Category Archives: history

C’mon, Bob, Lighten Up!

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We’ve been much too serious in observing the world from our lofty perch recently and some circumstances have reminded us that life shouldn’t be lived by frowning at others.  At least not all the time.  So we thought we’d share something that began with a recent telephone call.

We heard from somebody we didn’t know a few days ago who, for some reason or another, started doing some genealogical research on our family.  It’s okay, we guess. Everybody needs a hobby and if they’re a genealogist and they’ve tracked their own families back to the people who drew horses on cave walls in France, they need to find somebody else’s family to occupy their time.  Not that this was the case with this person, but my family for some reason had become an attractive matter for study and by using various genealogical sites on the internet, this person had gone back several generations—-although (and this happens sometimes with internet genealogy where bunches of people contribute to what they think are their family lines) the chart being developed was traveling down some wrong tracks.

As it happened, one of our own family members had set out on the same voyage some years ago and seemed to be headed in the right direction.  Until she ran into a circumstance where the family lines started to resemble the famous Cawker City World’s Largest Ball of Twine.  Following the threads became almost impossible.  We recall Aunt Mavis telling about it one day.  She had heard it from her Aunt Florence when she was younger. Aunt Mavis was well up in years when she told it to us and was talking about a few generations back when one line of the family lived in Pennsylvania, probably a little bit after the Civil War.  As near as we can recall—because we’re up in years now ourself—this is what she said, or something like it.

“You have to remember this was back in the days and in a part of the country where some people got started young in the family-making business. But not Uncle Irv.  He was about thirty, I guess, and for some reason had never gotten married when he met this widow lady named Bessie.  Bessie probably was pushing forty.  She’d gotten married when she was fourteen or so and she popped out a kid not too long after that, just before her husband died in a coal mining accident, you know, so the daughter wasn’t much younger than Uncle Irv.  But Irv had eyes only for Bessie, not June, and they got married and started a family of their own.   

“Now, Uncle Irv’s daddy, Martin, was still alive and he was only a little older than Bessie and when Irv and Bessie started sparkin’, Martin started looking at June, who was in her twenties by now, and they started to hit it off and the next thing you know, Martin married June!  Martin had a pretty successful general store, so he offered his younger bride some financial security, which was important because June, she was kinda plain anyway and didn’t want to be a spinster, so she decided she better jump the first broom that came her way and Martin was the first guy who offered her a broom.

“And this is why you’re having so much trouble trying to put together your family tree—because all of this meant that Martin had become his own son’s son-in-law by marrying his son’s daughter-by-marriage.   But that also meant that Irv’s father’s wife had become Irv’s mother, also by marriage!  In other words, Irv’s daughter was now his mother because she married his father. 

“You realize, of course, that there’s a lot of “steps” in that arrangement.  Step-mother, Step-father, step-daughter, but it’s easier to explain this mess if we don’t get all tangled up in the “step” stuff or in the “by marriage” stuff.

“Well, as nature ran its course, Irv and Bessie had a boy they named Charles (and with this, she paused for a few minutes while she made sure she had all the information straight in her own mind).  And that made Charles–let me make sure I have this right–Martin’s brother-in-law and also Irv’s uncle in addition to being his son.  

“Now, that also made Charles a brother of June, who was the daughter of Bessie, who was Irv’s mother because she was the mother of Irv’s father’s wife. 

“Now it gets a little complicated (she said this with a bit of a smile) because June and Martin had their own son, Lemuel—we called him Lem. And that boy therefore became Irv’s grandson because he was the son of Irv’s daughter, June. 

“Okay, now let me work this out.  Bessie, who was Irv’s wife, became the mother of Irv’s mother who was the wife of Irv’s father which made Bessie Irv’s grandmother. But as the husband of his grandmother, he therefore also was his own grandfather!

“And it was all legal.

“But that’s where the family tree turns into a swamp Cypress.”

—-

Now comes the time when we have to tell you, as they say in the movies, this story was “inspired by some actual events.”  That’s Hollywood-ese for saying, “One or two things in this story might be related to something that might actually have happened but most of what you see is made up.”

Someone did call the other day about researching the family tree and she was off on some wrong tracks. And we are familiar with the Cawker City ball of twine—my father was unable to keep the A&P Store open there during the days of the Dust Bowl and the Depression many years before Frank Stoeber started forming leftover baling twine into a ball, and we’ve visited the ball a few times.  I did have an Aunt Mavis but the rest of the folks were part of the “inspired by” thing.

The story of Irv, Bessie, Charles, June, Martin, and Lem is an old one that goes back at least as far as a London newspaper in the 1820s.  We were inspired to relate it because we were listening to the “Radio Classics” satellite channel the other day and heard Phil Harris sing one of his hit songs from the 1940s, “He’s his own Grandpa.”   It was a cover recording of a Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe country song recorded for the first time by Lonzo and Oscar, the country music duo of Lloyd George and Rollin Sullivan, in 1947.  The song, “I’m my own Grandpa,” remains a staple of country music.  Even Willie Nelson has recorded it.

Here’s Lonzo and Oscar on the Grand Ole Opry performing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgpsGmGyG0Q&nohtml5=F

 

And here are the lyrics to Phil Harris’ version (from an internet site of Phil Harris lyrics):

I met a guy today I knew years ago, when he was 23, And he was married to a widow who was as pretty as could be. Now this widow had a grown-up daughter who had beautiful hair of red, And this guy’s father fell in love with her and soon the two were wed.

Now this made the guy’s dad his son-in-law and changed his very life For his daughter was his mother because she was his father’s wife. Now to complicate the matter even though it brought him joy, He soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

Now his little baby then became a brother-in-law to his dad, And so became his uncle and though that made him very sad, For if the baby was his uncle then that also made him brother, Of the widow’s grown-up daughter who was of course his step-mother

[chorus] (He’s his own grandpa) Now you’re catching on. (He’s his own grandpa) Well naturally! It sounds funny I know, but really its so. (He’s his own grandpa) Well wait a minute, get a load of this!

Now his father’s wife had a son who kept them on the run, So he became his grandchild for he was his daughter’s son. His wife is now his mother’s mother and of course that makes him blue Because although she’s his wife she’s his grandmother too!

(He’s his own grandpa) Fun in the living room (He’s his own grandpa) Absolutely! It sounds funny i know, but really it’s so. (He’s his own grandpa) Yea, but look, get the payoff.

Now his wife is his grandmother, then he is her grandchild. And every time the guy thinks of it, it nearly drives him wild! For now he has become the strangest case you ever saw, As husband of his grandmother, he’s his own grandpa!

(He’s his own grandpa) And loving every minute! (He’s his own grandpa) Oh tell me more! It sounds funny I know, but really it’s so, He’s his own grandpa. He’s his own grandpa!

And THAT, my friend, is a real example of the badly-abused phrase “traditional family values.”

Equality: an inconvenient concept

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One of our state lawmakers has argued that “our First Amendment rights to religion, speech, assembly, and association, endowed by our Creator, are not subject to government approval.  The First Amendment is designed not just to protect popular or politically correct religious beliefs or speech. It is designed to protect all religious beliefs and speech—even repulsive ones.”

This lawmaker buttressed his idea that our First Amendment rights are “endowed by our Creator” by citing the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Combining statements made in two distinctly separate documents written for two distinctly separate purposes in this way can lead to mental and political mischief of the kind we have seen in our legislature for several sessions.

Missouri spends tens of millions of dollars every year so people like this lawmaker and his colleagues can, indeed, determine what our rights are.  Missouri has volume after volume of books that define our rights, some of which were favored by lawmakers such as this one who has argued that “Our country was founded on the belief that there are some areas into which government must not intrude.”

Anybody want to read through twenty volumes of Missouri statutes (plus the sixteen annual supplements published since the last statute books were put between hard covers) to find some areas in which the legislature has NOT passed some kind of intrusive law?

The unfortunately biggest flaw in the lawmaker’s reasoning comes from his citation of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (which, by the way, does NOT establish Freedom of Speech, Religion, Press, and Peaceful Assembly): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The same lawmaker who once accused opponents of the campus religious freedom bill of pretzeling the debate to say the bill sanctions discrimination didn’t do such a bad job of pretzel-making himself by leaving out a critical qualification in that sentence. You remember from school, don’t you, that the sentence really begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men ARE CREATED EQUAL, AND THAT THEY are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”

Equality.  What an inconvenient concept. It’s so much more convenient to leave out that part of the sentence to make this argument.

Equality gets in the way of so many things. Recognizing the idea that everybody is equally entitled to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness could cause massive problems for those who are well-paid to make sure their clients enjoy those rights more than others or to those who think government-sanctioned privilege is something for them to buy for their own purposes. Government would be so much easier and so much more convenient to some people if it were not for that troublesome requirement that equality be part of the equation.  But ignoring it is easy.

And there’s another flaw in the use of the quotation in this discussion.  It stops with “happiness.”   Let’s look at the entire sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”

There’s a comma after “happiness,” not a period. But look at what the Declaration really says: that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”   The founding fathers sanctioned government as the means to balance those natural rights.  Our lawmaker correctly says the Declaration does not say certain rights are “afforded” us by government.  What the Declaration says is that governments are created to SECURE those rights in which all have an equal opportunity to share.

Gosh, this document is a whole lot more inconvenient than some would like us to think, isn’t it?

After that, the second sentence says, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

There’s a lot more after the first “happiness.”   But it’s more convenient to discuss only the first part, and certainly more convenient to be selective in what part of the sentence is used to justify a position. But it’s time to think about what the Declaration of Independence says.  Really says.  All of it.

Professor Danielle Allen of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study has a book out called Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence on Defense of Equality.   In the prologue, she wrote, “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality.  It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows—a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination.  If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality.”

There it is.  The inconvenient concept.   Equality.

“Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other, “she wrote. “As a public we have swallowed this argument whole.  We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality.  Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom…Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.”

Professor Allen spends 282 highly-readable pages taking the Declaration sentence by sentence and sometimes wordy by word to emphasize the care with which it was written and the purposes for each element.  It’s not just something to read quickly on July 4tth.

From its beginning when it states that the time has come for the colonies to be considered an independent nation of equal standing with other nations to the last sentence that says the signers who come from a variety of economic, social, and religious backgrounds “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” the Declaration is about equality.

It was signed by wealthy delegates such as John Hancock and Charles Carroll as well as by Button Gwinnett, whose life is described by one source as “one of economic and political disappointment,”  and James Wilson, who later spent time in a debtor’s prison. They were equals as delegates. They were equals in what they dreamed of.  They were equals in the risk they knew they were taking.

The Declaration of Independence is so important it should be studied carefully by voters and those they elect.  Only by doing that, Professor Allen argues, can its true importance be understood and the descendants of those who risked everything by writing it, adopting it, and signing it be free.

And freedom is not freedom if it is not equally shared and is not an equally-borne responsibility.

Reaping the whirlwind

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A couple of syndicated columns published in the last several weeks seem from this lofty office (my office is in a loft that overlooks the living room) on this quiet street to be a good assessment of today’s politics and how we got here.

Cal Thomas wrote of the Republican presidential campaign in “Sewer Politics” in a March 1 column that he was going to talk about gutter politics “but given Donald Trump’s horrid statements, the gutter would be a step up because things have descended into the sewer.  Never in modern times has there been a presidential candidate who has hurled more personal insults and hurtful accusations at his fellow candidates and others who disagree with him.  It should embarrass a normal person, but Trump appears beyond embarrassment.”

Thomas admits he is amazed by the continued strong support evangelicals are showing Trump and the general silence about that support by evangelical leaders. “This is what can happen when some pastors who are called to a different kingdom and a different King settle for an earthly kingdom and a lesser king,” he wrote.  However he praises Max Lucado, a best-selling writer who told Christianity Today he felt he had to speak out because of “Trump’s derision of people.”  He says he would not be speaking up except that, “he repeatedly brandishes the Bible and calls himself a Christian.”   Lucado thinks it is “beyond reason” for Trump “to call himself a Christian one day and call someone a bimbo the next or make fun of somebody’s menstrual cycle.”

Thomas suggests at the end that this election could become not a choice for the lesser of two evils but a choice “between the least evil of two lesser.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his February 26 column, noted a rise in the last thirty years of people who are against politics, which Brooks says is recognition “of the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions.”  He says it’s the effort to balance or reconcile or compromise those interest, or at least a majority of them” by following rules established “in a constitution or in custom to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.”  He concedes it’s a messy, muddled process in which “disappointment is normal” because people have to settle for less than they want.”

He thinks the Tea Party is the best example of the anti-politics movement that wants to elect people with no political experience. “They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.”  But, he writes, “They don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victory for themselves and their doctrine,” a process that has had “a wretched effect on our democracy.”   And, he argues, the anti-politics movement is sending this nation into “a series of overlapping downward spirals.”

How is it doing that?  First, by electing people with no political skills or experience, he says. “That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.”

Brooks thinks these politically-inexperienced people “don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations.  When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitcs” leading to the election of people who “refuse compromise and so block the legislative process” which, in turn, “destroys public trust (which) makes deal-making harder.”

And along comes Donald Trump, a man Brooks thinks is the culmination of all of these trends: “the desire for outsiders; the bashing style of rhetoric that makes conversation impossible; the decline of coherent political parties; the declining importance of policy; the tendency to fight cultural battles and identity wars through political means.”  He compares Trump to the “insecure school yard bully.”

Brooks says he printed out a New York Times list of Trump’s Twitter insults.  Thirty-three pages is what it took.  And he cites a study by political scientist Matthew MacWilliams that Trump supporters are likely to score high on tests that measure authoritarianism.

He concludes, “This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide.  The answer to Trump in politics. It’s acknowledging other people exist. It’s taking pleasure in that difference and hammering out workable arrangements…”

Those of us who have or have had front row seats to the deterioration of politics in Missouri know precisely what Cal Thomas and David Brooks are writing about.

What it all boils down to is that the sewer politics we—and many of you—complain about is our own fault.  We have done this to ourselves and, quite frankly, we have been urged on in our destructive efforts by people in this columnist’s own medium, radio, who have found rudeness and disrespect profitable.  Analysts in years to come will undoubtedly find today’s era of antipolitics had many causes, but the root cause is that a large part of the general public bought into the idea that the way to solve government problems was to elect people who don’t respect government and the political system that has made it work.

Thomas and Brooks have identified the problem and how we got here.   So what is to be done about it?

Of all the public figures this reporter has watched in his forty-plus years of covering Missouri politics, John Danforth is the one he most respects.   A few months ago Danforth put out a new book.   It is worth reading.   In a future post, we will offer some of his reflections.

But in the meantime it might be good to think about the necessity of repealing term limits.  Missourians approved them but by their own actions on that very day and in every election since Missourians have shown they don’t really believe in them.  And it seems from this lofty view that the Brooks’ overlapping downward spirals accelerated in Missouri from that day.

Show Me State

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The generally-accepted version of how we came to be called “The Show Me State” is that Congressman Willard Vandiver, who represented a district in southeast Missouri, used the phrase in a speech to the Five O’Clock Club in Philadelphia.  There are other stories about the use of the phrase but the Vandiver version is the conventional wisdom.

One of the pleasures of digging through historical records is the discovery of things other than the object of the search.  While we were going through the papers of Governor Herbert Hadley (1909-1913) while researching the latest book on the Missouri Capitol, we came across this letter from Hadley to George W. Eads at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on February 11, 1911.  Eads had asked Hadley a couple of days later about the origin of the expression, “I’m from Missouri, you have to show me.”  Hadley didn’t much like the expression although he reconciles himself to it by the end of the letter.

The incident referred to in your letter did not arise from any objection upon my part to this expression.  The question was as to whether Missouri should be known as the “Show Me” state, and if not by that name, by what name it should be known.  It was suggested by Mr. Curran, the Immigration Commissioner, that a prize might be offered to the one suggesting the best name for the State.  In the discussion that followed, I stated in a newspaper interview that I preferred the designation “Pioneer State,” for the reason that the Missourians had been the pioneers in the development of the country west of the Mississippi.  I also stated that I had never been particularly enthusiastic over the expression “I am from Missouri you have got to show me,” as it had in it as much of a suggestion of the incredulity of ignorance as of hard-headed inquisitiveness.  However, it was apparent from the discussion that there was quite a general satisfaction throughout the State with the expression in that it was supposed to carry with it the suggestion that the Missourian did not propose to have anything “put over” on him.

Viewed from this standpoint, the impression and the designation which has been applied to the State is not uncomplimentary or unsatisfactory.  I do not know the origin of the expression.  I remember to have read a newspaper story in which it was stated that it originated in one of the Southwestern states by a cow boy who had a habit of using this expression which soon became general in the community and gradually spread throughout the country.  But whether this story is true or not, and wherever the expression came from, it is evident that it has come to stay. It stands as a protest against shams, pretense and hypocrisy. It signifies the conservatively aggressive attitude of the people of this State against that which seems to be wrong or presents the appearance of having a “joker” in it.

That’s the definition Governor Hadley felt the motto had in 1911.  How much does it still apply today?  Might be something to discuss at the coffee shop or the salad bar someday.  Or maybe it’s a high school or college debate topic.

Your faithful scribe has thought about Hadley’s interpretation from time to time and isn’t sure which side to take.  But the discussion would be fun.

Regardless, “Show Me State” is better than some of the other unofficial state mottos we’ve had.  The one we’re glad did NOT make it to our license plate is one from the nineteenth century.

The Puke State.

Find some other place to lie

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Sometimes when you feel that the world has gone too serious for you, pick up Gary Scharnhorst’s book of Mark Twain’s letters to the editor, Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics.  Scharnhorst is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico whose collection of Twain’s letters has been published by the University of Missouri Press.

Twain’s letters to the editor are a delight.  He sent one to the St. Louis Sunday Republican that was published March 17, 1867 asking for public sympathy.  As a journalist, I was first caught by his proclamation, “I have been in the newspaper business a long time, and I have some little peculiarities natural to the profession, one or two propensities, in fact, which are pleasant to me but which I have a delicacy in indulging in without explanation when among strangers.”

Sometimes, he wrote, he sought “relief” in a secluded spot in St. Louis’ Lafayette Park but he kept seeing signs saying “Visitors are forbidden to walk or lie on the grass.” He set out to find someone to talk to about them and found a man he took to be a watchman he presumed was taking care of the grounds.  I can hear the voice of Hal Holbrook as Twain relates more of the story.

“When the sign says I cannot walk or lie on the grass, it is a plain intimation that I can walk or lie in the public roadways of the park, ain’t it?” 

He said, “Certainly, certainly—nobody ain’t going to interfere.” 

“Very well,” I said, “it is a great relief to me—just give me your arm.  You were going toward the other end of the grounds, I believe?  Just so.  Well, sir, I once had an uncle—got him yet for that matter—an uncle whose name was Isaac—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—named after the whole tribe, you know, and—don’t interrupt me, please—this Isaac was rather stupid, stupid as an owl, sir, but a muscular man, and a man of prodigious appetite.  Why, as to his strength, nothing like it was ever seen in the world before—Samson was an infant to him—he carried off a church once, and you know it created dissatisfaction and considerable comment, and he went back after the congregation—DON’T interrupt me, if you please—and his plantation contained, well, say eighteen hundred acres of beautiful land, beautiful! But it was out of the way, some, and with no other implements, sir, than a wheelbarrow and a common shovel, he removed that entire plantation in a single night and deposited it in a most eligible position alongside the railroad.  It was a splendid idea, sir, splendid.  It increased the value of his plantation more than ten thousand percent.; but, as you perceive, sir, it utterly beggared the man whose plantation he covered up.  Strong?  Why, my friend, just the mere ballast of sin that that man carried around him would have crushed a common athlete to the earth; crush him?  It would annihilate him, sir!  My uncle, sir, could carry more sin on an even keel, and draw less water, and steer better than—please don’t interrupt me, sir—and he was a most remarkable man!  But at last, noble sir, that fell accident happened, which cast a blight over my life, and banished the roses from my cheek, alas! Never to return, watchman.  Heaven knows it was a sad day for me.  Well, that day my uncle had taken the oath, and several drinks, and a handful of spoons and various other articles and was feeling very well—he was always of a cheerful disposition—when all at once a sort of spontaneous combustion got started in his stomach, because, you see, he had been drinking a lot of uncommon bad whiskey, and trying to tell the truth all the while, and the truth and that sort of whiskey don’t really mix readily you know—but you understand these things.  This spontaneous combustion got started, and it extended upward and upward and upward, until at last it left go like an earthquake and blew the whole top of his head to the moon!—brains and all!—I pledge you my word of honor, there wasn’t the hundredth part of a teaspoonful of brains left in that idolized frame. It was awful.  Well, the whole top of his head was gone, you know, and so there was nothing for it but to put a tin roof on him—don’t interrupt me, can’t you?—no way but to put a tin roof on him, which disfigured him greatly, but was perfectly safe although it attracted heat of course, and might have caused brain fever, only, as I said before, the brains were all gone—but now comes the dickens of it, you know—what to do with him!—what the very nation to do with  him!  He couldn’t mould bricks, he couldn’t be a doctor, he couldn’t make more than a mere ordinary sort of a preacher—it didn’t really seem as if he were fitted for anything better than a kind of Mayor or City Councilman, or something of that description, and so, gifted sir, you can imaging the desolation that fell upon all our hearts and drove hope and happiness from our breasts—till at last, Heaven be praised, the people, the high and noble, the wisdom-inspired people, saw what Providence had intended him to be and they sent him to Congress, sir! They sent him to Congress…”

Twain reported the watchman at that point had had enough and left in a huff, which left Twain surprised and “grieved.”  After all, the watchman had told him he couldn’t lie or walk on the grass but could lie and walk on the walks as much as he wanted to, it seemed discourteous of him to leave. “Can I lie with any satisfaction without I have got somebody to lie to?  Why, certainly not.  Did that idiot suppose I wanted to march around that dismal park and lie all to myself?  It is absurd.”   He asked the editor to request the signs prohibiting lying or walking on the grass to be removed.  Their restrictions, he said, “amounts to heartless inhumanity.”

Your correspondent and his own “peculiarities natural to the profession” of journalism loves that letter.  The failure of mixing truth with too much bad whiskey. A tin-headed member of Congress.  The futility of a “march around that dismal park” lying only to himself.

It was a letter to the editor in 1867.  Is it a parable for the election year of 2016?

———-

(editor’s note:  We’ve seen Hal Holbrook and his “Mark Twain Tonight” show many times, spent a wonderful hour interviewing him once, and helped arrange for him to perform in Jefferson City on the last night of the 2014 legislative session.  Unfortunately, few members of the legislature stuck around to see him.

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After his two-hour performance, he spent quite a bit of time with some folks backstage and later had dinner with several of the concert folks.  Your correspondent, exhausted from the last week of the session, had to skip the dinner.  But the president of the concert association, Mark Comley, related that during dinner he told Holbrook one of the memorable routines he had seen Holbrook perform many years earlier was the story of the “Begum of Bengal,” the story of a pipsqueak boat captain challenging a great trading ship from the orient.  He said Holbrook grew quiet for a while and then, there at the table, performed the story!  Mark figured Holbrook had been going through his voluminous mental files of Twain stories during that quiet time.  If you’d like to see Holbrook/Twain tell the story, go to this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V65G_xA5eKc&list=PL7fTLA1i5h4Bhnlv1nhFTtsvSBUFb5myF&index=10

The story of the “Begum of Bengal” starts about 4:20 in.

He’s 91 today, February 17, and as far as we know still does his show on stage.  He’s been Mark Twain longer than Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. He is simply one of the greatest performers in the history of American theatre.  And that’s no lie.)

 

How I played the political game

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A thin line can separate History from nostalgia and we’re not sure which side we’re on in relating this story today.  Perhaps we have one foot in both.

Anyone who was in or around the legislature when Richard M. Webster was in the Senate is unlikely to forget someone once known as the “King of Missouri Politics.”  The description comes from Jim Wolfe, a longtime Capitol correspondent for the Joplin Globe who wrote often and favorably about the senator.  He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back in 1993, “Senator Webster had respect that bordered on fear.”

Webster served two terms in the House before running a losing race for Attorney General in 1952.  He was re-elected to the House in a special election in ’53 and became the last GOP Speaker of the House in 1954 until Catherine Hanaway was elected Speaker almost fifty years later.  He lost a race for Lt. Governor in 1956.  He told us the story once that in 1956 he became   the first statewide candidate to use television to solicit votes.

Webster was elected to the Senate in 1962 and if he had not died early in 1990 would surely have been elected to his eighth term there.  He gave a speech in his hometown of Carthage on the night of his election to his last term, in 1986.  Former Senator Ryan McKenna gave us a copy of a newspaper article, probably from the Carthage newspaper, some years ago. It’s kind of long but we pass it along today because Webster’s remarks need to be recalled as history more than nostalgia, a reflection on how things were done thirty years and more ago.

When I arrived in Jefferson City in January of 1949, I found that I was part of a Republican minority.  The Democrats were in complete control.  I had the same general feeling with regard to those people who sat on the other side of the aisle that the 95 percent of the straight ticket voters in Missouri generally had for elected officials from the “other” political party.  I presumed that they were all either hoodlums or controlled by nefarious political bosses.

It was seldom that a member of the minority party actually handled a piece of legislation on the floor, so I spent my first month voting against almost everything.  Our floor leader, a middle-aged pharmacist from El Dorado Springs named Bill Cruce, once commented in passing that things weren’t quite as bad as I seemed to think they were. 

During the second month of the session, a young Irish bartender by the name of Tommy Walsh was handling a bill.

As I remember, the bill raised the salaries of constables in St. Louis County from $9 a day to $10 a day.  I remember the debate, in which virtually all the Republicans and a large number of rural Democrats were voicing their opposition. One old Democrat from Monroe County pointed out that it was more than a 10 percent raise, that it meant the constables would be making more than his grandson who was an army sergeant, and that the next thing we knew, the governor would want a raise which had the same percentage increase as the constables.  It was at that moment that Bill Cruce motioned to me to come back to his desk.  He said, “Kid, if I were you I would vote for this bill.”  When I expressed my surprise, he simply said, “Trust me.”  The bill carried by one vote.

As I walked out of the chamber the young Irishman put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I haven’t met you yet, but you saved me today. I won’t forget.” 

I immediately went to our floor leader’s private office, and he was the only Republican with a private office, and asked why it was important that I vote for that particular bill.  Bill Cruce leaned back in his chair and said, “Kid, let me explain.  All the good guys are not in our party and all the bad ones are not in theirs. I’m not going to point out who our bad guys are. If you can’t figure that out by the end of this session, you shouldn’t be here.  Tommy Walsh is one of the good guys. You can trust him and he would never ask you to vote for something that was against the interest of the people you represent.”

On one other occasion during that first session, I cast a vote on another bill affecting only the city of St. Louis. Once again the young Irishman came around to thank me.

When the next session began, Warren Fuqua came to me and asked me to introduce a bill.  Many of the farmers my age and some a little younger may remember Warren Fuqua, who was the legislative adviser of the Missouri Farm Bureau for three decades.  He retired more than 20 years ago and has long since left this life.  When he asked me to introduce a bill, I thought he merely wanted me to be a co-sponsor and told him I would be happy to do it.  He said, “No, no, I want you to handle the bill.”

I thought the old gentleman must be slipping, because anyone in his right mind would have had a Democrat introduce the bill and some Republican co-sponsor it.  I did introduce the bill and was shocked when I received notice of a committee hearing the following Monday night.

When I arrived at the committee meeting I found that the young Irish bartender was the chairman.  There were two bills on the calendar that evening.  There were quite a number of witnesses who testified for and against the first one.

When my turn came, Tom Walsh said, “The next bill is one which is very important to our friends from outstate Missouri.  Representative Webster, do you want to explain it or do you want us to go ahead and take action?”  It’s the only bill I have ever seen that was never discussed, but I took the cue. I simply said, “I have faith in your committee,” and I sat down. With no further discussion he said, “Do I hear a motion?”  The motion was made, seconded, and unanimously carried.  I had it on the floor the following week and Tom Walsh and several other new friends on the Democratic side saw to it that I had a sufficient number of votes.  That bill, incidentally, was the legislation which authorized the establishment of rural fire districts and permitted rural areas to be combined with town and city fire districts.  Without that legislation, the farmers in this immediate area could not expect to participate in the use of the Carthage fire department. 

After I was elected to the Senate in 1962, my first stop was in the office of my old Irish friend from St. Louis.  He not only welcomed me back to Jefferson City, but immediately got on his telephone and started calling state representatives from both St. Louis City and St. Louis County.  Between the time that I had been elected to the House and the time I was elected to the Senate, there had been a massive change in the population of St. Louis.  Almost 100,000 black citizens had moved in from Southern states and occupied the northern part of the city. A large segment of the Irish and German population had moved to St. Louis County.  The redistricting of 1950 and ’60 had added a large number of state representatives to St. Louis County because of that population increase.  Tommy must have introduced me to 20 new city and suburban Democrats. Without exception he would say, “You can trust this guy. He’ll always tell you yes or no. His word is good.  And if he can’t help you, he’ll tell you why.”   That was the beginning of many new friendships, all of which have lasted down the years.  I sat on the platform at the second inauguration of Warren Hearnes and the first inauguration of Kit Bond with my old Irish friend.  He left us for a better world, I am sure, almost a decade ago, but not before he had gone up and down the aisles to help both Robert Ellis Young and me get the votes to create Missouri Southern College, to make it a full four-year fully funded college and establish many other worthwhile projects in Southwest Missouri. 

If I ever wrote a book, I would tell a similar story with virtually the same beginning in the same development of a loyal friendship with regard to many legislators. I could tell of my friendship with Yogi Berra’s cousin, Paul Berra, with whom I served in both the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate. He is now the comptroller of the city of St. Louis.  He was a loyal friend when we needed him.  Probably my closest friend in the Missouri House of Representatives today is the senior Democratic member, Gene Copeland from Southeast Missouri.  Two years ago at the close of a legislative session, we were visiting in my office and comparing how each of us had voted, and both of us are basically conservative.  We found that our voting records had been identical.  After thinking for a moment he said, “Why is it that you’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat?”  I asked him, “What color of uniform did your great-granddaddies wear?”  He responded, “Gray, of course.” 

Therein lies the basic reason that he was a Democrat and I am a Republican.  It was a family tradition and it explains why the Missouri Legislature is basically conservative with a Democratic majority on both houses.  A majority of the Missouri voters vote their traditional party line for the local candidates. They vote for the man at the state and national levels. 

In the Missouri Senate the leaders recognized, three generations ago, that party affiliation had little to do with political philosophy.  They were wise enough, in 1919 when the new Capitol was opened, to establish an unwritten rule that we would never sit by political party on the floor of the Senate.  It isn’t possible to walk in and see the Democrats on one side and the Republicans on the other. It is the only legislative body in this nation which follows that tradition.  The result is the ability to vote in accordance with your conscience and the interest of the people that you represent. Neither the Democratic floor leader nor I would ever attempt to crack the whip and deliver a solid party vote in order to maintain party loyalty.

When the next session opens, I will be called upon, as the senior member of the Senet, to explain the traditions and “unwritten rules” of the body.  We follow the same rules of procedure as the United States Senate.  A rule can be suspended by majority vote.  We also have “unwritten rules” which have nothing to do with parliamentary procedure. Some of them simply deal with the matter of common courtesy. Others deal with overall conduct toward each other.

As an example, it doesn’t matter who the governor is, no gubernatorial appointment will be confirmed if the senator in whose district the appointee resides objects.  This has been hard for many governors to understand. It is not a written rule, but it is strictly enforced.

One of the things that binds us together as a family is the rule that you do not speak in another senator’s district without advising him in advance and getting permission.  I have never known of a senator who said don’t come into my district to speak to the Rotary club, or a church group, or even at a political rally. It’s a simple matter of courtesy.  Since 1949 I know of only one senator who did not strictly abide by that rule.  She happens to be running for a national office today and we’ll find out tonight whether or not she’s been elected.

The bipartisan friendship has led to an extremely interesting development and that is the monthly Senate prayer breakfast.  Without desiring to stimulate a religious argument, I would offer my personal opinion that it is part of God’s plan that all Christians will be untied before He returns.  The greatest change that I have seen in philosophy among my fellow elected officials is the ability to freely discuss the Bible, regardless of our church membership.

Now, we know about the president’s prayer breakfast, our governor’s prayer breakfast, many mayors who have a prayer breakfast, and other such events.  These meetings ar eopen, large crowds are attracted, and tickets are sold. The Missouri Senate prayer breakfast, on the other hand, is strictly a private affair.  It is held on the first Tuesday of each month. No one attends but the members of the Senate.  Our average attendance is 26 out of 34 members. It isn’t unusual to observe a devout Catholic reading the scripture from a King James version of the bible. We have come a long way in unity in that regard.

I can best describe how our system works by telling you about the last two days of the last session.  Both the governor and a virtually unanimous news media said it was the most productive session in the history of the state.

The session ended on a Monday.  After church on Sunday, the president pro tem and the Democratic floor leader met in my office. 

They had a list of 45 pieces of legislation that they considered to be vitally important.  The Democratic floor leader said, “I know that some of the Republican members have bills on this list, but there may be other legislation that is important to them in their district. Will you work up a list between now and 2 o’clock and we can figure out how to get a vote on each of these propositions.”  Now bear in mind we were looking at an afternoon and early evening session on Sunday and a session between 9:30 and midnight on Monday to clean the calendar and take up all of the priority measures. 

When we adjourned for the evening at 9 o’clock Sunday the three of us met again and decided to find some out-of-the-way place where we could have breakfast on Monday to review the list and set a timetable. We had such a meeting and allotted time for each remaining piece of legislation.  At 7:30 we met with the governor to review his priorities. At 9, the day’s work began.

Bear in mind that through the whole procedure, the question was never asked, “How do you you  intend to vote?”  It was simply a matter of guaranteeing that the members of the body would have the opportunity to vote on each of these important issues.  We allotted a specific amount of time for each measure. At eight minutes before midnight we had finished our work.  All the priority legislation had been taken up and our job was done with ten minutes to spare.

As I watch our colleagues in Washington spend days and even weeks on one single piece of legislation, I don’t know why they can’t learn the simple lesson of bipartisan cooperation.

The question is always asked, Why do you have to wait until the last week of the session for that final action on legislation? The answer is simple.  If you are going to build 200 houses in 100 days, you don’t complete two houses on the first, two houses on the second day, and two houses each day for 100 days.  You have to have input from 34 Senators and 163 House members. That work has already begun. I am in Jefferson City two days a week when we are not in session working on legislation that will be introduced next year.

What has taken place in the last generation and a half in the minds of voters, in which they have demonstrated the genuine ability to “vote for the man,” has also taken place among Missouri lawmakers in the ability to recognize philosophical differences and at the same time attempt to work together for the overall benefit of the state.  When we had those conferences, not only the last two days, but the first day of every week during the session, we were not agreeing on what would pass and what would not pass. We were simply ageing that every member of the body would have the right to present legislation that he or she considered to be important.  We were agreeing that crisis problems in the state would be approached. We were agreeing that we would take a financially responsible position.

It’s been slightly more than 47 years since I first addressed the Rotary club. I was a senior in high school and had won the city oratorical contest.  We have seen a multitude of changes in the minds and attitudes of America’s voters and American’s public officials.  Our Constitution, however, is still in place and it will fail only when the people of America lose interest in their government and how it works.

The leader of the Missouri Senate these thirty years later, Ron Richard, represents the district Richard Webster served.   But it’s no longer Webster’s Senate, no longer Webster’s legislature.  It’s hard to believe in this term-limit, unlimited campaign money, polarized era that it ever will be again.

And that, Mr. and Mrs. And Ms. Missouri, is sad.

The spirit of the St. Louis

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There’s always somebody. Somebody not good enough for us no matter their circumstances. Somebody we can always tell, “Go back where you came from.”  Some of the campaign rhetoric this year reminds us of the story of a ship named for our second-largest city.

Let’s go back to Germany, 1938, where the Nazi government’s increasing persecution of Jews caused many to try to flee. Representatives of several western nations met at Evian, France in July, 1938, to discuss the worsening situation. Major nations such as the United States, France, and Britain refused to loosen their immigration laws to allow more refugees from Germany, even as Germany was tightening its laws against Jews wanting to flee. German policies against Jews broke into violence with the Kristallnacht on November 9-10 and in ensuing months, thousands of Jews were arrested.

Nine-hundred-thirty-seven Jewish passengers were aboard the S. S. St. Louis when it left Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939, hoping to find safety in Cuba or the United States.  But Cuba allowed fewer than thirty to disembark.

The St. Louis headed north, hoping to dock in the United States.  But this country had enacted a restrictive immigration law in 1924.  The state department worried that the Jews would be security risks or be dependent on government handouts if they were allowed in.  Passengers could not get tourist visas because they had no home address.  And there were a lot of other German immigrants waiting for entry.

After more than a month the St. Louis headed back to Europe, although not to Germany.  Britain agreed to take 288 of the passengers.  The remaining 620 went to Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, countries still at peace.

It was while the St. Louis was still at sea, its passengers still hoping to find asylum or at least safety in the United States that Heywood Broun, one of the great newspaper columnists of the time, wrote “There is a Ship” for the New York World-Telegram. It was published June 9, 1939.

——-

There is a ship. It is called the St. Louis.  If suddenly the vessel flashed an SOS to indicate that the crew and the 900 passengers were in danger every other steamer within call would be hurrying to the rescue. That is the rule of the sea.

And no vessel which got the flash would pause to inquire the economic, political, religious or national position of those in distress.  It would want no more than the position of the ship.

And the captain on the bridge, according to the prevailing tradition, would ask the engineer to put on all speed so that the work of rescue could be completed as expeditiously as possible.  And this would be true of the skipper of a totalitarian merchantman, one from a democratic nation or a ship flying under the flag of a monarchy, liberal or otherwise.

But there is a ship.  It carries 900 passengers—men, women and small children.  This is a group of God-fearing people guilty of no crime whatsoever.  And they are in peril.

They are in peril which threatens not only their lives but their very souls and spiritual freedom.  It would be better for them by far if the St. Louis has ripped its plates in a collision with some other craft, or if an impersonal iceberg had slashed the hull below the water line.

Then there would be not the slightest hesitation in a movement of all the allied fleets to save these members of the human race in deep and immediate distress.

But this is not an iceberg or a plate which has been ripped away.  The passengers—men, women and children—are Jewish. It is not an accident of nature but an inhuman equation which has put them in deadly peril.  It is quite true that when the St. Louis gets back to Hamburg these 900, with possibly a few exceptions, will not die immediately.  They will starve slowly, since they have already spent their all.  Or they will linger in concentration camps—I refer to the men and women.  God knows what will happen to the children.

And so the whole world stuffs its ears and pays no attention to any wireless.

There is a ship. And almost two thousand years have elapsed since the message of universal brotherhood was brought to earth.

What have we done with that message?  After so many years we have not yet put into practice those principles to which we pay lip service.  Nine hundred are to suffer a crucifixion while the world passes by on the other side.

At any luncheon, banquet or public meeting the orator of the occasion can draw cheers if he raises his right hand in the air and pledges himself, his heart and soul to the declaration that he is for peace and amity and that all men are brothers.  He means it, generally, and so do the diners who pound the table until the coffee cups and the cream dishes rattle into a symphony of good feeling and international sympathy.

But there is a ship. If one were to look upon it with cold logic it would be better for every one of the 900 if the vessel suddenly buckled and went down in forty fathoms.  That would be more merciful.

Against the palpable threat of death we can muster brotherhood.  But against the even more plain sentence of life in death we pretend to be helpless.

Our answer is, “We must look after ourselves.  What can we do about it?  Life is greater than death.”  We agree.  Here is our test.  What price civilization?  There is a ship.  Who will take up an oar to save 900 men, women and children?

——-

Heywood Broun died at 51 years of age on December 18, 1939. About the time he wrote this column, he had forsaken his professed agnosticism after extensive discussions with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and had become a member of the Catholic faith.

Germany invaded the safe countries of Western Europe on May 10, 1940. The Netherlands surrendered five days later. Belgium gave up May 28.  And France fell June 22.   The Holocaust Museum in Washington estimates 254 former passengers on the St. Louis died during the holocaust, most of them at Sobibor and Auschwitz.  Fewer than one-hundred eventually made it to the United States.

The St. Louis was a German naval accommodation ship until it was damaged by the bombing of Kiel in August, 1944.  She was fixed and was a hotel ship in Hamburg for a while before being scrapped in 1952.

But the ghost of the spirit of the ship still hangs over us.

Jews in 1939.  Mexicans and Syrians in 2016.

There’s always somebody.

The Nineteenth Century is alive and sometimes well

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–and it’s living in Missouri’s counties.

The legacy of Martin Van Buren is an overlooked part of Missouri history.  As far as we know he was never in Missouri.  He is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as a founder of the modern Democratic Party, and as the man responsible for the 1837 national depression.  He was so unpopular that he was voted out of the presidency in 1840 and spurned for his party’s nomination later.

But Van Buren County was named for him.  Not sure where Van Buren County is?  We call it Cass County today, named for Lewis Cass, who was Van Buren’s opponent for the Presidency in 1848.  Cass didn’t win the presidency either.

Kinderhook County was named for the town in which Van Buren was born.  You don’t know where Kinderhook County is?   It has been known as Camden County since 1843.

Johnson County is named for Richard M. Johnson, who was Van Buren’s vice president.

Butler County is named for Kentucky Congressman William O. Butler, who was Lewis Cass’s vice-presidential candidate.

How about Ashley County, named for St. Louis explorer, fur trade entrepreneur, and former Lieutenant Governor William H. Ashley?   Or Decatur County, named for naval hero Stephen Decatur?  Highland County?  Lilliard County, named for one of the members of the first legislature?  Or Seneca County?

Ashley County became Texas County in 1841.  Decatur has been Ozark since 1845.  Highland became Sullivan that same year.  Seneca County became McDonald County in 1847.  And Lillliard became Lafayette in 1825, the year Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, visited St. Louis.

We have a peculiar situation with St. Louis, which broke away from St. Louis County in 1876, creating a strange creature that is a city not within a county but having some county offices (sheriff, for example, in addition to the city police department).

Other than the St. Louis/St. Louis County divorce in 1876, Missouri has not gained any new counties since Carter and Christian Counties were created in 1859.

Maybe it’s time for a shakeup.   Our county structures don’t make a lot of sense in a lot of places.   Twenty six places in particular.   Missouri has that many counties with fewer than ten-thousand people.  And Worth County, up along the Iowa border, has dwindled to fewer than 2,200.  In fact, the northern tier of counties in Missouri are so sparsely populated that the entire area is represented by only two state senators.  A few years ago we wrote a blog for the Missourinet about “The Senator from Everywhere,” Brad Lager, who listed his senatorial district as the counties of Andrew, Atchison, Clinton, Daviess, DeKalb, Gentry,  Grundy, Harrison, Holt, Mercer,  Nodaway, Putnam, Sullivan,  Worth and Part of Clay County.  Fourteen entire counties and part of a fifteenth.  Dan Hegeman has those counties now that Lager has been forced out by term limits.

The other half of north Missouri is represented by Senator Brian Munzlinger. His district is  Adair, Chariton, Clark,  Knox, Lewis, Linn, Macon,  Marion, Pike, Schuyler, Scotland,  Shelby, Ralls and Randolph Counties.

Two Senators represent about one-fourth of all of the counties in Missouri.

A longtime friend from college days sent me a proposal for new counties a few years ago.  Wayne Vinyard and his wife Jan ran the Longview Gardens nursery in Jackson County for many years before they retired.  Now that he doesn’t have to water the plants and fight off bugs and other pests, Wayne has had time to ruminate on the state’s nineteenth-century county structure.  He has decided to try to make more sense out of our county government system by drawing more practical boundaries for the twenty-first century.

 vineyard map

His plan creates fifty-four counties plus the city of St. Louis.  St. Louis County would be the only county to shrink.

Wayne has suggested a new name for one of the newly-formed counties.  He thinks “Arcadia” would be a nice name for an area in southeast Missouri.  But that suggestion leads to another issue.

Do we have to continue having counties named for Revolutionary War soldiers who never lived here, colleagues and opponents of Martin Van Buren, a Whig politician from England who was never in this country as far as we know, or other obscure figures?

Some of our counties’ names are….are……Well, consider these:

Christian County is named for William Christian, a Revolutionary War soldier who signed the Fincastle Resolution (???) and brokered a peace treaty between the Overmountain Men and the Overhill Cherokees (more???s). Never lived in Missouri.

Carter County is named after an early settler whose first name is, ummm, unusual.  But should someone named Zimri have a county bearing their last name?

Here’s a doozy for you:  Camden County honors someone named Pratt.   No kidding.  Charles Pratt died nine years before Missouri became American territory.  He was a Whig politician, lawyer, and judge in England.  He was the Earl of Camden.  Given some of the deep political thinkers of our present day, we’re not sure he would be county-naming fodder now.  He was, you see, an early proponent of civil liberties.  Before they were unionized.

And Andrew County?   Ohhhhhhh, my.  This one is in dispute.  One source says it was named for Andrew Jackson.  Another says it was named for Andrew Jackson Davis, a prominent St. Louis lawyer.  But we’ve turned up a third alternative that is so bizarre that it cannot possibly be true. But this is Missouri.  The third candidate is Andrew Jackson Davis, who was known as “The Poughkeepsie Seer.” He became a devotee of “animal magnetism,” which we today call hypnotism, and was an advocate of “magnetic healing.”

It is easy to dismiss a county being named for a New York spiritualist.  But then again, consider that the original name of Fulton was Volney, for Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, a French abolitionist, philosopher and orientalist who once wrote, “All the Egyptians have bloated faces, puffed-up eyes, flat noses, thick lips—in a word, the true face of the mulatto.”

We have wandered far afield but this is such an entertaining diversion.

Back to our topic.

From time to time there have been discussions about whether it makes any sense to have seven counties with fewer than five-thousand people (twenty-six with fewer than ten thousand).  Worth County in 1900 had 9,382 of Missouri’s 3,106,665 people or .003% of the state’s population.  Now it has .0004 of Missouri’s 5,988,927 people (2010 census figures).  Mercer County is the second-least populated county in Missouri with 3,785.  In 1900, it had 14,706.

So the question becomes whether it makes any economic, or any other kind of, sense to have counties this small or the eleven others with fewer than seven-thousand people trying to maintain county courthouses and the officials who work in them?

And haven’t we had some other heroes from Missouri since 1859 who deserve to have counties named after them instead of counties named for people who’ve never been here?  Pershing, Bradley, Lindbergh, Danforth, Symington, Virginia Minor, Betty Grable, Yogi Berra?  Visit the Hall of Famous Missourians at the Capitol someday.  You won’t find anybody there named Van Buren, Zimri, or the Earl of Camden.   And try not to think of naming a Missouri County after Bob Barker or Rush Limbaugh or Jack Buck—although renaming St. Louis County “Musial County” might be appropriate.  History shows county names are not particularly sacred. We do have a precedent for re-naming our counties.

Regardless of how much sense the Vinyard map makes, we all know that any effort to make it or something like it a reality will ignite enormous protests from the 114 kingdoms that call themselves counties.  Border-to-border turf warfare will erupt.  After all, Wayne proposes turning about sixty county courthouses into—what?  Condos?   Museums? Antique malls?  Vacant lots in the hearts of communities?   Imagine the havoc that could be created by sixty county clerks, sheriffs, assessors, collectors, nurses, and 180 county commission members who would be forced to consider processing pigs or turkeys instead of drawing a government paycheck.   Imagine going into a big-box store and being greeted by your former presiding commissioner.  It’s not a vision very many county officials would tolerate.

Perhaps our legislators in 2016, when they’re not creating new state symbols at the behest of fourth-graders, will consider modernizing Missouri’s county government system and recognizing that a county named for, say, Reinhold Niebuhr makes more sense than one named for Martin Van Buren’s vice-president.

Niebuhr?  (Rine-hold Knee-bur) He might have been this nation’s foremost twentieth-century theologian and ethicist.  He was from Wright City.  Some of his musings are particularly appropriate in today’s political climate.

“Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.”

Or: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

But the one that is best known is his Serenity Prayer.  There are various versions of it but the lines from it that are most familiar are:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Maybe my friend Wayne’s map represents something that cannot be changed.  But maybe it’s time for the courage to change some things that can be changed.   Or should be.

And whether it’s county boundaries or social boundaries, let us all pray that those who return to the Capitol in a couple of weeks gain the wisdom to know the difference between specious proofs and the general interest.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there could be a map for that?

The terrorists are winning

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Just a few years ago, we recall, President Bush was saying this country would not do various things because if we did, “The terrorists would win.”

They’re winning.

Some of Missouri’s politicians are demanding Governor Nixon, in effect, seal the state’s borders to protect us from Syrians.   The Paris attacks this year and particularly in the last few weeks are giving ample opportunity to some to fan the flame of fear.  Fanning the flame of fear is good for those who want to be seen as protectors from evil.  Or, evil-doers to borrow again from the Busch II years.  And with elections coming up, it never hurts to carry the image as a protector.

Terrorists want to scare governments and people into changing their behaviors.  Their ultimate goal is much larger, of course.  But first they have to create a climate that is ever more restrictive of thinking, of movement, of hope.  Sealing borders tells us they are winning.

And what is all of this fuss about?

President Obama has said he will allow four times as many Syrian refugees to come into this country as have been admitted in the last four years.   And Secretary of State John Kerry has announced this country will lift the lid on the number of refugees admitted to this country from the present 70,000 to 100,000 in 2017.  Many of those new slots will go to Syrians fleeting terrorists.

Are Obama and Kerry going to flood this country with terrorists?   Are we all in peril if we go to a play, to a restaurant, to a sports stadium if a flood of Syrians comes in?  The answer is a simple one: to maintain public safety, we have to keep Syrians from flooding into our state.

There is no flood in Missouri.  There won’t be a flood in Missouri.

The New York Times on November 16 reported that only 1,854 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States since 2012.  The nine volunteer agencies working with them have scattered them among 130 communities.   The newspaper says Boise, Idaho has more Syrian refugees than New York and Los Angeles combined.  Worcester, Massachuesetts has more than Boston.  Should the people of Boise quit going to restaurants?  Should the people of Worcester fear attending a concert or a movie?

Missouri has a few Syrians in the St. Louis area.  Overland Park, Kansas has a few.  The International Institute of St. Louis, which has been working with immigrants for 96 years, reports eight percent of the population of St. Louis City and St. Louis County is foreign-born.  7,500 people from 75 countries.

The Post-Dispatch reported in September that 28 Syrians had arrived in St. Louis this year and twenty more were expected by the end of the year.

When we close our borders to Syrian refugees, can we draw the border so it keeps St. Louis on the outside because that city already endangers the safety of our state because almost fifty more of those dreaded Syrians will be there at the end of the year?

The Times says Syrian refugees made up only two percent of the 70,000 refugees admitted to this country last year.   Germany in that same four-year period has admitted 92,991 Syrian refugees.  President Obama says this country will admit 10,000 this year.  The Census Bureau says we already have 150,000 Syrians living in this country of 300-million people.

Syria ranks seventh in the list of countries whose immigrants have been allowed into this country in the most recent federal fiscal year.  Myanmar has sent almost 20,000.  Iraq has sent about 12,000.  Somalia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bhutan have sent more than 5,000 each.  Iran has sent far more than Syria.

But it’s Syrians who have a bunch of Missouri politicians in a froth.  Well, how easy is it for those scary people to get here?  They have to apply to the United Nations first.  If the UN says they can come, they have to be examined by the FBI.  They have to be run through terrorism databases run by the Defense Department and by other government agencies.

The UN has recommended 18,000 Syrians for scrutiny by the United States.  The State Department says more than half of them are children.

Not all Syrians are suicide bombers, you know.  And when it comes to killing bunches of people, we are pretty good about doing that ourselves.  A check of a couple of websites that list mass shootings and finds that since March of 2005, this nation has had thirty-three incidents in which 270 people have been killed and 254 have been wounded. One of those incidents was in Kirkwood in February, 2008.  Six dead, one wounded.  Another incident began in Illinois and ended in Festus.  Eight dead.  Four of the incidents happened in Wisconsin. Four more were in California. We don’t think we say any Syrian names on those lists of killers.  But we did see people from Wisconsin and California.  Perhaps we should block people from those states from coming to Missouri.  Those people clearly are dangerous.

(http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-ramp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(Americas)

We checked a list of German mass killings since March, 2005 and came across one incident where a German student killed 12 other students and three other people before killing himself in 2009.  We checked Germany because it has been a landing place for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East for more than a decade.

But let’s be afraid anyway.  Because some of our leaders find it advantageous to tell us we should be afraid. Of Syrians.

Cultivating a climate of fear among the electorate is convenient.  It keeps the electorate from raising embarrassing questions about things like school funding, mental health services, crumbling roads and creaking bridges, lack of funding for cigarette-related health issues,  services to veterans—-add your own priority here.  Then forget about it because you are supposed to be living in fear of a Syrian.

Edward R. Murrow, the great CBS newsman, observed on his See it Now broadcast of March 7, 1954, when he said, “No one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are his accomplices.”

When Murrow began a series of programs called This I Believe in 1951, he noted:

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all—now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog—there is an enveloping cloud of fear.

“There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt—doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.

“It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.”

If you want to hear the entire broadcast or read the entire script, go to http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16844/

And finally, from another See it Now broadcast, this one from 1954:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another.  We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”

The problem with sealing the borders is not necessarily the people we seal out.  It’s the kind of people we seal inside with us who made us fearful to begin with. And the action does nothing to end the terror that drives people to our borders.  In terms of our national character, could it be that those who tell us we should live in fear are more dangerous than children from Syria?

Perspective

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The Capitol time capsule thing this year has led to a lot of thinking about time and reflections on those who discover messages from the past.   Perhaps historians are more conscious of things like that than other people—I don’t really know.  But this one, who has spent more than forty years writing the first draft of history, as the role of journalists has sometimes been described, has been intrigued by the whole thing.

One of the things in the new time capsule being put in the Capitol cornerstone is the book co-authored with Jeff Ball about the art of the capitol.  Tucked into the back cover is a letter from us to those who we hope will open the capsule in 2115.  Part of the letter is an excerpt from President Kennedy’s speech at Amherst, Massachusetts less than a month before his death in which he expressed a dream for America.

The nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.” I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future. I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

A few days later, as I was discussing the time capsule with a friend, it occurred to me that many of us remember John Kennedy, who died 52 years ago this month.  If that message is discovered in 2115, those who read that quote will be reading it from the perspective of people who are 152 years removed from the time when Kennedy gave that speech.

And I wonder if they will see those words with the same kind of perspective that we see some cherished words that were spoken by another president 152 years in our past, this month, about his dream of a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

One-hundred-fifty-two years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.  One-hundred-fifty-two years after John Kennedy’s Amherst Address on October 26, 1963, Americans we cannot imagine will read his of his dream for his country.

Abraham Lincoln was still vivid as a living person in the memories of many who were alive when the original capitol cornerstone was sealed in 1915 just as John F. Kennedy is still vivid as a living person in the memories of many in 2015.

Time.  It plays with your mind.

One of the most intriguing pieces your correspondent ever read about the encapsulation of time was written by Herbert Winlock, the director of the New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s.  He wrote in a museum publication about the model boats, statuettes and other things depicting life in his time found in the Egyptian tomb of a man named Meketra who died about 1950 BCE.

The beam of light shot in to a little world of four thousand years ago, and I was gazing down into the midst of brightly painted little men going this way and that.  A tall, slender girl gazed across at me perfectly composed; a gang of little men with sticks in their upraised hands drove spotted oxen; rowers tugged at their oars on a fleet of boats, while one ship seemed floundering right in front of me with its bow balanced precariously in the air. And all of this busy going and coming was in uncanny silence, as though the distance back over forty centuries I looked across was too great for even an echo to reach my ears.

Four thousand years is an eternity.  Just saying it over and over again gives no conception of the ages that have gone by since this funeral.  Stop and think of how far off William the Conqueror seems. That takes you only a quarter of the way back.  Julius Caesar takes you halfway back.  With Saul and David you are three-fourths of the way.  But there remains yet another thousand years to bridge with your imagination.  Yet in that dry, still, dark little chamber those boats and statues had stood indifferent to all that went on in the outer world, as ancient in the days of Caesar as Caesar is to us, but so little changed that even the fingerprints of the men who put them there were still fresh upon them.  Not only fingerprints, but even flyspecks, cobwebs, and dead spiders remained from the time when those models were stored in some empty room in the noble’s house waiting for his day of death and burial.  I even suspect that some of his grandchildren had sneaked in and played with them while they were at that house in ancient Thebes. 

One century.  Forty centuries.  The past often waits quietly to speak in the future and then touches those who find it and gives them a personal perspective on what was.  And is.

(Winlock’s story of Meketra’s tomb was related by Thomas Hoving, then the head of the MMA, in his book Tutankhamun: The untold Story, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978.)