Monthly Archives: March 2020

Dr. Crane on truth

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(We normally reserve any political observations for our Wednesday posting but an event a few days ago has led us to bend that standard for this Monday. Last week, President Trump held a conference call with the nation’s governors to discuss the pandemic. When some governors questioned the federal help their states could get from Washington, the President said Washington was serving only as a “backup” to their efforts. That prompted Washington’s governor to respond that the nation doesn’t need a backup, it needs a Tom Brady—a reference to the great quarterback of the New England Patriots. At a news conference, the President seemed to miss the point entirely when he told reporters, “They think Tom Brady should be leading the effort. That’s only fake news, and I like Tom Brady, spoke to him the other day, he’s a great guy.” Our strong personal attitude on the President’s accusations that the mainstream media is nothing but liars aside, there is nothing fake about the news of the COVID-10 pandemic as it envelops our world ever more tragically. Truth, consistent truth, is badly needed in these circumstances. So we turn to Dr. Frank Crane and his thoughts just after the Great War on—

THE UPROAR

Violence is the gesture of Impotence.

Brutality is the outward sign of inward Cowardice.

The persecutor is not quite sure of himself. It’s the half-doubt lights the fagot.

When the boy passes the graveyard at night he whistles, because he is afgraid of being afraid. It’s the same with all who vociferate.

Only those who believe with their whole hearts can keep still.

The screaming reformers do not believe their cause—wholly.

If the Germans had been sure of the superiority of their Kultur they would have left it alone, to conquer the world by its inherent excellence. Because they were not sure, they went to war.

“Defenders of the Faith!” Ludicrous title! For real faith needs no defense. It is a defense.

You don’t need to stand up for the Truth, and to fight for it, and to preserve it against the enemy. When you talk that way it shows you don’t understand the quality of Truth.

Truth is the one indestructible, ever-green, eternally persistent thing on earth.

All we have to do is to see it, to believe in it, to adjust our lives, thought, and speech to it, and wait. By and by, it always wins.

Hence genuine believers in the Truth do not “strive nor cry, neither is their voice heard in the street.” They are quiet, calm, glad. They have hold of the one thing that cannot fail.

They lean against the pillars of the universe.

The Infinite flows through them, and they smile at the contortions of the Finite.

Whoever is sure is undisturbed.

All fret, worry, apprehension, and morbidity arise from uncertainty. Those who fight are not quite sure.

Only those who are sure can afford to turn the other cheek.

Only the sure can afford to forgive their enemies.

Few reach the dizzy height of Jesus, who saw the Truth so clearly, and believed so utterly inits triumph, that He refused to struggle for it.

The most amazing thing about Him was His leisureliness.

So true it is that “he that believeth shall not make haste.”

Most of us have only caught up with Joshua; we are miles from Jesus.

We juggle His texts, but have no idea of His vast, calm spirit.

Let us find the Truth, even if it be only the Truth about wood, or metal, or mathematics, just any little piece of the Truth, and believe it, and adjust ourselves to it, and be happy; for out of Truth flows peace.

 

Jefferson City vs. the Pandemic, 1918—II

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A look back at the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 might help us understand how the Coronavirus could run its course in 2020. There are some important things to remember, however. First, Jefferson City, a town of about 14,500 people, had one hospital, St. Mary’s, which was adequate under normal circumstances but faced the same issues today’s hospitals are facing. The other thing to remember is that in 1918 there were no vaccines available or on the horizon. Quinine, which gained popularity in the 1830s thanks largely to Arrow Rock Dr. John Sappington, was tried as a medicine in 1918 but showed no indication that it helped.

In many cases, what happened then is happening now. But in many other ways, today’s conditions, cures, and treatments are a far cry from what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents faced.

In recounting these sad and tragic days in 2020’s nervous and uncertain days, we hope we are not leaving the impression that the Coronavirus will have the same course or the same deadly results. Although health officials are struggling to find a cure, medical care is more than a century advanced from the days of the Spanish influenza. It is obvious now that it is likely to be with us for a while and we are likely to lose some people. But we are better prepared today because we know what happened long ago.

It was a bittersweet time. The Great War was ending about the time the Spanish Influenza was at its peak.

A new concern entered Jefferson City discussions in mid-November, 1918 when the National Tuberculosis Association voiced fears the flu epidemic could lead to substantial increases in tuberculosis, perhaps as much as ten percent for the next two years. The NTA said the influenza “weakens a person’s physical vitality and lowers a person’s resistance to the disease.”

The first case of the flu in the penitentiary led to an immediate quarantine reported by the local press on November 17. The first inmate death was reported.

When Mrs. Will Ruprecht died November 20th, the funeral at her home was private “on account of influenza restrictions.”   Home funerals were common in those days before Jefferson City had its first funeral home.

Thirty-nine new cases in two days in the city was considered a “slight falling off” from the previous week but there had been four deaths in the last four days.

The State Board of Health sent around word on November 21 that it would be okay for cities to remove the “more or less drastic measures” intended to limit the disease’s spread. The next day the city had 25 new cases of the influenza.

The day the controls were lifted in Jefferson City, a two year old boy died. The next day, “a beautiful young life went out” when a popular 24-year old woman “just budding into sweet womanhood” died at her home. Robert F. Mueller, “an excellent harness maker,” died the next day and police posted ten more placards on the doors of home signifying they were quarantined. The week ending November 22 saw 173 new cases. The next week the total dropped to 109. People were dying daily and the Federal Public Health Service reported the number of cases nationally was approaching 350,000. The Missouri Capitol was fumigated a second time.

It was December now, likely the longest six weeks in city history.

Community Nurse Ruth Porter, now recovered from her bout with the flu, said her case load had was double what it was in October. Fortunately, the Council of Clubs had bought a car for her to use in her home visits. She had 34 people under her care as of December 13.

The State Prison Board reluctantly admitted more than 100 flu cases behind the walls. State Health Board Secretary George H. Jones reported the state’s October death total of 3,145 represented half of all deaths in Missouri.

The Red Cross was looking for a building that could accommodate patients when St. Mary’s Hospital couldn’t handle any more. The hospital’s own annex became the spill-over building, capable of holding 25 additional patients.

“I am astounded at the death rate of this epidemic,” said the former Assistant State Highway Engineer J. P. Davis, an experienced sanitary engineer who believed in disinfectants. He suggested all of the back yards in town be cleaned up and disinfected. He also suggested the city use a flushing tank filled with a germicide “rather than men with brooms” to clean the streets.

The penitentiary got a gallon of pneumonia serum from the Mayo Sanitarium in Rochester, Minnesota, and quickly inoculated all of the convicts. It was too late for seven of them. Three days later the total was 13 inmate deaths.

But there seemed to be a glimmer of good news when the city’s doctors reported new cases were down fifty percent although the death of Oscar Walther at St. Mary’s Hospital put the city death total into the thirties.

The Daily Capital News asked, “Isn’t it time the state of Missouri was giving some attention to the health of its citizens? It is a sad commentary upon our humanity that we give more thought and spend more money on the health of hogs and cattle than we do upon men and women. The Board of Health has no power to do anything and no money to do anything with.” It was a valid point, but a state health department was not created until a new constitution was adopted almost thirty years later.

Four days before Christmas, the prison announced the deaths of three more inmates raised the total dead there to 22. A study of the fatalities showed 17 of those inmates had been in the prison for less than a year. The penitentiary blamed local jails because, “Many of the prisoners come to the penitentiary run-down physically and are in no condition to have the influenza.” The seriousness of the situation in the prison became apparent with the prison doctor’s end-of-the year report. The prison hospital usually had 20-30 admissions a month and a total of only 32 in October and November. In December it was 459. The final death toll was 26 inmates from pneumonia resulting from the flu.

An important sign that the flu was abating came when the school board decided to reopen schools on December 31. They’d been closed since October 10 and the school days would be lengthened by 45 minutes in an effort to catch up the students on their learning before graduation in late May.

St. Mary’s Hospital reported at the end of the year it had handled 154 flu cases. Forty-one patients had died during the year, “25 were brought in in a dying condition,” most likely influenza victims, many with flu-caused pneumonia.

By the end of January the city death toll was at least 34, fifteen of them people who died at home, plus the 26 prison inmates. Many other deaths were reported throughout the county.

On February 20, 1919, St. Mary’s Hospital caught fire. All 35 patients were removed safely, some taken to the top floor of the Governor’s Mansion and the rest housed in the 14-room vacant mansion of the late Jacob F. Moerschel a Jefferson City brewer who donated the land on which the hospital was built. The fourth floor of the hospital was destroyed, as was the roof, and the rest of the building was heavily damaged by water. A $75,000 fund-raising effort was started to rebuild the hospital, which served the city until 2014 when a new St. Mary’s opened.

The flu made a small comeback in March but by early June, Community Nurse Ruth Porter was reporting “General health conditions have never been half as good as they are now.”

Except—-

Tuberculosis cases resulting from the influenza epidemic were increasing in “staggering” proportions.

The city, the state, the nation survived the worst epidemic in American history up to that time in 1918-19. Most of the great-great-grandchildren of those who were victims of and survivors of the great Spanish flu epidemic will survive the Coronavirus epidemic in 2020. But we know from history that we might be facing a weeks-long struggle. Many will be sick. Some will die.

And then life will go on—as it did after the great pandemic of 1918-1919.

Dr. Crane on fearful times

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(Several years before President Franklin Roosevelt told Depression America, “The only thing we have to fear….is Fear itself,” Dr. Frank Crane had the same message in his nationally-syndicated newspaper column. In these fearful times of 2020, his message is renewed).

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST FEAR

The campaign against Fear is the greatest movement of the race. Fear is not bred of ignorance. It is the child of half-knowledge. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” What we don’t know at all we are not afraid of; as a sheep is happy, ignorant of the slaughter-house.

What we half-know scares us. Men used to be afraid of electricity, seeing it only in lightning; now they know it, and the motor-man whistles as he regulates the power of ten thunderstorms.

All along, humanity has been walking up to bugaboos and finding out they were absurd.

Stranger! Men have thought fear helped morality. They tortured, imprisoned, killed, to cure criminals. They beat children. They burned heretics. Gradually they saw their folly. They are learning that crime is essentially fear, the fear of the consequences of doing right, and that you cannot put out fire with kerosene; that is, you cannot cure the fear of doing right by the fear of punishment.

The Romans build a temple to Fear. Fear has played a malign part in the history of religion. The most amazing creation of the human imagination is hell.

There are still those who are afraid to walk under a ladder, to carry a spade through the house, and to start on a journey on a Friday.

Business once was based on fear. Men thought the only way to get work done was by slaves, and by keeping them frightened. The capitalist and the laborer still appeal to fear. But little by little, the futility of it all is appearing.

Employers and employed are learning to appeal to the free co-operation of beach other.

When men half-know gods they trembled at them. Timor fecit deos—fear made the gods. The race today fears and dreads God less because we are nearer Him than in the past.

Jefferson City vs. the Pandemic, 1918—I

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We are facing weeks of uncertainty, nobody knows how many, as we are stalked by a dark shadow that threatens to envelop us with the scariest health challenge in more than a century. We are taking the Coronavirus seriously because our ancestors throughout the world were devastated by a virus known as the “Spanish Influenza”—-although it didn’t start in Spain—and the terrible outcome has remained a specter within our culture. Now it is here and many find themselves trying not to think of their mortality.

The 1918-18 influenza epidemic might have started right next door to us. In Kansas, not Spain. Its first major flare-up was at Camp Funston, a World War One training camp at Fort Riley, Kansas. In March, 1918, five-hundred soldiers got sick. The outbreak quickly waned, perhaps because many of the Funston soldiers headed to Europe after war was declared in April.

The flu spread from there throughout the world, mutated, and eventually came back to the States.

By the time it had run its course, the worldwide death total was at least 50-million people, maybe 100-million. In this country, 670,000 deaths were attributed to it, more than the combined death counts in both world wars, Korea and Vietnam.   Missouri’s total was 12,250.   To put that in some context, the population of Jefferson City at the time was a little less than 14,500.

In those days there were two primary information sources: the newspapers and the telephone. The newspapers brought our ancestors news about the slow course of the disaster. The speculation (“analysis” if you will) of the day was two people on the telephone talking to one another.

Missouri had no cases of Spanish Influenza when St. Louis Health Commissioner Max Starkloff issued three “don’ts” to fight the spread of the disease “if it reaches here.”

—Don’t cough or sneeze unless your mouth is protected by a handkerchief.                                 —Don’t, if you can avoid it, sleep in the same room with another person if you have influenza.   —Don’t fail to call a doctor when the first symptoms are felt.

Less than three weeks later, on October 8, the Jefferson City Daily Capital News reported the Secretary of the State Council of Defense, Frank Robinson, had been sent to the “quarantine hospital” suffering from apparent Spanish Influenza. “Local physicians are not alarmed over the prospect in any way, but they are ready to take all precautions necessary,” aid the paper.

The very next day the newspaper reported the city had fifteen cases of the flu. The mayor called a meeting of physicians, ministers, and heads of the city schools to decide if schools, churches, and theatres should be closed. The state prison was under quarantine.

On October 10, the schools were closed, churches cancelled services indefinitely, students at Lincoln Institute were forbidden to leave the campus, gatherings of more than fifteen people were prohibited, and streets were to be flushed each morning. “These precautions are deemed sufficient to prevent the spread of the influenza epidemic in the city,” said the newspaper.

The next day city had “no fewer than 50 cases.” By October 15th, there were 65 and former Madison Hotel clerk Raymond Smith had become the city’s first fatality. Among the newly-infected people: City Physician, Dr. Edward Mansur, who was in bed with a “mild form.”

The next day, another man died, Missouri Pacific engineer Charles Alcorn, whose flu degenerated into a fatal pneumonia.

On October 17th, the city had 150 cases and a day later the number topped 185. The city already had a serious shortage of nurses and by the 22nd, Community Nurse Ruth Porter had taken to her bed with the flu.

Churches were allowed to have services for the first time in two weeks but the theatres remained closed. So were schools.

Forty-two new cases were recorded October 23-26. Dr. Mansur was able to visit some ill folks that day but was back in bed the next day. The number of cases passed 300 by the end of October.

About a dozen people had died by November 14 when the newspaper published a large public notice on the front page citing “Unusual measures” that were to be taken to “remove the influenza from our city.” Some of them sound familiar today. Others tell us about some of the sanitation issues of the day:

—Spend a lot of time out of doors but away from crowds.

—Open doors and windows of your homes, especially in the bedrooms, for a few hours each day and clean out dirty corners.

—If anyone in your home has had a cold or even felt bad fumigate their bedrooms at least if not the entire house. Fumigation can be done by anyone in three or four hours with Sulphur or formaldehyde candles which can be purchased at any drug store at small cost.

—It is the duty as well as a law that every contagious disease be reported to the City Physician for the protection of yourself as well as your neighbor.

—Business houses are urged to at least fumigate their stores one night this week. Formaldehyde is inexpensive and harmless, also there is no fire hazard. Those businesses serving other than alcoholic beverages must wash glasses and china used by patrons in hot water and with soap. Saloons must wash glasses used by patrons more thoroughly than usual. Water basins used for the washing must be emptied and refilled at least four times a day. And care must be exercised to keep large numbers of people from gathering in those businesses. Even small groups must be made to spread out. Any business allowing more than 15 people to assemble or enter the place at one time could be closed.

—All business places must have prominent signs asking people not to cough or sneeze in their places. Such signs will cause people to cough or sneeze into their handkerchief.

—Factory superintendents must take the temperature of all employees at least once a day and anyone who is 99 or more must be sent home and not allowed to return until he has a doctor’s certification that he is not affected with a contagious disease, particularly the flu. Each factory must be fumigated at least once a week.

The city board of health agreed a couple of days later to delay any closings for four days. If, on November 22, “there is not a decreased number of influenza cases reported daily in the city, the businesses houses will be closing tight for four days in an effort to stamp out the disease.”

The Miller and Weiss Pool Hall on Madison Street was closed for a week after a policeman found thirty-one people inside.

But people kept getting sick. And people kept dying. The Capital City—as well as all of Missouri and the nation—was fighting a plague with no medicine that could stop it.

We’ll have more next week.

 

Dr. Crane prays for doctors, and for us

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(If the forecasts are true, doctors are going to be coming under incredible pressure. And so will the rest of us, healthy or sick. Although Dr. Frank Crane wrote this prayer for doctors, the medical kind, it seems adaptable to a lot of other people these days, with only a few changes.)

THE PRAYER OF THE PHYSICIAN

O God, I pray that I may have absolute intellectual honesty. Let others fumble, shuffle, and evade, but let me, the physician, cleave to the clean truth, assume no knowledge I have not and claim no skill I do not possess.

Cleanse me from all credulities, all fatuous enthusiasms, all stubbornness, vanities, egotism, prejudices, and whatever else may clog the sound process of my mind. These be dirt; make my personality as aseptic as my instruments.

Give me heart, but let my feelings be such as shall come over me as an investment of power, to make my thoughts clear and cold as stars, and my hand skillful—strong as steel.

Deliver me from professionalism, so that I may be always human, and thus minister to sickly minds as well as to ailing bodies.

Give me a constant realization of my responsibility. People believe in me. Into my hands they lay their lives. Let me, of all men, be sober and walk in the far of eternal justice. Let no culpable ignorance of mine, no neglect nor love of ease, spoil the worth of my high calling.

Make my discretion strong as religion, that the necessary secrets of souls confided in me may be as it told to the priests.

Give me the joy of healing. I know how far short I am of being a good man; but make me a good doctor.

Give me that love and eagerness and pride in my work without which the practice of my profession will be fatal to me and to them under my care.

Give me a due and decent self-esteem, that I may regard no man’s occupation higher than mine, envying not the king upon his throne so long as I am prime minister to the suffering.

Deliver me from playing at precedence, from the hankering for praise and prominence, from sensitiveness, and all like forms of toxic selfishness.

Give me money; not so little that I cannot have the leisure I need to put quality into my service; not so much that I shall grow fat in head and leaden in heart, and sell my sense of ministry for the flesh-pots of indulgence.

Give me courage, but hold me back from over-confidence.

Let me so discharge the duties of my office that I shall not be ashamed to look any man or woman in the face, and that when at death I lay down my task I shall go to what judgment awaits me strong in the consciousness that I have done something toward alleviating the incurable tragedy of life.

Amen.

 

Quixote

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I have a friend who thinks efforts to convince the legislature to make the casino industry financially support saving the irreplaceable treasure that is the Steamboat Arabia Museum is equivalent to Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

Maybe it is.

But if you never tilt at windmills, the windmills always win.

The Senate Appropriations Committee last week took a look at two of this year’s bills legalizing casino wagering on sports. After listening to the testimony on similar bills during the last two sessions, I decided it’s time to change the narrative.

—-Because the entire focus so far has been on what the casino industry wants. What it wants the legislature to do is to ignore the state’s promises to fund some important state and local services and programs with taxes the casinos don’t want to pay.

This is what I told the committee in the limited time given for individual testimony (this, by the way, is not a complaint about that. Committees try to shoehorn their meetings between other hearings and floor sessions and time is precious. So they try to make sure everybody gets to speak who wants to speak):

I am Bob Priddy, a resident of Jefferson City. A year ago when I was talking with most of you about a proposal to have casino admission fees increased by a dollar to finance construction of a National Steamboat Museum to house the artifacts from the steamboat Arabia when that museum closes in Kansas City in 2026, my research took me to a number of related issues. Sports wagering is one.

I do not oppose casinos, nor do I oppose sports wagering. I do not oppose the casinos making a lot of money. But I am concerned by the steps the industry takes to keep it. These bills are prime examples.

There is not one word in either of the sports wagering bills you have heard this morning that protects the state’s interests in casino gambling.

Taxes on adjusted gross receipts—21 percent—produce revenue for education.

Two-dollar admission fees paid to the state are split with one dollar going to home dock communities and the other dollar going to the Missouri Gaming Commission and a series of programs it administers for veterans homes and cemeteries, college scholarships, and help for those addicted to gambling.

The bills protect the interests of five corporations that operate thirteen businesses, to the detriment of services that are supposed to be supported by casino taxes.

During some House Interim Committee meetings looking at sports gambling and other casino issues last fall, witness Chris Krafcik of Eilers and Krejcik, a research and consulting firm in Irvine, California, suggested casino income from sports wagering would be 289-million dollars at maturity. The industry’s own numbers show that’s more revenue than was produced from ALL table games in the last fiscal year.

But these bills would tax those sizeable new revenues at less than one-half to less than one-third of the rate of tax on the table games. One of the tax rates would the lowest in the nation.

The result? A significantly lower contribution to education funding from this new form of gaming.

In other hearings the proponents have suggested lower taxes because the house advantage in sports wagering is “only” five percent. But a 2015 study from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research indicates a house advantage of five percent is actually pretty high, not very low.

Proponents also have said sports wagering would bring more people to casinos although I have not heard any specific forecasts. Attendance at our casinos has been dropping since fiscal 2010-11 and it’s down another three percent so far this fiscal year. State admission fee income is at its lowest in more than two decades. It will take a whole lot of people drawn to casinos to bet on sports to offset those ongoing losses.

At a conference last year, industry analysts suggested that within five to ten years, 90 percent of sports wagering would be done remotely. Only ten percent would be done in person in casinos—and they did not suggest how much of that ten percent would be people already in the casino who visit the sports book.

Either way, having only ten percent of the sports bettors in the casinos won’t do much to improve on-site wagering.  

And it certainly won’t do much for the state’s income from admission fees.

Again, the bill seems to abundantly protect and enhance the interests of the casinos but do nothing or next to nothing for the state’s interests.

And I have not addressed how the two-dollar admission fee, established in 1993, is enriching the industry while producing a negative economic impact on state services the fee is supposed to support—and how within five years the casinos are likely to make more from admission fees than they pay to the state.

Point Two: This is not just a sports gambling bill.

It is the first major move to a 21st century gambling industry. But state law and regulations remain creations of the 20th century and their adequacy should be evaluated to protect the states’ interests.

This is the first proposal for remote gambling but more will come as casinos try to appeal to a new generation of people who don’t go to the casinos but will use the electronic devices they have grown up with to place bets. Casinos must attract that demographic to replace the older constituents who are dying off—and they’re not being replaced through the turnstiles by the television and internet generation.

The spread of remote wagering already is being planned by the industry that is developing new games that can be played remotely.  

These bills offer nothing to protect the state’s interests in these circumstances.  

In these two areas the legislation tilts the already-tilted table more in favor of casinos and farther away from the state’s interests in financing services with casino income.

As I understand these proposals—

Casinos want a new form of gambling that will produce big income gains but they don’t want sports wagering taxed the same way table games producing less revenue are taxed. The justifications for such lower tax rates in light of these numbers seems to make little sense, to me at least and I hope to you.

Whether this committee or the general assembly feels it appropriate to advance these proposals that have no protection for the state’s interest, or to put them aside until the economic scales can be brought more into balance is a decision for this committee. But I hope you will seriously consider these issues that have not been much, if any, part of the discussion until now.

I have prepared a lengthy memo that goes into greater detail—and includes citations for the statements I make—that I will send to the chairman later today after I have added a few tweaks based on this morning’s testimony. I know how busy legislators are at this stage of a session but I hope you will dig into that material for more details on what I’ve been saying and seriously consider whether these proposals are in the best interests of six million Missourians or just in the best interests of five corporations and thirteen businesses.

Will the committee take any of these words to heart in a campaign year when the interests pushing these bills have a lot of influence? Will the state’s interests be protected by those elected to serve in a building where the state motto is carved over the main entrance: “Let the Welfare of the People be the Supreme Law?”

Dr. Crane of truth and lying

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We thought we had posted this entry last week but we must have been more befuddled than usual.

(The cynical observation that “you can tell when a politician is lying; his lips move” is easy to make in these times but it also is unfair to the large majority of people we elect to serve us. After decades of watching our political processes, your observer likes to think good people are elected to work in a badly-flawed system where they find their principles challenged daily. Make no mistake: there are liars abroad which is why we have extensive fact-checking after each presidential debate or presidential rally, news availability, or statement. It is comforting to think, no matter how realistic such thoughts are, that the more honest person will emerge victorious. The real world doesn’t always work that way but we cannot abandon hope. Here’s Dr. Crane on

THE TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Listen, young man! The cleverest man in the world is the man that tells the truth, and tells it all the time, not occasionally.

Sometimes you can profit by a lie, but it is like dodging bullets; you never know when you are going to get hurt.

Lying is a game. Sometimes it is a very exciting game. But it is essentially gambling. And gambling, any sort of gambling, is not business.

The fundamental laws of business are just as accurate and as well established as the principles of geometry.

It is hard to see this, for our visual range is limited. Most us can see the crooked dollar coming today, but not the ten straight dollars it is going to lose us tomorrow.

Real business success is cumulative. It grows like a snowball. And the one thing that makes it keeps us growing, even while we sleep, is our persistent truthfulness and dependableness.

If you put an advertisement in the paper announcing goods worth five dollars for sale at two dollars, and if the people come and buy, and find out the stuff is not worth ten cents, you may make a one day’s gain, but you have alienated a lot of indignant customers and have started to saw away the posts that sustain your reputation.

If you have a store rented for a week only and propose to conduct a sacrifice sale of goods that will make everybody disgusted who buys then, then perhaps you may lie with a high hand and stretched-out arm.

But if you are in the town to stay, and want regular, returning, increasing, satisfied and friendly customers, it will pay you to stick to the old-fashioned truth.

Exaggeration is lying. It does not take long for the people in the community to get the habit of discounting twenty-five percent of all you say.

If you continually overstate and vociferate you must keep on getting louder, until you soon become incoherent.

But if you habitually state only what is soberly, honestly true, by and by everything you say will be away above par.

A man’s repute for truthfulness is as much a part of his capital as are his store and stock; so much so that he can raise money on it.

As civilization progresses, business becomes more and more an affair of credit, of trust. The very foundation of big business is trustworthiness. Therefore if you are ever going to get beyond the peanut-stand and push-cart stage of merchandise you must establish a basis of dependableness.

There is not one thing in this world, young man, that can be of as much value to you as building up a reputation such that men will say, “your word is as good as your bond.”

It is well to be clever and keen and Johnny-on-the-spot, it is well to look out for number one and to know a good bargain, but best of all is to have the world say of you:

“Whatever that man says can absolutely be relied upon.”

Worthless Tuesday

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Missouri was unworthy of playing presidential primary politics with the fourteen states and one territory that held primary elections yesterday. The big folks who run the national political parties have dismissed us from most important single day of the pre-convention process.

Missouri will have more delegates at the Democratic National Convention (78) than nine of the states in the primary. It will have more delegates at the Republican National Convention (54) than TEN of the Super Tuesday states.

But Missouri isn’t important is this process. The whole Super Tuesday thing leaves a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people. It is, of course, better than having fifty different primaries with fifty different stages full of debate contestants and who knows how many town hall forums before each election. But Super Tuesdays can take a lot of the wind out of political balloons by establishing reasonably clear front runners and start undermining what little interest there is in the national conventions four or five months before they’re held.

The aggravating thing, however, is that we have three times more Democratic delegates than Arkansas, and Maine, almost five times more than Vermont, almost a dozen more than Colorado, three more than Minnesota, fourteen more than Tennessee. We more than double the number of Republican delegates from Maine, triple the number from Vermont, have a dozen-plus more than Arkansas, thirteen more than Massachusetts, fifteen more than Minnesota, eleven more than Oklahoma and 34 more than Utah. We even top Virginia by a half-dozen.

AMERICAN SAMOA with its six Democratic delegates was part of Super Tuesday!

We remember—it must have been 2012—when Missouri was kept out of Super Tuesday. We watched the Missouri Senate, in a state of great urinary agitation, rail against the idea, especially after being told that if our Republicans didn’t stay out of Super Tuesday, our delegates to the convention might as well stay at home because they wouldn’t be seated.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has a great idea. The hell with it. Forget about a presidential primary in Missouri. It means nothing. Delegates are picked in party caucuses anyway. He’s been talking about this sing last summer, at least, if not longer. A few days ago he told the House Budget Committee his office can find something far better to spent $9.1 million dollars on than an election that brings no campaigning candidates to the state and isn’t binding.

Good idea.

We normally highly object to any move that takes votes away from people (term limits, for example). But the Missouri Presidential Primary began in 1988 when Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt had dreams of greatness. He won the Iowa caucus, the Missouri Democratic Primary and the primary in South Dakota. He finished fifth in a field of six major candidates overall and was gone within weeks..

Does anybody remember how our presidential primary turned out in 2016?   Hillary beat Bernie by 0.24 of a percentage point. Donald Trump beat Ted Cruz by 0.21 of a percentage point.

Anybody remember any significant candidate appearances in Missouri during this election cycle? Out of Tuesday, out of mind.

It’s time to kill this useless exercise. Jay Ashcroft has it right. And he has a much better way to spend $9.1 million bucks.

It’s formally known as a presidential preference primary. Our primary preference is to quit wasting money on it.