URBAN LEGEND ABOUT NEW ORLEANS LAND TITLE

I enjoy urban legends because of the challenge they present in examining the truth of their claims. The one copied below has been identified as originating as far back as 1955 (there are numerous web sites debunking it), but now with a Hurricane Katrina twist. I place it in the ridicule-of-government category, which has a long tradition in the U.S., especially of the proverbial hapless bureaucrat.

Even though the essentials of urban legends are made up (in this case, the denial of a loan by the HFA because of the supposed lack of title before 1803), frequently, they contain other factual errors, as does this one, that are used to propel the story. For example, France did not acquire the Louisiana Territory by conquest from Spain. In 1800, Spain willingly traded it to France, by the Treaty of San Ildefonso, for a small kingdom in northern Italy (essentially present-day Tuscany), elevating the son-in-law of the King of Spain to the title of king, rather than merely duke.

Second, Spain did not acquire rights to North America by way of Columbus, but through claims associated with Spanish explorations from 1513 to 1543, culminating in those of Hernando Desoto (he might have traveled through a part of Mississippi).

Third, Queen Isabella did not sell her crown jewels to finance the first voyage of Columbus; he was financed by Luis de Santangel, a member of a Jewish converso family (his grandfather had converted to Christianity). (Jewish web sites crow that it was not Isabella’s jewelry but Spanish Jewry which made Columbus’ discoveries possible!)

As far as the central claim of the story, that it is impossible to have land titles before 1803 when the U.S. took control of New Orleans--this is not true. Go to the web site of The Historic New Orleans Collection (<http://www.hnoc.org/>), a museum, research, and publications institution (on Royal Street) and its Manuscripts Division and you can see that it possesses numerous land documents (available online) showing land ownership, some originating as Spanish colonial land grants. Land was occupied, surveyed, licensed and recorded by the Spanish and French governors. When the U.S. took over in 1803, there were four boards of commissioners established, the last in 1812, to settle all claims.

Part of rebuilding New Orleans caused residents often to be challenged with the task of tracing home titles back potentially hundreds of years. With a community rich with history stretching back over two centuries, houses have been passed along through generations of family, sometimes making it quite difficult to establish ownership. Here's a great letter an attorney wrote to the FHA on behalf of a client:

You have to love this lawyer........

A New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client. He was told the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to a parcel of property being offered as collateral. The title to the property dated back to 1803, which took the lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA, he received the following reply.

(Actual reply from FHA):

"Upon review of your letter adjoining your client's loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin."

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:
(Actual response):

"Your letter regarding title in Case No.189156 has been received. I note that you wish to have title extended further than the 206 years covered by the present application.
I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased by the United States from France, in 1803 the year of origin identified in our application. For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U.S. ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain. The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Queen Isabella.

The good Queen Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus's expedition...Now the Pope, as I'm sure you may know, is the emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana . God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world as we know it, and the FHA. I hope you find God's original claim to be satisfactory. Now, may we have our loan?"

The loan was immediately approved.

AMAZING ACTS OR HYPERACTIVE IMAGINATION?

Perhaps you have read the long-lived story perennially circulating since the President Kennedy assassination which purports to demonstrate "amazing coincidences" between that event and the Lincoln assassination one century previous. The endlessly forwarded email attachment that I received (Feb. 2008), titled "crazy history story," leads with an injunction: "Have a history teacher explain this--if they can." Feeling personally challenged, I began thinking about visiting the respective presidential libraries (Boston and Springfield) to begin many months of historical research to investigate the veracity of the claims. However, being a prudent investigator who understands the importance of evaluating resources at one's disposal to carry out research, I instead visited snopes.com at http://snopes.com/history/american/lincoln-kennedy.asp This Snopes specializes in debunking urban legends and provides an adequate explanation of the Lincoln-Kennedy "amazing coincidences" hoax, rating it "unclassifiable veracity."

Snopes labels the account as a catalog of "mere superficial coincidences that fail to touch upon the substantial differences and dissimilarities that underlie them." For example, I have read elsewhere that some medical historians claim that Lincoln exhibited symptoms of Marfan syndrome, which explains the abnormal elongation of his limbs. How does one compare this disorder of Lincoln's (if true) to Kennedy? This is the problem inherent in a list of "coincidences": there are myriads of other facts that might be more salient, but are not comparable in any meaningful way.

What for me is an even more interesting question is why we seem to have a need to believe such "amazing coincidences" in the first place? Anthropologist Pascal Boyer has written that we see purpose, intention and design even when they are not there. He calls it hypertrophy of social cognition. It is a hypersensitivity to agency, in that we attribute intention (by Providence, God, the Universe, Divine intervention) where only randomness exists. Have you ever seen faces in clouds? People claimed to have seen Satan in the billowing smoke issuing from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Our imagination creates what is not there outside our imagination. Humans have an overdeveloped sense which creates patterns in randomness. When people are shown a string of heads and tails produced by a random-number generator, they tend to believe they are not truly random--they look too orderly and thus rigged.

This is not to assert that there is not considerable nonrandomness in the world, but to answer the question of why we are inclined to believe a catalog of supposed "amazing coincidences?" The answer seems to be that we want to believe there are deeper meanings in our everyday lives and in historical events, meanings that dispel what otherwise seems to us to be reality too random and lacking sufficient purpose and meaning. We do not want to feel our lives are random and purposeless; we would like to believe that we as individuals lead lives that are filled with amazing coincidences. And, if we can detect nonrandomness within historical events, then we feel we are justified in believing that everything--including our own lives--are actually much more than just random acts of a random-number-generator Universe. We desperately want to believe that "amazing coincidences" are actually attributes and acts of an Amazing Creation--and we are its amazing nonrandom Acts.

THE WAY OF PROPAGANDISTS

An early 2007 emailed message--titled “Who is Barak [sic] Obama"--forwarded through countless e-message trees has kept in circulation a debunked urban legend. The message purports that Senator Barack Obama is a radical, ideological Muslim. The message states that, “If you do not ever forward anything else, please forward this,” thus lending an air of emergency. The message goes further: “This is very scary to think of what lies ahead of us in our own United States” (my emphases), thus indicating that Sen. Obama is not a legitimate member of “our” United States, that somehow he would hand the country over to “them,” the “radical, ideological Muslims,” of whom the message tries to make Sen. Obama a confrere. The message then says, “…better heed this and pray about and share it.” The latter gives it an air of religious duty to pass on the message and vote against Sen. Obama.

The message contains a link to snopes.com and challenges the reader to check it for authenticity. The forwarders of the message do not personally check snopes.com. I DID. If you go to Snopes, you will see in the left column, under the “Hottest Urban Legends,” that the third one is “Barack Obama.” When you click on that link, you will read an earlier similar letter that is judged by Snopes as false. It is interesting reading. Snopes says that no evidence supports the claim that Obama is currently “ideologically Muslim,” or has ever been a “radical Muslim.” In fact, those who made these claims “have offered nothing to support it—no letters or documents, no reports of conversations, no revelations from friends or associates…”

Fortunately, CNN.com did its fact-checking of the message. Here is its link:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/22/obama.madrassa/

Within the CNN.com article there is a link to its video footage of the report: Watch video of Obama's school

Remember, as the current political season moves along, we should expect more swiftboating propaganda.

I do not personally care how you vote. I do care, however (being a high-school Social Studies teacher), about the gullibility of the American public. In a time when we have (overly) busy lives, and when we are deluged with “information,” this affords the opportunity for those who are interested in disinformation to cause a great deal of damage. If your sense of nationalism and Christian identity are appealed to, along with a message of fear, then have great doubts about the authenticity of those political messages. They are designed to touch you where you are most vulnerable to falsehoods. This is the classic way of propagandists.