Category Archives: government

Dive in!

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A heartbeat has returned to the Missouri Capitol. The legislature is back. It’s an election year. It’s a census year.

It’s leap year, meaning lawmakers have an extra day to accomplish something.

Because it’s an election year, members will want to burnish their records to improve their re-election chances. Sometimes election years leave incumbents vulnerable to interests that can threaten to cut off campaign donations or divert donations to challengers if the lawmaker doesn’t toe the line. That’s not a comfortable position for a legislator to be in but we’ve always thought some folks too easily let themselves be pushed around when their incumbency can be their greatest strength in the face of campaign intimidation.

By mid-May the idealistic rookies who were elected just two years ago will have had a taste of the real world. Some might have thought they could change things two years ago. Doesn’t look like they have. Yet. But maybe something is still burning within them that will produce positive change as they learn more about how to make the system work for them.

It’s always good to remember something the long-time Speaker of the California House, Jesse Unruh, said a long time ago, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” And there will be some who will chug it.

But others might remember Unruh’s comments about those who try to pressure (or bully) our legislators: “If you can’t take their money, drink their booze, eat their food, screw their women and vote against them, you don’t belong here.”

(We’re using the clean version because there might be ladies reading this entry)

Monday’s entry with Dr. Frank Crane suggested some things each lawmaker might say to himself or herself each day before going to the Capitol. In addition to those noble thoughts, it might be good for our lawmakers to recite the Unruh Gospel of Political Reality.

Swimming season resumes in the Missouri Capitol Shark Tank at noon today.

Dr. Crane: Today I will…

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Dr. Frank Crane, former Presbyterian minister turned widely-printed newspaper columnist in the 19-teens and twenties, wrote this piece in 1921.

Later this week our state lawmakers return to the capitol for almost five months of high-pressure work writing laws for themselves and more than six-million Missourians—and those who visit our state. We, as the lawmakers, learned early in our Capitol reporting career that legislative sessions quickly become all-consuming events that impose psychological blinders that narrow the view of life as the calendar days are crossed off. This column from almost a century ago by former Presbyterian minister-turned newspaper columnist Dr. Frank Crane extolls the value of spending a few minutes before leaving for the Capitol each morning to set some one-day personal goals. Maybe each of our lawmakers and others who will shape the laws and policies of our future should keep this column close by and read it out loud each day before going to do the public’s work.

JUST FOR TODAY

Here are ten resolutions to make when you awake in the morning.

They are Just for One Day. Think of them not as a life task but as a day’s work.

These things will give you pleasure. Yet they require will power. You don’t need resolutions to do what is easy.

  1. Just for Today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life-problem at once. I can do some things for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt I had to keep them up for a lifetime.
  2. Just for Today, I will be Happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness is from Within; it is not a matter of Externals.
  3. Just for Today, I will adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come, and fit myself to them.
  4. Just for Today, I will take care of my Body. I will exercise it, care for it, and nourish it, and not abuse it nor neglect it; so that it will be a perfect machine for my will.
  5. Just for Today, I will try to strengthen my mind, I will study. I will learn something useful, I will not be a mental loafer all day. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.
  6. Just for Today, I will exercise my Soul. In three ways, to wit:

(a) I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. If anybody knows of it, it will not count.

(b) I will do at least two things I don’t want to do, as William James suggests just for exercise.

(c) I will not show any one that my feelings are hurt. They may be hurt, but Today I will not show it.

  1. Just for To-day, I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress as becomingly as possible,  talk low,  act courteously, be liberal with flattery, criticize not one bit  nor find fault with anything, and not try to regulate nor improve anybody.
  2. Just for Today, I will have a Programme. I will write down just what I expect to do every hour. I may not follow it exactly, but I’ll have it. It will save me from the two pests Hurry and Indecision.
  3. Just for Today, I will have a quiet half hour, all by myself, and relax. During this half hour, some time, I will think of God, so as to get a little more perspective to my life.
  4. Just for Today, I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love and to believe that those I love love me.

The figure on top

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Ceres was lifted back to the top of the Capitol Tuesday morning. Not everybody was happy about it. The reason why is part of our national faith and national political history.

At a couple of the several pre-Christmas events we attended last weekend people asked if your observer had observed Representative Mike Moon’s letter in the local newspaper objecting to a pagan goddess being put back on top of our Capitol and what our observations were about his position that a statue of Jesus would have been better.

The tones of their voices as they asked those questions was indicative of their feelings that Rep. Moon was—–I guess “mistaken” is a generic way to put it.

My observation was that I disagreed with Rep. Moon, not because I am not a Christian—I shall let a much higher power than public opinion decide if I am and if being so entitles me to some eternal benefit—but because I am an American.

This incident and the attitudes implied in those brief discussion is both a commentary on some of the unfortunate polarization within our national community in which people tend to stake out a position and those who disagree are branded as political heathens, enemies, liberals, conservatives—whatever disparaging brands you can think of with which we brand people today instead of respecting their right to think differently from us.

There is nothing wrong with disagreement. Our nation, or at least the New England version of it that has been part of our school history lessons, was founded on disagreement. Unfortunately, our history tells us that those who disagreed with the Church of England enough to flee England often did not tolerate disagreement on matters of faith within their own ranks once they got here.

The discussion of Ceres vs. Jesus is part of our national faith fabric that we’ll explore a little bit later. But first, allow your faithful servant to explain why he comes down on the side of Ceres in this discussion.

Ceres is a symbol. Jesus is a person of worship. We do not worship Ceres by having her on our capitol. She symbolizes our greatest industry—agriculture—among other things. We do not worship agriculture although without it we could not exist. So her importance is in that quality of Missouri that is essential to all who live here. She might have been a goddess to be worshipped by ancient Romans and Greeks (who called her Demeter), but today she is but a symbol of a bountiful state.

The other day I drove past the Vipassana Buddhist Church, Center for Buddhist Development in Jefferson City, which has been in town since 2001. A few minutes later I drove past Temple Beth-el, the oldest synagogue building still in use west of the Mississippi River, built in 1883. Had I driven a little longer I would have gone past the Islamic Center of Jefferson City. Just outside of town is the Unity Church of Peace. And I have spoken several times at local Unitarian Universalist meetings. There even is a loose-knit organization of Atheists that gets together from time to time in Jefferson City.

Most Sundays you’ll find me at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), one block from the Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal Churches, kind of a mainstream nest in downtown Jefferson City.

All of these mainline and other organizations are free in this nation to worship as they please and who they please or to worship nobody if they please. This nation for centuries has tried to keep church and state apart. The degree to which that has succeeded has been discussed for as long as the effort has been made. But the underlying sentiment behind it has been that this nation is a nation where believers or non-believers of various ilks are equal in the eyes of the law and as such are to be respected as citizens of this country. Refining that concept has produced court rulings by the dozens without eliminating the attitudes by some that they are closer to God than others are. In the end, however, we think as an individual that God will decide who is closest to God and that the human tendency to separate ourselves on that basis is spiritually counterproductive.

Putting Jesus atop our Capitol would not recognize the diversity of faith or non-faith that is a perpetual part of American history, one of the things that sets our nation apart from many others.

Representative Moon sees things differently and he is entitled as a citizen and a man of faith to do so. Those who dismiss him out-of-hand are being dismissive of our heritage. A healthy and respectful discussion of the issues surrounding his feelings is not likely to produce many converts in any direction but the freedom we have to explore competing points of view on subjects such as this is part of who we are as a nation.

I’m reading George M. Marsden’s Religion in American Culture, a broad survey of the role of religion in creating and shaping our country. One of the things he writes about early in the book is the world that produced those we call Pilgrims and Puritans, people who came out of a Europe in which the Catholic Church only a century earlier had split into the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, and in which more recently the Roman church had divided through the Protestant Reformation (“Protestant,” as in one who protests), and the further divisions within Protestantism that was free of Catholic doctrine. In England, where King Henry VIII created his own church rather than follow dictates from Rome, a further split occurred between those who believed the Anglican Church could be cleansed from within and those whose disagreements with that church led to persecution and their eventual flight to Holland and ultimately to the New World.

But those who landed here in 1620 and the Puritans who came a few years later had a low tolerance for non-traditional interpretations within their ranks, the foremost result being Roger Williams’ banishment from Massachusetts Bay to found what is now Rhode Island as a refuge for those who felt church and state should not be one.

Williams was a co-founder of the Baptist Church in America with Dr. John Clarke. Marsden says, “Baptists carried the Puritan emphasis on conversion a step further by insisting that baptism of adults symbolizes spiritual separation from the world. Interested above all in the spiritual purity of the church, early Baptists believed in separation from the state Church of England, rather than working for reform from within, as most Puritans believed…Williams thus championed the separation of church and state, but not for the same reason that later Enlightenment thinkers, such as Thomas Jefferson, did. Jefferson was concerned that the church would corrupt the state. Williams feared that the state would corrupt the church.”

The challenges of survival by settlers who faced another new world beyond the Alleghenies led to new denominations that recognized individual responses to God rather than responses to the structured and creedal churches of the colonies.

We might have oversimplified what Marsden spent many pages explaining, but we remain today a nation of conversion-oriented, structured religions and religions that place greater emphasis on individual responses to faith outside of church-required adherence to doctrines.

One might be more likely to insist Jesus should be atop the Capitol. The other might be more likely to insist a state showing a preference for a particular faith tradition should not be what the country is all about. This discussion about the proper place of religion in American life is an ongoing one. Fortunately, we live in a nation that allows that discussion. We must be vigilant in protecting that right.

So Representative Moon is neither wrong nor right. He’s just being an American citizen and in his advocacy for Jesus being on top of the Capitol, he has reminded us of the differences that have shaped our free country and remain part of the diverse dialogue that is welcome here. We are glad that he can be such a citizen. And glad that those who respectfully disagree with him are Americans, too.

Dr. Crain: What is Democracy?

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(Dr. Frank Crane, a Methodist minister and newspaper columnist who died in 1928, compiled his weekly columns into a ten-volume series of small books a century ago. We have found his thoughts still valuable in today’s world and have decided to start each week with one of them. As the time approaches for the return of the Missouri General Assembly, we offer these thoughts.):

FUNDAMENTALS IN DEMOCRACY

These are axioms of democracy. Think on these things.

  1. The whole people is wiser than any group of men in it. Its judgment is sounder, surer. As Lincoln put it, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
  2. Democracy is not a scheme of voting, a plan for securing rules; it is a spirit.
  3. Remember what Mazzzini* said, that some day a man would arise to whom democracy would be a religion. He would be the Great Man (I quote from memory, and may be inexact.)
  4. Democracy is run for the benefit of the people in it; autocracy for the benefit of the people upon it.
  5. Autocracy is most concerned about efficiency; democracy about welfare. Autocracy is eager to build the house; Democracy, that the builders be happy.
  6. Autocracy is a White Passion; Democracy is a Red Passion.
  7. Autocracy thinks of the State; Democracy of the people that compose the State.
  8. Autocracy is abstract; Democracy concrete. The former exults impersonal aims; the latter aims constantly at men.
  9. Autocracy producers Order; Democracy Initiative. Democracy invents; Autocracy applies.
  10. Autocracy’s efficiency is quick, specious, and temporary; Democracy’s efficiency is cumulative; every success means another.
  11. Democracy is natural; Autocracy is artificial.
  12. Democracy is its own remedy. The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. It carries within itself its own recuperation. Autocracy prepares its own ruin.
  13. Democracy has in it the seed of evolution; Autocracy has in it the seed of revolution.
  14. The strength of democracy is education; the strength of autocracy is obedience.
  15. The God of democracy is the same God the individual has; the God of autocracy has a different moral code from that of the individual. The Kaiser’s God, for instance, approved of the rape of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania.**
  16. The method of democracy is light; of autocracy, darkness. Democracy created the free press; Autocracy the censor.
  17. It is complained of democracy that it debates too much, but only by free debate can the right be winnowed out.
  18. Democracy “washes its dirty linen in public.” True, but it gets it clean.
  19. Democracy is dangerous. And there is no progress without danger.
  20. Democracy is called vulgar, common, cheap. The real truth is that Autocracy is more so, only its defects are concealed and fester, while democracy’s are open and are healed.
  21. Democracy is capable of a more perfect organization and unity than autocracy.
  22. Autocracy is built upon caste; Democracy upon humanity.
  23. “The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” is only possible in a world of democratic nations. So long as there are kings, emperors, and dynasties there can be no world unity.
  24. Militarism is a function of autocracy; democracy functions in law.
  25. Art, science, and literature will do better under democracy than under any protection and patronage they may get from autocracy, just as plants and people grow better in the air and sunshine than in a closed room.

*Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) was an Italian politician and writer who was influential in the Italian Revolutionary Movement that argued for a unified Italy

**This column appeared during World War I and was published in one of his books in 1919.

Notes from a quiet street (holidays edition)

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We’re puzzled by President Trump’s pronouncements that some people are “human scum.” Apparently he has forgotten that there are good people on both sides.

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Ceres will be on display this weekend at the capitol before she’s hoisted back into her position on top of the dome. She’s back from her year-long “spa treatment” at a bronze restoration company in Chicago. We expect a lot of folks to go to the capitol to see her before she goes back up. Who knows, it might be another ninety years before she comes back down.

However, the folks in Chicago did some detailed 3D scans of the old girl. The Capitol Commission hasn’t decided what to do with them yet. There’s been some discussion of creating a Ceres hologram somewhere inside the capitol so we won’t have to wait ninety more years to see her up close.   Your observer has advocated for years flying drones or something around the dome to do just such a scan so 12-inch reproductions could be made and sold at the tour desk.

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Speaking of Ceres: One of the questions we’ve been asked several times is whether she was supposed to face north instead of south (or at least, north as we think of it in Jefferson City—an observation about that in a minute). We think she was always intended to face south.

North advocates say it’s odd that the patron goddess of agriculture isn’t facing the most fertile farmlands in Missouri and is instead facing the rocky Ozarks.   Not really. She’s facing south because that’s the entrance to the capitol and she’s extending a hand of welcome to those who come to the building. It wouldn’t do to have her turn her back on visitors.

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Now, is she facing south? No. We think she’s actually facing, uh, southwest.   Columbia is north; Fulton is northeast. Check a map that shows where north is.

Many years ago, Jefferson City officials realized house numbering was a scrambled mess because some houses, say, were in the 400 block of West Kneecap Street while houses right behind them on West Headache Avenue had numbers starting with 700. It wasn’t a problem in the earliest days of the town when it was a nice grid. But when it spread and the streets began to snake along the high ground that conformed to the meandering river channel, numbering became scrambled.

It was a huge deal when the city launched a house renumbering program that brought things into a more sensible system that would make it easier for police or fire or other service people to find out where something was happening or had happened. A lot of folks didn’t like getting new numbers but they had to go out to Westlake/s Hardware or maybe uptown of Schleer Brothers Hardware Store (imagine that: a hardware store on High Street. And a grocery store. And a dime store.) and buy new numbers to put on their walls, mail boxes, and doors.   But they finally did.

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We’ve often observed that our church as a hymn, “In Christ there is no east or west; In him, no north or south” and we’ve suggested the substitution of “Jefferson City” for “Christ” would give us an accurate city anthem.

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Our city has a contest for the best house Christmas lights. There’s a place just up the block from our house where the folks seem to take great delight in the darkening months’ holidays, not with lights but with balloons. This year there are inflatable figures of Snoopy and Charlie Brown and other Christmasy things. We always look forward to the fall holiday season when we see the latest Halloween inflatables , then the Thanksgiving ones and, now, Charlie Brown figures, including Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel, complete with turning propeller.

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Something from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune in June of 1914, a headline reading “Beautifying the River Front.”

Nothing is more unsightly than railroad tracks between a city and its river front. It was a mistake to ever permit the railroad tracks to be constructed between the city and the river. Under the circumstances, there is nothing to be done but to arch over the tracks, or at least a part of them…

The article was about an early drawing by the architects of the soon-to-be new capitol showing a terrace over the tracks on the capitol’s river side with steps leading down to the water. That part of the capitol project was never done, of course. But the often-maligned proposed Bicentennial Bridge might materialize that hope of 105-years ago.

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For the record, the last time a state official was impeached and removed from office in Missouri was when Secretary of State Judi Moriarty was removed from office for post-dating her son’s document filing as a candidate for the Missouri House. Eric Greitens quit before articles of impeachment could be taken up in the House. In about 1968 there was a circuit judge in St. Louis named John Hasler who had taken a fatherly interest in a woman whose divorce case he was hearing. But he resigned before the trial could be held. And the last impeachment before THAT was probably State Treasurer Larry Brunk in the 1930s, who was charged by the House but the Senate couldn’t get a two-thirds vote against him. Brunk had been a state senator a few years earlier. The Brunk case is considered one of the reasons the new constitution adopted in 1945 eliminated trial by the Senate and put it before the Missouri Supreme Court.

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And in each of those cases, we are sure there were good people on both sides.

Unity

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We offer today a vision of a different world, a plea to recognize that good things come from working together in common cause. In this time of division and derision, perhaps we can find some comfort in these long-ago words that sought to bring us together for our mutual benefit.

We found this poem in an 1894 newspaper published in the small town of Higbee and in several other communities in Missouri.

All Men Are Brothers

We are all a band of brothers, And should have regard for others, And with sisters, fathers, mothers, We should work for all alike.

Yes, we’ll work for all together, Both in clear and stormy weather, And our labor without measure Shall supply the wants of all.

For there’s room enough for all, And there’s plenty at our call;  No misfortunes will befall While in friendship we unite.

So we’re brothers all united, And our wrongs shall be righted, For our word we all have plighted, That our union shall endure.

Nature treats all men as brothers, Does the same for us and others, So, with sisters, fathers, mothers, Let us live in unity.

Am I the only person who hears these words as a potential hymn? Perhaps they are a song heard and forgotten, we don’t know. The sentiment might be unrealistic in these times of political crudeness and rudeness. But there seems to be a longing in many people’s hearts for this poem to prevail in our discourse.

But here comes what will be the bucket of cold water for some who have read these words and found them wistfully welcome.

This poem was published in the Higbee Altruist. The newspaper also was published as the Sulphur Springs Altruist, and the St. Louis Altruist. There might have been other communities that published it as an addition to local reading material in the days when reading prevailed, before radio, television, the internet, and hand-held devices intruded into thoughtful sentiments.

Alcander Longley published the newspaper from 1885-1917, the year before his death, and a predecessor with a different name from 1868 until changing the title to Altruist. He’s not widely recalled in Missouri newspaper publishing history despite that half-century career.

Longley’s newspapers were aptly named because he really did believe in the words of that poem. And he did more than just write about it. He founded communities based on the philosophy at the end, “Let us live in unity.”

Longley was living in a rapidly-changing post-Civil War Missouri. The growth of industry was changing the economic climate; the healing of war wounds was altering politics; and the movement of people from rural to urban areas was among the economic, social and political alterations to the Missouri in which Longley had grown up (he was almost thirty when the war began).

Robert Jeffrey David Wells wrote his master’s thesis at Missouri State University in 2008 about Longley and his newspapers. He recorded that Longley founded the secular utopian community of Reunion in southwest Missouri’s Jasper county in 1868. It winked out three years later. He created the Friendship Community in Dallas County a year later. It failed in 1877. His next attempt was the Friendship Community of Bollinger County, in 1879, the Principia Community in Polk County in ’81, The Mutual Aid Community in Jefferson County, which lasted from 1884 to ’85, followed by the Altruistic Society of 1886 there. In 1889 he formed the Mutual Aid Community of St. Louis before forming The Altruist Community in several locations between ’89 and ‘91. He established the Altruist Community in Randolph County in 1895 and Altro 1898, which lasted until 1900.

Missouri has had s number of communistic societies. Travelers driving through the few that survive, Longley’s or anyone else’s, might never know the unusual ideals behind their foundings unless there are signs.

The St. Louis Communist was his first newspaper, before the Altruist that contained the poem. Longley died in 1917, the year of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution that re-defined “communism” in dark, repressive terms. Perhaps it is best that someone who believed life is better if everyone contributes to the mutual benefit of all did not live to see Lenin’s longer-lasting definition become reality.

Today the words “communism” and “socialism” are political swear words. But once upon a time, they were sincere ideals. And, after all, what’s wrong with a poem that sounds like a lot of the songs in church hymn books today?

Nature treats all men as brothers, Does the same for us and others, So, sisters, fathers, mothers, Let us live in unity.

Courage

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I find myself using the word “courage,” or at least thinking of the word, too often in observations about our political world at state and national levels. It takes courage on both sides to break from partisan ideology, to challenge entrenched and powerful private influences, and to take stands that benefit the benign many more than the influential few. We wonder if lack of courage by those entrusted with leadership translates into lack of trust by those who think courage to truly provide for the common good is needed.

A poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko comes to mind often these days. Yevtushenko was a Russian (and Soviet) writer, poet, novelist, and film producer whose works questioning and challenging Soviet authority led to his expulsion from the Gorky Institute for Literature, and a ban on travel. (Both of his grandfathers had been declared by Stalin to be “enemies of the people” twenty years earlier.)

In 1961, he wrote a poem he called “Conversation with an American Writer.”

“You have courage,” they tell me.

It is not true.

I was never courageous.

I simply felt it unbecoming

To stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

 

I simply mocked at pretense and inflation.

I wrote articles, scribbled no denunciations,

And tried to speak all on my mind.

 

Yes, I defended men of talent,

branding the hacks, the would-be writers.

But this, in general, we should always do,

And yet, they keep stressing my courage.

 

Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame

To remember when punishing vile acts,

That most peculiar time

When plain honesty

Was labeled “courage.”

 

We suspect many people today would appreciate that kind of courage, seeing instead only bowing to power in the interest of personal security.

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Notes from a quiet street (Autumn edition)

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It’s still warm, 90s lately, and some leaves are starting to fall. But we are reminded of a rolling snowball as we watch the developments in Washington. We seldom have observations about the national scene, but we have lived long and seen much in state and national politics. And we know that once a snowball starts rolling, it gets bigger and bigger and it starts going faster and faster.

A friend of mine once advised a roomful of public officials, “It is better to admit you have a skeleton in the closet than to try to bury a body. A skeleton doesn’t stink as much as a body when it’s dug up.”

That’s not an exact quote but it catches the idea.

The problem we have seen in politics is that the tendency is to try to heap more dirt onto the grave.   And in heaping more dirt on the grave, the person under scrutiny is only digging the hole deeper.

Richard Nixon, Bob Griffin, Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Tom Pendergrast and insurance director R. Emmett O’Malley, Eric Greitens, and now, Donald Trump. And there are a lot more.

We don’t know what the case will be against President Trump or whether it is a sustainable one meriting an impeachment action by the House. But it just feels as if there’s a snowball starting to roll. And past experience tells us snowballs don’t stop until somebody is swept away.

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Nancy and I helped some of our church friends work on a Habitat For Humanity project backed by another church last week.  After several hours of standing, carrying, holding, and scraping, we went home and promptly stiffened up as we recovered in our recliner chairs for a short time.  As I got up, I dropped the TV remote and I tried to pick it up.   I found myself wishing I had one of those button things people wear around their necks. Except mine would be wired backwards so that the emergency responders would hear me say, “Help, I’m up but I can’t get down!”

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Cardinals are playing in October.  Milwaukee got knocked out early.  The only thing better would have been if it had been the Cubs.

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And what in the world is it doing being hockey season already?

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The District

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What if Jefferson City had become like Washington, D. C.? What if it wasn’t the county seat of Cole County? What if the state capitol was not even in any county?

What if everything within a four-mile radius of the Missouri Capitol, south of the river, was the District of Jefferson?

On February 26, 1923, Representative Casper M. Edwards of Malden offered a proposed constitutional amendment to create such a district. If the legislature approved it, the matter would go to a statewide vote in November, 1924. His proposed four-mile line would have taken in almost all of the city, at the time a town of more than fifteen-thousand people (and growing fast; the population would be almost fifty percent bigger in 1930)

All laws governing the district would be decided by the General Assembly which also would appoint all local authorities.

The proposed district would have devastated Cole County’s tax base, of course, and would have required relocation of the county seat. But where would it go? The population in the farmland outside of Jefferson City at the time would have been pretty small. Russellville had 364 people in 1920; St. Thomas, probably not more than 150; Lohman had 120 in1920; St. Martins, Taos, and Wardsville had a few hundred each. Osage City was unincorporated.

We could have had one heckuva fight for the county seat! Or maybe later laws would have merged the remainder of Cole County with surrounding counties.

We haven’t found any records of what Edwards was thinking about or what prompted him to suggest the District of Jefferson. While some contemporary accounts contemplated the district as being like the District of Columbia, it’s likely Edwards did not intend his proposed district to be part of no state. Even then, Missouri had districts of various kinds.

We’re not sure how much square mileage his plan would have totaled, but today, Jefferson City sprawls over almost 37.6 square miles (about 26 square miles fewer than Columbia but six more than Joplin, eight more than Cape Girardeau, eight fewer than St. Joseph) so the city would have grown far outside his circle. The Jefferson City Country Club is 5.4 miles from the Capitol, for instance. Binder Park is 3.2 miles farther west. (And it’s pronounced BIN-der, not BINE-der. It’s named for a German fellow who was a powerful civic leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

And what a mess would things be if the General Assembly was the agency that appointed local officials?

Citizens might have been offended by losing their rights to vote for members of the city council, the mayor and the municipal judge. Instead of a local police department, would there be a state police department and would it be in charge of penitentiary security and capitol safety as well as making sure the city streets were safe?

Would the appointment of local officials mean no election of school board members? Who, then, would hire teachers and on what basis. Would state taxpayers be financing the local high school football team?

Would the city have been more prosperous if state funds made up its budget? What would it be like if the legislature-appointed mayor had to go before the appropriations committees each year to ask for money for everything the city has or does now?

Good Heavens!

Fortunately for the City of Jefferson (that’s what its real name is), Edwards’ resolution was assigned to the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments and was not heard from again.

Who was this guy Edwards anyway?

He was a Representative from Dunklin County for three terms, born in Farmington in 1870, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher. Robert Sidney Douglas, in his 1912 History of Southeast Missouri, wrote that the Malden Clipper moved to Kennett in 1886 and became the Dunklin County News, a weekly paper. Several years later Casper Edwards formed Edwards Publishing Company, and took over the News. He was described as “a brilliant and forceful writer.” He finally sold the paper to the Malden Printing Company. The newspaper continued until 1931 when it became the Twice A Week Dunklin Democrat until 1956 when it became the Daily Dunklin Democrat, which continues to publish in Kennett.

Edwards died of a head injury suffered when his car overturned down an embankment near Malden in August of 1936. He appeared not seriously injured by died five hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. One newspaper report said the hemorrhage was brought on by “excitement over the accident.

Another account said he had practice law in Malden since 1900, had been an Assistant Attorney General under John Barker (1913-1917), and had published newspapers in Malden, Caruthersville, and Van Buren.

As we have noticed, from time to time, discovering a long-forgotten incident while prowling through old newspapers can lead to being involuntarily drawn down a path to other stories. This is one of those. It eventually leads to a poem saluting a legislative colleague who had died, the story of a disappearing rabbit, the discovery of a huge hoard of bat guano, and the early days of Missouri tourism.

It’s a long and winding road from the story of the Casper Edwards and the District of Jefferson and we’ll have to tell it some other time.

 

Bob

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More than forty years ago, in the months before we set up The Missourinet, when we were still in local radio in Jefferson City, a new guy showed up to cover city council meetings. He was working for a then-new FM station that hadn’t shown much in terms of news coverage but he’d been hired as the news director and he arrived determined to carve a place in this market for a new news voice.

I was impressed with this kid right away. And I was impressed with him right up to the day he died, Sunday, a third day after gall bladder removal surgery.

I liked Bob Watson’s ambition and his work ethic right away. He wanted to be part of the Missourinet when we started it and I kept putting him off through several cycles of new reporters on our staff because I didn’t want to tell him he just didn’t have the kind of voice we wanted to have on the air. I respected his commitment to reporting, his desire to be a good reporter, the persistence he brought to his work. On top of that, he was a good guy. But finally, I forced myself to break the news to him. I was sorry I had to disappoint him.

Bob left the radio station and worked for the local television station where his conscientious behind-the-scenes role shaped the content of the newscasts. Fortunately, Betty Weldon, the owner of the News-Tribune, saw in Bob Watson the kind of reporter she wanted on her newspaper staff. She hired him more than thirty years ago; Bob said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. That is where he carved his place. In years to come, when people look at the microfilms of the newspaper for the last thirty years they will find the byline of Bob Watson everywhere in the News-Tribune. I used to joke that there were times when he wrote the entire front page. While he might not have really done that, he came darned close a lot of times. His passion for reporting is reflected in the volume and the quality of solid reporting on those pages.

Mrs. Weldon died several years ago and the family sold the newspaper to an Arkansas-based company that, unlike many businesses that are buying the media today, maintains a high standard of local news coverage. A few months ago it named Bob its employee of the year.

He was the statehouse reporter for the newspaper and was a tenacious questioner of governors and lawmakers—-there were times when some of his colleagues had to force themselves to interrupt him to get OUR questions in. He, as all good reporters, hated vagueness and contradictions from the newsmakers. He never backed down in questioning their statements or their intentions. I knew when I read a Bob Watson story that it was accurate, balanced, and thoroughly-developed.

We sat at the Senate press table for many years, both of us at times going into what I call “screen saver mode,” Bob because he dealt with a sleep disorder and me because my work day had passed the eight-hour mark by 1 p.m. most of the time. Both of us always had our recorders running so we didn’t miss anything.

Bob’s coat pockets always bulged with pens of multiple colors. He had a color-coded system of note-taking of some kind that I never asked him to explain. His notes were always neat, his handwriting always clear—while most of us at the table filled notebooks with scrawls that only we could read.

One of his last stories was published on the anniversary of the first moon landing. It was about the reunion of the Apollo 11 astronauts with their space capsule that happened to be at the state capitol on July 20, 1970. Bob knew that I had broadcast the event and he tracked me down at a family gathering in Colorado for an interview. He wasn’t feeling well and had taken a rare day off from work the day before and still wasn’t back up to snuff but he had to get the story, had to find the person he wanted to interview, wanted to tell the tale.

That’s a good reporter for you. As long as you can drag yourself to the keyboard, there’s reporting to be done, a story to be told.

One thing Bob did that I never have done—-a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reporterbob

You’ll find a lot of his own words and informal photos that capture the spirit we’ll remember, his joy of being a journalist, his love of his family (official and unofficial families), a bit of his self-deprecating humor, and a face that says kindness, steadfastness, and  “character” in both senses of the word.

We have lost invaluable institutional memory. We have lost a good friend, a man who committed his life to good journalism, a newsroom mentor. His church has lost a willing worker, a good soul. His children have lost a proud parent, his grandchildren a proud grandfather. All of us have richer lives because God gave us Bob.

When I dropped in at his room at St. Mary’s hospital Saturday, the day after his surgery and shortly after the nurses had gotten him up for his a post-surgery shuffle to the end of the hall and back, I asked him, “Watson, what’s a good Presbyterian boy like you doing in a place like this?” He took it in all good humor. We talked for a few minutes but just before I left I said, “You know, people are going to start asking, ‘How can you have the gall to ask that question?’ after this.”

“You don’t have to have a gall bladder to have gall,” he answered with a weak smile.

That was Bob Watson.

(The photo is from the News Tribune “contact” page)