John Wesley had a birthday last week. He would have been 219 years old.
He was the founder of the Methodist Church.
Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” commemorated his birth by passing along “John Wesley’s Rule,” noting that there’s no evidence he actually wrote it. But it’s a good thing to remember as we breathe the increasingly toxic political air that is being generated in these times.
You might want to print it out and post it in several places in your home.
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.
Sounds like a good platform for a candidate. A candidate adopting this standard as part of the campaign platform could certainly stand out in today’s political climate. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to see somebody try it.
This is a day of eloquent words. The celebration of that eloquence is overshadowed by the festival this day has become.
We’re not talking only about the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence, approved by the Continental Congress on this day (but not signed by the 56 delegates for some time), but for the eloquence of a speech by a special man before thousands of admirers on this date.
This is the day in 1939 that Lou Gehrig, one of the greatest players and greatest people to play baseball, said goodbye—with words of courage and gratitude before a crowd of almost 62,000 people in Yankee Stadium who had come for baseball games but mostly to pay tribute to Lou Gehrig.
The words were spoken a little more than a month after a consequential trip to Missouri.
The most memorable line came at the beginning, not the end—as is the case with the Declaration’s most famous line.
“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
“Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.
“When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift – that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies – that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter – that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body – it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed – that’s the finest I know.
“So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”
As far as the trip to Missouri—
Gehrig had sensed something was wrong when he hit “only” .295 in the 1928 season with 29 home runs and 114 runs batted in—the kind of season most of today’s major leaguers would love to have. But it lowered his lifetime batting average to .340 and left him 287 hits short of becoming the seventh player with 3,000 hits, an achievement he could have expected to reach in 1939 under normal circumstances. It also left him seven short of 500 home runs and six short of 2000 runs batted in, both statistics he would have achieved in ’38 if he had had a normal year.
He was troubled at the start of the 1939 season by the fact that he was only four for fourteen in the World Series, all of the hits being singles, and going four-for-28—again, all singles—to start the year. He didn’t hit a home run during spring training and his coordination in the field was off. He played his last major league game on April 30, then told manager Joe McCarthy he was benching himself after 2,130 straight games.
But there would be one more game. Gehrig was still the Yankees’ captain, often the man who took the lineup card to the home plate umpire at the start of the game, as he did during a series in June against the St. Louis Browns. It was there that Gehrig told reporters he was going to the Mayo Clinic soon for some tests but expected to return to the playing field during the summer. “I can’t help believing there’s something wrong with me,” he told them. “It’s not conceivable that I could go to pieces so suddenly. I feel fine, feel strong, and have the urge to play…I’d like to play some more and I want somebody to tell me what’s wrong. Usually a fellow slows up gradually.” But this year, he said, “Without warning…I’ve apparently collapsed.”
After wrapping up the series with the Browns, the Yankees went to Kansas City for an exhibition game against their best minor league team, the Kansas City Blues, team that matched rising Yankee star Joe DiMaggio against brother Vince, who played the same position for the Blues against the Blues’ up and coming double play duo of shortstop and future Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto and second-baseman Jerry Priddy, who combined that year for 130 double plays, a league record. They were called up by the Yankees in ’41.
Lou Gehrig played his last game on June 11, 1939 in Kansas City. He played in great pain, but played errorless ball at first base. His last at-bat was in the third inning. He grounded out to Priddy.
While the rest of the team took a train to Cleveland for a series there, Gehrig and his wife, Eleanor (in this AP photo from 1936), flew to Rochester for tests on the 13th that she had arranged. Six days later, the clinic’s Dr. Harold C. Habein issued a “Two whom it may concern” letter telling Gehrig he had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an illness that “involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system and in lay terms is known as a form of chronic poliomyelitis—infantile paralysis.”
The letter concluded, “The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr. Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player inasmuch as it is advisable that he conserve his muscular energy. He could, however, continue in some executive capacity.”
Gehrig took the letter to manage Joe McCarthy and team president Ed Barrow on the 21st. They released the information to the media that day and announced that July 4th had been set aside for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at the stadium.
Gehrig admitted he was shocked by the findings. He told New York sportswriters, “Mrs. Gehrig and I are fully resolved to face the situation calmly” and he called the trip to the Mayo Clinic “the best move I ever made.” But he didn’t ignore the reality of his situation. “My friends tell me not to worry. They slap me on the back and say, ‘Don’t worry, Lou. Everything is going to be all right.’ But how can I help worrying.”
He was honored during a forty-minute ceremony held between games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. There were a lot of gifts including a fruit bowl and two candlesticks from the New York Giants. The one that might have had the most meaning was a 21-inch silver trophy from his 1939 teammates, their names and a poem by New York sportswriter John Kieran engraved on it.
To LOU GEHRIG
We’ve been to the wars together;
We took our foes as they came:
And always you were the leader,
And ever you played the game.
Idol of cheering millions:
Records are yours by sheaves:
Iron of frame they hailed you,
Decked you with laurel leaves.
But higher than that we hold you,
We who have known you best;
Knowing the way you came through
Every human test.
Let this be a silent token
Of lasting friendship’s gleam
And all that we’ve left unspoken.
Your Pals of the Yankee Team.
When Gehrig walked back to the dugout that day, the only one of the many gifts he took with him was that trophy.
Kieran said his poem was a “feeble interpretation” of how the players felt about Gehrig, who was his neighbor in the suburb of Riverdale, New York. Kieren often visited Gehrig as his health declined. One day, Kieran later related, Gehrig pointed to the trophy and said, “Some time when I get—well, sometimes I have that handed to me—and I read it—and I believe it—and I feel pretty good”
Lou Gehrig died, only 37 years old, On June 2, 1941. Six months later, the Baseball Writers Association of America voted unanimously to ignore the traditional waiting period for admission to the Hall of Fame and unanimously elected him.
When Eleanor Gehrig died in 1984 she donated that trophy to the Hall of Fame. It and other Gehrig memorabilia are on display in Cooperstown.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. There still is no cure for it. Nor is there an effective treatment to stop it or reverse its progression.
July 4th. A day we normally observe eloquent words. Perhaps a few of us today will remember, too, words not only of eloquence but of courage in the face of a life to come and gratitude for the life that had been.
” All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think.”
—Judge Michael Luttig. June 16, 2022 before the January 6th Committee.
Nancy and I had the same reaction as we listened to Judge Luttig’s testimony. We both recalled a routine by the comedy duo of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Bob & Ray, in which Ray interviewed the President of the Slow Talkers of America.
Sometimes we talk too rapidly. We are so accustomed to talking rapidly, even before we have understood a question or a discussion point, ignoring the admonition from the Gospel of James: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires”
The most underrated part of speech is the pause.
—-because pauses give listeners the chance to process what we say.
As we watched, it became apparent to us that Judge Luttig realized the gravity of his appearance before the committee, and wanted to so carefully respond to questions that there could be no lack of clarity in his responses or misunderstandings of what he said. His pauses made us listen more closely.
We were drawn into his answers not only by the pauses but by the exactness of his words. And it was because his pauses caused us to listen so carefully that one line had an impact (at least to this listener) greater than all of the others. It came as the committee was discussing the erroneous advice given President Trump that history and law establish a precedent for the Vice-President to overturn a presidential election. Judge Luttig, after refuting that claim, told the committee: “I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.”
He didn’t say that as the written transcript preserves it. Without raising his voice, the pacing of his statement carried an unmistakable power and a passion as he carefully formed his thoughts, pausing as he did so, knowing that his words became history a soon as he spoke them.*
Near the end, his carefully-delivered words carried a warning:
Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.
In the days since his testimony an unusual thing has happened. The judge has explained why he spoke as he did. Several organizations have reported his explanation. It began with praise from a writer for Vanity Fair, Joe Hagan, who wrote on Twitter:
“I like how this guy treats every line of his testimony like he’s engraving it on a national monument. And frankly, he really *is* engraving it for history. And he seems to know it. I also respect, despite how halting he may sound, that Luttig is not setting himself up to be a mere soundbite maker. He’s speaking to history, not TV. His sobriety, his graveness, his hallowedness, is so foreign to our modern sensibilities — but that’s the point. That is the precise point.”
Judge Luttig saw what Hagan had written and responded that Hagan “almost presciently understood precisely what I was at least attempting to do…”
What you could not know, and did not know, but I will tell you now, is that I believed I had an obligation to the Select Committee and to the country, first to formulate . . . then to measure . . . and then . . . to meter out . . .every . . . single . . . word . . . that I spoke . . . , carefully . . . exactingly . . . and . . . deliberately, so that the words I spoke were pristine clear and would be heard, and therefore understood, as such.
I believed Thursday that I had that high responsibility and obligation — to myself, even if to no other. Also please bear in mind that Thursday was the first time in 68 years, to my knowledge, I had ever been on national television, let alone national television like that. And though not scared, I was concerned that I do my very best and not embarrass myself, as I think anyone who found themselves in that frightening circumstance would be.
I decided to respond to your at once astute and understanding tweet finally this afternoon, because I have been watching the tweets all day suggesting that I am recovering from a severe stroke, and my friends, out of their concern for me and my family, have been earnestly forwarding me these tweets, asking me if I am alright. Such is social media, I understand. But I profoundly believe in social media’s foundational, in fact revolutionary, value and contribution to Free Speech in our country, and for that reason I willingly accept the occasional bad that comes from social media, in return for the much more frequent good that comes from it — at least from the vastly more responsible, respectful speech on those media.
That is why, 16 years after my retirement from the Bench, even then as a very skeptical, curmudgeonly old federal judge, I created a Facebook account and then a Twitter account — slowly . . . very slowly . . . one account first . . . and then . . . followed . . . by the other. All of this said, I am not recovering from a stroke or any other malady, I promise…
I was more ready, prepared and intellectually focused (I had thought) during Thursday’s hearing than I have ever been for anything in my life. I gather my face appeared ‘too red’ for some on Twitter, betraying to them serious illness. The explanation was more innocent than that. At the last minute, I had been able during the weekend preceding my testimony to help my daughter get settled into her new home, where the temperatures were in the upper 90s, and where I was appreciatively, though unwittingly, to get just a little bit of needed suntan!
What I will say, though, is this. And I think it explains it all. All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think. I will proudly assure everyone on Twitter that I was riveted, laser-like as never before, on that promise to myself… beginning promptly at the hour of 1:00 pm Thursday afternoon.
What is more, as consciously as one can be aware of something subconsciously, I was…supremely conscious that, if I were chiseling words in stone that day, it was imperative that I chisel the exact words that I would want to be chiseled in stone, were I chiseling words in stone for history.
He concluded, “I can assure you that on last Thursday, June 16, I had never felt, or been, better in my life.”
Judge Luttig, in addition to contacting Politico to explain his careful presentation, shared with the political news site a reflection he wrote in February about those who were heroes on January 6. He called the piece “the most important words to him that he has ever written” and said they are the words “that he wants remembered.” You can find it at:
Writing has no pauses. We, and many others, will remember Judge Luttig not for those words he wrote in February but the words and the pauses that he gave us on June 16, 2022.
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*National Public Radio (and others, probably) has been publishing transcripts of each day’s hearings. We have edited the NPR transcript for that hearing to highlight Judge Luttig’s testimony. For the full transcript, please go to https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105683634/transcript-jan-6-committee
The transcript (excerpted)
LIZ CHENEY:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Judge Luttig, thank you as well for being here with us today. You issued a very important statement earlier today, which I urge all Americans to read. And I’d like to ask you, Judge, about one of the sentences in your statement and ask if you could explain to us the significance of it. You say, had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.
Could you elaborate on that for us, Judge?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Thank you, Madam Vice Chairman. That — that passage in my statement this morning referenced the — the most foundational concept in America, which is the rule of law. Thus, as I interpret your question, you are asking about that foundational truth of these United States, which we call America. The foundational truth is the rule of law.
That foundational truth is, for the United States of America, the profound truth, but it’s not merely the profound truth for the United States, it’s also the simple truth, the simple foundational truth of the American republic. Thus, in my view, the hearings being conducted by this select committee are examining that profound truth, namely the rule of law, in the United States of America.
The specific question of course before you and before the nation, not before me, is whether that foundational rule of law was supremely violated on January 6, 2021. Now, to the question specifically that you asked, Madam Vice Chair, I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from his President and the President of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021 and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States, notwithstanding that then President Trump had lost the Electoral College vote as well as the popular vote in the 2020 Presidential election, that declaration of Donald Trump as the next President would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America, which in my view, and I’m only one man, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.
LIZ CHENEY:
Judge Luttig, did the Trump electors in those seven states who were not certified by any state authority have any legal significance?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Congresswoman, there — there was no support whatsoever and either the Constitution of the United States nor the laws of the United States for the Vice President frankly ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified by the designated state official in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. I did notice in the passage from Mr. Eastman’s memorandum and I took a note on it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but he said in that passage that there was both legal authority as well as historical precedent.
I do know what Mr. Eastman was referring to when he said that there was historical precedent for doing so. He was incorrect. There was no historical precedent from the beginning of the founding in 1789 that even as mere historical precedent as distinguished from legal precedent would support the possibility of the Vice President of the United States quote, “Counting alternative electoral slates that had not been officially certified to the Congress pursuant to the Electoral Count Act of 1887.” I would be glad to explain that historical precedent if the committee wanted, but it — it would be a digression.
JOHN WOOD:
Judge Luttig, I had the incredible honor of serving as one of your law clerks. Another person who did was John Eastman. And you’ve written that Dr. Eastman’s theory that the Vice President could determine who the next President of the United States is in your words incorrect at every turn.
Could you please explain briefly your analysis?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
It was my honor, Mr. Wood, to have you serve as my law clerk. I — I could answer that question perfectly if I had at my disposal either Mr. Eastman’s tweet or my own analytical tweet of September 21st. But I don’t. But that said, let me try to remember the analysis of — of Mr. Eastman’s analysis.
JOHN WOOD:
And — and Judge, I can read to you and to the audience I think what was a really key passage from your very insightful analysis when you wrote, “I believed that Professor Eastman was incorrect at every turn of the analysis in his January 2nd memorandum beginning with his claim that there were legitimate competing slate of electors presented from seven states.”
You’ve already addressed that issue. But your next sentence said, “Continuing to his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from the seven states from which competing slates were allegedly presented.” So what was your basis for concluding that Dr. Eastman was incorrect in his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from these disputed states?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
I understand. As I previously stated in response to Congresswoman Cheney, the — there was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman at all. None. With all respect to my co-panelist, he said I believe in partial response to one of the select committee questions that the single sentence in the 12th Amendment was he thought [unartfully] written.
That single sentence is not [unartfully] written. It was pristine clear that the President of the Senate on January 6th, the incumbent Vice President of the United States, had little substantive constitutional authority if any at all. The 12th Amendment, the single sentence that Mr. Jacob refers to, says in substance that following the transmission of the certificates to the Congress of the United States and under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the archivist of the United States that the presiding officer shall open the certificates in the presence of the Congress of the United States in joint session.
It then says unmistakably not even that the Vice President himself shall count the electoral votes. It clearly says merely that the electoral count votes shall then be counted. It was the Electoral Count Act of — of 1887 that — that filled in, if you will, the simple words of — of the 12th Amendment in order to construct for the country a process for the counting of the — the — the sacred process for the counting of the electoral votes from the states that neither our original Constitution nor even the 12th Amendment had done.
The irony, if you will, is that, from its founding until 1887 in — when Congress passed the Electoral Count Act, the nation had been in considerable turmoil during at least five of its presidential elections, beginning as soon thereafter from the founding as 1800. So, it wasn’t for — almost 100 years later until the Electoral Count Act was passed.
So, that’s why, in my view, that piece of legislation is not only a work in progress for the country, but at this moment in history an important work in progress that needs to take place. That was long winded. I understand.
JOHN WOOD:
Well, Judge Luttig, at the risk of oversimplifying for the non-lawyers who are watching, is it fair to say that the 12th Amendment basically says two things happen, the vice president opens the — the certificates and the electoral votes are counted. Is it that straightforward?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
I would not want that to be my testimony before the Congress of the United States. The language of the 12th Amendment is that simple.
JOHN WOOD:
Thank you, Judge.
PETE AGUILAR:
I appreciate that. In our investigation, the select committee has obtained evidence suggesting that Dr. Eastman never really believed his own theory. Let me explain. On the screen, you can see a draft letter to the President from October 2020. In this letter, an idea was proposed that the Vice President could determine which electors to count at the joint session of Congress.
But the person writing in blue eviscerates that argument. The person who wrote the comments in blue wrote, quote, “The 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session. And then in the passive voice that the votes shall then be counted”. The comments in blue further state, “nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own”. Judge Luttig, does it surprise you that the author of those comments in blue was in fact John Eastman?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Yes, it does Congressman. But let me — watching this unfold, let me try to unpack what was at the root of what I have called the blueprint to overturn the 2020 election. And it is this.
And I had foreshadowed this answer in my earlier testimony to Congresswoman Cheney.
Mr. Eastman, from the beginning, said to the President that there was both legal as well as historical precedent for the Vice President to overturn the election.
And what we’ve heard today, I believe is — is what happened within the White House and elsewhere as all of the players, led by Mr. Eastman, got wrapped around the axle by the historical evidence claim by Mr. Eastman. Let me explain very simply, this is what I said would require a digression, that I would be glad to undertake if you wished, in short, if I had been advising the Vice President of the United States on January 6th, and even if then Vice President Jefferson, and even then Vice President John Adams, and even then Vice President Richard Nixon had done exactly what the President of the United States wanted his Vice President to do, I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.
But what this body needs to know, and now America needs to know, is that that was the centerpiece of the plan to overturn the 2020 election. It was the historical precedent in the years — and with the Vice Presidents that I named, as Congressman Raskin understands well, and the — the effort by Mr. Eastman and others was to — to drive that historical precedent up to and under that single sentence — single pristine sentence in the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Taking advantage of, if you will, what many have said is the inartful wording of that sentence in the 12th Amendment. Scholars before 2020 would have used that historical precedent to argue, not that Vice President Pence could overturn the 2020 election by accepting non-certified state electoral votes, but they would have made arguments as to some substantive, not merely procedural, authority possessed by the Vice President of the United States on — on the statutorily prescribed day for counting the Electoral College votes.
This is — this is constitutional mischief.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
The gentlelady yields back…
Judge Luttig, I want to give you an opportunity to share your thoughts on the ongoing threat. You’ve written the clear and present danger to our democracy now is that former President Donald Trump and other political allies appear prepared to seize the presidency in 2024 if Mr. Trump or one of his anointed candidates is not elected by the American people.
What do you mean by this?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Mr. Chairman, I’m honored beyond words by your words. I was honored on January 6th, 2021, and also honored beyond words to have been able to come to the aid of Vice President Mike Pence. I prayed that day just like the vice president prayed that day. I believe we may have prayed the — the same prayer to the same God. I prayed that same prayer with my wife this morning before I came into these hearings.
I have written, as you said, Chairman Thompson, that today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because, to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don’t speak those words lightly.
I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us. As I said in that New York Times op-ed, wherein I was speaking about the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open, in plain view of the American public.
I repeat, I would have never uttered one single one of those words unless the former president and his allies were candidly and proudly speaking those exact words to America. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today for these proceedings.
Our ex-President has been raging on his personal social media platform about the January 6th Committee hearings and their discoveries. Last Thursday, after the third hearing explored the physical danger faced by the Vice-President during the Trump-inspired riot, Trump took to his own personal platform to complain, “It is a one-sided, highly partisan Witch Hunt, the likes of which has never been seen in Congress before. Therefore, I am demanding EQUAL TIME to spell out the massive Voter Fraud & Dem Security Breach!”
Your faithful correspondent suggests the ex-President make a minor change in his characterizations of the committee. It’s a small thing but precision in language is important in times of great personal and national stress. The committee hearings do not constitute a witch hunt. Witches are females. Males are Warlocks. It would improve his credibility as an intelligent individual if he referred to the perceived attacks on him with the proper term.
It’s a Warlock Hunt.
Your faithful correspondent also agrees with the ex-President that he should be allowed equal time to respond to statements made by numerous associates and advisers and played back during the hearings.
We believe his most equal time should be spent under oath.
Before the committee.
And the committee should extend to him the privilege of speaking in an open, public, widely-broadcast hearing in which he could explain at great length his thoughts, actions, and words—unlike the way the committee has handled his associates, with closed hearings and excerpts of their testimony played in the public hearings. After all he WAS the President of the United States and he deserves that special courtesy.
He’s correct in observing that these hearings are something “which has never been seen in Congress before.” It would REALLY be something that has never been seen before if he would explain to the committee under penalty of perjury—-as so many of his associates have done—his justifications for his words and his actions or his lack of actions.
But maybe his request should be refused because—
actually, the hearings are Democracy’s equal time to lies he told at all of the rallies he held before and after the 2020 elections.
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There’s another observation we have, uh, observed in the months since those events.
Some members of Congress deny the events constituted a violent uprising or insurrection or riot or whatever. The people who came into the Capitol that day, they say, were just peaceful tourists.
We were peaceful tourists at the Capitol once when we took our children to Washington, D.C. So we know about these things.
We didn’t see any of the Congressmen who say the people on January 6 were like our family greet us at their offices, as ours did. (Our Congressman even took the children down on the House floor with him during debate that day; our son wanted to go back the next day but we told him the only way he could ever do that would be to get elected).
One of our previous Congressmen once invited us to visit him in Washington and even told us he’d take us to the House cafeteria for some of the famous bean soup that’s served there.
We didn’t see any of those Congressmen go out on the front steps of the Capitol and get their pictures taken with their peaceful constituents that day. Ours did. He even signed the picture.
We’re sure the peaceful visitors would have enjoyed seeing their representatives and senators. They probably had worked up a pretty good appetite by then, too, and might have enjoyed some bean soup.
What a bummer of a day that was for those visitors. They go to all the trouble they went to to travel to Washington, to gather at the Capitol, to make a special effort to get in to see their Congress people only to find there would be no family picture and no bean soup.
It’s clear that too much of our political dialogue in this country has lost any semblance of courtesy.
I trace much of that loss to the medium that was my life for more than fifty years and to a slight degree still is. Radio.
Radio had been consigned to insignificance (again) by the early 1980s. But satellite-delivered content became more practical and with it voices that were no longer local and often no longer respective of listeners, guests or callers came into our radios. After all, the show was about them, not about the community and the residents radio stations lived with. Nationally-distributed talk radio is considered the savior of the AM band.
Now look at where we are. Not just in radio but in our political circles and even in our daily verbal intercourse with one another, even among family members. And it’s less than two months before the August primary elections and—-Oh, Lord! The flood of thirty-seconds of irrationality that will assault our eyes and ears and insult our intelligences.
The other day we found a concert by Glen Campbell with the South Dakota Symphony on YouTube. It showcased his great voice, his incredible guitar-playing, and even a solo with bagpipes.
He closed the concert, as he often did, with a song by Bobby Austin and Carl Sapaugh: Try a Little Kindness—
If you see your brother standing by the road
With a heavy load from the seeds he sowed
And if you see your sister falling by the way
Just stop and say, “You’re going the wrong way”
You’ve got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
Don’t walk around the down and out
Lend a helping hand instead of doubt
And the kindness that you show every day
Will help someone along their way
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
T.A.L.K. Kindly. We really need it these days. It’s time we got smart enough to ignore the self-centered lousy examples we have all around us and rise above them.
They don’t want us to do that. They profit if we continue to dwell in blindness, narrow-mindedness and narrow-minded streets. But we know we can be better than their examples.
Weimar, Germany is the country’s celebrated cultural city, the home of writers Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Composer Franz Liszt lived there for a time, as did 16th century painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus movement and the Bahaus School of design there. It also was the home for a time of artists and architects such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henry van de Velde. Composer Richard Strauss and philosopher Fredreich Nietzsche also lived there briefly. It is the city where Germany’s first democratic constitution was signed. It lasted from the end of World War I to 1933, when Hitler killed the Weimar Republic.
It also is four miles from the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp.
At various times in World War II and the years leading to it, 240,000 people were imprisoned and where an estimated 56,545 died or were murdered.
And the people of Weimar claimed they did not know of what was happening there—-although slave laborers from the camp worked in its munitions industry. When American soldiers found the camp in early April, 1945, they were stunned by the human wreckage the Nazis had left behind. General Patton ordered the soldiers to go to Weimar and round up thousands of the “unaware” citizens and force them to tour the camp to see the atrocities being conducted in the name of their country. A reporter for The Guardian, a British newspaper wrote:
There in groups of 100 they were conducted on a tour of the crematorium with the blackened frames of bodies still in the ovens and two piles of emaciated dead in the yard outside, through huts where living skeletons too ill or weak to rise lay packed in three-tier bunks, through the riding stables where Thuelmann, the German Communist leader, and thousands of others were shot, through the research block where doctors tried new serums on human beings with fatal consequences in 90 per cent of the cases.
It was an experience they can never forget. Most of the women and some of the men were in tears as they moved from block to block. Many were crying bitterly. Some of the women fainted and could be taken no farther.
Legendary American journalist Edward R. Murrow toured the camp three days after the Army arrived. He was so shaken by what he saw that he waited three days to broadcast his story by short-wave radio back to CBS in New York. I believe it is the greatest broadcast in radio and television history:
A few days later, the Dean in Weimar, Richard Kade, speaking for the Protestant church in Germany said, “We carry no blame for these atrocities.” In a memorial service many years later, one of Kade’s successors, Henrich Herbst, admitted Protestant Christians had not “courageously admitted and put a name” to the “unspeakable suffering of women and children, Jews, communists, Social Democrats and Christians” at Buchenwald.
I visited Weimar on a lovely June morning when the streets near the town square were filled with singing and music by college students whose year had ended, where merchants had set up their little booths on the square selling their wares. I bought a gold gingko leaf pin for Nancy that day. The gingko is the official tree of Weimar.
We had lunch with the mayor and after that, as a cold front had moved through the area and the afternoon was chilly and misty, we visited Buchenwald.
And we saw the ovens.
And urns filled with ashes.
And we put little stones on the outlines of the barracks that Murrow described so graphically.
And we all thought of people living four miles away who chose not to know what was happening at Buchenwald.
We are living a Weimar moment in America today.
A special Congressional Committee is taking us on a graphic tour of January 6, 2021. But there are those who want to ignore the brutal ghastliness of that day and its attack on our democratic-republic form of government.
Murrow began his historic broadcast, “Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.”
Last Thursday might, Congressman Bennie Thompson sounded a 21st Century equivalent to Murrow’s introduction: “We can’t sweep what happened under the rug… So, tonight and over the next few weeks, we’re going to remind you of the reality of what happened that day, but our work must do much more than just look backwards. The cause of our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over. There are those in this audience who thirst for power, but have no love or respect for what makes America great, devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect union. January 6th and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.”
Twenty-million television viewers that night began the equivalent of the tour the citizens of Weimar were forced to take. That night and in meetings to come, we will see what many of us have chosen not to see or to know. It will not be pleasant viewing. If you have no appetite to hear what has been done, this is a good time to turn off the television for the committee is going to explain what happened on January 6.
Just as Wiemar residents in 1945 chose to turn away from what was right in front of them, there were many who chose to, and will choose in future hearings to, look away, to seek out channels where the work of the committee is ignored or downplayed or where they will be encouraged to think of other things. If you don’t think about what happened on January 6 and why, it didn’t happen. You “carry no blame” for those events.
The Post-Dispatch reported the major Republican candidates for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat seem to have adopted the Weimar Defense. They took to Twitter to attack the committee findings—even before the hearing Thursday night began.
Eric Greitens called the hearing a “show trial.” Mark McCloskey expanded on that idea by calling the hearing a “fraud show trial” and claimed it is “government abuse you expect from Soviet Russia, China or North Korea.” Eric Schmitt called the committee “a joke.” Vicky Hartzler wants her people to ignore what the leader of her party might have done (we’ll learn more specifically what his role in that dark day was in more detail later) and look at her perceived failures of President Biden and congressional Democrats. She called the hearing a “sham.” Billy Long said it was a “reality show” that avoided Democratic party failures on various issues.
McCloskey is dead wrong. There are no congressional hearings in Soviet Russia looking into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, no hearings in China on that country’s repression in Hon Kong, and no investigations in North Korea about the impoverished population and the saber-rattling of the country’s leader.
A joke?
We wonder if those who think the hearings are a joke smiled as Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards recounted when the mob moved in while she and her fellow officers tried to hold them back with nothing more than bike racks. “I felt the bike rack come on top of my head and I was pushed backwards and my foot caught on the stair behind me and I—my chin hit the handrail. And then I—at that point I had blacked out. But my—the back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me.”
And were they chuckling when she described regaining consciousness and went to help those trying to hold back the mob on the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol and, “more and more people, you know, started coming on to the west front?”
The arrival of Metropolitan Police officers stopped the advance so, “for a while I started decontaminating people who had gotten sprayed and treating people medically who—who needed it.”
Did the joke get funnier as she described getting back behind the next line of bike racks and being sprayed in the eyes and another officer started to take her away to get decontaminated but they never made it because they were tear gassed? “I saw, I can just remember by—my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a—a war zone…I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground…they were bleeding. They were throwing up.”
And were those saying the hearing was a joke dissolve into side-holding laughter as Edwards told the committee, “I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood…Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”
That’s really hilarious.
There was nothing funny about what happened January 6. And those who suggest that these hearings are a show or a joke or a fraud or who suggest we become like the citizens of a city known for its culture who chose not to want to know about the hideous events on their doorsteps are beneath respect.
Jesus told his followers (John 8:31-32), “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Our freedom is at risk with those who think the search for the truth of what happened January 6 is a fake, a fraud, a show, or a laughing matter.
This is our Weimar moment. If we are to be disciples of freedom, we must not be afraid to see the truth of what happened January 6 and how it came about. The committee will escort us through that camp.
If we love our country we must be unafraid of what we will see.
Originally, this was Decoration Day, a day set aside in 1868 at the suggestion of Union General John A. Logan to remember the dead of the Civil War. By 1890 all of the northern states had adopted May 30 as “Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of those Civil War soldiers who had died “to make men free,” as the song says.
Two world wars turned the day into a day to remember our nation’s dead from all wars. It became “Memorial Day” in 1971 when a three-day holiday was created with the last Monday in May, regardless of the date, as the observance.
The Jefferson City Community Band is holding its annual Memorial Day Concert today at the First Christian Church, the usual venue for this concert.
The program is always patriotic music or music with a military orientation.
One of the selections this year is John Williams’ Hymn to the Fallen from the 1998 Stephen Spielberg movie “Saving Private Ryan.”
The movie is the story of a World War II Army Ranger unit’s search for a Private James Ryan, an Iowa farm boy whose three brothers have been killed in action. The Army wants him sent home, alive, but first he must be found.
The unit is led behind enemy lines by Captain John H. Miller to find Ryan before the War Department has to send a fourth letter of profound regret to his mother. The unit finds Ryan but pays a tragic price by losing several men to save this one. Miller is the last, telling Ryan, “Earn this” as he dies—to live a life worthy of the cost of saving him.
The musical motif is repeated at the end of the film as we see the face of Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon) morph into the face of James Ryan (played by Harrison Young) fifty years later, visiting the cemetery at Normandy with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He finds the simple cross that marks Miller’s grave and kneels.
Old James Ryan: “My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”
His wife approaches. “James?..”
She looks at the headstone. “Captain John H. Miller.”
Ryan stands and looks at his wife. “Tell me I have led a good life.”
“What?”
“Tell me I’m a good man.”
“You are,” and she walks back to the family members who have been watching, quietly, as Old James Ryan straightens, and salutes the cross with Miller’s name on it.
Writer John Biguenet, in a 2014 Atlantic Magazine article about the movie concludes that “the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of the fallen heroes; the living are in fact the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan we cannot help but ask what we’ve done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.”
On this Memorial Day, when self-centeredness, too often further corrupted by meanness, burdens our daily discussions, perhaps we can find a moment to justify the sacrifices of those intended to be honored today by living our lives better than we are living them.
“Put in front or burn it up,” August Duesenberg told Joe Boyer midway through the 1924 Indianapolis 500.
And he did.
Joe Boyer is the only Missouri native to win the Indianapolis 500 although Missouri’s connection to The Greatest Spectacle in Racing is long and varied, stretching from its earliest days to today. The story of his victory has been equaled only one other time in the 105 runnings of the race. The 106th edition will be run Sunday.
The race had changed engine rules in 1923, cutting engine size by one-third to only 122 cubic inches. The average speed of Tommy Milton’s winning car was about 3.5 mph slower than the winner’s speed in 1922.
But new technology powered Boyer’s car in 1924. It was the first 500 that allowed superchargers and the impact of them was immediate. Motor Age magazine told readers, “The perfected and groomed 122 cu. in. racing cars not only thrilled the ardent admirers of motor car racing with a new and unexpected record for average mileage but brought them to the ecstasy of sheer joy by setting a pace that rolled the first five over the finish line at greater speeds than the old record.”
The eight fastest qualifiers for the race all ran more than 100 mph with Jimmy Murphy’s Miller Special leading the way at 108.037. Boyer started fourth, the inside position of the second row, in the field 22 cars, at 104.84.
Joseph Boyer Jr., was 34 years old the day of the race. He was born in St. Louis, the son of the inventor of the first successful rivet gun. Boyer senior helped one of his employees, William Seward Burroughs develop a “calculating machine” in the company machine shop. Burroughs put Boyer in charge of the American Arithmometer Company that then absorbed a competitor. The Boyer family moved with Burroughs to Detroit when Joseph junior was 15. The company became the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and Boyer senior served as its president until his death in 1930.
The Boyer family was quite wealthy and Joe Junior soon got into boat and car racing. One day before his 29th birthday, Joe Boyer Jr., started 14th in his first Indianapolis 500. He lasted only 30 laps before his rear axle failed. The next year, he was the second fastest qualifier but crashed out of the race eight laps from the end and finished 12th. In 1921, he started fourth again but was sidelined by a failed rear axle again after only 74 of the 200 laps. He missed the 1922 race and Differential failure in 1923 left him 18th.
It appeared his fortunes were changing in 1924, at least for one lap. Reporter Clarence Phillips, in the press box, records, “As they pass the starter Murphy, in his gilded chariot, sprigs ito the lead. ‘Look at Murphy,’ I hear someone say excitedly. But Boyer shoots past Murphy like a streak and finishes the lap in first place…” But by the fifth lap he was “out of the immediate picture suddenly.”
A key was sheared in his supercharger. He could still run but not at competitive speeds. His teammate, L. L. (Lora Lawrence) Corum (on the left), who started 21st because he was a late qualifier despite having the 16th quickest speed, had worked his way up to ninth at the 150-mile mark. He was fourth at 200 miles. Just past the halfway mark, the 109th lap, Corum made a pit stop. Boyer had turned his crippled car over to another driver shortly before and Duesenberg ordered Corum out, put Boyer in and issued his famous order.
He was third behind Murphy and Earl Cooper after 120 of the 200 laps. Twenty laps later he was a minute-25 seconds behind Murphy and Cooper. When Murphy popped a tire on the 146th lap and had to pit, Boyer moved to second and started to close the gap on Cooper and was only 52 seconds back at 375 miles.
The lead shrank to only 37 seconds with 100 miles to go, down to 30 seconds with 30 laps left.
And then on lap 178, “Cooper goes into the pit…, Boyer springing into (the) lead and crowding his supercharger for full benefit…Each time the leaders pass the stands now there is yelling…Cooper gains four seconds…”
Twenty laps left and Boyer has expanded his lead to a minute-to seconds.
“Only ten more laps for Boyer. If he has good luck and drives the rest of the way as consistently as now he’ll win handily.”
Lap 195: “’Boyer is increasing his lead. He wants to finish strong. The starter is getting the flags redy. In one hand he has the green flag and in the other the checker. Boyer is given a big ovation on the next to the last lap. They know he is the winner unless he falls dead or some other calamity occurs.
“The checkered flag is waved in front of Boyer as he comes down the stretch. He wins.”
He finished the race in five minute more than five hours, an average speed of 98.24 mph, four miles an hour faster than the record set two years earlier. Cooper finished second and Murphy was third.
Boyer and Corum were recognized as the first co-winners in Indianapolis 500 history. In three other races (1911, 1912, and 1923) the starting drivers had relief drivers for part of the race but they got back behind the wheels and finished the race. This was the first time a winning car started with one driver but finished with a second one in control.
The only other time it has happened in race history was 1941 when Mauri Rose relieved Floyd David on the 72nd lap and went on to win the race. Davis is the only driver in the race’s history to win without leading a single lap. Rose also won the race by himself in 1947 and 1948.
Bowyer remains the only driver to lead the first lap and the last lap of the Indianapolis 500 in different cars.
Boyer drove during an era when some tracks were made of wooden boards and had high banks and featured motorcycle as well as automobile races. One of those tracks was the Altoona Speedway in Pennsylvania.
The annual Altoona Fall Classic, held about Labor Day, attracted the big names in auto racing. Boyer again was trying to run down Jimmy Murphy when his car blew a tire and crashed into the guard rail at 125 mph. Boyer was pinned in the car, his legs crushed. Rescuers got him to a hospital where both of his legs were amputated and he received blood transfusions. But he died on September 2, 1924, four months after he became the only Missouri driver to win the Indianapolis 500.
Motor Age concluded its article about Boyer’s 500 win, “As a result of this race the talk that has been heard heretofore about the maximum speed of the rack having been reached has been dissipated and some of the experts now confidenty believe that more than 100 miles an hour can be maintained for the 500-mile circuit of the famous speedway.”
On the 97th anniversary of Joe Boyer becoming the first (and so far, only) Indianapolis 500 winner from Missouri Helio Castroneves, using an engine about the same size as the one in Boyer’s car, averaged 190.690 mph in winning his fourth Indianapolis 500.
(Photo credits: Corum and Boyer—Bob Priddy, taken at the IMS Museum; all other illustrations are from Motor Age magazine, June 5,1924)
Jacques reflects on life in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
They’re gone. They’re done. The chambers are dark and cool. The hearing rooms are empty and quiet. The unpopulated rotunda echoes with the sounds of a few footsteps.
The players have departed, some to return but others now of no further use, their importance immediately extinguished because they can no longer do things for people who want things done.
Some of those who have served will never be seen again in these hallways. Their offices soon will be occupied by some other temporary presence who will come to this time, too.
And what have they left behind? What lasting benefit was there of their service?
The fact that they served, that they sought the responsibilities and the obligations of office, can be enough.
Some—those who will never again do anything as consequential as vote on some pages of words that establish allowable behaviors for six million people—might have time now to ponder their legacies. Did they benefit all Missourians or just a few? Did they protect the many or place a few ahead of them? Will their time in the Capitol matter in the arc of history.
Or does it make any difference?
We have found ourself wondering during this session what some departing members will consider their legacy. When the last newspaper article is written about them, will one of their distinguished accomplishments be that they shut down the Senate for half of the session, for purely partisan and sometimes personal reasons?
For those who won’t be back in either the House or the Senate, will they be remembered because they almost were part of the least productive legislative session in modern history? If the House had not approved twenty Senate-passed bills on Friday, the day after the Senate quit a day early, this session would have approved only 23 non-budget bills. The record low number in modern times is 31 in 2020, when the pandemic scrambled everything. What scrambled everything this year was the conservative caucus in the Senate that believed its seven members should tell 17 other Republican Senators and ten Democrats how to run the place.
Our friend Rudi Keller says the average number of bills passed since 1981 was 155.
Senator Emory Melton, who served 28 years from Cassville, once opined that “it is not the bills that pass sometimes; it’s the bills that DON’T pass.” A lot of bills didn’t pass this year, good ones and bad ones that were sentenced to death, early, by seven of 197 legislators who thought the congressional redistricting map should be about partisan politics rather than about public representation in Government.
We wonder if anyone considers whether a law they sponsored will still be on the books twenty-five years from now.
Will two legislators who talked to each other during debate almost every stay in touch even one year after leaving the capitol?
All glory is fleeting, said Patton. All glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever, said Napoleon. How many years will elapse before one of their townsfolk is surprised to learn they once served in the Missouri General Assembly?
What’s done is done. The session will be recalled for the stalemate that froze the Senate for half the session. It will be recalled because one chamber threw in the towel a day early and the other gave up before the statutory deadline on the last day. Well after any memories of individual accomplishments, this session will be recalled for those things.
Grantland Rice, the dean of sportswriters in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—–the man who described the Notre Dame backfield as “The Four Horsemen”—wrote a poem titled, The Record:
When the game is done and the players creep
One by one to the League of Sleep,
Deep in the night they may not know
The way of the fight, the fate of the foe.
The cheer that passed, the applauding hands,
Are stilled at last — but the Record stands.
The errors made, and the base hits wrought;
Here the race was run! There the fight was fought.
This is the last week of the legislative session. Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.
This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club. A lousy one.
Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.
Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.
If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.
To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber. Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.
Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value. We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.
Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.
America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.
The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.
New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.
The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..
Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic NorthAmerica, by Carrie Gibson. Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers. But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.
There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.
If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to. And with these books, there is.
We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.
But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.
