Category Archives: education

The period

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Independence Day is upon us.  July 4th. We’re going to spend the whole long weekend celebrating July 4th. Not many people will thinking of “Independence Day,” though.

We think they should, especially at this time in our national history.

It is a day, or a weekend, to examine the most quoted—and greatly misunderstood—section of the Declaration of Independence. We misunderstand it because someone, apparently in the 1820s, inserted a period in a crucial sentence

Have you read the Declaration? All of it?   Have you read it SLOWLY enough to understand what it is about?  Even if you have read it, have you THOUGHT about it?

From numerous platforms in numerous towns someone will perform a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.  It will be more performance than reading, more ceremonial than meaningful.

Princeton Professor Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality is a line-by-line exploration of what the document means and how carefully-worded it was by its creators.  She argues that while Thomas Jefferson is considered the hero-author of the Declaration, he was only one of dozens who molded it into the living document it should be today—rather than the misunderstood symbol it is in the minds of many people.

She points to the best-known (and, she maintains, misunderstood) sentence. The National Archives, which has the original engrossed document, transcribes it this way on its webpage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Allen argues that the insertion of a period after “pursuit of Happiness” is wrong and has led generations of readers to misunderstand the intent the authors intended.

How does she know the period doesn’t belong? “Jefferson’s first draft did not have this period, nor did any of the copies that he and Adams produced…In every draft that Jefferson copied out and in the draft that Adams copied out, each of the five truths is separated equally from the others with the same punctuation mark. The manuscript in the ‘corrected’ journal, as Congress’s official record of its work was called, does not have the period. Nor does the Dunlap broadside, the first printed text of the Declaration…Those who etched these phrases on the Jefferson monument also did so without a period. All agree: this well-formed syllogism is a single sentence.”

She asserts the period makes the Declaration a celebration of individual rights. But she contends the drafters intended the phrase “to lead us directly, and without interruption, in this single sentence through ‘consent of the Governed,’ and to the phrase ‘most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’  The sentence laying out the self-evident truths leads us from the individual to the community—from our separate and equal rights to what we can achieve only together.”

Or, as she puts it earlier in her book, “All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights (and) all people have a right to a properly constituted government.”

Harvard Public Policy Professor Robert D. Putnam addresses that question in his new book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and how WE Can Do It Again.  He looks back to the assessment of our still-young country by Alexis deToqueville who studied democracy in America in the 1830s and, as Putnam puts it, “Rightly noted, in order for the American experiment to succeed, personal liberty must be fiercely protected, but also carefully balanced with a commitment to the common good. Individuals’ freedom to pursue their own interests holds great promise, but relentlessly exercising that freedom at the expense of others has the power to unravel the very foundations of the society that guarantees it.”

His study looks at times when this country “experienced a storm of unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics, and our economics, and it produced then, as it has today, a national situation that few Americans found appealing.”

But, he says, “We successfully weathered that storm once, and we can do it again.”

Putnam argues that The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, a time when individual liberties were placed above the common good, gave way to the Progressive Era of the early to mid-20th Century in which the common miseries and challenges of The Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights movement made us a nation seeking a mutual good, a nation in which “we” confronted and reconciled individual liberties and universal freedoms.. But since then we have retreated to an “I” period, when the idea of achieving liberty as a community has given way to another period of “unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics and our economics.”

On this Independence Day weekend, let’s read the Declaration—slowly—and without that period and understand that ALL of us have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But with rights come responsibilities.  And it is the responsibility of ALL of us to make sure that “a properly constituted government” is in place to secure those rights.

—rights that belong to all of US.

As Professor Allen notes, “If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.”

—and lessens the chances for all of us to enjoy our shared desires for  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Patriots

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The time between the first Juneteenth National Independence Day and the traditional Independence Day on July 4th provides an opportunity to think about patriots and patriotism. It’s an important discussion to be having this year, as we approach the six-month anniversary of the attack on the national Capitol by many people who think they are patriots.

Their definition of patriotism is repugnant, we hope, to the huge majority of Americans.  We shall not explore that matter specifically today.

Instead, we are going to turn to a study announced the other day by WalletHub, a personal finance website that attracts attention to itself with surveys of public attitudes on this and that. It’s a good gimmick because Americans love two things in particular: surveys and lists.  And WalletHub provides them.

The self-serving nature of the surveys aside, they do often provide food for thought.  So it is with the recent one that ranks Missouri in the top 20 most patriotic states, thanks largely to a number 1 ranking in required civic education.  Otherwise we’re about where we are in so many ratings—middling.  That ranking for civic education boosts us to 18th.

The five most patriotic states according to the WalletHub system of rankings are Montana, Alaska, Maryland, Vermont, and New Hampshire.  The five least patriotic states in this survey are California, Michigan, Connecticut, Florida and New York.

One thing the survey does is debunk any feelings of superiority by Red States.  The survey shows there is little difference between them. The average rank of red, or Republican, states is 25.68.  The average rank of blue, or Democratic, state is 25.32.

It appears the red and blue states, however, are cumulatively much less patriotic than individual states.  Montana, number one, has a rating of 61.91.  New York, at number 50, has a rating of 21.64.  The cumulative ratings of red and blue states as blocs would rank them 49th among the individual states.

How do you measure patriotism?  Patriotism is an abstract term, a personal term, and trying to measure what is in one’s heart is difficult.  But WalletHub tries to use external factors.

While we are first in civic education requirements and 18th in the average number of military enlistees per 100,000 population, we are 23rd in percentage of voters who took part in the 2020 presidential election; 24th in percentage of veterans among adult citizens; 26th in Peace Corps volunteers per capita and volunteer hours per resident; 27th in volunteer rate and AmeriCorps volunteers per capita; 28th in active military personnel per 100,000 people.

WalletHub has a “panel of experts” that define patriotism apart from the statistics. It provided their comments in a news release accompanying the survey:

What are the characteristics of a good patriot? 
“Patriotism is about loyalty – an attachment to a particular place and/or way of life. A good patriot exhibits dedication to that way of life, sacrificing one’s private time and even resources to work on behalf of one’s community. The patriot, however, does not seek to impose that way of life upon others nor to blindly follow without questioning. Like any good relationship, a patriot is committed and generally trusting but also preserves the right to question and exercise healthy skepticism.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

“While some may argue that a good patriot is blindly loyal to their country, in fact, a key characteristic of the good patriot is the willingness to hold their country accountable in terms of living up to the high ideals it professes, or upon which it was founded.”
Sheila Croucher – Distinguished Professor, Miami University

Is there a link between socioeconomic class and level of patriotism?
“Studies suggest schools in places with higher socioeconomic characteristics engage in more critical approaches to history and civics than schools with lower socioeconomic characteristics. These schools are more likely to give students experiences in debate, dialogue, and critique—these concepts are important for healthy patriotism. On the other hand, studies also suggest military recruiters are more likely to seek students from schools in communities with lower socioeconomic characteristics. Having limited economic access to higher education, students in these communities are more likely to serve in the military.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
“There can be. When there are fewer economic resources in a community, there are often fewer chances to engage in community building as many individuals need to focus on meeting their basic needs, working long hours or multiple jobs, caretaking, and other commitments. Moreover, many areas experience civic deserts, areas where there are fewer opportunities to participate. In these communities, there are fewer organizations to join. This can happen due to depopulation or economic hardship.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

What measures should schools, and local authorities undertake in order to promote patriotism among citizens?
“I would love to see civic education become a larger priority around the country. Most American students learn the history of our founding, but citizenship requires more than historical knowledge: it requires a commitment to active participation in the community and politics (with voting as a minimum), and a willingness to work with fellow citizens to address our shared problems and to advance a common good, along with the media and information literacy to stay informed about one’s community and nation. Civic education requirements vary greatly from state to state, but few have gone far enough.”
Libby Newman – Associate Professor, Rider University
“The measures should come from individual citizens more than schools and authorities. Patriotism is a grass-roots concept. We need citizens to engage in dialogue with one another, work to experience and understand multiple perspectives, volunteer when the need arises—both military and civilian— and be continually committed to societal improvement. Schools and local authorities should be transparent in their work and take stewardship approaches to their responsibilities. Patriotism is taught through action as much as it is through the word.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University.

What makes you a patriot?  Or do you even consider yourself to be one?

What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism—and which poses the greater danger?

These two weeks between the Independence Days are time to weigh those questions.

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The Forty-Something State, Again, Still

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Let’s have a show of hands.

How many of you, when you think of people who have had the most influence on your lives put at least one teacher in your top ten?   I have at least three.

A lot of people in a lot of roles in our society do not deserve our praise; they deserve our awe.  As schools begin classes in whatever form, teachers join first responders of all stripes and health and mental health workers of all kinds, public safety employees, and men and women in uniform who “provide for the common defense” on the platform of heroes.

When it comes to recognizing all of these folks at the most basic level, however, we talk a good game but we don’t play a good game. We saw a recent survey by Business Insider that should bother all of us.  A lot.

Since then we’ve seen a report from the state auditor that buttresses what BI told us.

Business Insider is a German-owned website that focuses on business and economic issues.

The folks at BI have looked at figures from the U. S. Department of Education and the census bureau for the school year 2018-19, the most recent year for which data is available. It finds the average Missouri teacher was paid $50,064 that year.

The national average was $61,730.

Missouri ranked 44th.  The lowest-ranking went to Mississippi, which paid its teachers $45,574. West Virginia is 49th at $47,681.

The only thing that keeps Missouri from being West Virginia in the rankings is that our average teacher salary is a whole $46 a week more than the teachers there.

$46.

What’s worse is that when our average teacher salary is measured against inflation, our teachers have lost more than six percent of their purchasing power because of inflation in the last twenty years.

This isn’t news to our much-praised but barely-raised teachers.   But it should be disturbing to those who expect so much of them.

Spare me the excuse that you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.  The problem is the money. We need to throw $11,000 a year at our teachers just to get them to the national average.

This is a matter of recognizing the important role people play in building or maintaining our society. And in times like these when we are asking—and when some are DEMANDING—that these good people face the possibility that they are stepping into harm’s way every day they open their classroom door, recognizing how far below the national average they are in pay and doing nothing about it is demeaning.

Then when their school district doesn’t have enough money to provide their classrooms with enough basic things such as paper and pencils, we expect them to guy their own.

Now we have a virus threatening their well-being and the well-being of their students that has led to terrible cuts in state funding for education in this fiscal year. Legislation is being introduced in the General Assembly this year that will undermine state support for our schools and our teachers even more.

What is an appropriate salary for our teachers?  Don’t look to this otherwise all-knowing oracle for an answer.  We had two children in our house for about eighteen years. We can’t imagine having twenty or thirty children in one room for six or eight hours every day of the week—children who bring multitudinous health and personal issues with them from home.

We pat our hometown public servants on the head and tell them they’re doing good.  But we don’t appreciate them enough to pay them salaries that at least keeps up with inflation.

Such is the lot for anyone who sees public service—teachers, police and firemen, healthcare workers, sewage plant operators, government employees—you name it.  “What’s in it for them?” you might ask.  If you have to ask you’ll never understand the answer.

Sometimes being a low-tax state is nothing to brag about.

If you want to see how the states stack up in the teacher salary study, go to:

https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salary-in-every-state-2018-4#38-indiana-14

A month or so ago, State Auditor Nicole Galloway announced a study by her staff confirmed Missouri’s abysmal standing in education funding. She confirms Missouri ranks 49th in state support of elementary and secondary education. The report comes just two years after the auditor’s staff found more than two-thirds of local school districts have put increased financial burdens on local taxpayers in the last decade because the state (i.e., the governors and legislatures) budget for education has not kept pace with education’s costs.

We’ve cited before one of the favorite jokes of long-dead comedian Myron Cohen about the man who found a naked man in his wife’s closet one day and asked him, “What are you doing in there?’  And the man said, “Well, everybody has to be somewhere.”

Missouri is somewhere when it comes to funding for education, one of the things that is often spoken of as a key to the state’s economic health.  But Misouri’s “somewhere” in this case, as in so many others, is nothing to be proud of.

Who is an American?

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It’s time we reoriented the history of our country. Not rewrite it.  Reorient it—because most of it starts with the assumption that this country began with Protestant English religious-freedom pioneers establishing colonies on the east coast, thus history is told from East to West.

That is a questionable assumption at best, and some would say an excuse for a nation that talks about inclusion while its national culture has created barriers against it.

The great American writer Walt Whitman refused in 1883 to take part in Santa Fe’s observance of its founding because, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents and sort them, to unify them.  Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.”

American-born journalist and historian Carrie Gibson, who now lives in London, quotes Whitman in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. Unlike conventional histories, her book sees our national history from West to East.

Explorers and entrepreneurs from Catholic Spain were establishing settlements in this hemisphere a century before English Protestants started settling Jamestown and Plymouth as commercial ventures.

Gibson asserts that accepting the English-settlement version of our history is the root of some of our major social issues because it has led to categorizing people as lesser Americans. And she suggests part of the problem lies in our definition of “American.”

I am an English-German-French-Irish-Scottish-Canadian American. But none of that shows up on the census form I filled out last year.  A lot of other Americans were hyphen people in the census. African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans.  Asian-Americans. And others.

I have never self-identified with any hyphens. I don’t know a word of German. I had to take four semesters of French at the University of Missouri to pass three of them. I know no Gaelic languages. I don’t say “aboot” for “about,” or refer to my car’s trunk as the “boot.”

But we identify a lot of Americans with a hyphen and Gibson suggests none too gently that in hyphenating some Americans we are subtly saying, “not white,” and in doing so we are misunderstanding our history and, in effect, not recognizing one another as equals in citizenship.

Gibson was born in Ohio but moved to Dalton, Georgia as a child, just about the time many families from Mexico began moving in to work in the factories.  She soon realized “that if my surname were Garcia rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me” although she, too, was an immigrant—from the North rather than the South; she too was Catholic as were many immigrants coming to Dalton. Her grandmother, from Italy, never spoke English well and still had many relatives in another country. The difference, she perceived, was that she and her family were “European” immigrants and our culture, as Whitman wrote, lived with the image of being a second England—-instead of being American.

 

And what is “American?”  She suggests that many of us assume too much for ourselves and exclude others because we do not recognize the word.

It is convenient to we who call ourselves Americans to forget that the word derives from an explorer who never came to OUR shores.  Amerigo Vespucci explored what we now call South America. Our continents first show up as America, with any designation of separateness, on a map of the New World drawn by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a century before Jamestown and a century-plus before Plymouth.

She finds it presumptuous to forget that the word “American” applies to everybody from Canada to Cape Horn. But those of us from the United States like to thing WE are Americans. Everybody else from this hemisphere is somebody or something else. The most common phrase used for those coming from the south is “Hispanic” as though everybody speaks Spanish, which is another erroneous assumption.

She points to another big difference.  Gibson is two generations removed from her Italian grandmother. She is not identified as Italian-American, can’t speak Italian.  But she asks, “Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish?”  Many who don’t speak that language, however, are considered “Hispanic” no matter how many generations removed they are from their border-crossing ancestors.

That’s a nagging question.  How many generations have to pass before someone is no longer African-American.  If you’ve never spoken a word in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese languages, are you still Asian-American?

Gibson writes, “Like whiteness, being ‘American’ was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans.”

There probably are places where cultural identifications are useful—in determining, for example, what parts of our culture are not doing as well as others and what the reasons for that might be.

But hyphens create deep and unnecessary divisions in how we see each other.

Perhaps society will solve these problems with the passage of time.  But why should we wait for time to heal the wounds we continue to insist on inflicting on each other because we do not recognize that all of us are Americans, that our roots are not in northern Europe, but all of Europe? Or that many years ago, some who came here were Africans and others were Asians?

(For decades and decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence that the first people in our land came from Asia, thousands of years before anybody from England or other parts of northern Europe set foot in America. If we insist on identifying each other with hyphens, perhaps we should let descendants of the first peoples decide how the rest of us should be identified. Would the rest of us be satisfied with a designation that implies, “Not Asian?”)

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens says that mankind is nearing a tipping point driven by the third revolution that has shaped the history of Homo Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors gained the capability of abstract thought. Second was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors learned cultivation and food raising that led to longer lives and increased and diversified population.  He thinks we are living in the third, the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago. Harari theorizes we are headed toward a time when Homo Sapiens will be transformed into something different by science. Biological engineering, computing, and cyber development, he thinks, will lead to creation of “a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

It will be the death of the hyphen. And none too soon.

Do we need to wait for centuries to pass before all of the things we let divide us become irrelevant?  Do we need to listen to those who preach hatred of our fellow Americans or is it time to banish them to caves of their own ignorance where their bones might someday be discovered and puzzled over because of their narrowness?

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People’s Interests Being Dealt a Losing Hand

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Several bills have been introduced to legalize casino wagering on sports in Missouri this year.  Most are versions of bills that have failed to gain passage for the past three years.

None of the bills has a single word protecting the state’s interests in casino gambling.  Not a single word.

What are the state’s interests?

Funding for public schools.

Funding for various veterans’ services.

The National Guard

Funding of a college scholarship program.

Funding for a program to help people who become addicted to the casinos’ products.

Funding for the cities that are hosts for casinos.

The first hearing on one of the bills took place yesterday in a Senate Committee before which I raised this issue last year. In the year since, there has been time to dig deeper into this concern. And the concerns have become deeper.

Yesterday, I talked to the Senate Appropriations Committee about, first, the much-lower tax proposed for sports wagering adjusted gross receipts and, second, about the multi-million dollar damages that tax will cause to elementary and secondary education. Other concerns will be voiced as other bills are brought up for hearings.

None of these bills should be sent out for floor debate until they have been extensively revised to protect the state’s interests.

Please understand that these comments do not oppose casinos or sports wagering. But they do oppose the Missouri General Assembly being skillfully maneuvered into passing new gaming laws that degrade the state’s interests and the interests of the people of Missouri.

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After listening to three years of committee hearings on proposed sports wagering legislation, I am left with the impression that the proposals are being presented as if the issue is unique, separate from other forms of gambling and therefore should be treated as a special category.

It would be erroneous to accept that concept.

The creation of legalized sports wagering can be likened to the addition of a new kind of cheeseburger to the menu at McDonald’s. The biggest difference is that McDonald’s is not lobbying you to lower the sales tax on the cheeseburger while leaving it the same for all of its other products.

Sports wagering is just one more activity in which casino customers can take part. One more item on the gambling menu. But the menu also contains the same products it always has had. Separating one product from the other for taxation purposes makes no sense, whether is a sports bet or a cheeseburger.

This year’s proposed legislation makes it clear that sports wagering will not be done in some other building but will be done on the property of the casino, a phrase that bears scrutiny because it does not specifically say the activity will take place within the wagering area of the casino, a clear position for the state to take. Nonetheless, the assumption seems to be that bets will be accepted within the casino, processed within the casino, and—when necessary—paid within the casino—the same as with bets in all other forms of casino gambling.

Betting on sports is no different than betting on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice, or the circling of a little white ball.  You will hear me say it many times in these discussions: a bet is a bet is a bet. It’s done in the same facility; the money goes into the same bank account; the taxes are paid on both kinds of money—although the casinos want much less tax charged on proceeds from sports betting by calling for a much lower rate and then by re-defining AGR to make less money taxable by exempting things from the taxable amount in some of the bills.

The proposed legislation accepts that casino winnings on sports bets will be considered part of the casino adjusted gross receipts (AGR) and part of those receipts will be funneled to public education. But the industry claims some of those receipts are not equal to the others for taxation purposes. Once again, a bet is a bet is a bet. That’s the central issue.

Although I have not seen a federal or state income tax form filed by any of our casinos, I doubt that there is one line for taxable income and a second line for taxable sports wagering income on those forms. The federal tax on that income is the same regardless of the source of the income. There is no fair reason why the state tax on AGR should be different from the tax on AGR generated by other forms of gambling.

Sports wagering is NOT something apart from the rest of the casino operations in either space, processing of bets, or in accumulated casino income.

The casinos argued in an earlier hearing that the tax on adjusted gross receipts should be much less than the tax on other forms of gaming because the house advantage on sports wagering is “only five percent.”  That is true. But it’s not the whole truth.

The house advantage of sports wagering is more than the house advantage of several other games offered by the casinos. A study done for the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas indicates the house advantage is lower than five percent for some of the other gambling opportunities in casinos, yet the industry has never sought a lower tax rate on those games.

Because sports wagering is just another gambling opportunity within the casino, the income from which is part of the general profits of the business, there is no reason to grant sports wagering a preferred tax rate or a different definition of AGR than is used for other gambling activities—as is proposed in this year’s sports wagering bills.

Missouri has 28 years of history to support this argument.  For almost three decades the monthly financial reports of the State Gaming Commission have broken out revenues from table games from revenues from slot machines for each of our casinos. Table games contribute about 15% of the revenues; electronic gaming devices, as the category is called, contributes the other 85%.

For almost three decades, the casinos have had no problems with the revenues from those two sources combined into one AGR figure and taxed at 21%.  Now, however, the industry wants you to approve and new, and what is likely to be the second-most lucrative revenue stream, but they want the legislature to approve a far lower tax rate for it—a tax rate that will undermine support from the other two categories for elementary and secondary education.

I have been told that casinos say they cannot do sports wagering with a 21% tax on AGR.  That’s THEIR problem.  The legislature has a responsibility and that responsibility is not to solve the casino industry’s problems.  The legislature’s responsibility is to the people back home–the school teachers and children, the veterans, the college kids needing a state scholarship, the home dock citis.

If the casinos “can’t do sports wagering,” there still will be gambling on sports.  It just won’t be legal.  and the casinos won’t make any money from it.  That’s their choice.

DAMAGE TO ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

Various sports wagering legislation this year proposes tax rates on sports AGR of nine percent, 6.75 percent, 6.25 percent and 6.0 percent. (The particular bill heard yesterday proposes a nine percent rate)

The present tax on AGR from all other forms of gaming is 21 percent.  Ninety percent goes into a fund for elementary and secondary education. Ten percent goes to the home dock cities.

We can explain the problem with a fourth-grade-style arithmetic example.

Johnny’s mother wants to make some apple pies.  She gives him some money and tells him to guy ten apples. There will be enough to buy something for himself if wants it.

Johnny buys ten applies and, seeing plums also on sale, buys a plum to eat on the way home. At the checkout counter, he learns the apples cost $2.10, or 21-cents per apple.  His plum costs 6.75 cents.  The first ten items cost 21-cents each. The last one lowers the average cost of the eleven items to 19.7 cents each.

Using this example, the tax rates proposed for sports wagering could lower the average AGR tax to 19.91% (nine percent rate), 19.70% (the proposed 6.75% rate), and 19.66% (the proposed 6.25 rate, which would establish a new low rate in the nation), and 19.64% (the 6.0% rate proposed in a House bill).

In fiscal year 2018-19—the last full year before the pandemic significantly affected the casino business, the casinos reported to the Missouri Gaming Commission that $15,160,505,906 had been bet in their slot machines.  Table games produced “only” $1,255,959,366 for a total bet in our casinos of $16,416,465,272.  The slot machines had a payout rate of 90.3%.  Table games had a “hold” of 20.8%–meaning table games produced a 79.2% pay out.

The result was an AGR of $1,735,757,881, or 10.57% of the total amount bet and Missouri’s tax on the AGR amounted to 2.2% of all funds bet in slot machines or at gaming tables.

The math shows that a nine percent tax on AGR (the definition used for all other forms of gaming in Missouri) would cost elementary and secondary education about $17 million. The loss to schools would top $21.2 million at the lowest rate proposed.

I don’t know how many members of the General Assembly want to go home and tell their school superintendents they favor legislation that would pump tens of millions of dollars into casino profits while cutting state funding to education by $17-21 million with no realistic hopes of recovery. It will take a lot of PTA chili suppers to make up the difference.

All of this is based on numbers supplied to the Missouri Gaming Commission by the casino industry in Missouri.  We believe it shows the depth of loss the state will incur if the legislature passes these gaming bills without major rewriting.

The extensive homework behind these observations is below.

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All discussion of percentages and holds and payouts aside, here is what the current AGR tax rate produced in that fiscal year and how much the state would have lost if the tax rate were reduced.

21%       $364,509,155    Existing rate

9% (19.91) $345,589,394     Reduction of $18,919,761 ($17,027,785-$1,891,976)

6.75%  (19.7)  $341,944,303     Reduction of $22,564,852 ($20,308,367-$2,256,485)

6.25%  (19.66) $341,249,999     Reduction of $23,259,156 ($20,933,240-$2,325,916)

6.0%   (19.64)  $340,902,848  Reduction of $23,606,307 (21,245,676-2,360,631)

It might be argued that the increased AGR of sports wagering would have offset those losses.  How much betting would have been necessary to bring about that offset?

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $210 million to produce $18,900,000 at 9%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $336 million to produce $22,680,000 at 6.75%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $372 million to produce $23,251,000 at 6.25%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $ 394 million to produce $23.640,000 at 6.0%

Actually, the AGR increase would have had to be even more substantial because the sports wagering bills re-define AGR through a series of exemptions that would have lowered the amount of money that was taxable.

If, using the 2018-2019 fiscal year as the basis, we calculate how much more would have to be bet on sports to reclaim the lost funds, and understanding that AGR represents 11% of the total amount bet (we’ve rounded up the percent), then the amount bet on sports to recover the lost funds at the four tax rates advocated in this year’s bills would be:

9%—$2,079,000,000

6.75%—$3,326,400,000

6.25%—$3,682,800,000

6.0%—$3,374,938,195

And further, there would have been another loss occurring because of the lower tax rates because the schools and home dock cities would be losing income from the AGR if it had been  taxed at the present 21%.  For example:

$210,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $44.1-million.

$336,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $70.56 million.

$372,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $78.12 million.

$394,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $82.74 million

In other words, the schools and home dock cities, while waiting to collect $22,564,853 at 6.75% would have been foregoing $70.56 million that would have reached them at the current 21% rate.

The loss to elementary and secondary education and to the home dock cities, therefore would have been (approximately) $25.2 million, $48 million, $54.8 million, and $59.1 million.

Elementary and Secondary Education (and the home dock cities) will NEVER catch up.

The goal for the casinos in adding sports wagering is to INCREASE their AGR.  This study shows how much the DECREASE in elementary and secondary education and the home dock communities might have been if the average AGR tax had been lowered, that it would have taken hundreds of millions of dollars in wagering to REPLACE the funds lost by elementary and secondary education through the lowering of the average AGR tax rate, and the income loss while waiting to replace lost income through increased wagering would have been an even larger financial setback.

Casinos don’t seem to care about elementary and secondary education, veterans, college kids, problem gamblers, or even their home dock cities.  Somebody has to raise these issues. Perhaps you might ask your legislator about whether he favors passage of legislation that will undermine financing for all of these issues we’ll be raising in subsequent hearings.

I hope legislative committees don’t send any of these bills to the floors for debate without substantially rewriting them to protect the interests of the state.

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A good man, a statesman

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We usually are silent in this space on Tuesdays but today we must note the passing of former state legislator Wayne Goode.  His kind has been missing from our General Assembly far too long.  Wayne was from St. Louis and St. Louis County. He and John T. Russell (who died several years ago) served 42 years in the House and the Senate. Only Senator Michael Kinney, who represented St. Louis for 56 years served longer.

He died Saturday of leukemia. He was 83. He was one of the finest people I knew in four decades as a reporter at the Capitol.

Wayne is a prime exhibit in discussing the evils of term limits.  Last year, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis presented him with its highest honor, The Thomas Jefferson Award.  I was asked to talk about him.

Some people, it seems, are born for public service and if there ever was one of those people it is Wayne Goode. I will not even try to list all of the boards and commissions on which Wayne has served. 

Wayne always was one of the “white hats” in the general assembly.  In today’s sometimes irrational political world there would be critics who would say he was just a darling of the left wing fake news media, I suppose.  But they’d be wrong.

Wayne wasn’t very good at political rhetoric.  But he was great at common sense, sound reasoning, and persuasive credibility.  People listened when he talked. 

I remember him especially from his work in shaping state budgets.  Until he came along, the state budget was pretty much written by the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.  But Wayne got the job and decided that if there was a committee, the committee should do the work and state officials as well as common citizens should participate.  There were some folks in the Capitol who didn’t know what to make of that process at first, but the process is still used today. 

He co-sponsored a resolution to have Missouri ratify the Equal Rights Amendment….only to see the Speaker of the House and the Majority Floor leader introduce one, too…..The leadership resolution went to a committee where the chairman refused to hold a hearing and the Speaker refused to put the hammer down and get one…and the issue died that year.  After that, Phyllis Schlafly was in the way and the best chance of Missouri to ratify the ERA was lost.

His love of the outdoors led him to observe great damage was being done to it in the post-war industrial age…which led him to sponsor a hazardous waste bill that was the first major environmental cleanup legislation to pass.  We are grateful for that in our household because my wife, Nancy, worked for many years in the Department of Natural Resources Hazardous waste section.  I think she still has her big green boots in which she clomped around hazardous waste sites.  There is no truth to the rumor that the boots were black before she started clomping around.  

He got a bill passed that ended the legal dumping of hazardous wastes down wells. 

But one thing he could not stop was the construction of the Callaway Nuclear Plant.  I remember hearing Wayne and some other legislative colleagues protesting the plant’s construction.  Wayne and three other House colleagues proposed legislation that would have put some strict controls on nuclear plants. The issue made it to a statewide ballot. Union Electric outspent Wayne and Kay Drey and the legislators behind the bill by 3-million dollars to 100-thousand dollars; voters said no, big time, to the anti-plant proposal in 1984 and Callaway was built.  I saw an article a few years ago where Wayne admitted the plant was being operated about as well as a nuclear plant can be operated….although the industry still lacks a final solution to its nuclear waste problem.

It was his legislation, of course, that led to the creation of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, for which there is a statue of him on the campus. It’s a good statue. It captures Wayne fully engaged in straightening out a colleague on the bill Wayne holds in his hand. 

(Wayne, on the right, poses with sculptor Jay Hall Carpenter and Carpenter’s statue of Goode on the UMSL Campus. UMSL)

There is nothing angry about the debate that is portrayed in this statue. In fact, Wayne is enjoying himself.  There is a joy of earnest discussion. There is no animosity. No posturing. This is the Wayne Goode I remember.  It is an example of what collegial lawmaking should be. Unfortunately it also is a contrast to what too much of our lawmaking has become. 

University students will benefit for years to come because of the Senator Wayne Goode Scholars Program.  Goode Scholars, they’re called.  The recognitions are handled though the University’s Scholars and Fellowship program.  It’s a shame that the Wayne Good Scholars Program isn’t considered a fellowship…..because students happy to win one of those could be called Jolly Goode Fellows.

I saw Wayne in the pose frozen by that statue many times, never outwardly angry, never flustered, always knowing legislation better, sometimes, than the sponsors.  I never saw him try to slip something into a bill secretly.  I also never saw him stand still as long as he has since being cast in bronze. Wayne likes to be in motion—whether it’s hiking or riding a bike or going about doing—good(e).          

I was curious the other day and looked back at some of the people Wayne served with in the House and Senate. I dug out the Blue Book—the official state manual that has not always been blue. The list gives an idea of the eras that he spanned in his 42 years in the Missouri legislature.

When Wayne began serving in the House, Theodore McNeal was a State Senator from St. Louis, the first African-American state senator. The first African-American to serve in the House, Walthall Moore of St. Louis, served in the 1920s, BG (Before Goode)

Senator Michael Kinney was still there, the man who served 56 years in the Senate, the only man in the history of Missouri who served more years than Wayne in the legislature. Kinney had succeeded his brother who had died in 1912, toward the end of his second term.  So that part of St. Louis was represented by these two brothers for 64 years. Thomas was serving in the Senate when the Capitol burned in 1911 and Mike served in the temporary capitol while the present building was going up. 

The Kinney family, incidentally, apparently believed in naming children after Biblical figures…Michael and Thomas.  Thomas’ nickname also was Biblical—Snake. 

Here are some of the other people Wayne served with during his time in the House:

William C. Phelps, Melvin Carnahan, James Spainhower, James Conway, Harold Volkmer, John Buechner, Wendell Bailey, E. Thomas Coleman, Karen McCarthy, Alan Wheat, Betty Hearnes, Claire McCaskill, William Webster, Todd Akin, and Robert Holden.

In the Senate, he served alongside Patsy Danner, Roger Wilson, Jeremiah Nixon, William L. Clay Junior, Sam Graves, Joe Maxwell, Peter Kinder, and Steve Ehlmann. 

There were hundreds of others but the ones I’ve just mentioned have special distinctions.

Ten of these folks became members of the United States House of Representatives—Harold Volkmer,  Tom Coleman, Jack Buechner, Wendell Bailey, Karen McCarthy, Todd Akin, Alan Wheat, Pat Danner, William Lacy Clay, and Sam Graves. 

One, Claire McCaskill, became a U. S. Senator—after she had been state auditor.

There were four who became governors: Mel Carnahan, Jay Nixon, Roger Wilson, and Bob Holden.

Betty Hearnes was a first lady when Wayne showed up in Jefferson City and later became the only former First Lady to serve in the legislature.

Five of these names were Lieutenant Governor—Mel Carnahan, Fulltime Bill Phelps, Peter Kinder, Roger Wilson, and Joe Maxwell.

Three were state treasurers: Carnahan, Bob Holden, and Jim Spainhower.

Two served as Attorney General—Jay Nixon and Bill Webster.

James F. Conway became Mayor of St. Louis.

And Steve Ehlmann runs St. Charles County government. 

What I can’t figure out is why we are here tonight.

We’re honoring the guy who went nowhere—except to Jefferson City and back…and to Jefferson City and back….and to Jefferson and back…for 42 years.  

Wayne, you coulda been somebody!  

But for some reason, it’s you, a man of low ambition, that we’re honoring tonight..   

However, this stay-at-home, low-ambition guy is, I think, the only one of the 24 people I have just mentioned who has a statue of himself. That’s pretty special.  Not even James S. Rollins, who is considered the “father” of the whole University system has a statue.  A bust, but not a statue. 

Wayne served in a far different Senate and a far different House during his 42 years.  There were filibusters every now and then but they weren’t the self-serving filibusters that we see so much today.  Filibusters in Wayne’s time, were often funny, and often had a purpose of forcing two sides to find some middle ground that would let the Senate move ahead.  Today, in the days of supermajorities, filibusters aren’t funny; they’re often futile efforts by a weak minority; and quite often are not just ways to force two sides to work out a troublesome issue.  They’re unfunny and they’re boring. I know.  I was there for many of them and found laughter helped stay awake. 

A few weeks ago I asked some capitol staffers who remain from the Goode Old Days to share some thoughts about Wayne.  Most talked about how hard he worked—and in the process how hard he sometimes worked THEM.   One comment that I enjoyed was that Wayne was always careful with what he ate during legislative sessions.  I was told that he didn’t like potatoes…and often had rice with his meals.  

You might have noticed potatoes were not on our plates tonight.

I planned to bring Wayne a gift from Jefferson City tonight.  I suspect, Wayne, you’re not a fan of bumper stickers and it wouldn’t fit on your bicycle anyway. But I wanted you to have this bumper sticker that says “Eat More Rice. Potatoes Make Your Butt Big.”  But the one I have that I was going to give you is in a box that I have filed too far away.  Be watching for it in the mail, though.   

In his closing years in the General Assembly, Wayne was increasingly concerned about term limits and the loss of institutional memory that they would cause—among other concerns.  In the years since their adoption we have seen his fears of term limits—and similar fears voiced by many others who have served in the legislature—come true. 

I watched it happen from the House Press Gallery and from the press table on the Senate floor. I can tell you from personal experience all of the negatives we were warned about have come true…and there are darned few positives. 

There are three portraits that hang in the Senate Lounge at the state capitol.  One is Senator Kinney.  Another is Senator A. Clifford Jones who was from Ladue and was known for his humor, his tight-fistedness (he didn’t like spending money to redecorate his office, for example), and for not suffering fools gladly during debate.  The third is Senator Richard Webster, who was the last Republican Speaker of the House before Catherine Hanaway arrived, and who became one of the most powerful men in state government as the minority leader in the Senate.

I have suggested, always to deaf ears, that two more portraits should be in that Lounge—two men who served in the legislature together for 42 years.  One is a strong-conservative Republican from the city of Lebanon, in southwest Missouri, John T. Russell, and the other is Wayne Goode, a strong-liberal Democrat.   I don’t recall, as I mentioned earlier, ever hearing Wayne raise his voice. I heard him speak firmly at times, but I don’t remember that he ever showed a temper.  Russell was different.  He had a resonant voice and there were times—brief ones—when he could thunder.

The legislative session in the year that Republicans took control of the Senate, began with some vacancies, leaving Republicans and Democrat with the same numbers.   For a few weeks there were co-presidents pro tem, for example.  And for a short time, Wayne Goode—the dedicate liberal—was the co-chairman of the Senate appropriations committee with John T. Russell, the dedicated conservative.  

When Republicans won enough of the special elections to take the majority in the Senate, Russell became the stand-alone chairman.  But he and Wayne, as the ranking minority member, worked together on the state budget, respecting the experience and the knowledge and the shared legislative history that each brought to the process. 

To those of us who watched them, they represented the best that government can be.  Two men of widely-different political loyalties showed what statesmanship means.  We lost both of them at the same time because of term limits.  Both served the people in Jefferson City for 42 years—not just THEIR people, but THE people.  

In 1892, Maine Congressman Thomas B. Reed, who also served three terms as Speaker of the House, received a letter from a citizen who asked him, “What is a Statesman?”  Reed wrote back, “A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.”

Harry Truman embroidered that comment in 1958, after he’d been promoted back to private citizenship, as he liked to say, by saying, “A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”  

But both Thomas B. Reed and Harry S Truman were wrong.  Politicians can be statesmen in their lifetimes….and we have living proof with us tonight of the goodness that comes from that living statesmanship. 

Term limits robbed the legislature of the influence of people such as Wayne Goode.  Time now has robbed all of us of this good man.

Rights

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(The public discussion of public rights is all about us, whether in the streets, on the campaign trails, or in the halls of Congress and the chambers of our courts.  Dr. Frank Crane warns that false government turns people against each other as he ponders—)

“THE RIGHTS OF MAN”

A book that ought to be studied by every young American, a book from which extracts ought to be included in every reader used in our public schools, is Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.”

Because of his severe criticism of conventional religion, in his “Age of Reason” and other writings, Tom Paine’s name used to be among the bugaboos for children, for long held place in that dreaded and horrific trinity of “Infidels,” Voltaire, Paine, and Ingersoll.

But this was more due to the temper of his time than to the nature of his works; for what was bold and terrible in the age of the beginnings of free inquiry may now be heard from the most orthodox pulpits. I can assure the cautious reader, however, that in the “Rights of Man” religion is scarcely mentioned and not at all attacked. So much for the odium theologicum.

Paine’s “Rights of Man” was composed as a reply to Burke’s attack upon the principles of republicanism as manifested in the French Revolution.

It is a clear, masterful, and virtuous statement of the fundamental ideas of democracy; and this is what recommends it to us. Written about the time of the birth of the United States, and dedicate to George Washington, it is now, after a century of experiment, still one of the best compendiums of democracy to be found on the library shelf. It deserves a place among the dozen epoch-making books of the race. Like Kant’s “Pure Reason,” Rousseau’s “Emile,” and Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” it is a mile-stone in human development that marks a point of progress that never can be retraced. There are few volumes that contain so many sentences all men ought to know by heart.

The whole delusion of monarchy is pitilessly exposed; it is shown how militarism is monarchy’s  natural right hand; the fallacy of punishment and governing by terror, and the injustice of inheritance and the established rule of the living by the dead are riddled by his clear reasoning.

Speaking of punishments, he says: “Lay then the axe to the root and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments that corrupt mankind. It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror, instead of reason, is intended to operate, and it is on them it has its worst effect.  They afflict in turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practice.”

He thus incisively marks the differences between a monarchy and a republic: “Governments arise either out of or over the people.” The despotic governments of Europe arose in conquest; those of France and America arose from the consent of society itself.

This for heredities: “The idea of hereditary rules or legislators is as inconstant as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries; and as absurd as a hereditary mathematician; and as ridiculous as a hereditary poet laureate.”

Here are some other pointed sayings: “A man or a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”

“When a man in a wrong cause attempts to steer his course by anything else than some polar truth or principle, he is sure to be lost. Neither memory nor invention will supply the want of this. The former fails him, and the latter betrays him.”

“Wrongs cannot have a legal descent.”

Placemen, job-holders, can find for the system or party under which they hold office “as many reasons as their salaries amount to.”

“Every war terminates with the addition of taxes. War therefore is a principal part of the system of autocracies. To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to the nation, would be to take from government the most lucrative of its branches. The frivolous matters upon which war is made show the avidity of governments to uphold the system of war, and betray the motives upon which they act.”

“The animosity which nations reciprocally entertain is nothing more than what the policy of their governments excites to keep up the spirits of their system. Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imaginations of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. MAN IS NOT THE ENEMY OF MAN, but through the medium of a false government

Dr. Crane’s most honorable occupation

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(Being a school teacher is hard enough in normal times but we cannot imagine how so many people in that profession feel as they ponder so much uncertainty as the days rush toward the beginning of school. Although his words were written more than a century ago and use some terminology that time has modified, we hope Dr. Frank Crane’s encouraging words are of some strength for—)

THE TEACHER

Teaching is the most honorable occupation in which any one can engage.  It is the most self-respecting business on earth.

In it one knows he is earning his salt, if he is faithfully fulfilling his duties. He is justifying his existence among men, he is doing his bit for the state, and he is serving the Lord.

No profession offers such constant inducements to be honest, truthful, humane, and intelligent. The teacher has the most admirable of all opportunities for the development of high character.

There are probably fewer immoral, shady, devious, or hypocritical person in the teaching business than in any other, not excepting preachers and reformers.

The school teachers I have met in my time grade higher, I deliberately assert, than any other class of workers…

Good teachers are born. When a [child] finds one, the kind God makes, the kind that inoculates the pupil with the love of learning, [that child] has found a pearl of great price…

The teacher’s influence I reckon to be the most far reaching of all. No reform is of much value that is not begun with children.

It is more honorable to teach school than to make money, or to hold high office, or to lead an army.

“The durable satisfactions of life,” says a recent article, “come faster, in greater variety, and stay longer for the live and growing teacher than for any other human being except the teaching person called by some other name.”

The teacher has the greatest opening for intellectual advancement, for we learn more by teaching than we do by studying…

Teaching is hard work. But it is the kind of work that strengthens and constantly refreshes life, and not exhausts life, when pursued in the right spirit.

Everyone should do a little teaching if only to find himself, for it is the best of all kinds of work for self-revelation, self-development, and self-discipline. Teaching is an excellent preparation for any other career. The President of the United States* was a teacher, and he seems to be holding his own with the kings and czars that have been in the ruling business all their lives.

Take off your hat to the teacher. He is a personage.

*This was written when Woodrow Wilson, who taught in several schools before becoming President of Princeton University before entering politics.

Better names

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If we are to remove the names of traitors from our military bases—and we should—whose names deserve to replace them? The issue requires some thought and some understanding of the purposes of the bases.

Rudi Keller is a longtime friend whose company I used to enjoy during my days as an active member of the Capitol press corps. Not only is he a fine reporter, but he is an excellent historian. During the Civil War Bicentennial, Rudi wrote hundreds of columns about life in central Missouri during the war. The columns were turned into two books, one covering 1861 and the other 1862. I hope that someday, somehow, his work covering other three years of the war are published.

Rudi is now the news editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. He still finds time to write news stories and some opinion pieces published in the Tribune and in other Gatehouse-owned newspapers. A couple of weeks ago he offered some “humble suggestions for new base names,” a response to suggestions our military bases named for Confederate officers should get new, more honorable names. His ideas are worthy of consideration by the people who have the power to make changes.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley voted against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act directing that new names be chosen for bases honoring Confederate military heroes. The amendment targets 10 military bases — all in states that initiated a war to preserve the right to own another human being.

In a statement to reporters, Hawley played the history card. We’ve seen it before, used to defend everything from flying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol to keeping statues of violent racists in places of honor.

“I just don’t think that Congress mandating that these be renamed and attempting to erase that part of our history is a way that you deal with that history,” Hawley said.

Well, as the Tribune’s resident expert on the Civil War, I would recommend that Hawley ask his colleague, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, for some books on the generals whose names adorn some of the nation’s most important military installations. Blunt, you see, was once a high school history teacher and is a trustee of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Blunt is not advocating for the names to remain on the bases. In fact, he suggested to reporters that renaming some or all would be appropriate.

“If you want to continue to name forts after soldiers, there have been a lot of great soldiers who have come along since the Civil War,” Blunt said, according to CNN.

Blunt noted that Braxton Bragg, whose name is on the largest military base in the world, was “probably the worst commanding general in the entire Confederate Army. He’s an interesting guy to name a fort after.”

But in case Hawley is too busy to read some books, here’s a short list of reasons why renaming those bases is a good idea. As Blunt noted, some of them have less-than-inspiring records of military achievement.

FORT LEE

We’ll start with Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee was an audacious, enormously successful commander and an inspiration to his troops. He was scrupulously honest, a brilliant engineer and he had a lasting impact on higher education after the war with his reorganization of what is now Washington and Lee University.

But instead of fighting for the nation that had given him an education, employed him and made him prosperous, he took up arms against it. That, in the Constitution, is the definition of treason.

Lee’s greatest military achievements were as an enemy of the United States. If he had been any more successful, the property occupied by Fort Lee would not be in the United States.

Fort Lee is a training center. How about Fort Steuben, for Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben? A Prussian officer, he served in the Revolutionary War teaching basic military drill, tactics and discipline.

FORT HOOD

Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, an aggressive commander who destroyed through incompetence the last effective Confederate Army fighting west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Fort Hood is the army’s base for deploying heavy armored forces. How about renaming it Fort Patton, after the aggressive World War II Gen. George Patton? At a crucial moment of the war, he spearheaded an armored drive to defeat the last Nazi offensive in western Europe.

FORT BENNING

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry L. Benning, a competent fighter who served under Hood. Benning was never a grand strategist and never held an independent command.

Fort Benning is where the U.S. Army trains its airborne troops and is the home of its infantry school. How about renaming it for Gen. Anthony “Nuts” McAuliffe? He was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was surrounded at Bastogne, Belgium and acquired his nickname from the one-word answer he gave when Germans demanded his surrender.

FORT GORDON

Fort Gordon in Georgia is named for Gen. John Brown Gordon, who was an aggressive and audacious commander but who, after the war, opposed the Reconstruction policies that gave civil, social and economic rights to freed slaves. He is believed by many to have been the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he is also on the record as having made some statements of benevolence to the people freed by the South’s defeat in the war to preserve slavery.

Fort Gordon is the Army’s center for signal and cyber security. Perhaps a better name would be Fort Lowe, for Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, who organized the Union Army Balloon Corps, which provided aerial reconnaissance of Confederate positions reported by a telegraph wire from a platform tethered up to 500 feet above the ground.

FORT BRAGG

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is named after Braxton Bragg, as Blunt noted, one of the South’s least successful generals. On two separate occasions, Bragg had major strategic victories within his grasp but failed at the moment of execution.

Perhaps a fitting name would be Fort Washington, in recognition of the fact that George Washington led a meager, ill-fed and ill-clad force in the Revolution. The name applied to the world’s largest base would celebrate the power of what Washington started.

FORT POLK

Fort Polk, Louisiana, a joint readiness and training center, is named for Gen. Leonidas Polk, who did not survive the Civil War. As a military leader, he made a major strategic blunder early in the war that cost the Confederacy the chance to turn Kentucky to its side.

As a readiness center, perhaps it would be better named for Gen. George Thomas, who held his command in readiness at Nashville during an ice storm and struck at Hood when the weather warmed, scattering the rebel army and ending any substantial resistance in the war’s western theater.

FORT PICKETT

Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, is named for George Pickett, who gave his name to the famously futile Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. If the military wants a symbol of bravery in the name of a forlorn hope, perhaps it could remain Fort Pickett.

I offer the name Fort Johnson-Brown, for Gen. Hazel Johnson-Brown, the first black woman to become a general in the U.S. Army and, in retirement, a professor of nursing at George Mason University in Virginia.

FORT A.P. HILL

Fort A.P. Hill, an Army training and maneuver center in Virginia, is named for Gen. A.P. Hill, who died in the last days of the war after a distinguished battle record. Like Lee, Hill was educated by the United States at West Point and turned on the loyalties of a 14-year U.S. Army career to take up arms against his country.

It could be renamed Fort Sherman, for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. While Gen. Ulysses Grant was piling up casualties in Virginia in 1864, Sherman mainly used flanking maneuvers to drive Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston back almost 100 miles to Atlanta.

FORT RUCKER

Fort Rucker, Alabama, is named after Gen. Edmund Rucker. A cavalry leader, Rucker was a competent commander and after the war, a business partner of Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fort Rucker bills itself as the home of Army aviation. How about naming it Fort Doolittle, for Jimmy Doolittle, who commanded the daring raid in which B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier to bomb the home islands of Japan in early 1942? The raid did little damage but it did bring a big morale boost to a nation reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack and notified the Japanese that the U.S. had immense power to strike out.

If anyone is squeamish about the name Doolittle because it sounds like the camp for slackers, it could be Fort Wright, for the Wright Brothers, who built the first successful airplane and sold the Army its first air machine.

CAMP BEAUREGARD

And we come to Camp Beauregard, established as a training base during World War I and now operated by the Louisiana National Guard. It is named for Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the forces that opened the war with the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Beauregard won the First Battle of Bull Run, a battle he easily could have lost, but had few additional successes. His forté was dreaming up grandiose plans for a vast, strategic move with himself in command.

The camp is one of the oldest ones in existence from World War I. Might I suggest to the fine state of Louisiana one of their own, Natalie Scott, as the new namesake?

Known to be one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in World War I and II, Scott returned home from World War I a heroine. She was the only American woman to earn France’s highest medal for courage, the Croix de Guerre.

The current names are legacies of a time when racism turned those men’s traitorous conduct into a romantic legend of an honorable defense of home against invaders.

Time has consigned that legend to the ash heap of history and the base names should go with it.

Thanks, Rudi.

 

If one of your ancestors owned slaves—

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—should their name be erased from your family tree?

Should Jefferson City and Jefferson County change their names because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?

Should towns named for the Five Civilized Tribes or their leaders change their names because the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War?

We began thinking of these questions a few days ago when we saw a Kansas City Star comment suggesting a fountain and a parkway named for J. C. Nichols be renamed because he was a racist whose real estate developments defined Kansas City’s history of racism that lingers in the minds of many citizens today, and upon hearing of a petition circulated by a University of Missouri student to remove a statue of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson from Francis Quadrangle (where the columns are in Columbia) and after seeing a news account that protestors in North Portland, Oregon had pulled down a statue of Jefferson at a high school named for him.

New to the discussion is that military bases should no longer be named for Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, Henry Benning Robert E. Lee, and others.

These are troubling issues and troubling questions in troubling times. Today, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson. The military bases will wait for a later posting.

Correcting the historical narrative is better than trying to erase it, for we learn nothing from erased history and we can learn everything from placing history’s people and events in context. Hasty action in emotional days might rob those in the future of needed guidance in shaping their eras.

University of Missouri Curators correctly decided to leave the Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle although the petitions had more than two-thousand signatures. University System President Mun Choi said, “We learn from history. We contextualize historical figures with complex legacies. We don’t remove history.”

To remove the statue of Jefferson because he owned slaves would also remove the statue of someone who was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the founder of the University of Virginia (three things he wanted on his original tombstone that also is at the University of Missouri-Columbia), and the president whose administration added most of the land west of the Mississippi River that made us a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. Choi and the curators had it right.

Here’s a more intimate dimension to this issue:

Several years ago when I was a guest lecturer at Kent State University, I met a sharp, earnest African-American student, Shannon Lanier, and this then-girlfriend (now his wife, Chandra, and mother of their three children). He told me he was the sixth-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom some identify as the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33 in 1782. Shannon already had co-authored a book about Jefferson’s black descendants. DNA studies indicate Tom and Sally had six children, four of them surviving to adulthood. Many white Jefferson descendants accept the Hemings descendants as part of the Jefferson heritage.

I wonder how those African-American Jefferson descendants would feel if they knew a proposal had been made at the University of Missouri to remove a statue of their most famous ancestor. Would the removal place them in the position of being branded as products of some kind of unforgivable Original Sin? Is their existence the result of some kind of unforgiveable disobedience of widely-accepted contemporary codes against sexual relations between different races (a code often ignored in plantation America, including here in Missouri)?

The censuring of Jefferson as a slave-owner could be seen as a disparagement of hundreds of his descendants, a continuation of the idea that any child born out of wedlock—let alone also born of an interracial relationship—should bear a mark of historic illegitimacy.

And what difference does it make in the long run? The importance of a life is not how it begins but how it is lived. That is why a rush to judgment in emotionally-charged times can be perilous.

As Shannon put it on CBS This Morning, on February 14, 2019, “Sometimes, I’m proud of his accomplishments and sometimes I hate him for not doing more…We can’t necessarily judge history with contemporary eyes but we can learn from history and the mistakes that our past leaders have made.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTC_UFAhrvA)

The PBS Newshour ran an extended piece that featured other descendants of Sally and Tom commenting on a Monticello exhibit about Sally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gm3HtijrMQ)

The New York Times ran a Farah Stockman’s story on June 16, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/jefferson-sally-hemings-descendants.html) about the feelings of Hemings descendants about the exhibit. One of those descendants, former employee of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, took pride in his slave ancestors: “They were there at the beginning of the country. When you are of African descent, you are told that we had nothing to do with that. I’ve realized that members of my family had a lot to do with that. The contributions that the slave community did at this one plantation afforded Thomas Jefferson the leisure to be the genius that he became.”

Additionally, how, if we are to follow the wishes of those advocating removing monuments of racists and slave-holders, should we treat the thirty-nine men who signed the United States Constitution in 1787? Or the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence? Some of them were slave-holders yet they gave us the Declaration that declared we were a nation on equal standing with other nations and asserted the immortal line we are fond of quoting today despite the times in which it originated—All men are created equal—and then produced a Constitution that, with its Bill of Rights, defines our country as the republic that it is.

There is danger in applying a moral standard of our time to punish our ancestors for the values they held in morally different societies. To brand them for being part of an acceptable culture that would not be acceptable today runs the risk of diminishing our opportunities to learn from them. Failing to remember our past with its disgraceful as well as its noble moments is to risk an ignorance that could produce regrettable repetitions.

Thomas Jefferson, J. C. Nichols and all of those in our pasts whose flaws we recognize because of our contemporary values give us important context as we correct today’s shortcomings.

Tomorrow is more important than yesterday. But knowing about yesterday is vitally important in helping us shape that tomorrow. Ignorance of history is more dangerous than knowledge of it. Historic events and historical figures are products of their times. Placing people and events within the standards of their eras gives them a reality that we cannot ignore as we consider who we are today and who we will seem to be when we join them as history.

Our presence in these times is a history lesson for tomorrow whether we like it or not or whether those who come after like us or not.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham a few days ago on MSNBC discussed how he evaluates historical figures:

Was the person or the institution being memorialized ultimately devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union or were they for ending the constitutional experiment altogether. And by that test, even the most flawed white Americans—Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, could be memorialized and understood as imperfect people who nevertheless were about defending a system that ultimately gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that ultimately gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Woman Suffrage. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, the story of the country has been one of all-too-gradual liberation and we should build our monuments; we should focus our collective commemorative memory around those moments.

Taken as a whole, was Jefferson’s life a quest for that “more perfect union?” Yes, it was and is the reason his statues should remain in Columbia and elsewhere, a representation of a man who—as is true of all of us—is greater than his shortcomings.