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.
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:
“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….”
“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.”
“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.
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?
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.)
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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.
One in ten people living in Missouri in 1860 was a slave. A total of 24,302 slaveholders owned 114, 931 slaves. Thirteen percent of Missouri families had at least one slave. The division within the state on the issue of slavery played out in different ways. The situation was serious enough that national news correspondents came here to witness it.
A seeming innocent request by a church congregation to borrow the Senate Chamber for a few hours turned into an example of the conflict within Missouri and among Missourians as the nation trembled at the precipice of a Civil War. It began because a church wanted to hold a tea party.
The Senate Journal for March 5, 1860 is the usual dry record of procedures. “On motion of Mr. Scott;
Resolved, That the use of the Senate Chamber be granted to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday evening, the 13th inst., for the purpose of giving a tea party for the benefit of the church.” The motion was approved with only two or three barely audible “no” votes.
But some people started thinking about that resolution overnight and the next morning “Mr. Thompson moved reconsideration of the vote granting the use of the Senate Chamber to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday, the 13th inst; Which motion was decided in the affirmative…”
A correspondent for the New York Tribune watched what the journal does not record:
This morning, Senator Thompson of Clay moved a reconsideration on the ground that the Methodist Episcopal Church is Anti-Slavery, and an enemy to “the institutions” of the state. This brought out Senator Scott, in one of the finest vindications of political and religious freedom it has been my fortune to listen to in the State. It is more valuable, coming as it did from a most decided advocate of Slavery. It is impossible to do it justice in a hasty sketch.
He said he hoped the resolution would not be reconsidered. He remembered no instance in which the chamber had been refused any other denomination. It was true the Methodist Episcopal Church was thoroughly Anti-Slavery. They had the constitutional right to be so, as much as he had to be Pro-Slavery. His right to be Pro-Slavery and theirs to be Anti-Slavery, had a common origin in the inalienable rights of man beyond the just control of human governments. He believed Slavery to be a moral, social and political blessing—best for the white man and best for the negro—and he was not afraid of Anti-Slavery sentiments or Anti-Slavery arguments in the churches or out of them. If Slavery was right, it would be maintained. There was no danger in error, when truth was left free to combat it. He asked for himself the common rights of a citizen, of a freeman, and was willing to grant them to all others. Was Slavery so weak that it must be maintained by proscription? by a violation of the constitutional rights of our citizens? The denial of freedom of thought and religion? If so it was time it was out of the State. He was not willing to make the admission, and was sorry that anybody else was. Proscription would defeat its own purposes. The freedom of thought and discussion could not be crushed out by it. The Christian Religion had reached us through the proscription of ages, standing the test of infidel oppression, and arguments supported by local tyrannies and temporal persecutions. The Reformation swept over Europe like a tornado, unappalled by the terrors of the Inquisition. Even Mormonism flourished as long as it was animated by the fires of proscription. Driven into the Wilderness, a desert state astonished the world at the base of the mountains. Another example was the proscription of the Catholics by the Know Nothings. The charge of proscription broke up the organization. Many who were in it were now proscribing the Methodists. Were the lessons of experience lost upon them? Would they never learn them? The Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the oldest and most numerous denominations in the country. Founded by the great Wesley, thoroughly Anti-Slavery, its discipline had undergone no change for three quarters of a century. It was now what it had been before the division of the Church, when its members from all parts of the Union worshipped at the same Anti-Slavery alter [sic]. He was willing that they should worship God as of yore, according to the dictates of their own consciences, unmolested by the hard hand of proscription. He believed them to be obedient to the Constitution and the law. If not, he did not doubt the power of the State to bring them to punishment. To exclude them from the Senate Chamber for their religious opinions, learned from Wesley, the founder of Methodism and steadily maintained through the long history of the Church, was indiscriminately granted to all other denominations, was an attempt in violation of the Constitution of the United States, to prohibit the free exercise of religion, and in violation of the Constitution of this State, a denial that all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; an attempt, by human authorities to control and interfere with the rights of conscience, and to give preference to sects and modes of worship. He was sorry that such a wrong should become by anybody, but not surprised that it should be asked in e name of Democracy, which had long since lost its original meaning, and become synonymous with despotism.
Senator Parsons, a determined advocate of Slavery, rose to reply. He is a great, big, stalwart, black-featured specimen of humanity, whose contour and manner irresistibly suggest “Border Ruffian.” There were some strange things in his speech. He astonished the Senate with the statement that, ‘Bishop Andrews “was driven out of the church because he wouldn’t sell a slave girl he had got by his wife to a stranger.” Whether the statement was intended to carry with it the idea that the Bishop inherited the slave girl was left to inference. But with or without inference it was a rare item of intelligence, and could only have been dug out of the voluminous church controversy by the most laborious and profound research. It has established the Senator’s character as a well-informed man, and hereafter his statements will be received with universal credence.
Senator Halliburton followed on the same side. He, too, had made a discovery. The Senate listened in breathlessness. The Senator read from a scrapbook he held in his hand the astounding intelligence the Methodist-Episcopal Church was Anti-Slavery. He seemed to have just discovered it in some concealed book of church history, and put it in his scrapbook, that the world might not lose it. Where in the world he got the information, whether in the Discipline, or whether he stumbled upon it in some profound research into church history, I do not know; but that he has it, and in a way that the world can never lose it, there can be no doubt. The fact is, I heard it myself, and the Church need no longer deny it. The Senator stoutly insisted the Anti-Slavery sentiments of the church were not religious, but political, and on that account, they ought to be excluded from the chamber.
Senator Scott said if this were so, it was nonetheless proscription. Under the Constitution and laws of the State, there were two modes of emancipation—one, to emancipate on compensation to the owners, as had been done in the West Indies; the other to amend the Constitution, and pass a gradual emancipation act. Anti-Slavery citizens had the same right to insist on the measure as he had to oppose them. It was simply a question of freedom of opinion and discussion, and he was sorry to see any advocate of Slavery to defend by proscription of any kind, religious or political. It was the worst possible defense for Slavery, and would do more to break it up than anything else.
The discussion shows the character of Slavery. It originated in wrong, and must be maintained in the same way. It cannot bear discussion, and hence, its advocates want to suppress it. I need hardly add that the resolution was reconsidered and laid on the table. This is the institution which the Constitution totes into the Territories under the Dred Scott decision; and if it cannot be toted out again, no Christian denomination can have a tea-party there without indorsing [sic] Slavery.
About three weeks later, the March 28 journal recorded:
“Mr. Goodlett offered the following resolution: Resolved, That Mr. Wm. E. Dunscomb, Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government, be and is hereby authorized to grant to the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the use of the Senate chamber on the evening of the 10th of April next, for a charitable purpose.” The Senate passed the resolution a few hours later.
The Methodist Episcopal Church South favored slavery.
The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist Churches split—the Presbyterians in 1838, the Methodist Episcopals in 1844, and the Baptists in 1845 with the Southern Baptist Convention being formed and later becoming the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
And who were these men whose actions in March of 1860 reflected the growing divide in our country?
Senator John Scott was from Buchanan County. He was elected to the Senate to replace Robert M. Stewart when Stewart was elected governor.
Senator James T.V. Thompson probably was one of the first 75 residents of Liberty. He was part of the Confederate Senate that met in Neosho and passed an act of secession. He called himself a “an old-fashioned states’ rights Jackson Democrat” who donated the ground on which William Jewell College was built.
Senator Wesley Halliburton moved to Randolph County from Tennessee in 1823. He helped write the state constitution of 1875, which lasted for seventy years until it was replaced by a constitution that his grandson, Senator Allen McReynolds, helped write. He was one of the incorporators of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railway Company, the only railroad that did not go bankrupt in the early days. His southern sympathies led to his arrest by federal troops at the start of the Civil War. He was one of the first men arrested in northeast Missouri and was imprisoned in Quincy, Illinois until he was ordered released. He founded the first newspaper in Milan.
Senator Mosby Monroe Parsons was a Jefferson City lawyer who commanded a Confederate brigade in Sterling Price’s army. He was among the rebels who refused to surrender at the war’s end and went to Mexico where he was among a half-dozen American Confederate soldiers killed by Mexican troops in August, 1865. His family home at 105 Jackson Street is one of the homes the city has taken over under a widespread eminent domain action so it can be made habitable again. It’s one of the city’s oldest homes.
Senator M. C. Goodlett, whose resolution allowing an event by the slavery supporting branch of the Methodist church, was a slave owning Warrensburg lawyer. He went south with Governor Jackson. On October 12, 1861, Goodlett introduced the bill in Missouri’s rebel senate to “dissolve” Missouri’s ties to the Union. He apparently moved to Nashville, Tennessee after the war where his wife became a co-founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Methodist Church, South returned to the fold in 1939 to form the Methodist Church although some congregations held out and formed the Southern Methodist Church. The main Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968, which is why you’re most likely to have a United Methodist Church in your town.
A church tea party that never was, was much more than the Senate Journal tells us. But the names recorded in that dry journal record come to life in a reporter’s observations and in the historical records that tell us something of what we were and who we were as the people as a terrible war was about to engulf our state.
Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged. A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean. There are limits. Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged. A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years. The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.
At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?” The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever. But the new law offers new opportunities for many.
We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.
Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term. Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust. But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.
Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.
We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature. He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001. Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison. We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.
At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.
One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”
Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”
A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.” Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.
But Griffin did have his contemporary critics. One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”
And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”
It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership. It got two new state prisons.
Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians. After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there. Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.
And that brings us to this: While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian. But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians. A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office. But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.
Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory. Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.
Bob Griffin was no saint. But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters? Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness? Ever.
Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:
“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”
I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.
For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to. But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.
I have become one of “them.”
No pay is involved. This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.
The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.
I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about. I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.
Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me. Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever, are represented in the halls of government. Old person? AARP has someone. Concerned about justice for yourself and others? The ACLU is there. Want good education in Missouri? Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in? Transportation interests have lobbyists.
Against something? There are lobbyists for that, too.
They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle. There is room in the hallway for the little guy. It’s kind of intimidating to be one. But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.
I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years. And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock. It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.
But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.
I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying. ARE THERE ethics in lobbying? Well, of course there are. The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.
It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists. And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.
A lobbyist shall:
Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.
As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult. Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic. Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations. Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.
I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue. I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ. I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views. Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.
Not that it matters to me, really. I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest. I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.
So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist. Didn’t want to. But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.
I have to file my first monthly expenditure report. Zero.
But I’m in trouble. I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.
Bob Priddy, Lobbyist. Never in my wildest dreams…..
Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.
If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.
It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.
A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there. If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource. Jefferson City is acting.
The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City. Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity. And a major challenge.
We should not underestimate that challenge. Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.
We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.
There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package. It also would finance construction of a new state museum building. Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.
This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.
This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol. The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.
You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.
If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war. We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity. If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.
A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal. There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum. We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.
We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state. We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.
This is an important point: We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds. We can do all of this without a general tax increase.
Our proposal is even more significant because—
It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856. It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.
Why are these boats so special? And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west. Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier. We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived.
From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air. The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.
The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty. Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.
The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.
The Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.
David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.
And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete. If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.
If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.
Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill? Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?
David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere. The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.
David is a dreamer. Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River. That history spanned 1820-1880. By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.
The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles. It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close. The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta.
We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.
The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.
2019-2026. It’s not much time.
Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal. It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.
Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed. But we, as a community, must help them. Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers. Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms. It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.
We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”
We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.
We must do this.
(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)
Some capitol graybeards are watching the developing investigation of suspicions that Attorney General Josh Hawley used public money to further his successful campaign to oust Senator Claire McCaskill. We’re watching because we remember when another young, charismatic Missouri Attorney General who seemed to be a Republican shooting star crashed and burned.
Can it happen again? Let’s just wait and see.
The fact that it’s another Republican statewide office holder who has triggered this investigation adds some heft to the issue. And Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s successful involvement of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, in the investigation because she has subpoena powers adds more.
Hawley proclaims innocence—just as Bill Webster did throughout the long federal investigation against him while he was successfully winning the Republican nomination for governor in 1992, beating State Treasurer Wendell Bailey and Secretary of State Roy Blunt in the primary.
Circumstances will show whether Hawley’s “innocence” is genuine or whether it’s as flimsy in the end as Webster’s often-claimed “innocence” was all those years ago.
Public officials under investigation are right to maintain their innocence for two reasons. First, our justice system operates on the proposition that all of us are innocent until proven guilty. Second, it’s important that those who supported the office holder with their money and their votes continue to believe that person is above the suspicion swirling around him or her. While confession might be good for the soul, it’s disastrous for the career. People have survived close scrutiny, even charges and trials, and gone on to useful political careers.
But here’s something about investigations of public officials. Once one gets started, there’s no telling where it’s going to go.
We told friends about a year ago that the suggestions of sexual impropriety against Eric Greitens were a she-said-he-said matter. But, we suggested, if a prosecutor stepped in, things were suddenly much more serious. And if a grand jury was convened, all of the cards would be wild and who knows where the story would go. The Greitens story escalated pretty rapidly and Greitens left office to keep things from becoming even more serious, particularly on issues not connected with the first suspicions, and before light was shined on his dark money supporters.
So it was with Bill Webster, son of a powerful state senator; some said he was more powerful than some governors although he was a Republican, which then was the minority party. Some analysts thought that Dick Webster, who lost a shot at the being attorney general in 1952 and a chance to run for governor four years later, groomed Bill to reach political levels the father never could. He provided a good part of the money for Bill’s campaigns for state representative in 1980 and ’82. And in 1984 the elder Webster called in a lot of political IOU’s from various special interests for Bill’s attorney general campaign account. Bill was elected to a second term in 1988. He had his eyes on the governorship in 1992 as a successor to John Ashcroft (Jay’s father).
But Dick Webster did not survive heart surgery in March of 1990. State Senator Gary Nodler, who took the elder Webster’s seat in the Missouri Senate, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years later that the death of the father made the son “more driven to succeed.”
The early news stories by investigative reporter Terry Ganey in the Post-Dispatch centered on the Second Injury Fund which compensated employees whose job-related injuries make an earlier health situation worse. The early suggestions were that a second-injury fund lawyer in the attorney general’s office also was collecting campaign money for Webster’s run for the governor nomination and that private lawyers hired by Webster were getting bigger judgments for their clients than non-Webster friends. Webster survived the primary election but his reputation took a hit when his former deputy attorney general and a resort developer who had bought some Webster property pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Voters took notice and made Webster a big loser in the race with Mel Carnahan in November.
The investigation shifted to Webster’s use of Attorney General employees and equipment for campaign purposes. A corruption charge was dropped against him in return for a guilty plea on two charges using state resources for political campaign purposes. Almost until the unavoidable end, Webster claimed his innocence. In fact the federal judge in his case, who ran a multiple-day sentencing hearing, gave Webster an hour at the end to consider whether he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea or whether he wanted to accept his sentence.
He went to prison for 21 months, getting out three months early for good conduct. When he got out, he went to work for Bartlett and Company, a Kansas City agribusiness firm. As far as we know, he’s still a Vice-President. Life didn’t take him where once he wanted to go, but he’s done well.
Today, one of his political descendants is being investigated for using public funds while attorney general to support his senatorial campaign.
Josh Hawley, young, charismatic, is seen by some as a shooting star in the Republican Party. He’s entitled to proclaim his innocence. It’s unfair to assume that he is another Bill Webster despite circumstances reminiscent of twenty-five years ago. He has his protectors who say the investigation is baseless and shouldn’t go forward, just as Webster had his protectors. He has his critics who say smoke equals fire, as Webster did.
Time will answer enough questions, one way or another, as it did in 1992 and ‘93. We can wait.
Almost eight years ago (has it really been eight years?) after the Joplin tornado we were curious about how it stacked up compared to other disastrous events in Missouri and we put together a list on the old Missourinet Blog that we knew was incomplete. We’ve found some other tragic events to add to that list and have decided it’s time for an update. In fact, the number of deaths from the Joplin tornado was a premature total so we’ve updated that. Some accounts vary in the number of deaths for some of these incidents and some are only estimated numbers.
It is difficult to pin down the exact number of deaths caused by heat waves throughout Missouri. The National Weather Service has extensive records of the heat but we haven’t been able to find comprehensive numbers of deaths for Missouri during heat waves. We’ve been able to find numbers for St. Louis in three of them but it’s quite likely the statewide totals were much higher. We’ve listed the fatalities in St. Louis to make note of the tragedies and will update the figures if we find better numbers.
Few deaths were recorded in the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes. The areas hit hardest were thinly-populated in those days and while records were kept of the violence of the shocks it appears no effort was made to compile a comprehensive death total.
Just for the record or a record of some kind, here’s the list of disasters that have taken twenty or more lives in Missouri.
4,317—St. Louis cholera epidemic, Summer, 1849 (Some accounts put the number closer to 6,000.)
4,000 plus—Kansas City and St. Louis Spanish Influenza 1918-1919
479—St. Louis only, Heat wave of 1936.
255–St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896
209-300 (est.) Steamboat Stonewall fire, Neely’s Landing, Cape Girardeau County, October 27, 1869 (accounts vary)
158–Joplin tornado May 22, 2011 (plus three “indirect” deaths)
118—St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896 (118 more in East St. Louis)
114–Hyatt Regency Hotel Skywalks collapse, Kansas City July 17, 1981
