Category Archives: government

More Great

Posted on by
Reply

(The quality of greatness, explored in our entry for Dr. Frank Crane about a month ago, deserves exploration from a slightly different direction. We’re going to hearing of greatness a great deal in the next two months, so it’s appropriate we offer an additional perspective as Dr. Crane writes about—)

GREATNESS

The greatness of a man lies in his ability to interpret his age.

Such a man must have that rarest of traits and genius: he must instinctively feel his fellow men.

He is not a leader. The whole strong-man theory is a humbug. He is a servant.

The greatest man in the man who comes nearest to executing the will of the people. He is “servant of all,”

If he is a poet, he utters the word they dumbly feel.  If he is an artist, he bodies forth their impotent fancy. If he is a statesman, he materializes their political convictions. If he is an orator or a writer, he says what they all would say. Always behind him is the mass from which he draws his force.

It is this power of submerging one’s self in the current of others’ feeling that is the gift of greatness.

The lawyer is great who loses himself in the interests of his clisents.

The physician is great who gives himself up to his patients, serving the poorest of them as loyally as any subject ever served his king.

The teacher is great who is the exponent of his pupils, the expression of their intellectual curiosity, the will of their highest ambitions.

The workman is great who feels the profit of his employer, the care of his goods, and the perfecting of his work as if it were his own.

The merchant is great who senses his customers, divines their needs, ministers to their wants; and he is greater yet if he feels his responsibility to those he employs, if he is the personal embodiment of the activities of all his working force.

A president, a governor, a senator, a congressman, a mayor, is great if he knows his people; if their conscience is his conscience; if his voice is their thought; if their desires and ideals move his hand and brain.

Homer, Goethe, Voltaire, Shakespeare, spoke their time.

The great men are the manufacture of the people.

David, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, these knew how to ride the crest of the multitudinous wave.

Even of Jesus no greater thing can be said than that He uttered the heart of all mankind.

Just the facts, ma’am*

Posted on by
1

Well, we’ve endured two more political conventions, their tiresome tirades, their excessive exaggerations, their profound puffery, their ferocious flag-waving, their multiple misstatements, and sometimes their litany of lies.

We want to think those we root for in their pursuits of public office are pure in thought, word, and deed.  But we know better.  And we would be better if we were unafraid to challenge them, even those we support, when they mislead us.

One of the greatest responsibilities we have as citizens is to demand truth from those who seek our votes and our money. But experience shows we citizens fail to meet those responsibilities time after time.

It would be nice to say our candidates owe us their integrity.  But politics doesn’t work that way. Integrity often must be forced by those who are picking the men and women who will lead them.

So our conventions are finished. Dancing With the Candidates is down to the finals. Now it’s not Dancing with the Candidates.  It’s a World Wrestling Federation match. In the mud.

No, it isn’t.  It’s more real.

It’s a street fight until November 3. A sweaty, nasty, bloody, anything-goes brawl.

It’s too bad that we who want to be led will too much expect too little of those who want to lead.

One thing is abundantly clear after the conventions.  The busiest people in the country for the next few weeks will be:

Fact-checkers.

We should pay attention to them. We should know when the people who want to be (presumably) the most powerful person in the world aren’t shooting straight with us.  We should notice those who spout conspiracy theories—-and they seem to be more outlandish every day.  Watch out for those who say, “I have heard…” and those who, when challenged to prove their statements say, “I’ll let you know later.”

More than ever, this is a time to tell our candidates, “Prove it,” or because we’re Missourians, “Show me the proof.”

Conservative organizations are going to be especially watchful of liberal candidates. Liberal organizations are going to be especially watchful of conservative candidates.  We should pay attention to both of them.  We should pay attention to those doing their analysis from the middle. And in the end we should think for ourselves despite the plentitude of loud voices on our airwaves telling us they can think for us.  No, they can’t—unless we let them. Have enough citizen responsibility to think for yourself.

There will be carloads of commercials that wave at truth from a distance. Don’t believe them.

There already have been manipulated videos on our social media. Question them.  Better yet, turn off the social media except for person-to-person communication with people you know.

We’ll get all kinds of flyers in the mail that are not worth the postage that sent them.  Recognize them for what they are. Fill up your recycling bins with them.

It will be easy to throw up our hands, abandon our responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors, and just mark a ballot so we can say we voted.

Congratulations.  You just trashed your country. Or your state. Or your city.  You just put it in a big blue plastic container and rolled it out to the curb.

CARE, dammit!  Find the truth.  Demand the truth.

After two weeks of political conventions, it should be clear to all of us that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves and understand who is most trustworthy in a time when truth too often takes a back seat to bombast, accusation, misrepresentation and conspiracies.

We won’t find absolute truth from either candidate at the top of our tickets or from some of their supporters. But we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbors from coast to coast and border to border not to elect the biggest liar.  That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?  But it’s also the

Truth.

And we have to be honest with ourselves, for ourselves, to determine who that is. Sometimes that means traditional party loyalties have to give way to loyalties to something bigger. Increasingly, it means we have to get our noses away from the social media screens.

Keep up with the legitimate, established fact-checkers.  These campaigns will keep them up all night in pursuit of truths we haven’t heard from our candidates during the day.

Just the facts.  That’s all we should ask for. It’s all we should demand. There are reliable sources that will provide them because our candidates and their surrogates might not.

In a later entry we’ll try to recommend some fact-checking resources.

*Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, the main figure in hundreds of police investigations dramatized on radio and television for decades, never said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Snopes.com, one of the longest-running reliable fact checking websites, says that the character typically said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” or “All we know are the facts, ma’am.”

Ode DeJoy

Posted on by
1

(Not to be confused with Schiller’s poem and Beethoven’s composition setting it to music.)

I have a friend who delivered tons of mail in his forty-year career who has a simple answer to what’s going on with the Trump administration and the United States Postal Service: “It’s all Trump and Jeff Bezos.”  Bezos is the owner of Amazon. The President thinks the USPS should charge Amazon a lot more than it does to deliver Amazon’s packages. Bezos also owns the Washington Post which maintains one of the nation’s biggest and best-known fact-checking systems. It reported on July 13 that President Trump had given out more than 20,000 lies and misstatements since taking office. Our president does not like it when someone differs with him.

The Post doesn’t just target our president and it doesn’t just target Republicans. It recently jumped on Amy McGrath’s claim that Mitch McConnell made millions of dollars from China. McGrath is McConnell’s Democratic challenger for his U. S. Senate seat.

I have a friend who remembers when mailmen used to deliver census forms and then take the completed ones to the post office where they were kept until local census workers came in later in the process and determined which four percent of the residents had not replied—and then went out and started knocking on doors.

I have a friend who receives the Catholic Missourian, the weekly newspaper of the Jefferson City Diocese—although in the summer it comes out every two weeks, I understand. He usually receives it on Friday. But recently it arrived a day late. When he checked with the local post office he learned the newspapers had been brought in on Thursday for Friday delivery but the carriers had been told to wait until Saturday—part of the slowdown in service we’ve been hearing about.

For 250 years or so we have been spoiled by the service of postal carriers such as this fellow from about 1910, who have lived by a creed adapted from the writings of Herodotus in 430 B. C.:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

We don’t expect much from our postal service.

—Bring us our mail faithfully.

—If we mail something on time, deliver it on time.

Easier said than done especially when there’s too much snow in our driveway for us to drive out.  But we nonetheless expect to find mail in our mailbox when we struggle through the snow on foot to get there.

Our postal service has become a political football or maybe a pawn in a campaign chess match.  Our president thinks mail-in balloting will be bad for him—-although Republicans can mail in their ballots as well as Democrats.  He’s balking at additional funding for the USPS that would pay for extensive use of mail-in ballots.  He has appointed a Postmaster General whose main qualifications for the job seem to be that he has given a lot of money to the Trump campaign.  Postmaster General Lous DeJoy started removing machines that sort 30-40,000 pieces of mail per hour, presumably to be replaced by machines that can sort 30,000 pieces of mail per MINUTE although we have yet to see any accounts of the new machines being on site and ready to install when the present machines are yanked.  The Kansas City Star says four machines have been taken out in Kansas City and two more in Springfield.

He also banned overtime and late trips by mail carriers, meaning mail not delivered during normal working hours will sit in the post office until the next day, at least—including prescription medications, checks, and other time-sensitive materials.

With those policies and changes, the Postal Service expressed doubts it could handle the volume of mail ballots it will get this year. The volume is expected to jump because an increased number of voters want to vote by mail instead of going to a polling place and increasing possible exposure to the Coronavirus. The announced changes came at an important time in our democratic process and have led to suspicions that our president is using them to limit the number of mail-in ballots that are not expected to go his way.

Suggestions that the postal service is incapable of handling the volume of mail-in ballots that will go into the system increase suspicions the system is being manipulated to affect the outcome of the November election. Under normal circumstances, there should be little doubt the USPS is capable of doing that job.  After all, these are the people who year after year process a Christmas mail load that is likely to be much heavier than the load of mail ballots.  My former mailman friend, who hauled a lot of Christmas presents in his time, finds the election concerns or allegations insulting.

Just as we were about to post this entry, DeJoy announced he was going to “suspend” several proposals that had been moving ahead until after the election.  His quick turn-around came only after twenty states announced they would sue him if he continued with his plans. Yesterday afternoon he said no more changes would be made until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”  He went on, “We will deliver the nation’s election mail on time.”

The states drawing up lawsuits are nonetheless wary. Forbes reported yesterday they still plan to file their lawsuits. It would be nice if we could tell you Missouri is one of the twenty states but, alas, we cannot.  In fact, it was not until the Kansas City Star contacted Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and reported last Friday that he had received a letter from the USPS dated July 31 saying the service might not be able to deliver mailed absentee ballots in time for them to be counted because of DeJoy’s policies. The newspaper reported Ashcroft’s office did not appear to have told local election authorities about the letter.

If DeJoy thinks he has defused the controversy with his announcement yesterday, he is likely to be disabused of that notion Friday when he explains himself to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Although the committee is led by Republicans, he won’t be able to avoid anticipated sharp questions from Democrats. As we file these observations, the White House has not blocked his appearance.

Our president, who has supported DeJoy’s plans, has made a completely unproven case that mail-in voting will result in massive voter fraud if he loses. Unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations are a familiar theme to him. Four years ago he appointed former Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach to lead an investigation of massive voting fraud (mostly by illegal immigrants, as we recall) in the Northeast. Kobach couldn’t get a whiff of voter fraud.

“Voter fraud” has been a theme of the president’s party for several years.  It was voiced with great passion by supporters of Voter Photo ID legislation enacted in Missouri. Four years ago in this space, we reported looking at every statewide election from the August Primary of 2008 through the November, 2014 general election.  We compiled these statistics when we referred to Voter Photo ID legislation as a “solution in search of a problem.”  We found 18 prosecutions for voter fraud (17 of them in registrations) out of 36-million opportunities in Missouri, less than one for every two-million opportunities. We have heard of NO prosecutions by our Secretary of State for voter fraud since that post in May, 2016.

With a slight bow to fairness when it comes to Voter Photo ID in Missouri we observe that critics argued, as they argue now in the mail-in voting controversy, that the real reason these things are being advocated is to suppress voting by certain demographics that do not endorse the policies of the party in power.  Those critics have been pretty quiet since photo ID went into effect.  We have yet to see any trustworthy studies showing fears of voter suppression have come true because of Photo ID.

Regardless of whether you buy into our president’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in mail-in ballots or into suspicions that our postal system is a campaign pawn, we citizens deserve a postal system that does the two simple things mentioned earlier. We citizens deserve and the people who bring us our mail every day deserve to be treated better than we are being treated by those in charge of our country.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from its August recess to pass a bill providing the funding needed to make sure the Postal Service can handle the election mail crush. We will suggest in our next entry that the roots of this mess were created fourteen years ago and  it would be good also for her chamber—and the Senate—to clean it up.

Before we go, we anticipate in a few days the first trickle of direct mail political crap arriving in our mail box.  It’s called junk mail because it is junk and it treats the people receiving it as junk. We offer this suggestion to the USPS:  Deliver the newspaper on time to our Catholic friends and delay the political junk mail.

November 4 would be a good day to deliver it.

(About the dedicated mail carrier whose photograph you saw above: We don’t know for sure but we suspect it is a staged picture taken on his first day of work about 1910. Robert Milton Priddy, Sr.,–friends knew him by his middle name—was a rural mail carrier in the Beloit, Kansas area for more than 25 years. He died at the age of 57, three years before his grandson was born.)

Great

Posted on by
2

(One of the most mis-used words in our vocabulary is “great.”  It is thrown around cheaply—from the sports announcers who constantly refer to a “great play” to a cartoon tiger that proclaims a sugary breakfast cereal is “grrrrreat” to those who proclaim greatness for themselves or for others in this campaign year.  Dr. Frank Crane’s century old words give us some guidance in this year when “great” is easily abused about what to look for in—)

THE GREAT MAN

The great man feels with the people, but does not follow them.

He maintains his independence of thought, no matter what public opinion may be.

He is quiet. He does not strive nor cry out.

He knows and trusts the cosmic spiritual forces and is not impatient.,

He thinks clearly, he speaks intelligently, he lives simply.

His ethics are of the future, not traditional and of the past, nor conventional and of the present.

He always has time.

He despises no human being, nor any other creature.

He impresses you much as the vas silences of nature impress you, as the sky, the ocean, the desert.

He has no vanity. Seeking no praise, he is never offended. He always has more than he thinks he deserves.

He is teachable, and will learn even from little children. He is not anxious to teach others,

He is not welcome in any sect, cult, or party, for he is more desirous of understanding than of opposing the other party.

He is rarely elected to anything.

He works for the joy of it, not the wages.

He cannot retaliate, for he cannot descend to the level of them that love to do harm.

He lives in a certain self-sufficient aloofness, so that your raise or blame does to seem to reach him.

Yet his isolation is warm, and not cold.

He is keenly alive to human relationships and influences. He loves. He cares. He suffers. He laughs.

When you find him it is as if you had found are real human being among myriads of animals. All of the simple, strong qualities of the normal soul shine in him, with no pettiness.

You feel that what you have, such as your money or position, is nothing to him, only what you are; and that if he likes you it will be not at all of anything you do, say or pay, but for what your soul is within you.

He is not deceived by the two arrant humbugs of the world, Success and Failure.

He changes his opinion easily, when he sees his error. He cares not for consistency, which is the fetish of little minds, but for truth, which is the sum of great souls.

He believes that every man comes at last unto his own, and is not impatient.

Bitterness, cynicism, and pessimism, which are tempers of pettiness, he has not; but love, cheer, and hope abound in him, for these are always the by-products of greatness.

When you love him, you yourself become great; for there can be no greatness that is not the cause of greatness in others.

Who should represent Missouri?

Posted on by
Reply

(Before we plunge into this week’s issue, we’d like to update last week’s post.  The Kansas City Star reported last Saturday that the federal prosecutor had announced the influx of federal agents in Kansas City had produced 97 arrests for homicides (5), illegal possession of firearms, various forms of drug trafficking, carjacking and being fugitives with outstanding warrants against them. In Portland, Homeland Security agents withdrew from the federal building area and although protests continued in the area they were described as “mostly peaceful.”)

In our last entry we suggested that our president and his allies on the right have spoken with forked tongues on the issue of states’ rights.  On the one hand, the president has maintained it is the states’ responsibility to fight the coronavirus but in this campaign year when it suits his purpose to override states’ rights, he has sent federal militarized forces to cities with Democratic mayors presumably to fight violent crime although no local or state officials asked for that help.

A recent incident indicates the left side of the aisle is not immune to politically-oriented efforts to ignore the rights of states and to try to capitalize on the public mood. Our example is not as severe as our entry was last week, but it shows, we hope, that neither side has clean hands on this issue.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently asked the Congressional Joint Committee on the Library to remove eleven statues from Statuary Hall in the Capitol because they are men associated with the Confederacy.  The House has approved a resolution formalizing that request and it is before the Senate as we compose this.

Our senior Senator Roy Blunt, a former history teacher and a Vice-President of The State Historical Society of Missouri, has objected.  Almost 160 years ago, the federal government agreed to let the states decide which two famous state figures should be in the hall.  Some states already have replaced statues of white supremacists and confederate leaders with figures deemed more appropriate.  Blunt thinks a hearing would be good and he wants to know what states want to do.

The two Missourians who’ve been in Statuary Hall since 1895 are Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Francis Preston Blair, Junior, a Union General who represented the state in the House and in the Senate.  Last year, the legislature passed a resolution to replace Benton with a statue of Harry S Truman.  It hasn’t been done yet and we have suggested that the legislature has targeted the wrong man for replacement.

Given these times, the legislature might want to reconsider which of our statues is replaced.  Benton represents the self-contradictory figure of which we find many in our pre-Civil War history. He owned slaves but came to oppose the institution, and refused the legislature’s orders that he follow its sentiments on protecting slavery, especially as the frontier expanded. That position cost him his seat in the U. S. Senate. We have found no record that he freed his slaves.

Our other statue is that of Francis Preston Blair Jr., who was a Union General but also an undeniable racist. He owned slaves and when the issue of emancipation came up, he proposed sending freed slaves to Central and South America. When he was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1868 his anti-emancipation speeches weakened the party’s effort, including his theme that African-Americans were “a semi-barbarous race…who are worshipers of fetishes and polygamists (who wanted to) subject the white woman to their unbridled lust.”

Harry Truman would be a fitting replacement for either man, Blair in particular.  Truman has a bust in the National Capitol already—with the others who have served as Vice President.  We have our own suggestion for proper representatives for Missouri. (At the end we’ll have a list of most of the statues that, though of marble and bronze, have feet of clay).

We have no problem with a Truman statue representing Missouri and we realize a lot of people have contributed a lot of money to create one.  But we think our idea says much more about our state and the qualities of the people who should be in that hall and the qualities of the people who represent Missouri.

Other than a few women and Native Americans, the figures in Statuary Hall tilt heavily in favor of politicians and generals. But we think of two men who were neither but would better symbolize everything our state should always strive to be than any political figure or general ever has or could.  Not that anybody would listen, but we would love to see our state represented by statues of

Stan Musial and Buck O’Neil.

I met both of them, briefly.  In 1985 on the World Series Special passenger train Governor Ashcroft arranged to travel across the state from Kansas City to St. Louis for the third game of the Series, I asked Musial to tell me about the last time the Cardinals traveled by train.  It was the trip back from Chicago after Musial had gotten his 3,000th hit.  We talked for a few minutes.  He laughed.  My God! What a wonderful laugh!  I still have that interview somewhere.  And the day his bust was unveiled for the Hall of Famous Missourians at the Capitol he spent time talking baseball and other things, laughing often and then playing the harmonica he always carried.  It was easy to love Stan Musial.

I cannot tell you a single thing John Ashcroft did or said as Governor—-except that he arranged that train trip during which I got to talk to Stan Musial.

When President Obama presented Musial with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bernie Micklasz wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“We’re a polarized nation in many ways. We dig into our respective corners. Republicans vs. Democrats. Liberals vs. Conservatives. We snarl at each other. We don’t seem to agree on much. But we can agree on this: Stan Musial transcends all of that. When it comes to The Man, there are no differences in ideology or opinion. It’s unanimous: We love The Man. Even at the late innings of his life, Musial still brings people together and makes them happy.”

“He’s been doing this for what, 70 years? I don’t believe Musial has ever received enough credit for the way he conducted himself during an extremely sensitive time in our history, during the period of baseball’s integration. Musial didn’t make speeches. He didn’t use a media platform. He simply went out of his way to show kindness and concern to African-American players who had to deal with intense hostility in the workplace.”

Buck O’Neil, the great symbol of Negro Leagues baseball (and so much more than that), finally got his bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians, too, at the State Capitol although he still deserves a full plaque in Cooperstown.  The great Cubs player, Ernie Banks, advised us to, “Just follow Buck O’Neil. This man is a leader. He’s a genius. He understands people. He understands life…All of us should learn from this man. He’s an ambassador; he’s a humanitarian. We should follow him…”  Buck had plenty of reason to be bitter because he was never allowed to play a major league game.  But I heard him say one day, “Waste no tears for me. I didn’t come along too early—I was right on time.”

I sang a song with him one day.  A lot of people in a lot of meetings with him got to sing with him, too. He recalled in his autobiography, “Sometimes at the end of my speeches I ask the audience to join hands and sing a little song. It goes like this: ‘The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.’ At first the audience is a little shy about holding hands and singing that corny song, but by and by, they all clasp one another’s hands and the voices get louder and louder. They give it up. Got to give it up.”  I gave it up, holding hands with strangers, that day.

It will never happen of course, the placement of these two men in Statuary Hall as representatives of our state. But I can’t think of two other people who could represent what all Missourians should want to be and to serve as representatives of the best that Missouri could be than these two men.

0-0-0-0

Although Speaker Pelosi refers to eleven statues, there are more that might be candidates for removal.  We’ve looked at the list and here are those whose places of honor might come under scrutiny:

Alabama—Confederate General joseph Wheeler.

Arkansas—Judge U.M. Rose, supporter of the Confederacy, slave owner; and Senator James Paul Clarke, white supremacist.

Florida—Confederate General E. Kirby Smith

George—Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens

Louisiana—Edward White Jr., Confederate soldier who as member of the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the “separate but equal” concept.

Mississippi—Confederate President Jefferson Davis and James Z. George, Confederate Colonel and member of the state’s secession convention.

Missouri—Blair Jr., and Benton

North Carolina—Abraham B. Vance, Confederate officer; Charles Aycock, white supremacist

South Carolina—John Calhoun, defender of slavery, Wade Hampton, Confederate officer and post-war leader of the “lost cause” movement.

Tennessee—Andrew Jackson, slave owner and president who forced the Cherokees off their lands in the Carolinas and onto the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

Virginia—Robert E. Lee, Confederate Commander

West Virginia—John E. Kenna—Confederate officer at age 16.

In addition, Speaker Pelosi wants the bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney to be removed from the busts of Supreme Court justices because of his authorship of the Dred Scott decision.

 

Us vs. It—part IX, keep your distance

Posted on by
Reply

We’re back to this series of us against the virus because the virus is coming back, too. An increasing number of states are seeing terrible eruptions of cases and deaths and some of our numbers are on the rise. Each time Governor Parson has a virus update briefing he closes with urgings that we be responsible, social distance, wash our hands, and so on. He’s leaving it up to us to decide whether to wear masks. Personally, we’re scared enough about this virus that we do wear ours. I have three in my car and one at home for formal occasions—a dignified dark blue that matches my blazer.

We’ve come across a graphic description of how social distancing stay-at-home orders, and other other measures can work when a pandemic moves in. Please look at this graph as the virus begins to return to Missouri.

An organization calling itself Quartz.com, which says it provides global news and insights, has analyzed the big difference in Spanish Flu victims in Philadelphia and in St. Louis in 1918. Reporter Michael Coren writes that Philadelphia held a big parade despite warnings about soldiers carrying the Spanish Influenza virus. Two-hundred thousand people attended. Three days later, every bed in the city’s thirty-one hospitals was filled with a Spanish Flu victim. A week after the parade, the disease had killed 4,500 people. Only then did the local political leaders close the city.

St. Louis, under the aggressive leadership of City Health Director Max Starkloff, closed all of its schools, libraries, courtrooms, playgrounds, and churches within two days of learning of its first cases. The city banned gatherings of more than twenty people. It limited the number of people who could ride streetcars, and store and factory work shifts were staggered. The National Academy of Sciences reported in 20017 that per capita deaths in St. Louis were less than half the death rate of Philadelphia, thanks to Starkloff’s quick actions and the population’s response to his leadership.

The operative phrase is “death rate,” because Philadelphia was the nation’s third-largest city with a population of about 1.8-million then. St. Louis was the nation’s FOURTH-largest city at almost 700,000.

The graph that accompanies Coren’s article makes the point well.

We had a statewide lockdown in Missouri. Governor Parson began to lift it in early May and hopes Missourians have the good sense at a time when the virus is finding renewed energy to take steps that will avoid a rollback of the reopening. If we want to keep the jobs we have just recovered, and recover more; if we want to return to schools safely in a few weeks; if we want to keep being with friends again, we must not underestimate the capriciousness of this virus that we now know can attack and kill anyone of any age or condition. Hospitalizations are on the rise in Missouri. Seriously. Deaths seem to have moderated but we’ll look at the numbers in the next week to watch for indications of what our July 4th weekend behavior meant and whether the increased case numbers accelerate our death rate.

This stuff does not play games.

Our study of the 1918 pandemic earlier this year indicated viruses such as the one in 1918 and the one now seemingly can explode, and when they do, it’s awfully late to decide people need to dig in at home or think about masking-up. We cannot be blind to what is happening in other states, including states such as Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota. We can hope we somehow escape a second surge of the first wave, but reality better be sobering to even the most hopeful.

Nancy and I try to go outside and walk a mile or two every sunny day, breathing in fresh air (hoping that walking fast enough to speed up the heart and the lungs will make them stronger in case we, unfortunately, become positive in ways beyond thinking; Nancy and I got “nosed” last week and we were negative. But this is a new week.). We miss our social circles of friends from various activities but we don’t want to give them anything nor do we want them to give us anything but continued friendship.

There are, of course, those who will say wearing a mask is a blow against their freedom. We submit to them, and to everybody else, the story often told by the Chairman of the Prohibition National Committee in the 1880s, John B. Finch, who would say, “This arm is my arm….it’s not yours. Up here I have a right to strike out with it as I please. I go over there with these gentlemen and swing my arm and exercise the natural right which you have granted; I hit one man on the nose, another under the ear, and as I go down the stairs on my head, I cry out:

‘Is this not a free country?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have I not a right to swing my arm?’

‘Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.’

“Here,” Finch would say, “civil government comes in to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes.”

Our civil government in Missouri prefers each of us understands our obligation to the rest of us, whether it is swinging our arms, or spreading a virus. But we are confident our governor WILL tighten things down again if we fail in our personal actions to be as responsible as he wants us to be.

We hope all of you will look at the chart above and understand how important it is for us to endure the slight inconveniences necessary to protect one another. If we don’t get to see our friends for several more months, the minutes we spend behind a mask and the hours and days we spend binge-watching streaming-channel programs will improve the chances they will be there to be seen.

And we will be there to see them.

Better names

Posted on by
1

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.

 

Dr. Crane would like some quiet

Posted on by
Reply

(As we sink deeper and deeper into the muck of a major political campaign year, the noise level is going to rise with each new charge or claim or denial, with each new voice whether of a candidate a surrogate or a secretly-funded attack group. Although written almost a century ago, Doctor Frank Crane’s suggestion that we see all of this noise for what it is, is particularly contemporary.)

ALL NOISE IS A WASTE

Power is a curious and much misunderstood thing. Noise and display, which are commonly thought to indicate it, in reality are indications of its absence.

All show of force is a sign of weakness. Loud talking is a sign of a consciousness that one’s reasoning is feeble. When one shrieks it means that he knows or suspects that what he says does not amount to much, and it irritates him.

Profanity comes from a limited vocabulary.

A country is poor in proportion to its fighting spirit. A nation habitually peaceful is hardest to conquer. It was the United States that settled with the Barbary pirates.

In advertisements, a persistent over-statement will in time destroy all confidence. Even here the strongest, most impressive thing, in the long run, is modesty.

Power is an inverse ration to noise, as a rule.

The strongest being conceivable is God. And he is so modest, quiet, and hidden that many people to refuse to believe there is a God. He never blusters. Hence humbugs cannot understand how He exists.

The most powerful material thing in our range of experience is the sun, the source of all earth-forces. Yet the sun’s pull, energy, and radiation are silent. It raises billions of tons of water daily from the ocean with less noise than an April thunder-storm.

“The greatest things have need to be said most simply,” remarked a Frenchman; “they are spoiled by emphasis.”

 

If one of your ancestors owned slaves—

Posted on by
5

—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.

Wrappers

Posted on by
1

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement about ten days ago in which he said the NFL had been wrong in not listening to players’ protests against racism and police brutality. He said the NFL supports the Black Lives Matter movement now:

”Without Black players, there would be no National Football League. And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of Black players, coaches, fans and staff. We are listening. I am listening, and I will be reaching out to players who have raised their voices and others on how we can improve and go forward for a better and more united NFL family.”

Some have applauded the apparent awakening of the NFL to the issue. Some think the continued refusal of the league to re-sign Colin Kaepernick, who caused the initial stir by kneeling during the National Anthem, is a continuing sign the NFL is just talking a good game.

The proof of the league’s sincerity will be written in the future.

The message struck the President of the United States squarely in the knee, and the resulting jerk produced a Trumpian response that ignores the issue behind the message but helps stoke the fires of his loyal base. “Could it be even remotely possible that…he was intimating that it would be O. K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country and our Flag?”

I’m going to get in trouble from here to the end today.

I am one of those who loves our country and respects the flag that is its symbol for the good it has achieved as well as what our country can be. Should be. But that does not mean I should ignore the times when that flag has stood for regretful things or regretful things that linger.

I wonder if President Trump has ever visited an Indian reservation. I have. Some are better off than others and some are very poor, places where the ancestors of today’s inhabitants were forced to go so another race could appropriate their lands. I have, for example, stood at the edge of the ditch at Wounded Knee where so many were killed while the American Flag was flying overhead.

I can understand how the American Flag has a different meaning to those who live in those places.

I wonder if President Trump has ever thought about doing something to improve lives in ghettos and barrios or would visit one, mentally capable of understanding what he was seeing and what he was being told and then had the capacity to do something other than tweet about the experience.

I can understand how the American Flag lacks the meaning in those places that the President demands for it from his comfortable office.

I wonder if President Trump has ever visited the remains of an internment camp into which Japanese-Americans were herded a few years before he was born because they were considered security risks although their families might have been Americans for generations. I have.

I can understand why some descendants of those internees can see the American Flag differently from the President’s view that he seems to think is the only acceptable view.

It is easy for those whose lives have not included oppression or social uncertainty to wrap ourselves in a national symbol and feel warm and comfortable in it. But the flag is more than a wrapper. The problem with wrapping oneself in a flag of self-righteousness is that the wrapper can obscure one’s view of the real world around them.

The flag is my symbol, not just his. And I will decide what it symbolizes to me at any particular time. He will not dictate to me what the American Flag can mean and how I may legally express that meaning.

Among other things, the American Flag stands for moving beyond the status quo. The American Flag symbolizes a people always reaching for more, moving for more, developing more, creating more. The flag symbolizes a nation that would not be confined to thirteen states on the Atlantic coast. It symbolizes a nation that would not tolerate state-sponsored religion. It symbolizes a nation that, in time, would not tolerate a system of buying and selling people. It symbolizes a nation that demanded equality with other nations and got it. It symbolizes a people always asking, as Carl Sandburg put it, “Where to, what next?”

It symbolizes a nation with flaws and scars—and the best it can become despite them.

But moving beyond the status quo also means extending opportunity beyond the privileged. Moving beyond the status quo implies a public responsibility to one another so that allmight seek life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without fear.

Going beyond the status quo requires those who are comfortable with it to recognize enforcing the status quo stifles the very values the wrappers claim to cherish and leads to resentment and challenge.

Do not tell me, Mr. President, that I may not take a knee in a country that speaks of hope for better days but is seen by many as doing little to bring them to those people. Do not tell me, Mr. President, that your ideas of freedom are the only ideas I am allowed to have. Do not tell me it is un-American to kneel during the National Anthem, or to refuse to say “Under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance, or in some other way indicate that I believe the American Flag represents still unfulfilled goals that we should never rest in reaching for.

I am an American and I will decide the meaning of our national symbols, not you. My respect for them is based on what they mean we can be. And what we can be is surely better than what we are.

I want to make America great. And that is why I will kneel if I choose to do so. And if I remain standing with my hand over my heart, it is because I choose to believe in what must be, not what is.

I will choose how I interpret the flag. I will not wrap myself in it and proclaim that only I am righteous enough to interpret its meaning. I will not wrap myself in it and demean those who see it through different eyes. That, frankly, is un-American.

A flag cannot be inspirational and aspirational if it is wrapped. It can only be those things if it is free to blow with the winds of change.

There is a strong breeze blowing in our land today. This is a time to let the flag fly so all may see it in their own ways and be guided by it to better tomorrows.