Monthly Archives: March 2019

A t-shirt story

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I have a t-shirt that says “Missouri. It’s not all that bad.”

Some folks laugh at it.  Others just shake their heads.

A new survey indicates why those opposite reactions are both accurate.  A new survey says we’re keeping our money (“because the people know better how to spend their money than government does,” as the legislative cliché goes).  But what’s it costing us?

A personal finance company in Washington, D.C. peppers our mailbox regularly with surveys on local and state issues. One of the most recent looks at where Missourians rank when it comes to return on investment of their tax dollars.

Wallet Hub says Missouri is the sixth-lowest in total taxes per capita (meaning the population 18 and older).

But we don’t rank as highly in some key things the company also measured.

Our economy isn’t bad—19th, rated on the median household income, annual job-growth rate, the share of people living below poverty line, economic mobility, unemployment and underemployment rates.

We’re 25th in education, a measurement of the quality of our public university system. The company ranked 500 of the 951 public and private universities in another survey.  Truman State was the highest ranking public university in Missouri and it ranked 107th among the private and public schools. Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla was 140. UMKC was 200th, the University of Missouri (apparently Columbia) was 223.  Schools were measured on Student selectivity, cost and financing, faculty resources, campus safety, campus experience, educational outcomes, and career outcomes.

We were 29th in public schools rankings.  Among categories in that ranking were the number of blue ribbon schools per capita, high school graduation rate among low-income students, projected high school graduation rate increase between 2017-18 and 2031-32 school years, dropout rate, math test scores, reading test scores, median SAT and ACT scores, and pupil-teacher ratios.

Missouri ranked 35th in health, measured in terms of hospital beds per 1,000 people, the quality of public hospitals—using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, average life expectancy at birth, births, infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births, average health insurance premium, and the quality of health care.

The numbers for safety are worse. We’re 42nd in safety. The ranking is based on our per-capita violent crime and property crime rates and vehicle fatalities per 100-million miles traveled.

In infrastructure and pollution quality—only seven states are worse. The poor quality of our roads and bridges is well-known.  But other factors enter in: average commute time, parks and recreation expenditures, highway spending per driver, air pollution, and water quality and the share of the population that receives fluoridated water through public water supplies.

Not sure what we should expect as the sixth lowest in total taxes per capita.  Probably not surprising that we’re only average at best in some categories and among the worst in others.

But everybody has to be someplace.  And Missourians seem to be happy to be in the lower third of state in some important areas.

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

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We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

Vote for the boats

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Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist George Bernard Shaw said it in his play Back to Methuselah in 1949: “You see things; and you say “Why?”  But I dream things that never were; and I say “why not?”

I awoke one morning a few months ago thinking about a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, a museum that emphasizes the role of Missouri River steamboats as the lifelines to the American West.   It was a little while after our meeting in Kansas City at the Steamboat Arabia Museum where we talked about the museum’s future and its move to a new location where it can become a National Steamboat Museum.

There once had been some uneasiness about applying the “national” name to the museum— how a museum alongside the Missouri River could assume the “national” title for a creation that had such a profound impact on almost all of the nation’s navigable streams for most of the Nineteenth Century.  But that uneasiness went away when I remembered the Shaw’s remark about dreaming things that never were and asking “Why not?”

And that’s why we’re willing to buck some politically-influential big nay-sayers and the reason we hope members of the legislature will join us in a venture that requires some courage to make something great materialize for our city and for our state.

Why not put our National Steamboat Museum along the nation’s longest river system?  Why not put the museum on a hill overlooking the most challenging river that steamboats ever faced?  Why not display a boat or boats exhumed from their watery graves of a century and a half ago and more?  Why not a museum that represents the importance of steamboats to this nation’s greatest adventure—the expansion of our country from ocean to ocean?

Others have not been reluctant to use the “national” designation in connection with steam boating.  Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, has the National Steamboat Monument, a sixty-ton replica of the original paddle wheel from the “American Queen” (a modern tourist boat built in 1995) that towers forty feet off the ground, with a series of twenty-four metal smokestacks to symbolize the importance of steam in early river travel and the importance of riverboats to Cincinnati’s history.

Jeffersonville, Indiana—across the Ohio River from Louisville—has the Howard National Steamboat Museum in the 1894 mansion of steamboat captain James Howard (a museum that, appropriately, has survived a 1971 fire caused by an explosion of its steam heating plant).

Marietta, Ohio has the Ohio River Museum that includes a twenty-four foot long model of the sternwheeler “The Pioneer,” and a collection of artifacts from steamboats in three buildings.

The Clifton Steamboat Museum in Beaumont, Texas is a 24,000 square foot museum that includes steamboat history as well as artifacts from various wars in which Texans have participated.

Irvington, Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum includes the pilot house from the steamer “Potomac,” built in 1894 and disassembled in 1938.

And Marion, Arkansas has The Sultana Museum that commemorates the disaster that struck the steamboat Sultana in 1865, an explosion of boilers and fire on a 367-passenger capacity boat packed with 2,300 passengers, mostly paroled Union soldiers just released from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. Only five-hundred of those passengers survived.

But nowhere is there a museum that honors the steamboats that fought the nation’s most dangerous river, a river on which the average lifespan of a steamboat was only three years. And in honoring those boats and those who built and operated them, wouldn’t we be honoring steamboat history in general?

The dream is for a museum that houses at least one exhumed steamboat. The whole thing. But maybe more. We’ll know when we dig down to others. The museum also would provide a window on the people we were in the early days of the frontier through the years until railroads had so penetrated the West that steamboats were no longer essential to the survival of frontier communities and the movement of the frontier toward the Pacific Ocean.

Some parts of the museum already exist; the steam engine from the “Missouri Packet,” the first of about 400 boats to sink in the Missouri River when it went under in 1820, the two-hundred tons of cargo recovered from the exhumed “Arabia,” and soon, the cargo of and perhaps the entire “Malta,” due for recovery this winter if fund-raising can be completed.

Introductory displays of the earlier history of steamboats on the Hudson, Potomac, and Ohio Rivers—among others—can provide the context for the main displays in the National Steamboat Museum which will take nothing away from the importance of existing collections and monuments but will instead bring the importance of steamboats and their era into sharp and dramatic focus complementing other facilities that highlight this often overlooked but vitally important part of the development of our nation.

Why the Missouri River?  Writer and epic poet John G. Neihardt, who canoed downriver from Fort Benton, Montana in 1908 wrote:

“The Missouri is unique among rivers.  I think God wished to teach the beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace—and his precept was the Missouri.  To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”

I have come to realize we can call it The National Steamboat Museum because—while focusing on Missouri River steamboats—it will be a tribute to all of the rivers, all of the boats that challenged them and won or lost, all of the people who invented, built, and operated those boats—and those who died in their disasters—and all of the people who rode them into uncertain futures that are our national history.

Their descendants not only will have a unique glimpse of their real-people ancestors. They might draw courage by knowing that progress is not achieved by sitting on a riverbank and watching the water flow by but instead is often achieved by having the courage to go against the current in search of better things.

Those of us who want to create the National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City do not lack the courage to face the heavy opposition of our casino industry to provide the funding for that museum as well as for a State Museum building and the transformation of the present state museum space into a visitor center that focuses on the history of the capitol and of state government, a place to learn about being a Missouri citizen. The casino industry, which has capitalized on (some say “has taken advantage of”) our steamboat heritage for more than twenty-five years, appears not to care about leaving funds in Missouri to accomplish great goals that will benefit all Missourians. The legislature can decide if its best to keep some of the casino’s annual windfall here for future generations rather than let it flow to casino corporate offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, Missouri?

Why not?

Join us in making what never has been—-

be.

Notes from a quiet street (composed on a cold and dreary March day)

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Think the “me too” movement is new?   Consider this report from the Union Franklin County Tribune of December 12, 1913:

“Because Mike Kincannon of Joplin, a patrolman on the police force, told the wife of a prominent railroad man to ‘go home and get some clothes on’ when he saw her on the street wearing a slit skirt, his resignation was demanded by Chief of Police J. H. Myers.  Complaint of the patrolman’s orders to the woman were filed by the woman’s husband.”

(Isn’t that a little intriguing? Some creative writer could take that story and structure various narratives stemming from at least two questions: Why was the woman (especially a married woman) wearing a “slit skirt” on the street in those days?  Why did the husband complain? And what happened to Kincannon after that? What did HIS wife tell him after hearing of the comment? This, my friends, is a potential short story on the hoof.)

000

By now we all should have learned to consider March with suspicion.  December was a plunge into the darkness and cold of winter. January was the depths but that faint light in the distance was February which, while still not pleasant, at least raise hopes with the realization that it was a short month and by the end of it men would be playing baseball and racing cars again. Then comes March and we inevitably expect more of it than it deserves. Even the spring solstice on March 21 does not bring lasting relief.  Although April is considered the “cruelest month,” it nonetheless brings us greening grass and budding trees and the promise of May. Let us be patient and tolerant of March.  It cannot help itself.

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We were talking to a friend the other day who has heard confident predictions that President Trump could be elected for four more years in 2020. “The chances are good that he’ll get the nomination as long as political parties have ‘Winner Take All’ or ‘Winner Take Most’ primaries in which someone with thirty percent of the vote gets one-hundred percent of the delegates,” she said.  “If political parties had proportional primaries, conventions might be worth paying attention to again. The 2016 Republican convention sure would have been if the primaries had been proportional in awarding delegates.”

I didn’t ask her when she’d start wearing a MCGA hat—Make Conventions Great Again.

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Governor Parson knows that we can’t keep letting our roads and bridges turn to rust and rubble.  That’s why he’s out banging the drum for his bond issue proposal.  He really doesn’t have much of a choice, given voter resistance to any kind of a fuel tax increase that might keep a school bus or two from winding up in a creek.  But there’s a cost that does with issuing bonds.

All of us who ever borrowed money—whether it was to buy a car, a house, a daughter’s wedding, or to pay some backed-up bills—knows that we’ll have to pay off those loans.  And making payments on loans reduces the amount of money in our general bank account, limiting our choices in buying food, taking vacations, buying some nice things from time to time.

Because we as citizens refuse to pay for it now, we’ll pay for it later.  A long time later.

But somebody has to do something to keep school buses out of creeks.

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The city council in Jefferson City passed a resolution Monday night urging every citizen of the town who comes in contact with members of the legislature to tell them how much it would mean to the city to build a national steamboat museum here. Legislative employees, landlords who rent space to lawmakers, businesses that serve them food and libations, stores that sell them clothes or tires—anybody who sees a legislator needs to get in their ears about passing the bills financing this museum project, says the resolution in so many words.

Yes, I instigated it.  Not sure how the Missouri Ethics Commission will handle registering an entire city as a lobbyist but if it does figure it out, I’ll pay the ten dollar registration fee.