It is with great sadness that Marmie’s daughter, Julia, will write this last blog post.
Marmie Edwards passed away on March 7th, 2024, following complications after a fall on March 3rd. When she fell, she was listening to the audiobook, “The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues” by Edwards Kelsey Moore, and engaging in one of her favorite daily rituals of walking the mile-long trail behind her condo.
Mom, I’ll do my best to do you justice here, but I assume I’ll be forgiven for any errors and lack of writing chops by all.
How fitting that your last blog post was about your mother, and now I will be writing about you. As I read it last week, through tears, so impressed by your inspirational writing, your mother, and you, I continue to be struck by your selfless nature. You are, and will always be, one of the most giving and caring people I will know. And I know others reading this will agree. At 26 years old, you put your life on hold and nursed your mother back to health after her stroke. You helped care for your youngest brother and encouraged your middle brother to continue his college studies, while you helped establish the new normal. You have shared how hard those 6 months were, but I know they contributed to your caring nature.
From there, life was not always easy, but you are a fighter and did so much with what you had. From being a staffer in the house to a future Vice President, your devotion to highway rail safety for 20 years, going back to get your Masters in Crisis Management at 58, and eventually making the choice to move across the country from D.C. to Austin, to be near your grandchildren and restart your life at 64. In Austin, you found many mentoring groups you assisted, volunteered at many local triathlons and races, and spent countless hours and years volunteering at the LBJ Library as a docent. You worked many polls as a poll worker or election judge, walked door to door for the League of Women’s voters, and met dear friends through your love of the democratic process. You started this blog in 2017 as a way to share your deep love of history with others and to help bridge the present with the past.
Above all, your love for others was shared, especially with Family. You were the invisible string that stretched out and brought them together. The string even continued through the countless baby blankets you made – from many neighbors, to a nurse who helped you once, you wanted everyone to know each baby was special and worthy of your time. You never hesitated to share how proud you were of me or your grandchildren. As you were a single mother most of my life, I can understand why you were so proud. Thank you for your countless sacrifices you made to help me and others become who we could become.
As a grandmother, you taught us so much about our children and saw their gifts in a way that parents cannot. Your encouragement to Corbin, our eldest, and his writing will be influential for the rest of his life. I spent the last hours of your life reading his latest 15 chapter book as I knew that you didn’t want to go without reading it. He will greatly miss discussing plot lines with you and his future stories. They will miss your devotion to finding just the right book for each grandchild, especially a science or comic book for Kellen to explore his engineering and comedic chops. Your willingness to create any type of craft with Talia, your only granddaughter, always made me laugh. Talia will miss your many trips to the bookstore. The countless pictures I found on your phone of your “grand dog” Rowdy, made me smile.
The hole in our hearts is deep, but we know you would have wanted us to celebrate who you are and cherish the memories we hold dear. We will forever remember you for the amazing writer, volunteer, historian, friend and grandmother that you are.
After her fall, Marmie never regained consciousness, but she took a turn on Wednesday after the Super Tuesday results – a coincidence, I think not. Because of this, we are asking any donations be given to the Austin chapter of the League of Women Voters. Where hopefully, they can help deliver the future my mom would have hoped for.
Please go to lwvaustin.org, under donation, then general fund, and state the contribution is in memory of Marmie Edwards. If you wish to mail a donation: LWV Austin Area, 3908 Avenue B, Austin, TX 78751.
Dante: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Even Abe Lincoln hedged a bit about slavery while debating Stephen Douglas during the Illinois Senate race in 1856. Lincoln lost that race. But his words stood up well enough to reach delegates to the Republican Convention who nominated him for President four years later.
Then Lincoln led the country through its darkest days refusing to give up—the quintessential Profile in Courage. But when JFK wrote that book (or maybe worked with a ghostwriter), he didn’t focus on Lincoln. Although he might have if he’d ever had a serious discussion about history with his grandmother; she was alive when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Instead, Kennedy chose a man who lived just prior to the Civil War– Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (1782-1858). He served as a U.S. Senator from 1821 to 1851, completing five terms. He became one of eight men who embodied outstanding courage that Kennedy selected in 1956 for the book. (One would hope if the book were being written today the author would include some of America’s courageous women.)
During the War of 1812, Benton served as an aide to America’s then hero, General Andrew Jackson. Just a year later, Benton defended his brother, Jessie, when General Jackson pulled a gun on him. Jessie fired back seriously wounding Jackson in the left arm, creating a rift between the Thomas Benton and the General (and helping strengthen Benton’s reputation as a brawler). Friends and foe alike knew Benton to be a “rough and tumble fighter off and on the Senate floor, not with pistols but with “stinging sarcasm, vituperative through learned oratory and bitterly heated debate,” according to Kennedy’s Profiles. (see below) With just one year at the University of North Carolina under his belt, Benton was said to carry the Congressional Library in his head, easily correcting other Senators when they forgot a name, date, or incorrectly quoted a passage from the Classics or Shakespeare.
The Senator belonged to the 1840s Democratic Party helping to orchestrate the nation’s westward expansion, now referred to as “Manifest Destiny.” Benton foresaw a nation that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. A man of boundless energy, Benton pushed through legislation for the Pony Express moving mail service westward and extending the telegraph lines to eventually tie the coasts together and promoted the development of highways (such as they were) that drew a path across the nation for the heroic settlers to follow. He shared Lincoln’s dream of a transcontinental railway to carry merchandise and people betwixt and between the nation’s settlements.
Benton wrongly believed that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought his state into the Union, also took the issue of slavery out of politics. He reigned supreme as the Kingpin of Missouri politics from 1821 to 1844. Then he broke with his Party by engineering the defeat of the annexation of Texas. He believed John Calhoun from North Carolina (vice president from 1824-1832) had cooked up a political plan to loop the Texas territories in with the slave state to increase Congressional votes in favor of slavery. His courage came as Benton did not hesitate, even on the eve of an election, to denounce his party’s policy. He managed to be re-elected but at the same time a pro-slavery candidate won to fill an unexpired Senate term by three times his tally. Benton continued his struggle against bringing Oregon and California into the Union as slave states—an opposite stance of Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. Despite Senator Benton’s near defeat in 1844-45, he would not join the Whig party, saying the group “are no more able to comprehend me . . .than a rabbit, which breeds 12 times a year, could comprehend the gestation of an elephant, which carries for 2 years.”
In 1832, President Jackson and Benton faced a serious challenge from Henry Clay, who supported nullification. Under nullification the individual states could veto individual laws to meet the desires of individual states. But Jackson pointed out that the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy, during the War of 1812 with such a policy. “Nullification,” he wrote, “was incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” It became an issue claimed by the South to win freedom from Washington. Here again, Benton did not side with the South, but with the Union.
Home in Missouri became his respite, but the death of two sons early in life and the long physical and mental illness of his wife, made this relief short-lived. Benton’s son-in-law, John Fremont, explored the West and became the original governor of California. Benton’s daughter, Jessie Benton Freemont, a well-educated and well-spoken force of nature herself, would later seek support from Lincoln to get her husband out of a jam during the Civil War. (Like most things in politics, it was complicated, suffice to say. Lincoln had bumped Fremont up to General rank, based on his expeditions, despite his lack of military training, which created some problems due to Freemont’s failure to respect the chain of command.
Benton met his waterloo on February 19, 1847, when Calhoun read to the Senate his resolution insisting that Congress had no right to interfere with the development of slavery in the territories. Calhoun called for an immediate vote. Benton rose from his chair, accepting his fate.
Mr. Calhoun: I certainly supposed the Senator from Missouri, the representative of a slave state, would have supported these resolutions. . .
Mr. Benton: The Senator knows very well from my whole course in public life that I would never leave public business to take up firebrands to set the world on fire.
Mr. Calhoun: Then I shall know where to find the gentleman.
Mr. Benton: I shall be found in the right place . . . on the side of my country and the Union. (An answer Benton noted later he “will wish posterity to remember.”
When the Missouri Senator was warned not to deliver a eulogy in appreciation of John Quincy Adams, a foe of slavery, Benton marched up and delivered a tribute for the ages.
Signing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights 1787, Continental Congress, PhiladelphiaSigning of the Magna Carta, King John (far right) Knights (far left) 1215
Remember when we believed someone who pleaded the Fifth was guilty? Those who took the 5th did not want to “incriminate” themselves. So, we determined if the accused would not answer questions, they must have something to hide. Donald Trump, the same guy who in 2016 lacerated Hillary Clinton’s tech staff who installed her private email server, for taking the Fifth, proclaimed: “only the Mob takes the 5th.”
But in 1990, in his first divorce trial and again just last week, Trump took the Fifth himself. He says the allegations against him are a “witch hunt” or a “fishing expedition” as his excuse for not responding. (By the way, after the investigation, no one was ever charged regarding Clinton’s mail server.)
Trump sat with New York State’s Attorney General Letitia James a week ago. She has been investigating Trump’s state tax returns in a civil suit for tax evasion (lowering his income for purposes of income taxes) and inflating his wealth to obtain loans to cover his debts.
During his presidential campaign, Trump said that evading taxes “shows he’s smart.” But now, Trump’s long-time chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, 75, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of evading taxes on $1.7 million perks, including a free apartment in Manhattan, school tuition for his grandchildren, and lease payments on a luxury car. (He made a plea deal rather than face 15 years in prison and will spend five months at New York City’s Rikers Island. He will be answering questions.)
What’s the source of the Fifth Amendment?
It goes back to the heart of Anglo-Saxon law–The Magna Carta signed on June 15, 1215, by King John, the British barons, and landowners at Runnymede. The charter limited the king’s absolute authority and laid out the rights of English citizens and commoners. American law is based on this social contract written into the Magna Carta.
In America, the Continental Congress passed the Bill of Rights in 1789; this included the 5th Amendment to protect a person’s rights in these ways:
A person cannot be forced to give testimony against themselves (Self-Incrimination). The 5th Amendment is the basis for the Miranda Warning. (“Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law.”) The government must call other witnesses and find evidence to prove the crime.
You have the right to a fair trial that follows procedure through the judicial process
You are judged innocent until proven guilty. (Due process)You can’t be tried twice for the same crime (Double Jeopardy)
A Grand Jury looks at the evidence to determine whether to indict the accused for a criminal offense; if they decide to charge a person with a crime, they issue an indictment and hold a trial. The Grand Jury traces its roots directly to 1215, the Magna Carta, and Due Process.
The government cannot take your private property unless you are paid current market value in return. (Eminent Domain)
Another critical case about the Fifth Amendment (self-incrimination) involved five young black men convicted of killing a white woman in Central Park in New York City. After they were imprisoned for ten years, a court ruled they had been coerced into giving false testimony after lengthy interrogation and abuse. Under the Fifth Amendment, a confession obtained illegally is not admissible in court. They were freed when the truth came out. Then the actual killer was arrested and convicted.
Due process says that a person is innocent until proven guilty and deserves an opportunity to present their case in court. The concept of due process tells me to reconsider my idea that those who plead the 5th are “guilty,” but it is challenging at times.
Taking the 5th has different outcomes in criminal vs. civil courts. In federal cases, taking the Fifth does not imply guilt. But in civil cases, it can have consequences—providing an inference of guilt is allowed. The current case in New York State likely will be the beginning of a triangular legal sea saw between Trump, NY Attorney General James, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
What’s the Magna Carta’s role in Pleading the Fifth in American courts today? It’s bedrock. American law sits on the foundation of British law that traces to the 13th century when the nobility and the landed gentry demanded fairness in their courts and protection from the absolute power of the king.
Next week I’m looking at David Litt’s book Democracy in One Book or Less.
Rowing Together on Lady Bird Lake, Austin Photo by Author
There’s nothing like the sound of oars pulling through the water and the rush when drawing them back to thrust the boat forward. I live vicariously through my daughter now, who competed last weekend in the Henley Master’s Regatta. She stroked a quad crew to victory. So pardon my pride, but there is a broader issue here; stay with me.
When we “row” together, we have a much better chance of winning. When we row separately or out of sync, we lose.
The Henley is rowed an hour from London, so I could not fail to note what’s going on politically in England. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been paddling apart for some time, practically since he took the job in July 2019. He took over from Teresa May, who could not get Brexit through Parliament.
Johnson seemed to think that he could perpetually break with convention. Childish antics—like having a Christmas party for staff at 10 Downing when the rest of the country was locked down with COVID– rankled the Brits. But last week, he hit the wall when he again lied to his fellow citizens, denying knowledge about unsavory actions by a political associate. Furthermore, just a few weeks before, 40 percent of Parliament voted “no confidence.” This time he lost the leadership of the Conservative party and now will no longer be the Prime Minister.
In the end, he may have that in common with his orange-haired American conservative crony. Time will tell. Rather interesting, a new wrinkle or two has also come up for Donald Trump as well. Both men have rowed along their Atlantic shore, rebelling against traditional political norms—thumbing their noses at convention. Trump still has a following and is pushing hard to wedge the Republican party to continue to swing the conservatives to himself.
But the need to row together with a crew still works here. When you insert a wedge against a portion of your former party, are you not dividing what you should be combining to form a winning coalition? Maybe it only works when not everyone in the opposition votes. And when you separate the competitor by corrupting the Voting Rights Act (limiting voters) and dividing a state’s voting districts, making it impossible for diverse candidates to have a fighting chance—that does complicate matters.
What destroys all credibility is when the former president or governor commands/controls a Secretary of State–the person responsible for voting regulations, voting counting, and preparing the ballots for the Electoral College. That is one person who should respect their role in holding the vote as their state’s voters intended—irrespective of party.
The poll workers I have spent hours with during general and primary elections are dedicated to reporting an accurate ballot every time. I suspect that is true throughout the country. We row together because we believe in the process and are sworn to maintain the vote’s safety. It is nothing short of criminal for a Secretary of State to do the bidding of a political party, a governor, or a former president hell-bent on making up for the last election—he cannot admit he lost but appears sworn to win a second term. At least for now. Time will tell.
My 2023 July 4th wreath celebrating the eagle’s pride and the hope representing the brightest stars in the sky.
This wreath carries meaning for me this July 4th. Over the past few years, I saw too many American flags flying from the back of pick-up trucks circling U.S. beltways or hand-held by Proud Boys marching in Charlottesville or invading the U.S. Capitol. They swore allegiance to falsehoods and exclusionary beliefs I will never share.
They have warped the authentic meaning of the red, white, and blue. Yet, the principles of truth and justice have never wavered for me. I pledge my allegiance to the true America I love. I cannot associate myself with those who do not ask the critical questions democracy requires but prefer to follow along and exclude others from the opportunities and rights we enjoy.
In 2023, this wreath, approximating the proud feathers of the American eagle and the brightest stars in the sky, will represent my brand of patriotism. Today America is a country struggling mightily to return to its principles–while suffering body blows from those we never elected. A President, who lost the popular vote in 2016 and refused to concede his loss in 2020, now spreads political mayhem from coast to coast. His efforts further ignited falsehoods and culture wars that erupted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and are slicing this proud nation in two.
I don’t love my country less because I do not agree with the false representations of the U.S. flag in 2021. I can’t see our nation dragged backward two and a half centuries. The 21st century has no time for fabricated beliefs and false images of a glorified Disney-esque “Davey Crocket” time when men provided for their families by landing dinner with buckshot. American families cannot afford to move backward, leaving behind our leading role in technology, business/industry, and world affairs.
Do we want to return to an era where women tended the firepot to prepare whatever animal their spouse’s musket fell? Then women had four children because the child mortality rate was over 30 percent. Women didn’t fare much better. Without contraception, women wore out their bodies with repeated pregnancies, and a high percent died young while giving birth (life expectancy: 38 in 1787). Today women’s work outside the home and their earnings are as important as a men’s. The economy tanked during the Pandemic when schools were closed, and many women stayed home. We’re still beefing up the workforce.
If women had been present for the writing of the Constitution in 1787, the document would have taken a different course. Families and women’s needs, would have been recognized– not listing women as chattel belonging to men—unable to own land, start businesses, or sign legal documents without their husband’s permission.
Over the years, women have realized the only way to make gains legislatively would be by gaining the vote for themselves. Unfortunately, women did not get an opportunity to vote until 1920, one hundred and thirty years after the ink dried on the Constitution. Today women are in Congress: 24 serve in the U.S. Senate and 120 in the House of Representatives (27% of the 539 elected, an all-time high, but well below women’s 50.5 percent of the population.)
You have a responsibility, both men and women, to exercise your right to protect our future and our nation. This right comes with a commitment to get out to vote (or obtain and mail in a ballot if your state allows). Help protect your freedom by exercising that vote. In most states, you cannot register to vote on the same day as you vote. So, get registered NOW. Contact your county’s Board of Elections and be prepared to vote come November.
Two and a half years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a Union General freed 250,000 slaves in Texas, saying they would work for hire from then forward. Juneteenth, 1865
Determination does pay off. . . at last! Opal Lee, a grandmother from Texas, at 89 walked two and a half miles a day from Fort Worth to Washington. DC, surrounded by a caravan of cars. Opal walked to raise support for designation of Juneteenth (19th) as a federal holiday. Last year at 94, she received a signing pen from President Biden after he inked legislation creating such a celebration. Vice President Kamala Harris took her hand while praising her determination.
Opal, who had been a teacher before becoming “the grandmother of the movement”, had a personal reason for her crusade. When she was 12, she lived in Marshal, Texas, in a home surrounded by several white homeowners in Sycamore Park. A band of white men came one night and burned her home to the ground. Freedom means more to her than recognizing the end to slave labor, but safety in one’s home and access to quality education.
No doubt President Lincoln would be pleased with Opal’s determination and Congressional efforts in 2021 to celebrate Juneteenth, but he might hope this was not a consolation prize offered instead of insuring the opportunity for all Americans to exercise their constitutional Voting Rights.
Above you see the document that Lincoln wrote and signed after Congress passed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, ending slavery in the Confederacy. Governors in Southern states, with economies mainly dependent on cotton, were very slow to pass this information on to the enslaved population, some waited until the end of the Civil War to notify blacks in the South that they were free.
Texans, being the furthest western state in the Confederacy and with an abundance of cotton, were least likely to share this information. And they didn’t. . . until Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, backed up by 1,800 U.S./Union troops, issued General Order Number 3, from his headquarters in Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865—157 years ago.
Maj. Gen. Granger’s order began: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Simple. Then: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
This order announced the freedom of 250,000 slaves in Texas. In the two and a half years between the Emancipation and Granger’s arrival nearly 200,000 black men had enlisted, mainly in the Union army. Historians estimate that about 500,000 slaves—out of a total of 3.9 million—liberated themselves by escaping to Union lines between 1863 and the end of the war—the rest remained in slavery, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
More recently, in 1979, Texas State Rep. Al Edwards, “known as the father of the Juneteenth holiday” succeeded in working with the Texas Legislature to make the date an official holiday statewide as a “source of strength” to young people. “Every year we must remind successive generations that this event triggered a series of events that one by one defines the challenges and responsibilities of successive generations,” Rep. Edwards said. These efforts plus others worldwide can be seen at https://juneteenth.com .
Books
The Great Migration helped spread Juneteenth across the country, as Gates says, one person, one family, one carload or train ticket at a time. Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, tells the story brilliantly, spreading the knowledge Juneteenth to places distant to the South, like Los Angeles, Oakland, and Minnesota. Ralph Emerson’s novel, Juneteenth, said to reflect the “mystical glow of history and lore, memory and myth.”
Unveiling
Juneteenth 2021 will also mark the unveiling of Frederick Douglass’s statue in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, the result of long-term efforts of D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
In honor of the festivities, perhaps these dining festivities will prepare us for the Fourth of July, red, white and blue creations, while Juneteenth recipes focus on the color red. I’m told that’s for resilience and freedom. So I have one offering and links to several others:
Brad West Unsplash–Full array of seafood, representing New England’s coast, 17th century
(Plus Mac & Cheese recipe with Parmesan from )
Plenty of stories about the original Thanksgiving float around at this time of year. I’m going with the Smithsonian’s story: Massasoit, the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Tribe received an invitation to thanksgiving from William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony in fall 1621.
The Pilgrims, who Bradford led, had fled England to avoid religious prosecution. To them “Thanksgiving” meant fasting and praying, so the original intent of the gathering might not have been a gourmet feast. But Native Americans had held Autumn Festivals for many years.
When Governor Bradford invited Massasoit, 90 warriors from combined tribes were meeting to form an alliance for mutual defense. Ousamequin, the warrior’s leader, had heard gunfire from the colony. (Colonists, not unlike future Americans, were celebrating by firing shotguns into the air.) The Tribe believed it meant a war had begun. But native leadership remained level-headed, thanks to the skill of translator Tisquantum. (Bradford called him “Squanto,” based on his community: Squantum.) After negotiating with Bradford, the Wampanoag agreed to attend thanksgiving.
Backstory
Tisquantum had been kidnapped from the Patuxents on the coast of Cape Cod by explorer Thomas Hunt in 1614. Hunt took him to Spain, whereTisquantum was sold into slavery, but educated by monks. He escaped to England and learned English working for shipbuilder John Slanic, then returned to Plymouth. Upon his return, Tisquantum found his family and the entire tribe had died from Yellow Fever they caught from the European explorers. Alone, he joined the Pokankets.
After arriving on the Mayflower, forty-five of the 102 Pilgrims died of disease or starvation between 1619 and 1620. Maybe because of his own loss, Tisquantum agreed to share with the Pilgrims what he had learned about coastal farming, hunting, and fishing. He explained how to use a fish to fertilize the corn seed to improve the Pilgrim’s crops. His advice helped the Pilgrims to survive and become self-sufficient. This showed the true sense of community that could have marked a turnaround in Pilgrim-Native American relations. But as the colony grew, so too the need for additional land. Unfortunately, the value and scarcity of the rich land on the tip of Massachusetts created a desire to own it, which motivated the colony and later the growing nation’s efforts to push the Native Americans off the land.
1621: What Did the Warriors Bring?
Wampanoag warriors were fishermen and hunters, skills that ensured their tribe would have food. They came to the celebration loaded down with the fruits of their toil and the bounty of New England’s seacoast:
Venison, lobster, fish, wild fowl, clams, oysters, eel, corn, squash, maple syrup, and wild rice—a substantial feast. Maybe the warriors thought it was an “autumn festival!” It could easily take a three-day festival to consume such a feast. Over the centuries, the Native American tribes moved into the heartland,chasing buffalo and/or pushed west and south by federal policies. The tribes brought the foods they originally discovered on the coast that contribute to our Thanksgiving tables today: beans, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkin, Chile peppers, and cacao, the basis of chocolate, another gift to us from Native Americans, is seen as an “essential” food by those craving sweets.
Did Anyone Say Pie?
Today most Americans take Thanksgiving pie for granted. If pie existed at all in 1621, it would come from a squash molded into a bowl and cooked over a fire. Move forward to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first official Thanksgiving before the end of the Civil War. For his celebration, Lincoln made sure The Excelsior Pie and Cake Bakery had set aside one of his favorite Pecan Pies with Molasses.* Now we have a full spectrum of fruit pies year round, through the magic of freezers and pre-made pie shells. I’m depending on pumpkin blended with the modern miracles of Cool Whip and cream cheese for a Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie! (See Plum Pudding Recipe below.
(President’s Cookbook, Poppy Camon and Patricia Brooks, 1968.)
Obviously, not Mac & Cheese in 1621, right? Well, the British came up with pasta made from breadcrumbs in the 1390s! They added a sauce made of stock and what they called chese ruayn, a hard cheese similar to brie. The result: a cross between macaroni and cheese and lasagne. But it wasn’t your mother’s or my daughter’s Mac & Cheese!
My update to Mac and Cheese couisine came on Wednesday’s National Public Radio’s “1A” discusson of 2021 Thanksgiving offerings. Stephen Satterfield, host of “High on the Hog” podcast, explained that the updated British recipe for Mac & Cheese came back across the Pond in 1789. Thomas Jefferson’s slave James Hemings (half-brother of Sally) trained to be a chef in Paris. He rose to head chef at the Hotel de Langeac before heading back to New York City when Jefferson became Secretary of State.
Englishwoman Elizabeth Raffald’s recipe “To Dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese,” brings together bechamel sauce, cheddar cheese,and pasta (see below) Published in 1769, it could be similar to what Hemings served to Jefferson’s guests.
I have my own favorite Mac & Three Cheese recipe my daughter fixes at Thanksgiving. Breadcrums on top bake up to an crunchy, brown crust. The treat lies below among the moist macaroni and the three flavors of cheese. Some things do get better with time!
Modern Thanksgiving
Anything goes in 2021 after a year and a half Pandemic that separated families and friends, isolating Americans. Now we have an opportunity to cook whatever your heart desires for the people you love, related or not. Whether it’s turkey or tofurky, to stuff or not to stuff, pumpkin pie or candy cames, the script is your to write this year. Take a moment to read about America’s Native Americans. You can start with the link below:
Note: A six-foot tall stone marker and aging bronze plaque at Plymouth, Massachusetts, commemorates themeeting of the Wampanoag’s Massasoit and Plymouth Colony Governor Bradford. Fortunately, Tisquantum of the Patuxent tribes could translate.
The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769
“To Dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese”
Elizabeth Raffauld
Boil four ounces of macaroni till it be quite tender and lay it on a sieve to drain. Then put it in a tossing pan with about a gill (a quarter of a pint) of good cream, a lump of butter rolled in flour, boit it five minutes. Pour it on a plate, lay all over it parmesan cheese toasted. Send it to the table on a warm plate, for it soon gets cold.
Plum Pudding Native American Traditional Recipe
Wild plums, sugar, cornstarch
Wash plums, put in a pot. Cover with water. Bring to a boil and cook until the plums split and fruit comes away from the seeds. Cool and strain juice and put juice in pot and boil. Make a paste with cornstarch and hot water. Used about e tablespoons cornstarch to ¼ cup hot water. Stir until lumps disappear. Slowly add paste to boiling juice to thicken pudding. Add cornstarch if needed. Remove from heat and add sugar to taste.
Coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII 1533 HistoryExtra,com
Does Anne Haunt Henry VIII’s Dreams?
Two figures from the deep, dark past adorn my lawn this season of spook. I thought a wee bit of ancient English history might interest my Texan neighbors or at least their curious children who might continue, given a taste of it. I have started with the two most referenced—the ones on my lawn—Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife. He had four more wives. (As king, Henry took advantage of his regal power.)
Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas Earl of Wiltshire, served as ambassador to the Netherlands and France and encouraged his daughter to be educated there. Her date of birth is murky because records from the 16th century are spotty, but a birth in 1501 fits with her education in France and her courtship. While there, Anne served as a maid of honor to Queen Claude of France, learning how to appear in court.
Anne probably would not serve in court much before 14. She returned to England in 1522 to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, but the marriage did not take place. Instead, joined the court of English Queen Catherine of Aragon as maid of honor. King Henry would have been eighteen when crowned and married to Catherine. The king desired and achieved a court of unsurpassed glamour with he the handsome, athletic, and cultured lead. Henry liked to dress like a peacock, enjoyed wearing costumes, including a Turkish outfit of white damask, embroidered with roses made of rubies and diamonds.
Henry Declares War Against France, Builds Navy
But Henry was distracted. In 1522, he declared war against France. This required an increase in taxes, which was not popular. He built the British Navy from a few ships to fifty, earning the title “Father of the British Navy” and making England a serious contender on the water.
Henry got on the wrong side of Hapsburg Charles V of Australia, who carried influence with the pope, from whom the king would eventually want a divorce from Charles’ aunt. Not likely.
By 1526 Catherine of Aragon had failed to produce a healthy heir (her male child died young). Henry took this as an afront to his manhood, damaging his growing ego. While he continued his marriage with Catherine for 24 years, he began to look elsewhere.
Then the king noticed Anne Bolen’s beauty as she danced and sang in court. Henry moved the courtship forward sending Anne love notes and a golden pendant that have survived through the ages. He thought these would sway her decision.
Initially Anne would not be convinced of Henry’s sentiment because she did not want to be a mistress, knowing that women who did not produce legitimate children would not have a long future in court. She brought back from France a knowledge of court and her formal schooling could have been a few paces ahead of Henry. (Although his knowledge of three languages speaks well of him.) The couple could have corresponded in French and few the wiser. (We know Anne wrote in French from a letter to her father.)
We see a different picture of this pair from more recent evidence. Five centuries later, given the picture of the rotund Henry, we find it difficult that Anne would come under the king’s spell. Bur we have learned as a young man Henry bore no resemblance to the portrait by Holbein that shows a guy who resembles a walk-on lineman for the Chicago Bears with the face of an emotionless simpleton. Their courtship lasted seven years. At the front of it, he was a 6’2” man when most everyone else was 5’7.” He kept in shape jousting and performed what we would consider extreme cross-fit sports to impress his subjects and his conquests with his prowess. Henry more likely came in around 175 pounds in his courting years.
. Venetian diplomat Sebastian Giustiani left behind his impression of the young king that draws an attractive suitor, which he shared with the senate:
He is very accomplished and a good musician, composes well: is a capital equestrian, and a fine jouster; speaks good French, Latin, and Spanish, is deeply religious. . . He is extremely fond of hunting…He is also fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.
Perhaps the diplomat wanted to score points with the king, but he gives a picture of someone NOT the size of a refrigerator (like the portraits of Henry VIII that come down to us.)
Pope Denies Annulment; Henry Names Self Head of Church of England
Desperate to end his marriage to Catherine with an annulment, Henry appealed to the Pope in 1534. Pope Clement VII excommunicated Henry from the church for dissolving convents and monasteries. Henry broke from the Catholic Church and went to the English Parliament to endorse his claim to be the SUPREME Head of the Church of England, launching the English Reformation and separating from the Roman Catholic pope. This gave the king authority to annul his marriage himself.
The year 1534 marks the beginning of Thomas Cromwell’s role as the king’s chief minister, Great Lord Chamberlain. A lawyer and statesman, he became a chief proponent of the English (Religious) Reformation and helped engineer the annulment of the king’s first marriage. This helped Cromwell become an ally of Anne Boleyn, but this soured by 1536.
Henry took Anne to France to get a blessing for their marriage from the French Archbishop, which they received and celebrated with a secret marriage in November 1532. That same year Henry conferred on Anne the title Marquess of Pembroke, a step towards their upcoming official marriage on January 25, 1533. By which point Anne has already conceived a child, the future Queen Elizabeth I, born on September 7. This pregnancy was followed by several miscarriages.
Anne Fails to Bear a Son; Pays Ultimate Price in 1536
Henry became even less forgiving after he fell off his horse in a jousting contest in 1536, the third year of their marriage, and seriously injured his ankle and the front of his brain. He was unconscious for several hours and the physical damage to the control center likely harmed his emotional responses. Those who have studied his reign believe that he became a more brutal ruler after the accident, though he may always have had a mean streak to begin with.
This might have influenced his decision, to file treason charges against Anne considered false and self-serving. He wanted to remove her as his wife, so he could marry Jane Seymour. Anne’s execution took place in the Tower of London on May 19, 1536. This is where the GHOSTLY part comes. Henry brought in a professional executioner from France, known for a sharp blade, to complete her beheading. She left this earth at 35, leaving behind a daughter, Elizabeth I, who ruled for five years.
Are we to believe that Anne Boleyn did not haunt Henry VIII’s dreams?
Henry will marry four more times before his death in 1547, at which point his waist measured 54 inches. They buried him next to Jane Seymour, the only wife to present him with an heir—the only one he officially mourned.
Ian Crofton, The Kings & Queens of England. (New York: Metro Books, 2006) 128-135. Quote from Venetian and other information about the 16th century king come this source.
Manhattan’s myriad of high rises reflects the talent, creativity, passion, and perseverance that created them over a century.
America is mesmerized by talent or what passes for it. Nearly two decades of televised contests have drawn huge audiences: snarky Simon Cowell’s America’s Got Talent (despite the fact that he is a Brit), music’s chameleon + EGOT John Legend (1) provides counsel on The Voice, granddaddy show American Idol still selecting soloists, and aging Dancing with the Stars, where contestants have put on their dancing shoes and coaxed themselves into spandex for years.
But are we sending the wrong message? Does talent alone win the race?
No question American Idol Grand Dame Kelly Clarkson towers over country music, winning three Grammy’s (12 nominations), and a slew of Video Music Awards before expanding into television to be a judge on The Voice, and earning Daytime Emmy’s in 2020 and 2021 for her talk show. But would we even know her name today if she did not squeeze every opportunity out of her American Idol crowning and diligently work to assure her worthiness?
Most cannot boast a true “talent” that towers over others in our field, so does that mean we will never achieve “success?” Grammy Award-winning musician and Oscar-nominated actor Will Smith has thought a lot about talent, effort, skill, and achievement. “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented,” he said. “Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.” Since May the 51-year-old has worked the gym to turn his Pandemic-weakened body into a muscular physique, better than before 2000.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth studied the “talent vs. grit” question after teaching math to elementary students on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She thought, like many of us, that talent trumped about everything until she had an average student who kept pounding away at the problems until the light went on.
Duckworth’s Chinese father was fixated on creating “genius” children. She assured him she was not one, even when she received a McArthur (“genius grant”) Fellowship in 2014. What she wanted to tell him as a kid: “I’m going to grow up to love my work…I won’t just have a job. I will have a calling. I will challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I will get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”
In 2016 after over a decade of research, plus writing time, she poured her thoughts into Grit, (2) a book documenting her work showing how people extend their passion beyond talent with perseverance. Unlike struggling to identify talent, her research shows we lesser mortals can develop “grit.” Duckworth conducted research at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to test out her theory. Each year 14,000 juniors apply, just 1,200 are enrolled. Most of these men and women were varsity athletes, even team captains in high school. Yet one in five would drop out of West Point before graduation. A high percentage leave in the first summer, during “Beast” the “most physically and emotionally demanding part of your four years at West Point…designed to help you make the transition from new cadet to Soldier.”
These were cadets who scored well on the Whole Candidate Score judging preparation for the rigors of West Point. This included a weighted average of SAT or ACT exam scores, high school rank adjusted for the number of students in the graduating class, an expert appraisal of leadership potential, and physical fitness performance.
Military psychologist Mike Matthews, who worked with Duckworth, explained his personal reaction to Air Force training: “I was tired, lonely, frustrated, and ready to quit—as were all of my classmates.” What kept him and the remaining classmates from moving forward? A “never give up” attitude. Now Duckworth wanted to know if this applied to elite athletes.
Every four years elite competitive swimmers—multiple gold medal winners that included superstars Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz—bring their “talent” to our screens. Sociologist Dan Chambliss traveled with swimmers and their coaches for six years, from local meets to the elite teams composed of future Olympians. “It is as if talent were some invisible substance behind the surface reality of performance, which finally distinguishes the best among our athletes,” Chambliss said. “These great athletes seem blessed ‘with a special gift, almost a ‘thing’ inside of them denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological. Some have it and some don’t. Some are natural athletes, and some aren’t.”
But Chambliss found biographies of great swimmers reveal many contributing factors: parents who were interested in the sport, earned enough money to pay for coaching, travel to swim meets and access to a pool, plus thousands of hours of practice in the pool developing muscle memory, all leading up to the “flawless” performance we see on our screens during the Olympics. All those hours polishing the apple until it turns gold.
“With everything perfect, we do not ask how it came to be,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes. “We rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.”
Duckworth points to Nietzsche, who preferred that we not talk about giftedness or inborn talents. “One can name great men (note: and women) . . .They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
There is no better example of the “little, secondary things” (rivets) that build into a “dazzling whole” than the persevering craftsmen of the Iroquois tribe, Mohawks, trained ironworkers. They built the Victoria Bridge near Quebec in 1886. Their work required not just personal strength, but mental fortitude, willingly facing death from great heights every single day. They learned climbing skills and absorbed from their elders the courage to venture out onto steel girders suspended in space far above the city.
Mohawks are not superhuman. Thirty-three Kahnawake (Mohawk) died in the collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907. That did not end the tribe’s commitment to urban structures. The next generation drove 12 ½ hours to Manhattan (and home on weekends) to walk on 12-inch girders fifty or more stories above the city’s sidewalks while drilling rivets into the 1,046- foot Chrysler Building (1930) and the 1,250-foot Empire State (1931) and the Rockefeller Center (1932-1939). In cold weather, ice needed to be scrapped off the beams before work began. No safety lines existed in those days. (3)
The Mohawks continued to work above the city to constructing five more skyscrapers (the UN, the Woolworth Building, the Seagram Building before applying their skills. Then the veteran ironworkers applied their skills to erect the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers from 1968 to 1973. Over the years Mohawk families moved to an enclave in Brooklyn, so the ironworkers were in New York to help rescue people from the burning towers in 2001 and provided their expertise to disassemble the metal protrusions from the building’s remains following 911.
Being an ironworker throughout the 20th century and into the 21st requires a fearlessness to push higher into the sky, ensuring the buildings continued to rise. No better definition of “grit” exists than the work ethic of those who built America’s towers of business and entertainment, some sacrificing their lives, to provide these lasting monuments to their perseverance.
NOTES:
Legend is one of 16 performers who have been awarded the ultimate creative quad–an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony for their performances on TV, in music, film, and the stage.
Angela Duckworth, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016) Quotes can be found in her work.
(*Yes. we can. I took a short break from Past Becomes Present but didn’t do the promo because I didn’t know how long it might be. Optimistic by nature, I believed it wouldn’t be long. And happily, my positive attitude bore fruit!)
Optimists get a bad rep. People say we’re Pollyanna’s, breezing along believing that everything is wonderful and will continue to be. True, we like to walk on the sunny side, but there’s the other half of the equation—we work to “make it so.”
The recent Delta strain threatens to scale back Americans’ escape from Covid’s 15-month hibernation. Some cities, like Austin, hang a return to level 4 restrictions over our heads (and dim dreams of mini vacations, while increasing infections nationwide).
How do our brains handle the dramatic pendulum swings we encounter now? Well, being optimistic doesn’t come naturally. Martin Seligman, a psychology professor, and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says we are “hardwired” to stick to a negative bias. He indicates this goes all the way back to the caveman, preparing us to address the worst-case scenario. It’s why we know not to touch a hot flame after we’ve been burned. Humans are more likely to respond to negative stimuli.
But we are not condemned to be grumps! Humans can learn to protect themselves and bounce back from misfortune—like divorce, unemployment, or health crises. But how? We’re not good at predicting how each of us will react to misfortune, according to Tali Sharot in From the Optimism Bias, A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.
Imagination Helps!
How is it possible for humans to stimulate and predict the outcome of possible future scenarios? Using imagination can help us create and examine all the possibilities we might face, pulling away the drama that could prevent our success.
Like many others, prior to experiencing hip surgery I feared for a long, painful recovery unable to get around and completing the most basic tasks with great difficulty.
Sharot’s research points to the human mind is flexible enough to find ways to restore balance when facing a challenge. Our brains can change our perceptions of the physical world.
Matt Hampson, a 20-year-old rugby player, experienced a life-changing event that proves the point. In 2005 during practice, he dislocated his neck, paralyzing him. Suddenly this vibrant young man needed round-the-clock care and steers his wheelchair with his chin and breathes through a ventilator.
Rather than dreading his life, Matt has found a purpose. He created the Get Busy Living Centre, a rehab center for those with life-changing injuries in Leicestershire, England. The brain can find the silver lining in seemingly unimaginable circumstances, if only we can use our imagination. The brain is more flexible and adaptable than we imagine.
We don’t need to have a crisis in our lives to take a moment to check in about our own purposes—or to create something that enriches us or others. Putting a couple words together, even just for us, can start the ball rolling. What’s important to you? How could you make a difference in your life and maybe others?
Notice the balloons in the photo above. They are not your garden variety birthday balloons. No, these are Hot Air Balloons. Why this choice? Anyone can manage a single helium balloon but rising a hot air balloon high into the sky and bringing it back to the ground safely requires effort and skill—an optimistic approach paired with knowledge!
Optimism is my vision. Positive brings on more of the same, provided it’s joined by works! So now let’s just try it out and see if it breeds!
Jay Hamilton with his mother, Nancy Bradsher Hamilton, and his wife, Bonnie, when they received their first Emmy Award.
(Note: For Women’s History Month I’m sharing the story of a pioneering woman journalist, written by her son, Jay Hamilton, a talented writer-producer.) His mother also pioneered multi-tasking, a trait we talked about last week.)
Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my mother, Nancy Bradsher Hamilton, who along with my father were my inspirations. My current company, Hamilton Media DC, is an offshoot of Hamilton Productions, which my mother co-founded in the early 1980s. She was the driving force.
Looking back on her life, it’s hard to believe that a young woman raised by a single mother in the small town of Salisbury, NC, “took her shot” and landed in the “bright lights, big city” TV studios of Manhattan. There, she hosted numerous programs. Her pioneering journalism career included raising me and my sister. Looking back, I now realize that she epitomized the modern multitasker well before that term entered today’s lexicon.
This Women’s History Month you hear numerous women’s stories about their key influencers, also female. But I dare say, for each successful man, there is also a woman who inspired his success, too. Afterall, most men are unabashedly “mama’s boys.” I’m a member of that club.
Nancy Bradshur Hamilton with columnist Jack Kilpatrick
Nancy Bradsher wrote a dairy entry in 1953, when she joined the staff of the women’s department of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I was a Depression baby born bald September 7, 1929 at Mercy Hospital, Charlotte, North Carolina.” She went on to grow hair and become the Women’s Club Editor. Back then the only jobs for women in journalism were in the “women’s departments.” Journalism was a male dominated world.
Throughout the years, mom worked as a reporter on the Salisbury Post, The New York Journal American and as a correspondent for The New York Times before co-founding Hamilton Productions and stepping in front of the camera. Mom had the “looks” and the smarts for TV and thrived in New York City with her sweet-sounding southern drawl.
Most of this was happening during my formative years. I knew her simply as “mom” and never gave it a thought about how she successfully balanced family and career. One of her favorite playwrights was Shakespeare. This Women’s History Month, I am reminded of one of my mom’s favorite lines from “As You Like It.”
All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.
So, too, one woman in her time can play many parts. My mom proved it as a pioneering journalist…wife…mother…grandmother. For her to play these many parts vindicates Shakespeare. I am enormously proud of all she accomplished and her contribution to women’s equality.
Jay Hamilton is founder of Hamilton Media DC and Chief Media Strategist of Story Squad.
Note: I met Jay when he wrote and produced a Telly Award-winning safety training video backed by the Department of Transportation with Operation Lifesaver after students were killed at Fox River Grove, IL in a school bus-train crash. Jay led us to Dalton, Georgia, during a very warm summer to work with the city’s school bus drivers. By using actual drivers and students, the video captured the attention of school bus drivers from coast-to-coast, which saved lives.
“Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.” Jazz Great Miles Davis
Endless time seems to move so slowly as to drip like a leaky faucet, making every moment pregnant with ideas, some alerting our fears to endless possibilities.
Time has taken on new meaning, while simultaneously dropping away into nothingness as we struggle to answer a multitude of WHEN questions.
It has been barely two months since my family flew off to work in London and a month since their dog, my part-time companion, joined them. Sometimes it seems like it’s been six months. Naturally due to the pandemic’s quarantine, I wonder when I might see them again. Even now, a visit this summer is rapidly slipping off the plate, but I am coping by writing, exercising, and appreciating every sunny day.
WHEN? The Universal Question
We’ve all joined in questioning WHEN? When did life as we knew it screech to a halt? When won’t I depend on Zoom to see colleagues or Facetime for friends and relatives? When can I walk in the woods, go to the library, or gym, or get my hair cut, or leave home to hear any concert in person? When will I enjoy the aroma of cooking not my own? Far more important to more than 36 million Americans: When, if ever, will my job come back, so I can resume living without losing a place to live and be able to feed my family?
No matter where we sit politically, or whether we stand in the unemployment line, the food bank line, or the grocery line, stress rides along daily with each of us.
There are few universal answers to WHEN. Many are being made state by state or county by county. As of mid-May, 90,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and 1.5 million tested positive, while 260,000 have recovered. This nationwide pandemic has only engendered more stress and fear and seems in some parts of the country to have widened the divide. But in some communities, people from a wide spectrum of political and religious beliefs are working together to feed the hungry unemployed and their children—taking action, which often lessens the feeling of helplessness and anxiety.
Use your stress to propel you forward. By Forgetmenot. Jancene Jennings
Recently I saw an article that sheds some light on this question:
“In Stressful Times, Make Stress Work for You,” by Karl Leibowitz and Alia Crum, which brings down to lay terms a study of the mindset of Navy SEALS, college students, and business leaders experiencing stress. They consider how to harness stress. Here are their three steps:
Acknowledge Your Stress
Seems by taking on stress we move the place it resides in our mind. Normally before we address our fear, it sits in the amygdala, the brain center for emotion. When we begin the acknowledge our stress, our thoughts move to the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This is where executive control and planning take place–where we can be more thoughtful and deliberate in our actions– where we can do something about it.
Have you ever tried to stop thinking less about something and instead your mind returns to it even more often? That is the “ironic mental processing” at work in the brain as we stress over something. According to the scientists, the brain tries to help us out by constantly checking in to see if we continue to think of it. Suppression does not work.
Now is where you need to determine what is at the heart of your personal stress or anxiety.
Are you most concerned about getting sick yourself? Or your mate or partner? Is it your children, their education or health? Are you worried about a loved one who is at high risk? Is your anxiety caused by balancing working from home and family responsibilities?
Once you determine this, then you can examine your reactions to these stressors. What emotions come with this? Frustration, sadness, anger? What do you notice in your body? Tight neck and shoulders or do you have difficulty sleeping?
Own Your Stress
Why welcome stress into your life during a pandemic? We only stress, really stress, about the things (and people) we really care about. By connecting to the stress, we identify what is at the core of our anxiety. By denying or trying to avoid our stress, we can do the opposite and avoid what is really important to us.
Difficult task? Try completing this sentence, “I am stressed about (list answer you gave in step one) because I deeply care about. . .”
Use Your Stress—Make it Work for You!
If you connect to the core values behind your stress, then you set yourself up for the most essential ingredient: using or leveraging stress to achieve your goals and connect more deeply with the things that matter most to you.
Are your typical responses aligned with the values behind your stress? Think how you could adapt your response to this stress to facilitate your goals and your responses. There is a lot happening that we cannot control, but there are also unprecedented opportunities amid the fear. It is a matter of connecting with people and materials at hand. Action will help you overcome your anxiety and begin to tackle fear of the unknown. Addressing the here and now. The trick is to channel your coronavirus stress as energy to make the most of this time. Difficult though it seems, if we fail to embrace our stress and utilize it, it will only grow. Take baby steps forward to tackle your anxiety.
WHY?
On a personal note, much earlier in my life, I needed to learn coping skills after a difficult period. I developed a calm approach to crisis that helped me professionally and has stood by me for three decades. Sticking to our universal values, working to overcome fear and anxiety, we can develop stable solutions to serve us and the next generation.
Notes:
Daniel Pink, When, the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018)
Karl Leibowitz and Alia Crum, Stanford University, “In Stressful Times, Make Stress Work for You,” New York Times, April 1, 2020
Alia J. Crum and Peter Salovey, “Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013, Vol. 104, No. 4, 716-733
“In this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” The words etched above Lincoln’s head explain why this place is an American shrine, not to be sullied.
A classic tenant of crisis management for savvy leaders. Even if your personal chipmunks are running a marathon in your stomach, when you have a team—whether its four classmates, a room full of colleagues, or all 328 million Americans—a time comes when it hits the fan, you set up your essential goal, put on your game face, hunker down, and pass out the assignments to the most qualified, most tested in the room. That makes it much easier to appear sweat less!
Establishing the Critical Goal
Leading a country and overseeing a military at war requires an intensely capable person. Lincoln wasn’t that person at the beginning of the Civil War, but he made it his business to catch up. Some say it took him until he hired U.S. Grant in March 1864, but Lincoln established his goal at the get-go. He did not waiver in his belief that preserving the Union was his prime responsibility. Everything else came second, was collateral damage, or would be a tool to accomplish this goal.
Lincoln preferred to focus on the essential foe and not push a blanket plan to prohibit slavery as he prepared the Emancipation Proclamation. He battled flames in front of him on the battlefield and saw significant matters smoldering behind him, threatening to ignite the abolitionists and the opposition Copperheads at his rear. This messy political stew revealed the alchemy he brewed while working to weave the nation together and draw his critics apart. Developing the persuasive mixture eluded him as his supporters began to lose faith that Lincoln could manage the broth before the wildfire consumed him.
Jousting with Journalists
Being a writer himself who appreciated a turn of phrase, Lincoln enjoyed mixing it up with journalists. Due to his seemingly “rustic” communications skills and quick mind hidden beneath a slow delivery, he could be waiting for reporters’ questions twenty steps ahead of them and have a fitting quip ready. Today wrangling with the media is a required sport for office holders, particularly if they seek or have achieved higher office. Disarming humor, not used as a spear but as a reminder of shared humanity, seems to have nearly disappeared with an earlier generation (think Ronald Reagan, who often appeared with a smile to friend or foe alike, or Barack Obama, who could flash a smile when he wasn’t preoccupied with a financial implosion).
Lincoln saw journalists as another branch of politics. (At the time 3,000, or three-fourths of the newspapers published in America, were supported by a political party). He worked to establish a mutual understanding with the big three of the day: James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, Democratic, pro-slavery, against most of Lincoln’s stands; Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, an abolitionist who had a love-hate relationship with the President, but got special treatment on several stories; and Henry Raymond of the New York Times, a Republican and formerly Greeley’s chief lieutenant, later founder of the New York Times in 1851.
Greeley, like Bennett. loved his role in journalism, but the two loathed each other, primarily for political reasons; A final Greeley-Raymond final split came when Raymond beat him to become New York’s Lieutenant Governor in 1854. Setting up the perfect storm between the three major newspaper editor’s Lincoln needed to cajole. In 1864 he helped engineer Lincoln’s 1864 re-nomination.
Disagreeing Without Being Disagreeable or Worse
Bennett came from the pro-Democratic Party, pro-slavery and against pretty much everything Lincoln valued, but Lincoln wooed him rather than pushing him away, most of the time. Lincoln walked a tightrope between Bennett and Greeley when he fed stories and news tips to Greeley, but at times the Tribune bit the hand that fed it, angering Lincoln.
In August 1862, Horace Greeley published “The Prayer of the Twenty Million,” a plea of the “Loyal Millions” requiring a “frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land.” Greeley wanted Lincoln to enforce the emancipating provisions of the Second Confiscation Act (July 17, 1862) removing slaves from the Confederate states. Greeley believed his readers had carried Lincoln to victory and “now feel that the triumph of the Union is dispensable not only to the existence of our country to the well-being of mankind.” They expected Lincoln to deliver on their request.
Lincoln responded on August 22, 1862 in the Daily National Intelligencer, a newspaper long a part of the Washington scene, founded by George Washington. Lincoln said he did not argue with what Greeley said, but reaffirmed his own chief goal to “save the Union and not either to save or to destroy slavery.” At the very bottom of the letter, Lincoln affirmed: “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere be free.”
Concerning the letter, historian David Herbert Donald pointed out Lincoln sought to assure the large majority of Northern people that he did not want to see the war transformed into a crusade for abolition, while offering himself time to contemplate further moves against slavery.
No doubt that Lincoln suffered at the hands of the press, but he also knew how to give as well as he got and used humor as honey to make the message go down a little easier. Yet he chastised a visitor to his office who pestered him for “one of his stories.” Lincoln noted his stories were not a “carnival act but were a useful way of directing discussion.” (Elihu B Washburne Chapter3 note 15)
Lincoln exercised patience, waiting for a victory, or close to it, to bolster his proclamation. He only freed the slaves in the states that were in Rebellion—the Confederacy, holding the freedom of slaves throughout the country for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Who Was the Greater Martyr?
The question came up recently as to whether Lincoln or the current President were the greater “martyr” (poor word choice, given that one made the ultimate sacrifice) to the slings of the press. While the current President has a wide array of broadcast and digital media to pester him, Lincoln could only rely on the telegraph and the vital coast-to-coast postal system to send his lithograph—with his warts, wayward tie knotted under his collar, and an unruly mop of black hair—far and wide. His tired, sympathetic mug became fodder for frequent political cartoons that etched in the brains of the electorate.
Lincoln’s low key personality and friendships helped him take on the darts that were flung his way. He had fewer instruments available to respond, being able to utilize only the overhead wires and the power of his pen. He aimed his words at “the people” of the entire nation—North and South alike. The modern president reacts by email or sends a barrage of Twitter messages laser-focused on those aligned to him, “his base,” not concerned about increasing his support or addressing the entire country.
Seven years ago, Mark Bowen of The Atlantic looked at “How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day.” He said that the “bile poured on him from every quarter made today’s Internet vitriol seem dainty.” Lincoln seemed caught in a no-win situation, always criticized by those who felt he had gone too far versus those who believed he hadn’t gone far enough. (Mark Bowen, “How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day,” June 2013.)
Lincoln’s critics came not just from the South, but from Northern sources, causing him “great pain,” according to his wife, in part because he had thin-skin and felt the thorns others might ignore. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher ‘s attack specially grieved the President, who was sensitive about his lack of formal education. Beecher wrote:
” It would be difficult for a man to be born lower than he (Lincoln) was. He is an unshapely man. He is a man that bears evidence of not having been educated in school or in circles of refinement.”
After reading such an attack, Lincoln exclaimed: “I would rather be dead than, as President, thus abused in the house of my friends.” Note, he did not take Beecher off his list of friends. When faced with a raft of such statements, Lincoln would wave his hand and say, “Let us speak no more of these things.” (Ibid.)
In 1861, Ohio Republican, Lincoln’s own party, William M. Dickson charged that Lincoln “is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity. . . and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.” Early in the war, Lincoln was still learning the ropes, but this had to sting.
Charles Sumner, a Republican from Massachusetts, to whom Lincoln often turned for advice, opposed his re-nomination in 1864, wrote: “There is strong feeling among those who have seen Mr. Lincoln, in the way” of business, that he lacks practical talent for his important place. It is thought that there should be more readiness and also more capacity, for government.” (Bowen)
Could Jealousy Have Framed the Response?
If one looked at Lincoln’s Inaugural Address through a clear, clean lens, would not the words sing?
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this road land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
And yet, an editorial writer for the Jersey City American Standard (surely a Democrat) found the speech “involved, coarse, colloquial, devoid of grace, and bristling with obscurities and outrages against the simplest rules of syntax.” Ouch!
The Gettysburg Address Didn’t Fare Much Better
“We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” The Harrisonburg Patriot & Union printed a much-belated apology 150 years later. Thank goodness they weren’t, and we have this example of clean, heartfelt writing.
The responses pro and con to the Gettysburg Address no longer sway modern opinions. It’s established that positive responses were from the Republican press, while the negative came from the Democratic. Those in-between might have been caught up in the custom of the times that believed the longer the speech, the better it was. Though the crowd that day, most standing throughout, would appreciate a two-minute speech. Perhaps the true nature of Lincoln’s pared-down speech, using exact, purposeful words and few of them (269 in the original speech) would fit nicely on the front pages of newspapers across the country. His intention: to reach the masses.
The celebrated orator who spoke for two hours ahead of Lincoln, Edward Everett, knew a good speech when he heard it and gave credit to Lincoln in a note. “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Inside the Lincoln Shrine
Since he did not sit for TV interviews, Abe did not require Pancake makeup and likely would not have taken to it, indicating with a quip that not much could improve his physical image. Today the lights in the Lincoln Memorial and the exquisite work by sculptor Daniel Chester French do not require a touchup. Recently the current White House occupant chose a respite in Lincoln’s shine to seat his favorite contemporary news team for a partisan report.
Maybe the 16th President would have equated that with his sit-down with Greeley of the Big Three Newsmen in the 19th century, but maybe he would have preferred the sound of school children instead. Lincoln, accustomed to working in the White House all but three weeks of the Civil War, might have been surprised that a month sequestered there be such a burden for the current president. Likely Lincoln would see the visit inside as a respite—maybe to catch the draft from the former’s reputation.
The World Sweated After His Final Speech
Once the ink on the Appomattox surrender dried, Washingtonians rushed to the White House portico to hear a response from their President, expecting a grand announcement of victory. They didn’t know Abe, who asked the army band to play “Dixie” on the lawn outside his window, calling it a “good tune.”
Lincoln didn’t gloat, instead moved on mentally to the essential work–bringing the nation together. He called for national thanksgiving. He did not plan vengeance against the South’s leader and agreed with a letter he’d received that said: “The people want no manifestations of a vengeful spirit. They are willing to let the unhappy rebels live, knowing that at the best, their punishment, like Caine (sic), will be greater than they can bear.”
Instead Lincoln talked about the hard task ahead: Reconstruction and bringing the tattered nation back into one. John Wilks Booth, a late entry to the far edge of the audience, did not have to strain to hear the President’s high-pitched voice. His disgust grew into rage as Lincoln advanced the idea of the elective franchise for the colored veteran men.
Lincoln told the crowd that by keeping the vote from these men (now 140,000 strong after the deaths of 40,000 black Union soldiers), were saying:
“This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.”
The President sealed his fate when he spoke of rewarding those who had sacrificed the most, (see note) extending the vote to any black male veteran. With these words, the anger in Booth’s mind boiled over to rage. His initial plans were to kidnap Lincoln to exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war. In his wrath, Booth heard Lincoln’s words as the ultimate sin and from that moment planned for Lincoln to pay the ultimate price.
Yet the country and the Southern states suffered more because of Booth’s action. Bleeding emotions from those fateful days 155 years ago, misunderstandings and grievances surrounding race shape the national psyche and influence the nation’s divisions today, threatening to bring more destruction to America than a pandemic ever could.
You decide: Who was the greater martyr?
NOTES:
Jennifer Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads,” University of Michigan Vol. 32, Issue 1, Winter 2011, p. 33-47
Mark Bowden, “How Lincoln Wad Dissed in His Day,” The Atlantic Magazine, June 2013
David Blanchette, The State Journal-Register, Springfield, IL. “Abraham Lincoln, like Donald Trump had his media enemies, too” February 25, 2017
Horace Greeley’s” Open Letter to President Lincoln,” New York Tribune, August 19, 1862
Abraham Lincoln’s “Letter to Horace Greeley,” Daily National Intelligencer, August 22, 1862
Donald Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (London: Random House, 1995)
Ryan Holiday, “Abraham Lincoln as Media Manipulator-in-Chief: The 150-Year History of Corrupt Press,” Observer, November 5, 2014
National Archives: “Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During the Civil War,40,000 of the 180,000 negro ground troops died in the Civil War; 10,000 in battle and 30,000 of disease, receiving different treatment than white soldiers. Thus 75% of blacks died of disease vs. 50% of whites.
Louis P Masur, Lincoln’s Last Speech, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) p. 12
NOTE: Michael Burlingame’s 1000-page tome, Abraham Lincoln, Vol II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) p. 810 The week of the murder Booth was challenged as to what he had done for the Cause. While he had thought of the death of Lincoln, he had not moved on it, instead having put together a group to kidnap the President, planning since the prior fall. But the events including the surrender, pushed him to act.
Favorite view during daytime flight. Fluffy clouds that change from minute to minute represent the future because you never know what you’ll find on the ground. The world has changed while you’ve been in flight.
In conversation, we often talk about the past as if it were the present.
Instead we should live in the present but prepare for a future that improves upon it. You say it’s hard to know whether the future will meet that expectation. Ah, but if you aim low, for a so-so or not-so-good future, it’s harder to envision the possibility of a better one and harder yet to obtain the desired future.
“Past Becomes Present,” is this blog’s title, pulling our combined history into present day for better or worse. Or turning history inside out. That seems legitimate. But in conversation this week, I found myself reliving the past, not so much to sample its lessons, but to examine points of trial and pain that should be soothed and digested by now. I decided to take a look at the role the past and future play in life. One might think my hands and mind would have little bearing on the future as I am over 60, but as long as there is breath in any of us, we can influence tomorrow–whether it is the next time we awaken or even possibly 30 years from now.
If we want to push forward, we need to go far beyond the past, carrying it with us, pay attention to our role in the present, embrace it, but hold in our minds a vision of the future that we will work to achieve.
Cruel realities of 21st century life—extreme fluctuations in temperature and rainfall, political philosophies that whiplash the country left and right, and an economy rising upper incomes but often neglecting the bottom–threaten to cloud our impression of the present and impose fears for the future.
As a grandparent, who frequently looks into the inquiring eyes two generations below, I seek the positives that could provide them a future worth moving into. While the current state of affairs has not reached the conundrum faced by Abe Lincoln in the Civil War and Winston Church in World War II, they exercised hope in bleak worlds when their people needed it most.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Message sent to Congress delivered a written review of the nation-(The tradition at the time minus tv cameras to register the clapping, standing, and sitting of the opposing parties). On December 1, 1862, Lincoln seemed to address my concern as he wrote:
“ The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Abraham Lincoln December 1, 1862
Churchill ventured across the Atlantic Ocean peppered with German U-boats to address the Canadian Parliament on December 30, 1941. He asked for their assistance but also spoke to his countrymen:
Let us address ourselves to our task, not in any way underrating its tremendous difficulties and perils, but in good heart and sober confidence, resolved that, whatever the cost, whatever the suffering, we shall stand by one another, true and faithful comrades, and do our duty, God helping us, to the end.
Winston Churchill December 30, 1941
Each man had the ability to see beyond the current difficulty to believe in their nation’s ability to overcome, not in a Disney-esque fashion, but in a positive reality built out of turmoil.
Few could have predicted what post-war Reconstruction would bring without a fair and steady hand, like Lincoln’s, at the helm. Some might say America still suffers from the missteps after 1865 that resulted in Jim Crow laws in the South that punished blacks and might have been avoided had race relations been handled differently immediately following the Civil War. Fortunately for Europe, Germany, and Japan a more progressive hand administered the Marshall Plan after World War II, yielding strong partners today. But still this did not prevent backward looking nationalist tendencies from cropping up throughout Europe and the U.S. today.
Every country and every era has been divided by serious issues, but without agreement about the need to draw the sides together and ease opposition by finding areas of agreement and common need, stagnation or worse begins to destroy a country and upset global harmony. On so many issues America seems to be at a stalemate, but as Churchill so memorably proclaimed to students at Harrow School on October 29, 1941:
“Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never in nothing great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
For modern America facing the future this seems to translate: Stick to your guns, don’t give in to petty challenges. If, however, your country is at stake, work like heck to preserve democracy, just like Lincoln worked to preserve the Union, and Churchill sweat blood to protect England from the Nazi horde.
. . .in conversations with Mom after her stroke. Next, she welcomed international students to Lafayette.
I was scratching my head thinking about what to blog about when one of my friends said, “You should write about your mom!”
Mom was rather amazing in a hometown sort of way. She taught school briefly after the last of us got into first grade. Her stint as an in-school reading teacher didn’t last long. That first year, Mom had a migraine headache coming in from the playground with her students. She fell before making it inside the door, and it took EMS eight minutes to revive her.
Her doctor ran tests at Home Hospital and found a blood clot had burst in her brain. Later the following day, the surgeon went into the right side of her brain to repair the damage. Following a brain swell after surgery, she could no longer move her left arm or leg when she awoke. This situation changed little after months of therapy.
This may sound like a sad story, but it wasn’t. Despite mom’s impairment, she made the best of it. In church, offering a greeting, her right-handed squeeze made a 6-foot-tall construction worker wince; the strength of her grip could have won an arm-wresting contest.
In the mid-1970s, when this took place, little research was available to guide doctors and patients about stroke recovery. Together we discovered that she saw in vertical stripes—seeing and not seeing from right to left. Mom learned to turn her head to gather all the words in a sentence when she scanned a page. As a reading teacher, novels and short stories were vital to her happiness. She gathered a stack of books by the couch to read before the library came to trade her load of books for a new batch. Mom knew what was happening in town and across the world because she read the Lafayette newspaper, listened to National Public Radio, and watched Walter Cronkite every night.
Mom also listened on the radio to her Indiana Hoosiers basketball team, especially Isiah Thomas. Yes, years later, Thomas moved on to a professional career. Still, when Indiana won the national championship in 1981, Marion, an Indiana graduate, sat glued to the television.
Remembering recipes with more than three steps to them proved to be too challenging, but her muscle memory helped her get back to tutoring young children having difficulty with reading. Mom had no problem with her speech, which was a blessing that helped her reach out to children. I remember a particular guy, maybe eight, who had become a bit of a problem in the classroom because being unable to read took away his confidence and returned a belligerent, not very happy student. There was something about mom and struggling students. This guy, I’ll call him Tommy, may have seen Mother walk back from the door with a walker and understood life provided challenges for her. He saw her as a kindred spirit, not someone to be mocked or pitied.
They talked, and Mom, with nothing but time, listened. Tommy told her all about his favorite baseball team, the Cubs, quoting scores and the names of his favorite players. Mom’s eyes lit up because she listened to the Cubs baseball games, too, since it was Dad’s favorite team. They made a connection, and Mom ordered books about baseball for Tommy. Since he desperately wanted to know more about baseball, he had a reason to sound out the words on the page because they were about BASEBALL, his favorite thing. Funny, it wasn’t long before Tommy liked reading because he could learn more about baseball players! Soon several boys who were into sports cars, football, and baseball came along and had experiences similar to Tommy’s.
A bit later, Mom noticed a news article asking for volunteers to help international students at Purdue University feel more at home in Lafayette. She called and explained she would not be able to come to campus but would welcome students to her home for discussions.
Not long after, students from Japan, China, Mexico, and South America made the trip to Lafayette’s east side, some taking three busses, to chat with Mom. She had no English as a Second Language training but offered a willingness to answer questions on any topic. Her age endeared her to many of the students, who respected her as an elder, like those they left behind. The students soon realized they could indeed ask her anything, including things they were too embarrassed to ask their roommate. They ask about the many English words that have dual meanings, like “hear” and “here.” Some at the time were really interested to know more about football, which has always been part of student life at Purdue. Mom could easily help out. Her Dad played football with Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, of course, long before any of these students would have known. The game had not changed all that much, except maybe for weight rooms, fancier locker rooms, and probably more meat on the training tables.
My protective father asked Mom one Saturday, “Do you think I should be here when these students arrive?” My mom glanced over and gave him a strong Mom Look that said, “I got this, thank you.”
We’ve been down this path before–163 years ago. Then we went to war with ourselves to determine if people could be held in bondage based on their race. And whether or not a state can write its own rules because they disagree with the federal laws established by “We the People.”
Many who claim today to be “strong Constitutionalists” cling to the basics found in the Constitution written by the Founding Fathers. But they do not accept the Amendments that grew out of the Bill of Rights—a compromise among the Colonists that made ratification of the nation’s Constitution possible.
In Texas, a big, rowdy state far from the national seat of power, Governor George Abbott believes he has the power and the right to “go it alone,” at least on certain issues. Immigration for starters biased on his interpretation of State’s Rights. He savors a run for the Presidency in 2028, when his good buddy Donald Trump will no longer be eligible, figuring Trump will win the White House in 2024.
Immigration as a Campaign Issue
Americans on all sides of the immigration issue realize federal legislation to establish a viable U.S. immigration policy is decades overdue. (The last political agreement on the issue came in the Reagan Administration over 40 years ago.) On Sunday, February 4, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators issued a compromise immigration bill after working together for four months. The results closely follow the immigration demands of the Republicans. But now that their efforts appear to be nearly ready for a vote, Presidential candidate Donald Trump refuses to support any compromise on immigration policy until after 2025, when he intends to regain the White House. Why? Trump intends to use immigration as a 2024 campaign issue. (Simultaneously this rejection also prevents American ally Ukraine from receiving badly needed ammunition in its conflict with Russia. Unitil the Trump Administration, Russia was considered an adversary, if not an enemy, of the U.S.)
Abbott names immigration as the critical issue in his State, next to the Mexican border. Texas, he says, is feeling the pain of a massive increase in migrants coming to its borders–more than in other State. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping thousands of newly arrived immigrants to Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. Democratic city mayors there have had no warning of these “revenge” arrivals coming from Texas and Florida’s conservative governors–politicians hoping to create chaos that would be reflected in conservative media, like Fox News and opinion coverage, to enrage their political base. Abbott won legislation in the Republican-dominated Legislature that allows state and local enforcement to arrest migrants crossing from outside Texas.
Lone Star Campaign Installs Razor Wire
The immigration nightmare gets very real for people caught in the concertina wire that Abbott demanded the Texas National Guard install 1,000 feet of razor wire along the Rio Grande as part of his multi-million dollar” Lone Star” campaign to prevent southern access. Several people have died in the razor wire, including a mother and her two children in late January. They drowned in the Rio Grande in sight of Abbott’s state border guards. Not only did the Texas patrol not lift a finger to assist them, but the Texans also prevented the U.S. Border Patrol from going in to assist, blocking access to the park that borders the river.
Supreme Court Nixes Razor Wire on Rio Grande: January 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court, not currently known to be liberal in its perspective, overruled the 5th Circuit Appeals Court ruling that prevented removal of the razor wire while a final decision came down. The Court voted 5-4 under Article VI of the Constitution against Abbott’s decision to install razor wire. Article VI is the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution that gives federal law precedence over state government and state officials, including legislators and judges, and state laws. Since the case, Homeland Security v. Texas, came under the Court’d emergency shadow docket, no explanation came along with the ruling.
The Court ordered the razor wire to be removed from the Rio Grande River that serves the entire region. The decision could also come in part from the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, dealing with free access to America’s waterways as well. The Constitution does not specify immigration, but it is determined to be a plenary power of sovereign nations. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the federal government as having jurisdiction over immigration.
In response, Abbott has vowed to maintain the razor wire as a means of preventing immigrants from entering Texas (and incidentally maintaining his name in the public eye). He continues the war of words with a news release rejecting the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States,” he charged. “The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now.”
The criticisms flow both ways. Has the Republican-controlled House passed the funding needed to cover housing and court hearings for the waves of immigrants? Even if every immigrant were immediately sent back to their country of origin, it would still cost money to do so. However, our laws also require those seeking asylum, those fleeing mortal danger, to be given a fair hearing. Or are Republicans willing to buck American law? Will they be comfortable letting the issue fester into an even greater uproar by 2025?
U.S. Law Back to 1798 Defies Abbott’s “Compact Theory
Abbott, in his postings, offers “compact theory” as giving Texas the right to cast aside federal rulings. This theory takes us back to the 1798 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions issued in defiance of the Alien and Sedition Acts. These two states were not supported by the other 11 Colonies. Kentucky and Virginia said the agreement was between the States, not “We the People.” Check the first line of the Preamble to the Constitution.
In 1816, legendary Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story established the Court’s power of judicial review over state decisions and rejected the compact theory. Story wrote for the Court: “The constitution of the United States was ordained and established not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the constitution declares, by ‘the people of the United States.’ ”
Three years later, Chief Justice John Marshall, in McCulloch v. Maryland, strengthened Story’s attack on the compact theory. “No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lives which separate the States . . .,” Marshall wrote. “The Government of the Union is emphatically and truly a government of the people.”
In 1828, after the passage of a protective tariff, conflict over states’ rights and economic policy blew up after South Carolina found the tariff unconstitutional and prohibited its application among the State’s coastal ports. Southerners developed “nullification” to address this and other federal issues they hated. Under nullification, the opposition said a State could scrub away or erase any federal laws it did not wish to follow. Thus began a slippery slope, but surprisingly, President Andrew Jackson, who had a reputation for rule-breaking, strongly opposed nullification.
President Jackson said: “Perpetuity is stamped upon the Constitution by the blood of our fathers—by those who achieved as well as those who improved our system of free government. For this purpose, was the principle of amendment inserted into the Constitution which all have sworn to support and in violation of which no state or states have the right to dissolve the Union.”Notice how he mentioned those who “improved” our system of free government.
“Union of these States is perpetual. . .It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its termination (referring to nullification),”Jackson said.
Later, the Civil War resolved the question—the Union is forever. No state or states, on their own, could decide otherwise. As for Governor Abbott, he comes from a large, diverse state, but Texas still belongs to the Union; what happens in Texas is of concern to those in the other states, including California, New Mexico, Virginia, and Alaska. We are all tied together with rights, responsibilities, privileges, and obligations among and between us.
Politics may be the lifeblood and even a blood sport for American politicians eager for pole position in 2024 or even 2028, but “We the People” want to see them apply themselves to solving the most difficult problems of our generation. We’re smarter than they think, and political theater, social media videos criticizing the opposition, or false interpretations of the Constitution will not win the race in November 2024.
I close with a quote from an ambitious 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln in 1838, speaking to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, IL, when he served in the Illinois Legislature. He speaks of the threats to America.
“At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Lincoln 186 years ago urged us, “We the People,” to guard our democracy as we protect the Union.
References:
Heather Cox Richardson, January 30-February 3, 2024, “Letters from an American”
Jamelle Bouie, “No, Nikki Haley, the Constitution does not say that,” New York Times, February 2, 2024.
Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Backs Biden in Dispute with Texas Over Border Barrier,” New York Times, January 22, 2024
Dante: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Even Abe Lincoln hedged a bit about slavery while debating Stephen Douglas during the Illinois Senate race in 1856. Lincoln lost that race. But his words stood up well enough to reach delegates to the Republican Convention who nominated him for President four years later.
Then Lincoln led the country through its darkest days refusing to give up—the quintessential Profile in Courage. But when JFK wrote that book (or maybe worked with a ghostwriter), he didn’t focus on Lincoln. Although he might have if he’d ever had a serious discussion about history with his grandmother; she was alive when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Instead, Kennedy chose a man who lived just prior to the Civil War– Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (1782-1858). He served as a U.S. Senator from 1821 to 1851, completing five terms. He became one of eight men who embodied outstanding courage that Kennedy selected in 1956 for the book. (One would hope if the book were being written today the author would include some of America’s courageous women.)
During the War of 1812, Benton served as an aide to America’s then hero, General Andrew Jackson. Just a year later, Benton defended his brother, Jessie, when General Jackson pulled a gun on him. Jessie fired back seriously wounding Jackson in the left arm, creating a rift between the Thomas Benton and the General (and helping strengthen Benton’s reputation as a brawler). Friends and foe alike knew Benton to be a “rough and tumble fighter off and on the Senate floor, not with pistols but with “stinging sarcasm, vituperative through learned oratory and bitterly heated debate,” according to Kennedy’s Profiles. (see below) With just one year at the University of North Carolina under his belt, Benton was said to carry the Congressional Library in his head, easily correcting other Senators when they forgot a name, date, or incorrectly quoted a passage from the Classics or Shakespeare.
The Senator belonged to the 1840s Democratic Party helping to orchestrate the nation’s westward expansion, now referred to as “Manifest Destiny.” Benton foresaw a nation that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. A man of boundless energy, Benton pushed through legislation for the Pony Express moving mail service westward and extending the telegraph lines to eventually tie the coasts together and promoted the development of highways (such as they were) that drew a path across the nation for the heroic settlers to follow. He shared Lincoln’s dream of a transcontinental railway to carry merchandise and people betwixt and between the nation’s settlements.
Kingpin of Missouri Politics
Benton wrongly believed that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought his state into the Union, also took the issue of slavery out of politics. He reigned supreme as the Kingpin of Missouri politics from 1821 to 1844. Then he broke with his Party by engineering the defeat of the annexation of Texas. He believed John Calhoun from North Carolina (vice president from 1824-1832) had cooked up a political plan to loop the Texas territories in with the slave state to increase Congressional votes in favor of slavery. His courage came as Benton did not hesitate, even on the eve of an election, to denounce his party’s policy. He managed to be re-elected but at the same time a pro-slavery candidate won to fill an unexpired Senate term by three times his tally. Benton continued his struggle against bringing Oregon and California into the Union as slave states—an opposite stance of Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. Despite Senator Benton’s near defeat in 1844-45, he would not join the Whig party, saying the group “are no more able to comprehend me . . .than a rabbit, which breeds 12 times a year, could comprehend the gestation of an elephant, which carries for 2 years.”
In 1832, President Jackson and Benton faced a serious challenge from Henry Clay, who supported nullification. Under nullification the individual states could veto individual laws to meet the desires of individual states. But Jackson pointed out that the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy, during the War of 1812 with such a policy. “Nullification,” he wrote, “was incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” It became an issue claimed by the South to win freedom from Washington. Here again, Benton did not side with the South, but with the Union.
Home in Missouri became his respite, but the death of two sons early in life and the long physical and mental illness of his wife, made this relief short-lived. Benton’s son-in-law, John Fremont, explored the West and became the original governor of California. Benton’s daughter, Jessie Benton Freemont, a well-educated and well-spoken force of nature herself, would later seek support from Lincoln to get her husband out of a jam during the Civil War. (Like most things in politics, it was complicated, suffice to say. Lincoln had bumped Fremont up to General rank, based on his expeditions, despite his lack of military training, which created some problems due to Freemont’s failure to respect the chain of command.
Benton met his waterloo on February 19, 1847, when Calhoun read to the Senate his resolution insisting that Congress had no right to interfere with the development of slavery in the territories. Calhoun called for an immediate vote. Benton rose from his chair, accepting his fate.
Mr. Calhoun: I certainly supposed the Senator from Missouri, the representative of a slave state, would have supported these resolutions. . .
Mr. Benton: The Senator knows very well from my whole course in public life that I would never leave public business to take up firebrands to set the world on fire.
Mr. Calhoun: Then I shall know where to find the gentleman.
Mr. Benton: I shall be found in the right place . . . on the side of my country and the Union. (An answer Benton noted later he “will wish posterity to remember.”
When the Missouri Senator was warned not to deliver a eulogy in appreciation of John Quincy Adams, a foe of slavery, Benton marched up and delivered a tribute for the ages.
Coming to the end of a challenging year, let’s see if there were also some shining lights to help us trudge forward. Here is a list of 20+ reasons to celebrate:
OneGoal is helping teens in Chicago tofinish high school and complete a year of trade school. The program started as an afterschool program for 23 students and now serves 15,000 nationwide.
Women came back into the labor force in 2023 after 800,000 left at the height of the Pandemic—moving into higher-paying jobs. The gender pay gap is at an all-time low. American women working full time still earn just 84 cents for every $1 men earn, but that’s up from 78 cents a decade ago.
The Camfed program haseducated 1.8 million African girls, including 8,000 girls in sub-Saharan Africa in 2023. Women are the kick-starters of home-based small businesses in their countries.
Finland joined the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), which will give Ukraine another ally thanks to the agreement with Turkey to let the Scandinavian country join. Sweden’s request is next up, but no doubt Russia will put an even stronger squeeze on Turkey and others in an attempt to prevent another pro-US entry. Who knows what piece of bounty Turkey might have gotten to achieve this important strategic goal?
The hole in the ozone layer is shrinking. (Slowly, don’t go crazy and drive faster; set your heat higher in the winter or at a lower temperature in the summer!) The CHIL United Nation’s trackers indicate by mid-century—that’s 26 years away—it could recover to 1980s levels.
The United States expected a recession in 2023 to take away jobs in exchange for a drop in inflation. Instead, over 2.5 million jobs were added while inflation slowed (not enough to please everyone). Egg prices are back to $2 a dozen after soaring to $4 at one time due to a disease that infected hens but impacted shoppers needing this kitchen table staple.
In the 19th century, nearly 50% of children worldwide died before they reached age 15. In 2023, the United Nations Population Division projects the world reaches a low in global child mortality, with just 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 5. While this is excellent news, serious work remains to address the causes, care, and delivery of pregnant black women, who die in childbirth at 2.6 times the rate of white mothers.
Polio is expected to be eradicated worldwide by 2024, thanks to the efforts of Rotary International over decades. There were just 12 cases in 2023. The polio vaccine helped my generation avoid paralysis, living in steel iron lungs, and walking on crutches. This generation might need a reminder of the scourge they missed.
CRISPR, a gene-editing technique, has begun to treat sickle disease and blood disease. Sufferers require hospitalization and blood cell transfusions, often when the temperature outside changes to hot or cold. Researchers are now looking to apply what they have learned to other gene-based diseases.
Four Columbian kids survived 40 days in the jungle, aged 13, 9, 4, and 1. They survived a plane crash that killed their mother and were rescued by the Columbian military on June 9.
Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour is expected to draw $2.1 billion worldwide. Taylor Swift’s Era Tour: $1.4 billion from touring and merchandise, enlarging their status as an American icon. Both women have been recognized, along with Alicia Keys, for writing eight #1 songs on the Billboard 100.
Americans are traveling again—the number of air passengers—domestic and international are at pre-pandemic levels.
The leading cause of blindness worldwide, Blinding trachoma, is near 0. In 1996, the United nations aimed to eradicate the disease by 2020 by helping provide clean water, relieving overcrowding, and improving sanitation. The numbers were 189 million sufferers in 2014 and 105 million in 2022. Now, the target has been set for 2030.
Another win over disease has come with just 13 cases of the painful Guinea worm disease in 2022. This water-borne, sub-tropical disease removed disabled village workers from the farms, sending children to the fields, away from school. In 1986, the disease infected 3.5 million people. Former President Jimmy Carter fought to defeat the disease, wanting to end it in his lifetime. We’re hopeful he will, making it the second after smallpox to be eradicated by cleaning water supplies and digging deep wells.
Runners will commend the ability of Kevin Kiptum, a Kenyan runner, who set a new official record at the Chicago Marathon in October: 2 hours and 35 seconds. Or lament the bar has gone even lower!
American diners are selecting climate-conscious meals that are good for them as well as the planet. They’re called “climatarians” or “climavores.”
Many looted antiquities were returned. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning objects to Cambodia, Thailand, Turkey, and Greece. Thirty looted objects are being sent back to Italy by the California man who took them. The Museum of the Bible and Cornell University packed up 17,000 pieces and returned them to Iraq. The Smithsonian has agreed to give back to the families the “racial brain collection” acquired during the 19th century.
Gymnast Simone Biles came back and dominated the 2023 world championships and got a new fault named after her (The Biles II) so hard that nearly no one else, male or female, can complete it.
California is drought-free for the first time in years after snow and tropical storms—the reservoirs are filled.
We’re off the couch and back to the theaters! Thanks to movies like the pink-infused comedy “Barbie” and the less light-hearted “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour sit-down about the creation of the atomic bomb.
You may disagree with the ranking. Let me know or write your own list between watching football, eating tamales or lighting firecrackers!
Thanks to the Washington Post’s December 27, 2023: “No, 2023 wasn’t all bad, and here are 23 reasons why.” And Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, December 23, 2023“This Was a Terrible Year, and Also Maybe the Best One Yet for Humanity.”
Secular Christmas came alive in America in the late 1840s. A picture of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree, complete with ornaments, appeared in the U.S. via telegraph. Other British seasonal traditions that made their way across the pond include Christmas cards, Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol,” and Clement Clark Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nick.”
Someone dressed as St. Nicholas appeared in Concord, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve in 1853. Two years later, in New Orleans, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church set up a Christmas tree aglow with candles and credited the German tradition. In Philadelphia in 1857, immigrants who’d become citizens said they were “naturalizing” the tree. An electrified tree did not appear until the 1880s, created by an employee of Thomas Edison. Yet the White House did not have a Christmas tree until 1889, when President Benjamin Harrison had a tree placed in an upstairs bedroom of the White House, maybe to please his grandchildren. Christmas became a federal holiday in 1870. Earlier, when Lincoln served in Congress for one term, he voted against making Christmas a holiday. He said state workers did not need another paid day off that regular workers would not receive.
Ah, but how did the Lincoln’s celebrate? In the 1860s souvenir hunters visiting the White House were so intent on collecting mementos (they cut scraps from the velvet drapes and swaths from the European carpet) that any decorations would be gone within a day. So, no tree went up at the White House.
Christmas as Unifying Force
Before the Civil War, Americans celebrated Christmas with their relatives from Europe or following their own religious traditions. These continued, but during and after the war a unique celebration of the family coupled with the yearnings of soldiers for home and for those left behind on the battlefield. The desire for peace and goodwill spoke to the immediate prayers of the nation.
Lincoln Christmas Traditions
Abe Lincoln and Mary, the Christmas before they left for the White House, probably would have joined other Springfield parents putting garlands of pine, evergreen boughs, and holly over the mantles and doorframes on Christmas Eve after their boys went to bed. Likely, Mary would be certain there would be Mistletoe and the chandelier would swing with the bough, spraying its scent throughout the dining room. Several bright red Poinsettia would grace the room. An array of culinary treats would include chicken salad, oysters, glazed fruit, venison, eggnog, and, of course, Southern biscuits. An orange and citrus tower would center the table with its fragrance, and a macaroon pyramid would be nearby for dessert. We recognize the turkeys and fruitcakes they expected at Christmas. (We will ignore the outcry of those who wonder if the fruitcakes are leftovers from that time.
Lincoln Family Christmas
The store registry at John Williams Co. store in Springfield had Abe Lincoln stopping by on Christmas Eve 1860, after his election but before the family left for Washington, to purchase four linen handkerchiefs, three gentleman’s silk handkerchiefs, and four children’s silk handkerchiefs. We know he also purchased fancy perfume for Mary. We hope he made sure the boys also had some sweets!
The Lincolns were known for their hospitality–once, months before an election, they invited 500 people to a gathering. They did a much smaller get-together in 1861, a Christmas party at the White House before the beginning of the war. The Lincolns did not send out Christmas cards during the Civil War. In 1862, the Lincolns visited soldiers at the many hospitals in Washington, D.C. Then the following year, Abe took his son to visit the troops with gifts of books and clothing with a tag: “From Tad Lincoln.” The President held a reception for his cabinet along with the White House Historical Society that, to this day, celebrates Christmas with special White House ornaments celebrating the Lincolns and other Presidential families.
Lincoln’s Winning Ways
The 16th President had a sixth sense of positive publicity. He knew Thomas Nash, the famous political cartoonist known for his work with Harper’s Weekly in the 1860s, created the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party. For the New Year in 1863, Nash had drawn a picture of Santa visiting the troops on January 3.
Then, Lincoln asked Nash to create an image for December 31, 1864, entitled: “Union Christmas,” featuring Lincoln at the door offering cold and frost-bitten Southerner soldiers an invitation to join the Union. A second one featured Lincoln offering a Christmas Box to Jeff Davis, the Southern leader, with the message: “More war or peace and union?” In a few months, the surrender would be signed.
I hope the women of Texas and the men who love them have long memories. The next general election for Texas attorney general is a long way off, and it appears the State’s Leadership Triumvirate is banking on it.
Texans are suffering under a multi-year dictatorship over our minds and bodies. Our Triumvirate of “leaders” lack the equipment to understand a key issue vital to half the population of the Lone Star State and now are second-guessing the doctors who do.
In this case, Texas leaders appeal to a political faction clinging to the right wall, carved to fit nicely into gerrymandered sections of the state’s political landscape, thus far bringing reliable access to power for the Triumvirate.
Following this pattern, in 2021, Texas passed one of the most restrictive state bans that prohibits abortion after six weeks if the cardiac activity (the “heartbeat” law) of the fetus can be detected. In 2022, the Texas legislature passed the “trigger law” that prohibits abortion after fertilization, only granting exceptions for cases in which a pregnant patient risks death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” The Texas language is the most restrictive language, first used in Texas and now being copied in other states.
The most recent stretch of Texas Attorney General Paxton’s power has impacted the life of Kate Cox, pregnant with a fetus suffering from trisomy 18, a fatal genetic disease. She appealed to the Texas district court to block the state’s enforcement of the ban, which cleared her for the procedure under an exception. In her appeal, Cox explained she risks losing her fertility and could lose her life if she continued to carry the fetus. Doctors told her the disease leaves an unborn child “virtually no chance of surviving,” and 95 percent of the fetuses with the disease do not live until birth, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The Texas District Court cleared Cox for the procedure on Friday, but that night, the 9-GOP-member Texas Supreme Court, encouraged by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, put that decision on hold. On Monday, that court issued a seven-page opinion tossing out the District Court’s temporary restraining order, which would have blocked the state’s enforcement of the ban and cleared Cox for an abortion in Texas.
Expecting that ruling with her health deteriorating, Cox left Texas to have an abortion.
Ken Paxton bullied his way out of impeachment in September by threatening to find primary opponents for those in the House and Senate who voted against him, then following up on it. (The Texas House voted to impeach by 121-23, and the Texas Senate voted against by 16-14 (21 being required). His anger has him spending more time working against Republicans who voted against his deeds and pleasing the anti-abortionists than fulfilling the activities of a state’s legal leader.
Now, he’s stretching that tactic to bend doctors and even hospitals to his will and that of those who fund his political campaigns. His Texan constituents should be aware of the extent he will go to ensure his will is fulfilled.
Not Just Politicians Receive His Bullying
Before Cox left the state, Paxton released a letter threatening legal action against her doctor and other doctors and hospitals if they performed her (or any) abortion, pledging “civil and criminal liability including first-degree felony prosecutions.” He went further to say that the case did not fall into the exception of the Texas abortion law, and the (district court) judge was “not medically qualified to make this determination.” So, Paxton is? And the Texas Supreme Court, also made up of lawyers, is more qualified?
In a letter to Texas hospitals early this week, Paxton threatened to prosecute hospitals, doctors, and anyone who would assist in an abortion procedure. He threatens doctors with first-degree felonies and five years, up to life in prison. He goes so far as to discuss a review of hospital certification (which would threaten the hospital’s ability to serve the entire community, not just pregnant women) for those going against HIS will in their effort to deter a desperate, seriously ill pregnant woman from requesting an abortion.
“Even before winning an appeal (from a 9-GOP court),” Mary Ziegler, UC-Davis law professor, said, “This reflects his (Paxton’s) ultimate goal of wanting to go after abortion providers and supporters at all costs.”
Earlier, he went so far as to send out an advisory in 2022 to local prosecutors encouraging them to pursue criminal charges against abortion doctors with the threat of five-year prison sentences and offering the services of the AG’s office in assisting their prosecutions.
The court ruling appeared to endorse Paxton’s specific constructions on reproductive rights, according to Lara Portuondo, University of Houston law professor. “(This ruling) permits a green light precisely to the kind of intimidation campaign that you saw Ken Paxton doing here.”
Dr. Rick W. Snyder II, Texas Medical Association president, expressed a need for “legislative clarity to protect physicians so they don’t have to go to court (in these cases).”
Joanna Grossman, a professor at the Dedman School of Law at SMU, noted this current behavior is a continuation of what Paxton has done for three years and beyond enforcement through fear.
A few months ago, a group of 20 Texas women who had difficult /life-threatening pregnancies and experienced difficulty determining if their case would allow them to receive medical treatment in Texas petitioned the Texas Supreme Court for a determination of what is “reasonable medical judgment” in these cases. The Texas Medical Association has also asked for clarification so that, as the women’s case states, ” doctors do not have to wait until a mother is within an inch of death” before acting. A decision is expected in June.
I have avoided writing about the chaos created in Congress during the selection of a House Speaker. I hoped once the selection occurred, sanity might return. But with eight days until a government shutdown on November 17, newly elected Speaker, Mike Johnson, excused the House for the weekend. I felt bound to address the situation. I don’t see the House earned a trip home because their work isn’t done.
Speaker Johnson complicated the possibility of finding a compromise to the debt crisis before the deadline. He appears more intent on pushing his religious beliefs on the country than fulfilling his responsibility to bring forward a successful budget resolution. Now it has been suggested that Johnson released House Members on Thursday, so he could fly to Paris, France to speak on Friday at the worldwide Freedom Initiative Conference. (Correction: the New Republic, not sourced in the original article, retracts this report and Johnson’s spokesperson, Raj Shah, said Johnson did not leave the country this weekend.)
When Johnson assumed the Speaker role on October 25, after a three-week stalemate in identifying a new leader, he slid into place as a stealth candidate, despite being #5 in the House hierarchy. At that time, he knew the most pressing order of business would be to avoid a government shutdown by November 17. Instead, he scheduled a series of unnecessary votes to appease his Right Wing. He scheduled a vote to set the annual salary of the White House Press Secretary and the DOT Secretary at $1 to punish political opponents.
Threat of Losing AAA Moody’s Rating
Just after the markets closed on Friday, Moody’s Investment Service issued a warning on the U.S. economy, saying it could lose its AAA rating. Moody’s concern is that Congress could fail to act in time to avert topping the debt ceiling. As of January 19, the debt sat at $31.4 trillion, augmented by Covid-19 spending. S & P already downgraded the U.S. in 2011 during that budget stalemate. Earlier this year the third rating company, Fitch Group, also expressed disfavor with the status of the U.S. economy. This investment rating process began in 1917. Since 1960 the U.S. has raised the debt ceiling 78 times.
Typically, Congress begins consideration of the nation’s annual spending bills the day after the debt ceiling is approved the year prior. Former House Speaker Pelosi, who had more experience wrangling her caucus, scheduled spending bills so they were passed in August, before the deadline. Lately, we have been white knuckling the decision until the very last minute. The debt ceiling only approves funds that have already been appropriated. The discussion provides a grand-standing moment for the GOP’s Hard-Right Wing to flex their will in a House where the majority is razor thin.
This procrastination in the House requires federal agencies to spend time, money, and effort preparing for the possibility of a shutdown. At the same time, Congress votes to push the debt ceiling decision into the future instead of legislating a solution. Amid their efforts to purchase housing and vehicles, Americans cross their fingers, hoping their interest rates will not hike due to market instability, sending their purchase out of reach.
Polarization Adds to Concern
Some Members of Congress appear unworried about the consequences of their failure to act—appearing unconcerned about the impact on financial markets or on America’s reputation around the globe or the ability to borrow money. They seem to welcome the chance to blame Democrats, while the Democrats blame the GOP for the legislative chaos. As they engage in a fierce game of pickleball, the interest rate on cars, houses, and personal debt threatens to rise. This situation is more like a hot potato than a casual backyard picnic. It should be taken seriously.
Some point to the Democrats, saying the deficit is their responsibility, while Trump kept the deficit in check. But the federal debt rose from $14.4 trillion in 2016, his first year in office, to $21.6 trillion in 2019, his last. The Office of Management and Budget estimated the debt would rise between $1 and $1.2 trillion per year (rather than drop to nothing or decrease as the Hard Right suggested it should.)
But Trump’s signature tax cut, enacted in 2017, will cost $1.7 Trillion by the end of this fiscal year 2023. The cuts permanently lower the corporate tax rate, increasing annual losses to the U.S. Treasury far into the future. Expenditures during Covid-19 have helped balloon the deficit. But by the end of 2023 the Trump and the Bush tax cuts have cost the Treasury Department $10 trillion. According to the Treasury Department, the cuts are responsible for a 57 percent increase in the debt ratio (total debt to total assets).) They represent more than 90 percent of the debt ratio or trajectory of the U.S. debt if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to Covid-19 and the Great Recession.
Entitlement programs, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid continue to rise with the aging and ailing population but cutting tax revenues without an eye to the future, only passed around dessert before managing bread and butter issues. Now it’s unlikely Congress can take away the corporate sweets in order to serve public citizens in the future.
Clean, Easy-to-Pass Bill Unlikely
When the House returns on TUESDAY, there will be three days to resolve the debt issue. Even if the speaker intends to kick the debt issue into 2024, there’s scant time to identify a bill with language able to pass the House and receive final approval in the Senate before the deadline.
The bill will need to be “clean” of any poison amendments (like prior legislation) that contain language related to abortion or shorting the IRS of already approved funding (Just before tax time- maybe a treat for the tax-collection haters in the GOP?). Current history in the House does not suggest a “clean” bill will be forthcoming.
The new House Speaker faces a forced vote on a last-minute “solution.” Or he will pray to kick the decisions again into 2023 or 2024. Attempting to starve the government of already approved funds to continue essential services–like disaster relief, soldier pay, air traffic control, food safety inspection, and border security–appears not to be a problem for the GOP.
Legislating the future of the nation’s 355.7 million Americans (Census Clock) is serious business. We need a House Speaker who works for all of us!
Landscapes around Willow City Loop, Texas at sunset
Texas’s current trio of government leaders, we’ll call them the Triumvirate because the three usually rule as one. During Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial, we heard repeatedly that Ken Paxton got 4.2 million votes in the mid-term election. They neglected to notice that there are 30 million people living in Texas. The State has 17.7 million people eligible to vote. But just 45.7% of those potential voters went to the polls to tell Texas who they wanted to represent them. They’re busy working, raising children, living life, unconcerned about all the confusion that politics seems to represent today.
But it’s not just being busy that keeps Texans from the polls. In Texas the GOP gerrymanders political maps — ripping them and rejiggering them in key precincts and counties so only the Republicans have a chance of winning, which discourages people from registering and voting. And now they’ve devised a plan to ensure that they win every battle, even those they could lose in court.
Texas leaders have managed to wrangle votes and personnel so Republican judges make political rulings. Where a Texas judge manages to rule for the citizens of Texas, the once impeached attorney general can now supersede the judge’s order. In essence the people of Texas have no way to win through avenues normally open in a democracy with functioning legislative, executive and judicial branches.
The provision known as the supersede rule prevents legal challenges from upending the status quo desired by the Attorney General before a full legal case can play out. [Kind of like what happened in the AG’s impeachment trial when the Lt. Governor (#2 in the Triumvirate) sat as judge in the AG Ken Paxton’s trial before the Senate and decided when to wind up the testimony, allowing the Senators to meet together Saturday night before making their final judgements Sunday. This timetable offered an opportunity for texts from Lt. Gov Dan Patrick’s and his minions to reach the Senators with incentives and plenty of stick (by threatening to “primary” those who voted for impeachment by sending another Republican candidate into their districts to run against them for 2024.)]
Rule by One Party corrupts. When there are no checks and balances, no compromise, one Party seeks to serve only those most fervent followers, no longer fulfilling the needs of the majority of the state. Opportunities for corruption abound. Ask the Chinese living under the Communist Party. Texas has had one-Party rule since 1994.
Likewise, fake speech that spreads lies, like the “stolen 2020 election,” threatens democracy. When fake speech was used in Congress in the 1950s under Senator Joe McCarthy, it pitted Americans against each other. During the Cold War with Russia, McCarthy spread fears of Communist subversion, charging Soviet spies infiltrated the federal government, universities, the film industry, and across the country. The term “witch hunt,” was applied to his “invstigations,” which spread falsehoods using television coverage of the hearings to spread his “fame’ throughout the country. The reference traces back to the witch trials in Salem centuries earlier.
We know how tight AG Paxton is with Far-Right Conservatives. He filed 48 cases on behalf of Trump’s false assertion that he was cheated in 2020. Rumors of a leak prior to the Supreme Court’s overturning the Roe decision seem plausible given that Paxton ruled in Texas the DAY OF the decision that a woman could not get an abortion. Immediately he put in place 50-year-old pre-Roe statutes, mimicking those on the books in Texas since before the Civil War. Very forward looking. The woman denied an abortion that day was in septic shock, had spent three days in the ICU, and her doctors said a miscarriage was inevitable. But they could not induce her because there was a still a fetal heartbeat. (Note: The legislation passed in Texas threatens doctors with up to 99 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines for avoiding the strict rules. Does that sound like language written by people concerned with protecting the health and welfare of Texans or those ensuring that they “win” in a political battle?
The couple had gone through multiple rounds of in vitro to conceive this child and hoped to eventually be able to conceive again. They found the infection she suffered while waiting medical treatment prevents a future pregnancy.
Now that the impeachment trial is behind them, TX Governor Abbott is using a similar tactic to squeeze passage of the school voucher plan he’s promised to his far-right base, even though it went down in flames in the last special session, not being considered. Now because Gov. Abbott isn’t happy with the results of the earlier Texas Legislative session; he’s vowed to continue to call special sessions until his beloved school vouchers/public funding for religious schools is passed. This despite the fact that the rural school districts are smart enough to know siphoning money from the meager education pot will threaten funding for their public schools. What happened to one and done? It would be comical if these repeated sessions weren’t stealing funds from the Texas budget, like the public schools, who still have not gotten relief? Texas should not go any further into mimicking dark times in American history.
Preserving the Soul of Texas
Texas has a soul, though some might doubt. No one person or Triumvirate carries the burning core of a state way bigger than its 268,596 square miles. A state always in motion from the farmers working the flat plains of Amarillo to the climbers overwhelmed by the pin-drop quiet in the vast mountains of Big Bend, to those whose ancestors landed their make-shift canoes to found Nacogdoches, to those who fought at the Alamo and all the other battles within and without Texas, plus those millions in Houston, now the fourth largest city in America. Some are more concerned about how the next storm will impact their families and their jobs than they are worried about politics.
Ah, but there’s the rub—it’s all connected. Let’s not forget the hearty bunch in West Texas who have ridden the roller coaster of feast and bust that is the oil business. Across the state future generations of football and baseball and basketball players sweat and practice their game, while wind generators and sunshine gatherers and electric vehicle manufacturers push forward. A state of contrasts, but under it all, the soul of Texas remains. Let’s have a government worthy of these Texans.
Past Becomes Present.Blog 
