Category Archives: government

Jefferson City vs. the Pandemic, 1918—II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except—-

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

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

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

Worthless Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Exonerated?

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We got a message from Eric Greitens last week proclaiming, “We’ve been exonerated.”

—as in not guilty of criminal charges.

As we discussed last week, “not guilty” does not mean “innocent.”   But the Greitens news release said the Missouri Ethics Commission found “no evidence of any wrongdoing” by Greitens.

Well, except for that little finding that his campaign has been fined $178,000 because a political action committee supposedly independent of Greitens’ gubernatorial campaign violated laws requiring independence. The commission says the failure to disclose that A New Missouri, the non-profit set up to support the Greitens agenda, paid for a poll that was given to the Greitens campaign—a violation of rules requiring the reporting of gifts.

Greitens told his faithful followers in his emails that the ruling “makes it clear…our justice system was abused. Lies were told and bribes were paid in a criminal effort to overturn the 2016 election.” He points out that “some of the people” who lied about him face criminal charges for lying under oath and evidence tampering.

Frankly, we‘ve heard just about enough of this “overturning an election” business. Getting elected is a gift, not a license. And one thing government does from time to time is take away the license of someone who misbehaves behind the wheel, in a profession, or even misuses the gift of public office.

Some of the people” actually is one person, William Tisaby, who was hired to investigate the Greitens sex scandal is scheduled for trial next month on six charges of perjury and one of tampering. Greitens resigned as governor in a plea deal with Tisaby’s boss, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, that she would drop criminal charges connected to the sexual affair if he quit.

Greitens’ email message to the faithful quickly becomes a pity plea. He cites “constant harassment and vitriol, the lies—repeated and magnified over and over again—the vicious attack on family and personal finances.” The months since he left office, he says, have been “the hardest of my life” with “plenty of dark days.” But he’s been uplifted by “how compassionate, strong, and loving most regular people are.”

Greitens is not the first political figure to experience “dark days” because he or she fumbled the big chance to be significant.

But he’s right, you know. History shows that even disgraced politicians remain human beings. To go farther, if you get a politician out of his or her theatre of operations, they’re just regular folks (most of them, in our experience). And if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that the face we wear while practicing our profession often is not the face that our friends outside the profession recognize. The ruthless politician, the toughest lawyer, the matter-of-fact doctor, the hard-bargaining car dealer, the flinty-eyed reporter are different people when they’re barbecuing hamburgers with friends or coaching their child’s sports team.

Greitens’ email shows the kind of magnanimity that people in his position eventually realize regardless of how much they maintain they have been persecuted. Dwelling on the hurt and resentment gets one nowhere. “Hang on, keep faith, and have courage—life comes back around and it offers a lot of joy, and purpose, and love.”

Sounds like the roots for another book. “A friend” told the Washington Examiner, a conservative monthly political publication, that Greitens is writing one. The same person said Greitens is preparing to launch a new service organization. The Mission Continues, the veterans services organization Greitens founded in 2007, became embroiled in the Greitens investigation when it was revealed he had used the organization’s mailing list to solicit campaign donations. The Missouri Ethics Commission fined the Greitens campaign $1,000 for that little episode (The campaign paid $100 of the fine and promised not to sin like that again with that organization). The Mission Continues continues, by the way.

However, his comment that, “The deepest possible tragedy in all of this would come if we let them change who we are” indicates an inability to grow beyond what he was. And what he was was a not-very-good-governor. He was arrogant. He was secretive. He tried to control the message although that didn’t go well in the end. He believed he could force some members of his own party to support ideas that weren’t going to fly by divulging their personal phone numbers on the internet. He was derogatory toward the legislature and saw no need to patch things up after he was in office for his critical but publicly-popular comments during the campaign.

And we shouldn’t forget that he quit when a legislative investigation headed toward likely impeachment had cornered him on possible serious campaign finance violations. The special investigative committee basically gave him a choice of revealing intertwined big-money links between various committees providing financial fuel for his political ambitions, or leaving town. So he announced his resignation, took no questions, and got out of Dodge.

It’s not altogether helpful for Greitens to suggest he’s not going to change his spots.

There have been rumors that Greitens would emerge and run for the governorship this year as an Independent; the Republican Party could hardly be expected to welcome him back. But the “friend” who spoke to the Examiner said he does not expect to seek political office this year although his options remain open for the future.

Greitens’ email says he’s not thinking of revenge, which is “about the past,” he said. “Justice is about the future…the future is bright.”

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Eric Greitens. “The future is bright.”

Unless, of course, that’s the headlight of a locomotive.

That House investigation shut down after the resignation before all the questions were asked or answered. He would prefer those efforts not be resumed in his future public life.

Eric Greitens will have a political shadow over him for a long time. He still has a core group of believers of seeming Trumpian loyalty that he was speaking to with his emailed statement. But it will take more than commercials showing him blowing up stuff and claiming he was wrongly persecuted to convince the general public it can trust him again.

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Lord, but do I ever need baseball!

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It’s gray and it’s cold and it’s been gray and cold far too long and far too much. Or maybe grey and cold.

Life is so bad that I have been driven to ask what the difference is between “gray” and “grey.” Which one has fifty shades (It’s “e”). Is it Thomas Grey or Thomas Gray who was the 18th century English poet who wrote “Elegy Written in an English Churchyard,” a poem with the original ending that doesn’t do much to improve the mood on these cold, gray days.

No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester’d vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.

Gray (not “e” but “a”) rewrote the 128-line poem with a different conclusion but it offers no more solace on days like these.

I have been driven to Grammar (“a” not “e”) dot com for help. It wasn’t real helpful.   Look for yourself.

The past few weeks have given us the leaden cloud of impeachment, the weight of which has left us tired and has left our political system with a terrible burden of public distrust precisely at the time we must start deciding who, if anybody, can lift our confidence in government, which is—after all—led by those we, ourselves, select.

It is easy on days like these to think of ourselves as victims of government instead of what we really are—partners in government.

We have attended too many funerals of friends in the last year, read far too many letters to the editor that are little more than partisan political popgun skirmishes, watched noble aspirations for public benefit wither under the power of campaign donations, seen too few films or shows or television series that leave viewers uplifted, and watched too many late-night comedians whose one-note monologues encourage fleeing to bed and seeking refuge fully under the covers.

Yes, the Chief won the Super Bowl but then the President tweeted that they made the state of KANSAS proud and I wondered if he could identify Ukraine on a map without country names printed on them.

Lord, do I ever need baseball.

Some friends at the YMCA, knowing of my media background, have asked if I can get them tickets to a New York Yankees-Chicago White Sox baseball game to be played near the small Iowa town of Dyersville, Iowa, population about 41-hundred, this summer. Dyersville, as you probably know, is widely recognized as the home of the National Farm Toy Museum and the home of the Ertl Company, which makes die-cast metal alloy scale models of farm equipment and other vehicles.

There’s also THE baseball field, the filming site of Field of Dreams, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last year.

Major League Baseball has been pretty close to the vest with information about tickets for the Dyersville game but there won’t be very many. https://www.mlb.com/news/field-of-dreams-game-tickets-and-faqs

The teams taking part were announced last November:

https://doyouremember.com/108307/mlb-field-of-dreams-game

Beyond that, there’s been little information. We do know the game is scheduled for August 13 and it will count as a regular season game. It will be played in a specially-built ballpark owned by Go The Distance Baseball, the present owners of the movie site. The park has only 8,000 seats and it will be north of the movie ball diamond, connected to it by a path cut through a cornfield.   There will be windows in the outfield walls so fans can see the corn. The owners say they’ll find other things to do with the ballpark after the game.

No, I can’t get tickets for you. But like you, I’ll probably watch the game on the teevee.   Who will throw out the first pitch?   Your guess is as good as mine but I’ll bet it’s a pretty close.

But baseball is coming near. And, boy howdy, do I ever need it!

Chasing down information about the ball game at Dyersville brought me to several Youtube sites about Kevin Costner, the movie, and even the composer of the theme music, James Horner, who was killed in a plane crash in 2015 and is best remembered for the soundtrack to Titanic.

And that, of course, led to James Earl Jones intoning his ode to baseball near the end of the movie. It’s been cited so often that it is almost corny. But, gosh, is it good.

“They’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces….The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past…It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

In the offseason we’ve watched baseball writhe because of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. We’ve watched the free agent meat market produce players paid sums beyond our imaginations. The Royals have changed managers. The Cardinals still have enormous potential waiting to break through.

But when we hear the sound of baseball hitting leather or wood hitting the baseball, all of that offseason stuff fades away because games are played in their time and it is only the game that is important. Uniforms change, players once young and now old at 37 come and go. But it is still 60’6” from mound to plate, still 90’ from plate to first, still 127’ 3 3/8” home to second. The eternal dimensions contain the game.

The rules are clear and mostly unchanging year to year, decade to decade. Lines clearly mark what is fair and what is foul. Every batter has an equal chance to get a hit—three strikes and four balls. The tag of the bag in the first part of the double play, the infield fly, obstruction, the balk—all have rules requiring specific actions or situations. Baseball will be played this year with the same basic rules and dimensions it used last year. It’s one thing we can count on in otherwise unstable times.

Go to a baseball game and for a few hours you know how the game will be played. In the time before the game and the time after the game, we live in a world much less certain.

And the game is all there is for however long it takes to finish it. Cold, gray days, politics and impeachment, popgun partisanship in the letters to the editor page, and most of the cares of the world fade to insignificance because baseball is baseball, a game that by its eternal dimensions tells us there can be stability in life and that what once was good could be good again.

Lord, I do need baseball!

Dr. Crane on being on rascals and revolt

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(Dr. Frank Crane, who died 92 years ago, had words in his early Twentieth Century newspaper columns that resonate in today’s events. In this one, he wrote of the dangers of tolerating intolerable behavior.)

WHEN TO INSURGE

It’s all right to be resigned, to take things as they come, and not to complain; but there are things which we ought not to accept smilingly, against which we ought to kick strenuously, and protest loudly.

“When it rains,” says James Whitcomb Riley, “why, rain’s my choice.”; and this is a sample of intelligent resignation. To the thermometer and the barometer you should adjust yourself. When you accidentally break your leg, there is nothing to do better than to look pleasant and try to think it is all for the best.

When death separates us from our beloved, when the market goes down at the moment that we expect it to go up, when old age comes, when the hour-hand on the clock moves, and when the sun goes down, we are face to face with the inevitable.

But there is a world of other conditions in the presence of which cheerful adjustment is little less than a crime. There are certain events of which to say, “The Lord’s will be done!” is blasphemy, when it is not cowardice; for it would be much more honest to say, “The devil’s will be done!”

For instance, to begin at home, the unruly, spoiled, petulant, self-willed and selfish child who rules the house by sheer force of disagreeableness. This is no case for pious resignation.

There are the bullying husband and the nagging wife and the mischief-making neighbor. Here what you need is spunk, not sweetness and forbearance.

When you climb; over the end-seat hog in the street car, the righteous thing to do is not to move softly and apologize, but, quite by accident, of course, to drive your heel right into his pet corn.

When your city is owned and run by a gang of grafters it is time to arise and smite.

When shrewd thieves manipulate the world of business so that stock that is pure water is made to pay 16 per cent dividend, while the workers’ wages are reduced, that is no time to be praying to be content in the position in which Providence has placed you. You have not been placed by Providence, you have been flim-flammed by rascals.

When streets are unswept an backyards are unclean and alleys vile with rubbish, and the pest comes along and begins work upon the children, that is no time for fasting and prayer, or for kissing the rod. It is time to blow the horn and summon the trouble-makers to battle.

Submission to the unavoidable is good, but submission to the devices of wrong, crafty, cruel, or lazy people is contemptible.

“We make the greater part of the evil circumstances in which we are placed,” said Southey*, “and then we fit ourselves for those circumstances by a process of degradation.”

A man who is always satisfied, calm, and equable, who does nothing but smile and smile in this world where villainy is far from extinct, is either a fool or a knave. Every decent man ought to get angry about once in so often, just to maintain his self-respect.

Dr. Crane of truth and lying

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

THE TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let America Be America Again

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For many people, America has never been as great as some have nobly proclaimed it to be or proclaim to have made it. Again.

It’s good. But great? Yes, for some. For others, no. Can it be great if it is not great for all? We explore that issue today through the words of a great Missouri writer.

Langston Hughes is considered one of the nation’s greatest African-American authors, a Joplin native whose poetry and prose spoke powerfully of the African-American experience from the time his great grandmothers were slaves to the days when segregation was still a powerful and widely-accepted social institution. He died in 1967, still writing about what this country was but aware of what it could be or should be.

In 1935, he wrote a poem that portrayed the two Americas—the one he dreamed would come with a counterpoint describing the America he knew.

In our turbulent times today, it’s a good idea to think about Langston Hughes, who hoped for a better country while the real world around him seemed far from it. His voice from 85 years ago is a voice for many in these times and a challenge for others who are comfortable with their station.

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Langston Hughes reminds us from generation to generation we have much work to do before we should proclaim ourselves great. Proclamation is cheap. Achievement of greatness is hard and the quest for it should be never-ending if we really want to create, “the land that never has been yet—and yet must be.”

It not a matter of “again.”  It’s a matter of “yet.”

Dr. Crane on thinking

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(Dr. Frank Crane left the pulpit as a Methodist minister after 28 years to become a writer and newspaper columnist. The New York Times wrote in his 1928 obituary, “His message always was one of uprightness of living, sincerity of thinking and ‘sweet reasonableness.’” We could use a few doses of that sort of thing these days of division and derision, so we have been sharing some of his thoughts at the start of each week.)

SLOVENLY THOUGHTS

Clean up your thoughts.

Don’t have your mind looking like the dining-table after a banquet, or the floor after a political meeting. Sweep it and dust it and put the ideas away where they belong.

Don’t have a waste-basket mind.

Or a top-bureau-drawer mind.

It doesn’t do you much good to have a grand idea, or a wonderful impression, or a strong passion, if you don’t know where to put it.

I notice when I talk to you that you have a good many interesting notions. The trouble is they are all higgledy-piggledy; they have no unity, coherence, order, organization.

You think, but you don’t think anything out. Your wheat is full of chaff.

Perhaps I can help you if you will lend me your ear for a space.

  1. Don’t pick up some opinion you hear and make it your own because it sounds fine, and go to passing it out, without carefully examining it, scrutinizing, cross-questioning and testing it.
  2. One of the best tests of any opinion (not an infallible, but very valuable, test) is “Will it work?” If it won’t something’s wrong with it, nine times out of ten. That last brilliant notion of yours—hundreds of sensible people have had it, and discarded it, because it wouldn’t work.
  3. Don’t let anybody make you think you owe a certain amount of belief in a thing simply because you can’t disprove it. Nor be deceived by the argument, “If that doesn’t account for it, what does?” You don’t have to account for it at all. Some of the most pestiferous bunk has got itself established by this kind of reasoning. You don’t have to believe or disbelieve everything that comes along; most things you must hang up and wait.
  4. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” It’s a sign that you know what you do know.
  5. Ask questions. Don’t be ashamed of appearing ignorant. What you ought to be ashamed of is seeming to understand when you don’t.
  6. Classify. Education is nothing but the art of classification. Keep a scrap-book. Keep an index rerum. And classify.
  7. Waste no time in acquiring “general information.” Always read and study with a purpose. Look up subjects; don’t just read books. Books are to be referred to, consulted, not to be read through—that is, as a rule.
  8. Be a friend and daily companion to the dictionary and encyclopedia. Look things up.
  9. Define. Practise defining. Practise telling what a thing is not, as well as what it is.
  10. Get clear ideas of what you don’t know. Then you can see better what you do know.
  11. Write. Not for publication, necessarily, but for yourself. Writing accustoms you to choose just the right words. Beware of adjectives, especially two of them. Favor nouns. Use simple, short words. They mean more and carry further.
  12. And never hurry or worry.

Whose Money Is It?

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—OR, how a $2 fee is having a multi-million dollar negative economic impact in Missouri.

This entry will be lengthy because we have to use a lot of numbers to make our point.

A number of bills changing Missouri’s gambling laws have been filed for this year’s legislature. But we wonder if any of them should be considered until a significant problem with one of our existing laws is corrected because it has turned into a growing economic drain on our state.

Regular consumers of these pages know that the author has been advocating a fee increase for the casino industry to pay for the creation of a National Steamboat Museum.

As we’ve researched that issue we have come across a lot of interesting other issues and concerns. We passed some of them along to the House Interim Committee on Gaming that met this fall. In some cases we think we have some answers but here’s one where we don’t. Maybe some of our lawmakers will try to provide some. Or maybe somebody will ask the court system to do look into things. Our voice, however, is puny compared to the politically influential voices of a large, wealthy, and politically persuasive industry.

First, the scenario.

In 1993, the legislature required the casinos to pay the state two dollars for each admission on their proposed riverboats. Our first two casinos opened for business in the spring of ’94 and they paid the two dollars, no problem.

Our casinos have paid the two dollars in each fiscal year since. They are obeying the law.

But there’s this thing called inflation.

In the second fiscal year of casino gambling in Missouri, the inflated value of two dollars was $2.05 and the purchasing power of two dollars dropped to $1.95. In the fiscal year after that the equivalent value of two 1993 dollars was $2.11; purchasing power was down to $1.90. (Our numbers come from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

We get into some higher mathematics now. Our casinos paid the state in fiscal 1994-95 a total of $25,216,862, a very healthy increase in state general revenue. But if they had paid the state the inflated value of the two dollars, they would have paid the state an additional $702,172.

Whose money was the $702,172? The 1993 law does not say anything about casinos being able to keep what we refer to as “windfall profits.”   In fairness, the law does not prohibit casinos from keeping that money, either.

We were around then, covering the legislature, and don’t recall any concerns that the day would come when two dollars wouldn’t be worth two dollars. Trying to determine legislative intent at this great distance could be difficult although there are a lot of people still around who were serving in 1993 and voted on that bill who might recall what it was.

Fast forward to fiscal year 2018-19 that ended last June 30. Our thirteen casinos paid the state $75,000,634. But the inflationary value of the 1993 two dollars had risen to $3.48 (and it’s $3.53 for this fiscal year). Had the casinos paid the state in contemporary equivalent dollars, they would have paid the state about $55.6 million more than they did. Instead, they kept the money. The total windfall profits after twenty-six years of unadjusted two-dollar payments had reached $888.5 million as of June 30.

Whose money is it?   And whose money SHOULD it be?

Neither side seems to be protected by that 1993 law.

Compounding this question is the continued decline in purchasing power of the two dollars our casinos pay the state. It was down to $1.15 in the most recent fiscal year. The total loss of purchasing power since our casinos opened had reached $944.2 million.

The combined total of dollars the casino industry has kept because of windfall profits and the loss of purchasing power of the two dollars the industry did pay represented an economic deficit to the state during those twenty-six years since the two-dollar fee was established of almost $1.833 Billion as of June 30.

Now the question becomes even more acute: Once again, Whose. Money. Is. It?

There are some other questions, too. Why wasn’t anybody paying attention, either at the gaming commission or in the legislature? The casino industry probably was because it was reaping the benefits but should the industry have stepped forward and said, “Hey, legislature, this two-dollar fee thing is making us a lot richer while the programs intended to be funded by the two dollars are getting poorer and poorer?”

It was under no legal obligation to do so.

Now, with the accumulated negative economic impact after more than a quarter-century of casino gambling nearing Two Billion Dollars, shouldn’t somebody start trying to determine whose money this really is?   Should these windfall funds have been set aside in some kind of an escrow account until somebody decided who is entitled to them? Nothing in the law requires that.

A complicating factor is that the customers of casinos do not pay the fee. It comes out of casino revenues, the money casinos win from the customers. When the law was passed in 1993, it was still assumed there would be boats on the rivers making two hour cruises for which customers paid two dollars. They would get off the boat at the end of two hours and a new group would get aboard (and those wishing for another two hours on the boat would get back on board), each paying two dollars. But when the present system of boats in moats ended any thoughts of customers paying to enter the casino, the decision was made for casinos to pay the state two dollars per person with a new count being made every two hours. That’s how casinos wound up with 37.5 million admissions last year in a state of only six million people, most of whom don’t go to casinos. No customer pays anything.

That means the two dollars is not a pass-through from customers to the state, in effect a user fee. It is now a fee charged to the casinos and it is paid out of their money. (Their adjusted gross receipts in the last fiscal year were more than $1.735 Billion.)

If it is the casino industry’s money, is it the industry’s responsibility to make sure the two dollars going to the state are worth two dollars to the programs and entities that the fee was intended to pay for? If the two dollars are worth only $1.15 to the receiving entity, are they really the “two dollars” promised them by the statute?

The law says two dollars. Period. No inflationary adjustments are mentioned. And the casinos have done what most of us would have done (and what we might have done in certain circumstances)—if there’s money left on the table and nobody else claims it and if it’s MY table, it’s my money.

It is time to answer the questions. Here are the main reasons why.

The two dollar admission fee is split with one of the dollars going to the host city of the casino and the other dollar going to the state gaming commission which takes its budget out of those funds and then divides the remainder among a handful of worthy causes. The biggest worthy cause is the Missouri Veterans Commission Capital Improvements Trust Fund that provides money for nursing homes and cemeteries for our veterans.

Last fiscal year, each of those dollars had the purchasing power of 57.5 cents. The value is down another penny this year. Five years ago, the figure was 61 cents. At this rate, it won’t be long before the casinos are making more money from the two-dollar admission fee that was intended to offset the additional costs to host cities of a casino’s presence and to fund the gaming commission and its worthy causes benefiting veterans, college students, and programs for people who get in trouble because they gamble.

Nothing in the law says they can’t.

Nothing in the law says they can.

Whose. Money. Is. it? And—

Whose. Money. SHOULD. It. Be?

Who can answer the question? The state auditor? The attorney general? The legislature?

No matter what happens with our steamboat museum idea, isn’t it time to find an answer for our veterans, our college students getting scholarships under a program funded by admission fees, problem gamblers looking for help from a program financed by these fees, and our casino host cities?

Here are some additional figures that seem to bold-face the need to address this situation. It has been a long time since our high school bookkeeping class so we hope there is not a flaw in this reasoning. But here it is.

The state received $75,000,634 in admission fees in the last fiscal year. But because of the lack of inflationary adjustment in the two-dollar fee, it did NOT receive $55,600,438 more. That was the windfall profits that the casinos kept. The inflation-caused loss of buying power meant the $75 million the state did get was worth only $42,375,358, a loss of $32,625,276. Here is what it all adds up to:

If we add the amount of money that the casinos kept to the amount of lost purchasing power in the money the state got, the total is $88,225,744.

That means the state of Missouri and the home dock communities in the last fiscal year saw an economic DEFICIT of $13,225,110. Our analysis shows the unadjusted admission fees have produced annual economic losses to the state for the past five years totaling almost forty-eight million dollars.

That economic deficit is on track to almost DOUBLE in the current fiscal year.

In the first six months of this fiscal year (July-December) the economic loss was $$12,201,732—almost as much as all of last fiscal year. Why? Although admissions are down four percent from last year, the value of the two-dollars in contemporary money is more and the purchasing power of the money the state has received is less. The windfall profit so far this year is $28,285,835. The purchasing power loss for those six months is $20,890,844, a combined total of $49,176,680. The two-dollar fee has produced a payment of only $36,974,948.

At least, that’s how it appears from our calculator. And that’s why it is time for the General Assembly to take corrective action, despite this being a campaign year in which the well-financed casino industry can exert great pressure to keep millions flowing into its accounts while the programs the admission fee was created to pay for are victims of a rapidly rising negative economic impact. As long as that $2 fee is not adjusted, the casinos get richer and the programs and entities the fee was intended to finance get poorer.

The casinos want the legislature to let them take bets on sporting events, a new type of wagering that some expert testimony in last autumn’s committee hearings say could increase their revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Why should it be unrealistic to think the admission fee problem should be solved before these thirteen businesses are allowed to haul in even more dollars through sports wagering?

The casino industry probably would prefer this boat not be rocked, this sleeping dog not be awakened, this pot not be stirred. Its reasons are understandable. But for the others, isn’t it time somebody rocked the boat, awakened the dog, and got busy stirring?

The beast

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Sometimes as we go through old newspapers, magazines, journals, etc., we come across things that remind us of what we were as a society. They’re painful to read in today’s world but they’re reminders of something that remains not far beneath the thin social crust on which we live, as recent events show. It was difficult to read the accounts we relate today, but we pass them along as a reminder of what we can become if we listen to the wrong people, believe the wrong words, and fail to recognize that all of us have a responsibility to each of us.

The Republican takeover of the governorship and the legislature in the 1908 elections immediately increased racial tensions of the time at the capitol. The Clinton Henry County Weekly Democrat commented, “The first fruit of Republican victory…was the distribution of patronage; and in this the black bullies from Kansas City and St. Louis were not overmodest in their demands.” Ten African-Americans were hired for jobs with the House doorkeeper and the House Chief Clerk. “Naturally their first thought was to swell up and strut around, shedding the perfume of their presence among white members,” said the newspaper.

The “negro question,” as it was called, turned ugly in the Missouri House when a white woman Senate stenographer told State Auditor John Gordon she had been approached by a black employee of the House bill clerk’s office as she walked home one night. She reported she had refused to respond when he tried to engage her in conversation, although he told her, “The women clerks in my department like me.” She was badly frightened.

Although the Senate had no black employees, some senators joined some House members in questioning bill room clerk Virgil Franklin. The inquisitors were angered by what they considered his “impertinence,” and were stopped by cooler heads from throwing Franklin over the capitol’s second floor railing to the tile floor a story below. Franklin was suspended from his job and quickly put on a train to safety in St. Louis.

The incident prompted an angry resolution in the House from Representative Jesse Duncan of Lincoln County complaining that “numerous negro employees of this House…have, by their constant use of toilet rooms and towels provided for the members of the General Assembly and white employes [sic] become such a nuisance” and recommending the firing of almost all black employees of the House. The resolution also demanded separate toilets and towels be provided for black employees remaining.

But Duncan would go only so far. When Representative William H. Wade of Greene County asked him if he would accept an amendment calling for firing all negro cooks and waiters at boarding houses, restaurants, and hotels where legislators boarded, Duncan responded, “Certainly not. That is a different thing.” Wade retorted, “I would as soon have a negro pass me a bill as handle my food.”

A second resolution, from Iron County Representative C. H. Polk went further, proclaiming, “This is a white man’s State, and the white man has ruled its official conduct in the past and will continue to do so as long as time lasts.” He complained, “The big negro bucks continue to loiter and lounge around the corridors and the ingress and egress of the Assembly hall,” forcing lawmakers and others entering the chamber “to push and edge their way through this motley crowd of unclean, common, stinking negroes or return to their homes or lodging places in the city.”

He also complained, “The toilet rooms, eating counters, benches and seats, drinking cups, wash basins and towels furnished at the expense of the State for the convenience and comfort of the members of the Assembly and their white employes [sic], and…This horde of colored men use indiscriminately and with impudence all the above named necessaries and comforts of life without authority or consent given them by this assembly.” He wanted to protect “the white girl…where she is compelled to come in contact with him in any way whatsoever, her very nature revolting against his presence and rebelling against his every touch or attention.”

His resolution continued in the same vein for another couple of paragraphs but we have run out of capacity to share more of it. In the end, Polk advocated firing all “colored” employees of the House except for those doing menial labor for the doorkeeper and told “to leave the hall at once.”

The resolutions were sent to a committee that recommended a compromise replacing two black employees in the House mail room with white men “who would not mind” working with the two remaining black clerks. The compromise was suggested when all Democrats in the House refused to go to the bill room as long as all of the clerks were black. The committee also recommended separate bathrooms for black employees and visitors, a move called by one correspondent, “the first Jim Crow order…in Missouri,” further observing, “For years such democrats as James M. Seibert, Sam B. Cook and the democratic governors down to the present time had used the same wash rooms as the janitors. But the first change was made by the Republicans in the report of the clerical force committee…” (Seibert had been the State Treasurer, 1885-1889, and Sam B. Cook had been Secretary of State 1901-1905.)

The Keytesville Chariton Courier commented after the legislature had acted, “The only way that it is possible for the white race to get along with the negro is to make him know his place and then see that he stays in it.” Keytesville, in Chariton County, had been the home town of former governor and later Confederate General and former governor Sterling Price.

Before the end of the month, however, the first African-American lobbyist appeared in the legislative halls, Kansas City minister T.C. Unthank, who became the fortieth lobbyist to register for the session. The legislature had voted in 1905 to spend thirty-thousand dollars for a separate building for “incorrigible negro girls” at the Chillicothe Industrial School. But when the building was completed, so many white girls wanted to be in it that the building was made whites-only, leaving black girls to go to jails, work houses, or even worse to the state penitentiary. The sentencing in 1908 of a twelve-year old black girl to the state penitentiary added impetus to Unthank’s lobbying. He asked for a separate industrial school for girls—somewhere other than Chillicothe. His work paid off but the school did not open until 1916, largely because of trouble finding a community that would allow such a school. The Missouri Industrial home for Negro Girls opened in Tipton in 1916.

Eleven years after these events, Walthall M. Moore of St. Louis was elected the first African-American member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Forty more years passed before Theodore McNeal of St. Louis became the first black state senator.

Even after McNeal took his seat in the senate, no black member of the Missouri legislature could stay at a Jefferson City hotel. They either stayed in private homes or in dormitory rooms at Lincoln University. Not until fair housing laws came in the mid-1960s did that situation change.

Three years after Walthall Moore took his seat in the House, the Ku Klux Klan tried to hold its state convention in the House chamber. But it moved elsewhere when the governor ordered the chamber doors to be unlocked so anyone could enter.

Next year will mark 100 years since the election of the first African-American to the state legislature. Missouri has yet to elect a member of a minority race to a statewide office.

We debated with ourself whether to create this entry. But we recalled a few years ago when we were talking about newswriting to an Indiana college class and we let them listen to Edward R. Murrow’s powerful report from the German concentration camp at Buchenwald. We watched the impact it had on those young people, some of whom were near tears. Later, some of those students told me they had never been told about that part of history.

We do ourselves no favors by forgetting about or hiding from the painful words and deeds of the past in these times of anti-Semitic attacks on the streets of New York; of culturally-motivated mass murders in theatres, malls, churches and synagogues; of concerns about white nationalism shaping public policy; of toleration of cruel words and characterizations. The beast lurks beneath the thin social crust of our daily existence and we fail to recognize its nearness to each of us at our own peril.