Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  A road cuts through the killing field, separating the small round valley where the Lakota were encamped, though it’s hardly a valley, more like a soft dip in the landscape, near the Wounded Knee creek bed that’s hardly a creek, just a small indentation in the land, not even as deep as a small person is high. The valley is surrounded on three sides by hills, and on the highest one are a church and cemetery marking the place where the Cavalry stood, pointing their Hotchkiss guns directly down on the tipis. “Hotchkiss guns fire shells rapidly with great range and lots of power. They had them in a fish bowl,” Brosz told me as we climbed the dusty hill to gain the soldiers’ perspective. To our left were the tree-covered hills where soldiers on horses hunted down fleeing women and children.

  We walked to the cemetery, its entrance framed by a decorative metal arch spanning red and white brick pillars. I leaned over the wire fence and read the inscription on one of the graves that packed the cemetery. “Lost Bird, born May 1890, died February 1919.”

  “Lost Bird died of pox, smallpox, at age twenty-nine,” a young Lakota man said, moving up next to me. He was hanging out, ready to tell stories to the tourists for tips. “When they found out she was a descendant of the massacre, they brought an eagle feather to her grave and prayed, and then carried the feather here and buried it in this grave.”

  Some graves were decorated with careful arrangements of plastic flowers—pink, lilac, yellow, blue, and white. Others featured twigs of sage, ribbons, and other small gifts. “Emerald Gibbons, 8-7-1925 to 5-1-1927; Baby Girl Gibbons, 7-9-1929 to 11-11-1929; Elsie Long Cat Gibbons, 8-16-1914 to 9-25-1997.” People continued to bury their dead here long after the Wounded Knee massacre.

  In the center of the cemetery is a trench four feet wide and seventy-eight feet long, the mass grave where the victims of Wounded Knee were buried three days after the massacre ended. Surrounding it is a wire fence hung with red cloth prayer bundles, socks, bags of sage, and scarves. At one end is a monument with a plaque that reads: “This Monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre, December 29, 1890, Col. Forsythe in command of U.S. Troops.”

  Who was to blame for the deaths at Wounded Knee: the Lakota or the Seventh Cavalry? This was the question that brought James Mooney, Smithsonian ethnographer, to this desolate, ghost-filled landscape, the question he attempted to answer with exhaustive research in official and unofficial documents, in interviews with survivors and participants, and in carefully walking the battlefield accompanied by a scout. Here is, in part, what he found:

  [T]he author arrives at the conclusion that when the sun rose on Wounded Knee on the fateful morning of December 29, 1890, no trouble was anticipated or premeditated by either Indians or troops; that the Indians in good faith desired to surrender and be at peace, and that the officers in the same good faith had made preparations to receive their surrender and escort them quietly to the reservation . . . that the first shot was fired by an Indian, and that the Indians were responsible for the engagement; that the answering volley and attack by the troops was right and justified, but that the wholesale slaughter of women and children was unnecessary and inexcusable.[12]

  Standing on the hillside overlooking the small valley, I thought about the emotional resonance of the Ghost Dance Shirt. Where does it come from? Is it because, as Nason said, “Wounded Knee was a clear cut massacre, a blatant case at a very late date?” Is it because the shirt was a burial garment that now stands as witness? Or does its power also derive from something else? Does the return of the Ghost Dance Shirt also represent an act of grace from one people to another, which allows, as Marcella LeBeau said, the healing to begin?

  Today, the Ghost Dance Shirt from Wounded Knee hangs in its unlit case in a dim gallery in the museum built into a prairie hillside, awaiting its final resting place. In Great Britain, the Kelvingrove’s willingness to repatriate it to the Lakota has become a shining example of how museums sometimes do the right thing by native people.

  Every couple of years, someone promotes a new plan for an official commemoration of the massacre. One recent plan that became a piece of federal legislation would have established the Wounded Knee massacre site and its cemetery as a National Tribal Memorial Park. The National Park Service would provide funding for restoration of the site and its perpetual upkeep, though its ownership would remain with the Oglala Sioux tribe. The tribe would operate the site, creating jobs for administrators, maintenance workers, and rangers. The park would not only commemorate that historic tragedy and honor the victims of the massacre, but also bring visitors to the reservation and revenue to the local economy.

  The Wounded Knee Survivors Association is now called the Heartbeat at Wounded Knee 1890. It and others put a stop to the legislation. Their reason, I was told, is that they did not want anyone exploiting their honored dead by making money from the sacred site.

  If I hadn’t been at Wounded Knee, I would not have understood why. Now I do. These are the proud Lakota.

  Someday, the Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt will return home, but that might take a while. When it comes to the return of tribal treasures, it’s best to take the longer view.

  Notes

  1. For an overview of the repatriation of the sacred Ghost Dance Shirt see: Daniel Brosz, “Mending the Hoop: The Repatriation of the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt” (The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002).

  2. Jeanette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 312.

  3. Dan Brosz, “Lakota Ghost Dance Clothing: History, Meaning and Manufacture” (The University of Nebraska- Lincoln, 2002).

  4. James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973).

  5. Interview with Daniel Brosz (Curator, North Dakota Cultural Heritage Center) in discussion with the author, July 24, 2012.

  6. James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973), 796.

  7. Sam Maddra, “Glasgow’s Ghost Shirt,” booklet published by Glasgow Museums, 1999.

  8. Interview with Marcella LeBeau (Cheyenne River reservation), in discussion with the author, July 25, 2012.

  9. Mark O’Neill, “Glasgow City Council’s Arts and Culture Committee Report,” November 13, 1998.

  10. “Curation Agreement,” South Dakota Department of Tourism and State Development, January 2005.

  11. Interview with James Nason and Megon Noble (Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle), in discussion with the author, August 1, 2012.

  12. James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, 870.

  Chapter 4

  Babe Ruth on a Quail Hunt

  On October 26, 2010, Leslie Waffen, the recently retired director of the Motion Picture, Sound and Video Branch of the National Archives, opened the door of his house in Rockville, Maryland, to find five government agents with a warrant to search the premises. In the basement, they found boxes of audio discs stolen from the Archives.[1] A year later, on October 4, 2011, Waffen pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement of government property with a value greater than one thousand dollars. As part of the plea agreement, he surrendered 955 sound recordings owned by his former employer and agreed to pay full restitution. He was eventually sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison, fined $10,000, and ordered to pay $99,864.44 to the National Archives and the victims who had inadvertently purchased the purloined sound recordings. He also lost his pension. “Our hope as you go forward is that you will abandon that parallel universe of crime,” said federal judge Peter Messitte. [2]

  The news of Waffen’s sentencing in the Washington Post brought me back to my days as executive director of Philadelphia’s history museum, the Atwater Kent. The responsibility for the one hundred thousand objects in the museum’s collections weighed heavily on me. I worried about them all the time—their condition, their safety. My sleep was haun
ted by a recurring nightmare: I would open the door of my house to find men in black looking for stolen artifacts that I couldn’t remember if I had stolen. Angst notwithstanding, I loved the job, especially the topsy-turvy valuations of artifacts, where the most valuable items were actually the most ordinary ones, because ordinary items are the least often saved. I came to share the curatorial staff’s deep devotion to the 1840s school desk carved with the initials of long-dead children, the display signs from long-defunct department stores, the two-hundred-year-old wooden pipe that carried water from river to households, the scruffy taxidermied dog named Philly who had protected our brave boys in the foxholes of World War I France. While the Atwater Kent was no National Archives, I felt a punch in the gut when I read about Leslie Waffen’s crime.

  Waffen, it turned out, had spent forty years climbing the bureaucracy to a senior position in what is arguably the country’s most important archive. How was he caught? I wondered. Why did it take ten years to detect the thefts and figure out that it was Waffen who committed them? I knew that collecting institutions tended to keep insider crimes like Waffen’s under wraps, but was this possible in a public institution like the National Archives? Why would someone of his stature risk his reputation to steal the very items for which he was responsible?

  Les Waffen’s story is a cautionary tale about those curators, registrars, archivists, and librarians, those collections professionals who stray over the line. On the surface, he seemed an unlikely thief. His colleagues called him a “committed scholar” who was “very conscientious and upstanding” and “pretty easygoing.”[3] Even the man who discovered the crime admired Waffen as one of the nation’s top audio archivists. No one suspected he was pilfering piles of audio recordings.

  Since neither the felon nor his wife would grant an interview, I turned to the documents to get the facts of the case. A generous attorney, Bruce Bellingham, prepared a Freedom of Information Act request for the Office of Inspector General, National Archives and Records Office, and the Department of Justice. A few months later, a letter arrived from the Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Inspector General. Attached to it was the report for Investigative Number 11-0002-I, “Theft of Historical Audio Recordings.” Large swaths of the investigation report were redacted, and some of the court documents were secret, but between the parts of the report that were legible, the available documents from the trial transcript, and a couple of newspaper articles, I was able to piece together the sequence of events.

  In 1976, David Goldin, an avid radio collector, donated thousands of original sixteen-inch and twelve-inch acetate aluminum, pressed vinyl, and glass base disc recordings to the National Archives and Records Administration. Each disc carried old radio broadcasts that Goldin had acquired over the years. On September 27, 2010, Goldin notified the Archives’ Office of General Counsel that someone with the handle “hi-fi_gal” was offering one of these discs for sale on eBay. That notification led to the raid on Waffen’s home by U.S. marshals and special agents from the Archives’ Office of Inspector General. They arrived with a long list of missing discs and a moving truck, went down into the basement, found boxes of audio recording discs, identified them as owned by the National Archives, and loaded them into the truck. According to the agents, Waffen appeared surprised and his wife upset as they sat together on the couch while all this was going on. The raid lasted about forty-five minutes.

  The agents seized 6,153 individual sound recordings, 955 of which were confirmed as National Archives holdings. Eventually, the court ordered Waffen to surrender a total of 4,806 discs.[4] Attached to the Report of Investigation on the Waffen theft were fifty-three pages of titles of radio broadcasts that he had stolen from the Archives. They included the first World Series Game of 1948, a rare recording of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, episodes of three radio series—“Counterspy,” “Suspense,” and “Gunsmoke”—news shows, game shows, the Boston Symphony, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, and an address by Madam Chiang Kai-Shek to Congress, one of a series titled, “NBC Historic War Speeches.” Disc number RG200G was the one that led the agents to Waffen. It was titled, “Babe Ruth Quail Hunt at Forked River, New Jersey,” recorded on December 10, 1937, by WOR radio.

  Babe Ruth on a quail hunt? I knew Ruth was a baseball powerhouse who played both pitcher and outfielder positions. He retired in 1934—three years before the quail hunt broadcast—with 714 lifetime career home runs, a baseball record until Hank Aaron broke it in 1974. But even if Ruth were the greatest baseball player of all time, I couldn’t figure out why a radio show about him quail hunting was significant enough to end up at the National Archives. In fact, I wondered why any of these stolen sound recordings belonged in the National Archives, as its mission is to preserve federal government records, and these recordings seemed to be a hodgepodge of everything except government records. So, I decided to visit the man who had made the original donation and discovered the theft.

  J. David Goldin, who goes by Dave, is a burly guy with a twinkle in his eye and a Santa Claus rosebud of a mouth under a thick white mustache.[5] He and his wife, Joyce, live in a corner of Connecticut that looks like a suburb plopped down in the middle of the woods. When I contacted him for an interview, he was happy to oblige. I drove up a long dirt road to a wooden house set high on a woody hillside and knocked on the door. When Joyce opened it, the first thing I saw was a stack of boxes of recording tapes four feet high sitting in the front hall. She led me into a wood-paneled room. I looked around in awe. The entire room was banked with shelves lined with radios of all shapes and sizes. There was a radio shaped like a violin, another shaped like a piano, a radio featuring pictures of the Dionne Quintuplets, another of famed ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, and a line of colorful transistor radios that had a Jersey shore vibe, circa 1950.

  Over the shelves hung a frieze of record album covers from old radio shows: the “Fred Allen Show” with Fred in a bowler hat and handlebar mustache; “The Wizard of Oz” with Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow on the cover; “Little Orphan Annie”; “The Shadow”; and “Tokyo Rose,” the famed World War II Japanese propagandist, this last one with a photo of Lotus Long, the elegantly dressed Japanese lady who played Rose in the movies. It was like sitting inside the head of a particularly avid radio aficionado.

  And there, seated in a chair on a raised platform at the far end of the room, surrounded by computers, printers, and other paraphenalia, was Dave Goldin. Although he owns about one thousand radios, one hundred and fifty thousand radio broadcasts, and many television sets, microphones, recorders, and other communications gadgets, you can’t really classify him as simply a collector because he’s so much more: a radio authority, archivist, historian, entrepreneur, producer, and engineer. He is also a philanthropist who has made major donations of audio discs to not only the National Archives, but also the Library of Congress and the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Some call him “the man who saved radio” because he has rescued so many radio shows that would otherwise have been lost. He calls himself a radio historian, curator, and archaeologist.

  “I was one of those kids who was passionate about radio,” he told me. By age sixteen, there was no question what he wanted to do with his career. Radio was his life. In 1963, Goldin left college for a year to follow his dream to Alaska for a short stint as a disc jockey, then returned to school in New York, graduated, and secured “a whole bunch of FCC licenses.” He worked as a radio operations engineer at NBC and the Mutual Radio Networks before landing a job at CBS.

  Collecting old radio shows has been a major part of Goldin’s life since he recorded the December 1957 broadcast of the CBS show, “A Year in Review.” Some recordings he purchased; others he salvaged from radio stations that were cleaning house. He had a knack for turning radio station trash into marketable treasure. In 1969, he produced his first record, “Themes like Old Times,” for the Viva label. It landed the number twenty-three spot on Variety’s weekly list of best-selli
ng LPs and led to a contract with Columbia Records to produce “WC Fields on Radio,” which was nominated for a Grammy for the Best Comedy Album of the Year. In 1971, Goldin left his job at CBS and started his own label, Radiola, selling, via mail order, tapes of old recordings. In 1978, he entered the video market, selling Betamax and VHS videotapes of films in the public domain. Twenty years later, he retired and sold his business. Along the way, Goldin’s productions garnered one Grammy award and five additional Grammy nominations.

  “Take a look at this,” Goldin said, holding up a sixteen-inch electronic transcription disc. “This is what Les Waffen stole.” The discs, originally made of metal, then manufactured of glass during World War II, cut on a lathe one at a time, were used exclusively by radio stations to record broadcasts.

  “There are more in the basement,” Goldin said, in what turned out to be a major understatement. The basement, like the first floor study, was lined with shelves holding radios of every shape you could imagine. There were several radios shaped like horses, with and without cowboys atop them, an elegant Art Deco radio loudspeaker with dancing nymphs, a whisky bottle-shaped “Magic-Tone” radio bearing the inscription “The Radio that Soothes Your Spirits,” and a sleek black-and-cream-colored radio with a stylized eagle standing on a wreath surrounding a Nazi swastika. The basement was also home to the “vault,” a museum-quality, climate-controlled storage facility for original recordings that Goldin preserved after cleaning up the sound and transferring them from disc to tape. Each tape carried an average of five radio broadcasts; the tapes were neatly housed in boxes with catalog numbers. All the recordings were entered into Goldin’s own Radiogoldindex Master Catalog so that he could locate anything at any time. It was as professional an archival set-up as I’ve ever seen, inside or outside an archive.