Dudley noted, "Thanks for the pollution lab, Mr. Onassis, which--by the way--we wouldn't need if there was no refinery in the first place."

The governor and Mr. Loeb agreed to always refer to Dudley Dudley as "Mrs. Thomas Dudley, the housewife," and Loeb's editor a man named Finnegan, wrote in the Union Leader, "It's impossible to satisfy people who are determined to be unreasonable, or--in the case of Mrs. Thomas Dudley--are motivated primarily by a hunger for personal publicity," who, he assured readers was so craven for public attention, "We're sure the Durham housewife would have braved a hurricane to get her picture taken."

Other hostilities leaked out, "Consider the kind of illogic demonstrated earlier this year," Finnegan wrote, "by Mrs. Thomas Dudley, the Durham legislator who is currently the most voluble spokesman--whoops, spokesperson--against the oil refinery."

This is the tenor of the men arrayed against Dudley Dudley, Nancy Sandberg and Phyllis Bennett. 

Were they men at all? 

What sort of men would believe they could bully women simply by calling them names or refusing to refer to them as independent people with names and identities beyond that of being their husband's wives?

In today's world, we can clearly see the traits for what they reveal--men who cannot win by argument, so they resort to the ad hominin attack. They are the little men, who never saw a shot fired in anger at themselves, but who try to bathe in some imagined reflected glory of manhood, of male gender. I may not be smart enough to debate Mrs. Dudley, but I'm a man, which is all I need to be.