Category Archives: Jefferson City

I am a lobbyist

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I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.

For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to.  But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.

I have become one of “them.”

No pay is involved.  This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.

The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.

I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about.  I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.

Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me.  Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever,  are represented in the halls of government.  Old person?  AARP has someone.  Concerned about justice for yourself and others?  The ACLU is there.  Want good education in Missouri?  Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in?  Transportation interests have lobbyists.

Against something?  There are lobbyists for that, too.

They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle.  There is room in the hallway for the little guy.  It’s kind of intimidating to be one.  But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.

I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years.  And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock.  It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.

But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.

I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying.  ARE THERE ethics in lobbying?   Well, of course there are.  The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.

It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists.  And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.

A lobbyist shall:

  • Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
  • Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
  • Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
  • Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
  • Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
  • Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
  • Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
  • Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
  • Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
  • Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.

As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult.  Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic.  Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations.  Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.

I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue.  I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ.  I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views.  Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.

Not that it matters to me, really.  I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest.   I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.

So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist.  Didn’t want to.  But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.

I have to file my first monthly expenditure report.  Zero.

But I’m in trouble.   I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.

Bob Priddy, Lobbyist.  Never in my wildest dreams…..

 

A chance to do something extraordinary

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And a chance to BE something extraordinary.

Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.

If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.

It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.

A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there.  If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource.  Jefferson City is acting.

The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City.  Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity.  And a major challenge.

We should not underestimate that challenge.  Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.

We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.

There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package.  It also would finance construction of a new state museum building.  Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.

This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.

This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol.  The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.

You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.

If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war.  We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity.  If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.

A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal.  There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum.  We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.

We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state.  We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.

This is an important point:  We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds.  We can do all of this without a general tax increase.

Our proposal is even more significant because—

It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856.   It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.

Why are these boats so special?  And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west.  Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier.  We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived. 

From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air.  The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.

The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty.  Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.

The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.

The  Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.

David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.

And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete.  If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.

If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.

Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill?  Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?

David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere.  The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.

David is a dreamer.  Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River.  That history spanned 1820-1880.  By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.

The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles.  It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close.  The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta. 

We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.

The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.

2019-2026. It’s not much time.

Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal.  It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.

Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed.  But we, as a community, must help them.  Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers.  Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms.  It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.

We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”

We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.

We must do this.

(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)

Tennial Time, Boat Edition

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Bi and Cen.

The new year starts an ten-year run of tennials.   Between now and August 4, 1828 we will observe a series of 200th and 100th anniversaries:

2019 is the first of the bicentennials.  We doubt that anybody was here to see these two events.  It was two years before the legislature decreed this area become known as the City of Jefferson City. On May 15, 1819 the steamboat Independence under Captain John Nelson became the first steamboat to challenge the dangers of the Missouri River .  It arrived at the now-vanished town of Franklin on May 28. It got as far as the community of  Chariton, near the mouth of the Chariton River, called by some “Missouri’s gran divide” because streams east of it flow towards the Mississippi and those to the west flow into the Missouri or into its tributaries.

A month later, on June 21another steamboat, the Western Engineer, left St. Louis.  The boat had been built for an exploratory expedition organized by the U.S. Topographical engineers and led by Major Stephen Long.  It was the first steamboat to make it all the way across Missouri, wintering at Fort Lisa near present Council Bluffs, Iowa on September 17 before going back to St. Louis in the spring.

Steamboating seems to be slow developing on the Missouri, perhaps because it took time to develop boats strong enough to run the great river.  Five boats were regularly running the river in 1836.  But travel on the river was assuming such importance a short time later than when the original government building in Jefferson City burned in 1837, a new capitol put up on the first hill to the west was built facing east. Travelers coming upriver, therefore, saw the new capitol’s impressive face as they approached.  In 1839, James Crump, built a stone building to serve as a landing point for riverboats. The upper story became a hotel popular with river men and legislators.  The building, known locally as “Lohman’s Landing,” still stands, one of the few early nineteenth century river port buildings remaining. Today it’s part of the state museum system and has been renovated to represent the kind of general store that a riverboat landing structure might have been.

May Stafford Hilburn wrote in the local Sunday News and Tribune, in 1946 that, “In 1840 fruit trees were shipped into Jefferson City by boat and sold for twelve and one-half cents each. In 1840 Captain Dunnica, a pioneer builder of the city, reported that “the Steamer Camden on key passage down the Missouri struck a snag and sunk in eight feet of water. Ship and cargo were a total loss. In 1841 a stranger who came into Jefferson City by steamboat wrote home to a relative in Lancaster Pa., this statement: ‘The boating trade of the Missouri River is increasing annually. This insures a ready market for all produce of every kind.’”

James E. Ford, who wrote a history of Jefferson City and Cole County eighty years ago, said, “In 1841 twenty-six steamboats were engaged in regular trade on the Missouri River. These boats made 312 arrivals and departures at Glasgow with freight and passengers.  The Iatan, regular packet, made twenty regular weekly trips from St. Louis to Glasgow. About forty-six thousand tons of freight were transported during the year 1841, according to the Columbia Patriot.”

The St. Louis Western Journal observed in 1842, “Two years ago it was considered foolish and dangerous to navigate the Missouri River at night, and the time by steamboat from St. Louis to Jefferson City was forty to forty-eight hours. Just one year ago thirty-six hours was considered a speedy trip. In 1842, the trip was made in twenty-four hours by several boats. The steamboat Empire made the trip last week in twenty-two hours and fifteen minutes. Now Jefferson City, one hundred and fifty miles distant from St. Louis, is within a day’s travel.”

But steamboats transported more than politicians and trade goods.  Sometimes they transported death to Jefferson City.  City Clerk James E. McHenry recalled in 1893 that when he was fourteen years old in 1849:

“On a bright May morning, I sauntered down to the river to see if there were any boats in sight, when I was surprised to see the James Madison lying at the wharf, apparently deserted.  She had no steam up, no one on board, and the passengers with their baggage lying around loose on the levee, some were vomiting and all looking forlorn and distressed. I learned the boat had arrived sometime the night before, from St. Louis, with a number of cases of cholera, had docked and abandoned the trip; her Captain and other officers had deserted the Monroe and struck out across the river for their homes and firesides, leaving the poor sick passengers to take care of themselves.

When the citizens learned of the situation, they organized and took charge of the sick passengers, gave the dead and dying all of the attention possible. After a few days I ventured uptown—we lived at the foot of Richmond Hill on Main street. I found the town a deserted, desolated looking village. There was no business in the stores, no wagons on the streets, and but few people and they were gathered in little squads talking low and looking scared and anxious. The only places doing business were the “groceries,” as saloons were then called.  After going uptown and seeing the hearse constantly on the move, going and coming, the doctors hither and thither, and the good citizens bracing himself at the “grocery,” I picked up courage enough that day to take a peek into the Episcopal Church. I saw men in all stages of the cholera; some vomiting in the first stage, some in agony of pain, some dying and some dead. I became an errand boy, going after soup and medicine for the sick. The James Monroe landed here on that May morning with 75 people on board, now only two of whom escaped death by cholera. Most of them were California emigrants. The Captain and other officers who deserted their posts, we learned afterwards died either before or after they reached home.”

On August 26, 1854, the steamboat “Timour” (number 2) was tied up at the Edwards wood yard about three miles below Jefferson City when it exploded.  Former State Treasurer Phil E. Chapell, then a barefoot boy just turned 17, was standing on the Jefferson City levee waiting to be rowed across the river, when he saw and heard “a loud report as of a tremendous blast, and the boat was enveloped in a great cloud of steam and smoke.  In a moment the cloud had blown away but alas! The boat had disappeared. The ferryman and I at once realized what had occurred, and jumping into a skiff, rowed as rapidly as possible to the wreck…We were the first to arrive, and what a horrible scene met our gaze.  All of the boilers of the boat, three in number, had exploded simultaneously, wrecking the entire forward part of the boat, and causing the hull to sink after of the forecastle. The shrieks and groans of the dying, and their piteous appeals that they be put immediately out of existence to end their sufferings were heartrending, and resound in my ears to this day, although more than a half-century has passed.  Many lives were lost—how many was never known, as many bodies were blown into the river and never recovered. Those still alive were so badly scalded as to have but little resemblance to human beings.”

The New York Times on September 6 carried a report from the St. Louis Democrat that, “There had been no record of deck hands kept, and, doubtless, there are some who have been blown into eternity whose names will never be heard again, and whose fate will always remain a mystery within the circle of relatives and friends from which they will be missed. We have learned that the complement of hands which the boat had in leaving this port was 45 or 47, and that of these but 25 have returned.”

By then, however, a competitor was making its way toward Jefferson City and it eventually would kill steamboat traffic as it is fondly remembered. In fact, a Cincinnati newspaper reported two of the Timour’s boilers had been thrown onto the nearby railroad tracks by the explosion. The third was blown into the river and some pieces of the boat were found a mile away.

The Pacific Railroad planned to start began passenger and freight service from St. Louis to Jefferson City in November, 1855, prompting this ad from the Jefferson City Inquirer on November 10, 1855.

June, 1861 brought not death, but a military invasion. When Confederate-leaning Governor Claiborne Jackson hurried back to the capital city after negotiations with federal officials in St. Louis failed to produce a promise the U. S. Army would stay out of Missouri, and fled to Boonville with several state lawmakers in tow, the Army was in pursuit.  General Nathaniel Lyon and his troops disembarked from the steamboat Iatan (a replacement of the earlier one that helped open shipping on the river) east of the penitentiary, marched behind the prison to Lafayette Street, then marched through town to occupy the Capitol. A special correspondent for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat described “an enthusiastic reception from the loyal citizens, headed by Thomas L. Price…(They) marched in good order through the city, cheered at several points, and finally occupied Capitol Hill, amidst tremendous applause.”  Price had been the city’s first mayor and long remained a prominent civic leader.

Long-time Jefferson City banker and politician Julius Conrath remembered a happier experience in about 1868:

“I can remember as a boy of about five years seeing my first circus.  It came up the river on a steamboat and landed at what was called the levee, or Lohman’s landing, at the foot of Jefferson Street. A large crowd and especially the small boys went down to see it unload…

“In those days Jefferson City boasted a wharfmaster who was one of the city officials. He had charge of all loading and unloading of steamboats.  Steamboats were plentiful on the river then, and three or four passed up and down every week.  Every boy in town knew every boat by its whistle. In summer time, as soon as we heard a boat whistle we grabbed a basket filled with peaches, apples or grapes, or whatever fruit might be in season, and rushed to the levee and sold our wares to the passengers for in those days many passengers traveled by boat.”

But the days of the steamboat being a lifeline to Jefferson City were numbered, as they were for communities along the Missouri River.  By the 1880s, the railroad had reached the farthest most point on the river served by steamboats.

It was a glorious era, however. But it was a dangerous one.  The average lifespan for a steamboat on the Missouri was only about three years.  It’s estimated more than three-hundred steamboats sank between St. Louis and Kansas City.

In 2019, we’ll observe the bicentennial of steamboats on the Missouri River, kicking off what we are calling the “tennial era” in Missouri.  We’re thinking of the best way to commemorate our steamboat history.

Christmas: Just another working day

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Merry Christmas from the Missouri Capitol.
Governor Mike Parson’s office is fully involved in the Christmas season. We don’t recall anything like this in all the years we have covered the capitol. Don’t expect to see him at his desk on Christmas day, however, although there were many times when a lot of people were at their capitol desks at Christmas.
The governor’s office often has been on display during this Christmas season because of something else Governor Parson has done that we’ve never seen done before. The double doors between the capitol hallway and the big oval office are open often with a glass barrier that people can walk up to and look into the office. The doors are closed when he’s doing governor business but at other times they’ve been opened so the visiting public can see the office and its Christmas decorations.
We’ve often thought it’s a shame that capitol visitors don’t get to see that magnificent room.
History tells us that Christmas has been through a lot of changes through the decades. For decades, it was just another day. Not until Victorian times did it begin to assume the secular commercial bonanza it is.
When the state legislature moved from its temporary home in St. Charles to the City of Jefferson, the fourth session of the General Assembly convened on Monday, November 20. Christmas day was just another regular business day, as was New Year’s Day. A reading of the House Journal for December 25, 1826 sounds similar to the House Journals today. It is—as it is now—pretty dry stuff.

MONDAY MORING, DECEMBER 25, 1826
The house met pursuant to adjournment.
Mr. Speaker appointed Messrs., O’Bryan, Grant, Thornton, Jewell, Canole, Bollinger, Nash, Johnson, Bruer, Brinker and Brock as a select committee on an engrossed bill from the senate, entitled an act supplementary to an act to organize, govern and, discipline the militia, approved 11th Feb. l825.
Mr. Grant of the committee of ways and means introduced bill appropriating money for defraying the expenses of government, which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading. On motion of Mr. Watkins, the rules of this house requiring a bill to be read three several times [sic] on-three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on to-day.
On motion, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house. Mr. Harris of the select committee to whom was referred the petition of sundry inhabitants of the counties of Chariton and Ralls, praying for the formation of a new county, reported a bill to establish the new county of Marion which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading.
On motion of Mr. Burckhartt, the rules of this house requiring bills to be read three several times on three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on jo-day,
On motion of Mr. Cook, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house.

The journal continues for several more paragraphs of routine business before the House adjourned until the next day. Representative Jewell, by the way as Dr. William Jewell of Boone County, a founder of Columbia for whom William Jewell College was named. Bollinger was George F. Bollinger, who represented Cape Girardeau in the territorial and state legislatures from 1812 until 1840. When a new county was formed of Cape Girardeau County, it was named for him.
Working on Christmas was not all that unusual in those times. It was seventeen years yet before Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published or that Sir Henry Cole, an Englishman, printed a couple thousand Christmas cards that sold for a shilling each. Christmas would not be declared a federal holiday for forty-four more years.
In 1828, the second general assembly to meet in Jefferson City took December 25 off but was back at work the next day. The practice was common for several years. In 1840, the House took the day off but the Senate did meet on Christmas day, a Friday, and on Saturday the 26th but adjourned both days because it could not achieve a quorum. Business as usual resumed in both chambers on Tuesday the 29th.
The House met on Saturday, December 21, 1844 and transacted business before adjourning until Monday the 23rd. But not enough people showed up to make a quorum again until the afternoon of December 30. The Senate met on Christmas day but only five members answered the roll call. It tried to meet each day after that but didn’t get enough members in the chamber to do official business until the 30th.
Then we get to this entry:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, At the First Session of the Fifteenth General Assembly, begun and held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, the Twenty-Fifth day of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight.
The Senate was called to order by the Hon. JAMES YOUNG, Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate, and FALKLAND H. Martin, Esq., acted as Secretary pro tem.

That’s right. The 1848 legislative session began on Christmas Day. And it happened again just six years later:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, AT THE FIRST SESSION, BEING THE REGULAR SESSION, OF THE EIGHTEENTH GENERAI ASSEMBLY, BEGUN AND HELD AT THE CITY OF JEFFERSON, ON MONDAY THE 25TH DAY OF DECEMBER, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR, THAT BEING THE DAY FIXED BY LAW FOR THE MEETING OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI.

The Senators were called to order at 11 o’clock, A. M., by the Hon. Wilson Brown, Lieutenant Governor, and President of the Senate.

Lt. Governor Brown was one of about thirty people killed in the Gasconade bridge disaster on Nov. 1, 1855, the day the first passenger train was to have arrived from St. Louis.


In this building, long ago, Christmas was just another day for many years. There were times, though, when it appears some members of the general assembly left town for a few days, leaving the House and Senate without enough members to transact business although a few members who lived too far from home in those pre-highway, pre-bridge, pre-railroad days when the rivers were too icy to travel by boat stayed in Jefferson City, a town of no paved streets, few amenities, and fewer than three-thousand people before 1860.
The new Missouri Constitution adopted in 1865 established the January start date for the legislature, ending the winter sessions. Although the observance of Christmas had been slowly building, it was not until the Reconstruction years that December became the biggest month of the year for retail sales.
In a couple of weeks, today’s legislators will start a new session in today’s capitol. By then the Christmas decorations will be gone and the present capitol will feel, as the old one undoubtedly felt, the quickening pulse within it. Christmas and the old year are gone. A new year and new careers soon will begin to take shape. And so will the new journals that somebody else might read 170 years hence.

A GODDESS COMES TO EARTH

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Ceres, a lady of myth and mystery who has extended blessings to state capitol visitors for ninety-four years, has been brought to earth by mortals who love her and care for her.
She’s in Chicago now and will be staying there about a year before she comes home to the capitol.
She’s a ten-feet four-inches tall, two-thousand pound bronze statue whose presence among flesh-and-blood humans was an emotional event for many of those who spoke quietly in loving terms as they walked around the flatbed trailer on which she’d been carefully laid after days and hours of preparation for her removal from the capitol dome.
She’s beautiful.
We’re going to spend some time in this entry telling her story, which is as ancient as the Greek and Roman empires, as recent as last week, and is beginning a new chapter. We’ll be drawing on the research we did for The Art of the Missouri Capitol: History in Canvas, Stone, and Bronze and for the upcoming book about the history of the building.

WHO IS CERES?
Ceres is a figure from Roman mythology whose Greek counterpart is Demeter. She’s the goddess of grain, of agriculture, of fertility, a representative of Mother Earth. We’ll use the Roman version of her story here. She was a sister of Jupiter who was impregnated by Jupiter (family relationships among gods and goddesses apparently were not frowned upon in the myth
The family weirdness continues with Pluto kidnapping Proserpina with plans to marry her and live in the underworld. Mama Ceres, as you might expect, was not favorably disposed to such an arrangement. As she searched for her daughter, she stopped the growth of crops and caused deserts, acts that alarmed Jupiter to send Mercury to the underworld to convince Pluto to let Proserpina return to the surface.
Pluto blackmailed Proserpina. He forced her to agree to return to the underworld for part of the year. When Proserpina showed up, Ceres was happy and as long as the two were together the earth was fertile and crops grew, trees had leaves, and the grass grew. But when Proserpina has to return to Pluto, Ceres becomes depressed and the earth begins to lose its productivity and the trees start to lose their leaves and the lawn finally stops growing.
So we have brought Ceres to earth at a time when she supposedly becomes depressed because she misses Proserpina—which might explain the chilly and snowy day of falling leaves and dying lawns when she came down. Although the capitol restoration workers say she’ll be put back up in a year, regardless of the weather, we think it would be more appropriate to put her back in place at a time when the wind blows warmer, the trees are budding, the days are growing longer, and so is the grass.
That’s the best we can figure out this complicated family relationship of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome and ancient Greece.
Regardless, let’s hope that Proserpina, unknown to her mother, already is living in Chicago (known for many years for its underworld history) and hears that Mom is going to be in town, and that they get together. We’re ready for a quick return of spring.

WHY CERES?

Simple. She’s the goddess of agriculture, among other things.  Although Missouri is becoming more urban, its number one industry remains agriculture. It was even moreso when she was commissioned, cast, and put into place.

THE MISSOURI CAPITOL WAS NOT HER INTENDED SITE
It not only was not the intended site, but the statue of Ceres appears to be less than an original design.
For example, the Smithsonian Learning Center has this statue titled “Maidehood,” a version of which also is in the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.
The hand is up, not down, and the gown is more revealing than the attire of Ceres. But the design similarities are unmistakable.
Then there is this work from the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, also by Sherry Fry:
She’s called “Peace” in this version.
Fry originally intended the statue to fulfill a commission for Grant’s Tomb in New York. But an undated newspaper clipping in the papers of Decoration Commission member Cora Painter says, “When he visited the Missouri Capitol, he was struck with the thought that there was the building to which his theme was fitted and he executed the model for Missouri instead of New York.”

SHE’S NOT THE ONLY CAPITOL CERES
We aren’t the only state capitol with a statue of Ceres. Vermont’s capitol in Montpelier has had a Ceres statue since 1858. As this is written, sculptor Chris Miller is carving—from Honduran Mahogany— the third Ceres statue to adorn the statehouse dome. The clay model he is working from was done by Jerry Williams, who usually works in granite. The first two wooden statues fell victims to rot after about eighty years each.
(The picture is from Sevendaysvt.com)

WHO DECIDED SHE SHOULD BE UP THERE?
The original decision was made by the State Capitol Commission Board, the predecessor of the Capitol Decoration Commission. And for a time, there was some consideration of making her out of something else.
The capitol architectural firm of Tracy and Swartwout (pronounced Swart-out) proposed a ten-foot statue of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture “fully robed and head erect.” They suggested, “In her right hand she carried the torch of education and in her left, which hangs by her side, are a few blades of wheat.” The Capitol Commission Board approved the idea in September, 1915 then wondered whether the statue should be made of sheet copper instead of bronze, what the thickness of copper should be if that was the material of choice, and what would be the cost difference.
By mid-1916 the board was waiting for the great bonze doors to arrive for the south front of the building and had started casting up sums to see what else it could buy. It thought there would be enough for a statue of Ceres on the dome, among other things. The W. F. Norman Sheet Metal Manufacturing Company of Nevada, the home town of commissioner Theodore Lacaff, sent the board a plaster model of a proposed twelve-foot ball statue that could be made of 48-ounce of sheet copper for $2,480.
But the board was hit with a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that almost drained its bank account, leaving it without funds for the statue or to hire sculptors to carve figures for the main pediment.

Architect Egerton Swartwout called the board’s suggested cost of the statue “absolutely inadequate” and noted the price of bronze had gone up so much since war broke out in Europe that the board could not afford the bronze for the statue much less pay for casting it. He warned of vendors who would “sell you a lot of junk which they too often put on court houses and other such buildings, like the Civil War Memorials that are scattered through the land, made out of stamped tin.”
Swartwout suggested the statue be made of hammered sheet copper, the material used in the Statue of Liberty. Norman said copper and bronze were scarce because the government was not allowing their use for anything but war work. Norman endorsed the idea of Ceres “since such stress is being laid upon the importance of cereals” at the time and the Missouri War Production Board was encouraging, and getting, great improvements in state agriculture production. Although Norman later got an option on some copper of the same weight used in the Statue of Liberty, the Ceres project wound up on the Capitol Commission Board’s scrap heap.
The Jefferson City Daily Capital News observed that the war had caused Ceres “to gracefully sidestep the honor of standing on top of the capitol dome and beaming down upon a peaceful world. Gallantly Ceres gives way for old glory who will proudly wave over the most beautiful state capitol in the Union.” But, forecast the newspaper, “When victory ends the war, Ceres will have her inning.” Sherry Fry’s bronze Ceres statue was hauled to the top of the dome in the fall of 1924, made of bronze. It would be more than six decades before the Norman Company got some of its products in the capitol, when it installed the tin ceiling in the office of Senator Harold Caskey.

THE SCULPTOR
The statue was designed by Sherry Edmundson Fry, an Iowa-born sculptor who began his career when he shaped a figure from clay scooped from a ditch near his Creston, Iowa home. His father refused to support his desire to study are in college so Fry picked potatoes to work his way through Grinnell College.
After graduation, Fry worked with sculptors Lorado Taft and Charles Milligan in Chicago before moving to New York to work for Karl Bitter, who created the original “Signing of the Treaty” panel that is on the river side of the capitol. He signed on as a crewman aboard a cattle boat bound for France so he could study at the leading art institutes in Paris. Fry continued his studies in Italy before returning to France where he met Des Moines businessman James Edmundson who hired him to create a sculpted image of his father. Fry so admired Edmundson that he took the man’s last name as his middle name. (The Archives of American Art in Washington, D. C., has the only photograph of Fry we have been able to track down.
)During World War I, Fry was part of the newly-formed Army Camouflage Corps, one of the leaders of which was Evarts Tracy, whose architectural firm designed the Missouri Capitol. Tracy appears to have been the connection that got Fry the Ceres commission. He was paid $15,000 for this work (about $215,000 today).

THE REAL WOMAN, PERHAPS
We have suggested that the inspiration for the figure on our capitol’s dome might have been Audrey Munson, considered the country’s first supermodel. We have only circumstantial evidence because the records of the Capitol Decoration Commission have disappeared (we maintain a hope somebody will find some dust-covered file boxes in their attic or in a long-forgotten closet corner that will contain those records) and we have not located any of Fry’s personal papers

 Audrey was the favorite model for New York sculptors—the New York American referred to her as the “queen of Artists’ Studios”—including those who decorated our capitol, for more than a decade. She was such a popular subject that the organizers of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco published a guide book of the exposition statues that featured her face and body. More than half of the statues at the exposition were of Audrey.
Audrey Munson went into movies and became the first woman to appear nude in an American mainline movie. Her family put her in a mental institution in 1931. She died there in 1996 at the age of 104, thirty years after Fry’s death.

SIZE

Some of those who saw Ceres on the trailer after she was brought down were surprised that she isn’t bigger. It’s a matter of proportion and the Capitol Decoration Commission that commissioned the statue wanted to make sure the statue did not overwhelm the building’s design nor would it be insignificantly small. When Sherry Fry submitted a design, a steeplejack made a two-dimensional wallboard silhouette that he hoisted into position atop the dome. Commission members and others on the ground walked around the dome to study the figure from all angles and found, as one chronicler put it, the statue “stood out, bold, distinct, and beautiful.”
By contrast, Thomas Crawford’s statue of “Freedom” on our nation’s capitol is nineteen feet-six inches high and weighs fifteen-thousand pounds. The statue was cast in Rome, where Crawford had his studio. It was shipped to this country in six crates and put together atop the capitol in 1863. Your loyal observer frankly thinks that she is too large for that dome but—to the surprise of some, perhaps—he was not around in 1863 to protest. Neither was Crawford, who died in 1857.

BRINGING HER DOWN

No one is alive today to see her return to earth who saw Ceres, or at least the top part of her, hoisted to the dome in 1924. For most of a century we have had only photographs from airplanes or long lenses to show us her beauty.
Unless you went to Columbia.
Before Sherry Fry was allowed to cast a bronze statue, he had to submit a half-size preliminary sculpture to the Decoration Commission. Many of the preliminary drawings, paintings, window designs and sculptural models were taken to the University of Missouri School of Art and Archaeology by commission chairman John Pickard, the founder of the university’s art history department. Some preliminary painting are in the Ellis Library. The plaster models of the south front frieze line some of the hallways on the top floor of Jesse Hall, the main administration building. Unfortunately (as of our last visit there) there are no signs telling anyone what those encased things are.

For years, Fry’s preliminary model of Ceres was in Pickard Hall on the Francis Quadrangle but when that building was closed after it was found to be contaminated by radioactive elements left from research in the early 1900s the museum was moved to what’s known as Mizzou North, the former Ellis Fischel Cancer Hospital on the business loop. The statue is still there although it has lost a hand and some toes.

In 1995 some folks made their way to the top of the dome to check on Ceres’ condition. A few days before she was brought down, the Office of Administration had a photographer on the dome with her. Until workers started preparing to bring her down several days ago, nobody had gone face-to-face with the goddess since ‘95. Unless they’d been to Columbia.

It’s hard to compare the face of the plaster model with the face of the final bronze statue because of light and perspective. But it appears to us Fry made a slight alteration in the face of Ceres, perhaps slightly lengthening it, when he made the final version. (Compare with the statue’s face at the end.)

Two guys were essential to the safe return of Ceres to earth. One was Zack Franklin who ran the big crane that reached up and over to Ceres and gently lifted her from her perch and gently lowered her to the trailer below. Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe (who commemorated their roles) called Franklin “the most important man in Missouri during the five to seven minutes Ceres was in the air.”

The eyes for Franklin on the platform far above was James Stafford, talking by radio to the crane operator as the delicate task of attaching the hook to the carefully-wrapped harness around the statue. It was fitting that Stafford should be intimately involved in the process. His great-grandfather had been one of the workers who constructed the building that Ceres has presided over all this time.

 

So she came down, wrapped in a state flag that was a last-minute thought earlier that morning, turning to seemingly bless the building over which she presided or maybe to wave goodbye for a little while, and then for the first time in more than nine decades, she was allowed to lie down.

 

FACING THE WRONG WAY?
We don’t know where this got started, the idea that when Ceres was winched to the dome in 1924 that workers turned her the wrong way before anchoring her. We have never found any contemporary accounts saying that.
We’re not sure what the rationale is for that idea other than north Missouri is the state’s main corn, wheat, and beans producing region while the south (except for the Bootheel) is better at raising rocks.
One person has suggested she faces south to reflect Missouri’s Confederate heritage, in effect turning her back on the North. Again, we have never found any contemporary comment or account indicating that is the case. It is true that “Dixie” was part of the inauguration ceremonies for new governors in those days but we do not believe the Capitol Decoration Commission was in any way motivated to turn its goal of appropriately decorating the building into a political statement.

So why does she face south—and WILL face south when she returns from Chicago (as shown in Lloyd Grotjan’s photo from our Art book)? Because the south front of the Capitol is where the people come for admittance to the halls of their government. Her hand is extended in blessing to the people of Missouri who gather below her for inaugurations, rallies, concerts—-for some years in the hot summers the mainline Protestant churches held joint worship services on the lawn—or just to visit the state’s greatest symbol. It would be extremely poor manners if the patron goddess of Missouri turned her back on her people.
We wouldn’t be surprised if that was what the commission thought when Ceres ascended in 1924.

AND A FINAL NOTE—
Some of us think the beauty of Ceres should not be so far away that Missourians cannot be touched by it for another century or so. Perhaps those restoring the Capitol would consider doing what has been done with “Freedom” in the National Capitol.
The full-size plaster model for that statue that was used to cast the bronze statue on top of the building was stored in pieces for more than 130 years before it was restored by the Architect of the Capitol in 1929. It stands today in Emancipation Hall of the U. S. Capitol’s Visitor Center.
The United States Capitol Historical Society sells a nine-inch tall version of the statue made of crushed marble removed during the renovation of the east front of the building and mixed with resin. It sells for forty-six dollars. An much smaller replica is available as a Christmas ornament.
Oklahoma, which finally put a dome on its Capitol is topped by a twenty-two foot tall statue, a nine-foot replica of which is in the rotunda.
Today’s laser scanning and 3-D printing technology could produce an accurate reproduction of Ceres that would make a striking attraction in the Capitol Museum or to the Capitol visitor’s center that is talked about from time to time. And a small but well-detailed version made of the dust from the stones removed during the present restoration and repair project could be a solid seller at the tour desk.

Beauty should not be hidden, even if it is in plain sight, 250 feet above those who would admire it.

 

Notes from a quiet street—elections issue

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A week from today is elections day.  We look forward to elections days for the wrong reasons.  Instead of being excited about taking part in the voting process we are excited because it’s the end of that interminable period when our intelligence is assaulted 30 seconds at a time—all the time, it seems, on the television.

—and when our mailboxes are stuffed with mailers of questionable veracity usually provided by people without the courtesy or the courage to admit they paid for the appropriately-named junk mail.

Interestingly, at the end of the day, a lot of people will transfer from being the kind of people they campaigned against to being those people. And what will they do to correct the impressions their voters have about government?

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We have been interested in some of the reasons various groups don’t want us to vote for a new system of drawing legislative districts after the 2020 census.  One side says it would be a mistake to let the state demographer (a person who spends his or her life analyzing population and population trends) draw new districts because they’ll just use statistics and will come up with districts that are more gerrymandered that some districts from the last go-around.  Others worry that letting the demographer draw the districts will weaken the political power of this or that group.   We must have been mistaken all these years because we thought reapportionment dealt with representation rather than power. Silly us.

Could it be that the state demographer won’t care if two legislative incumbents wind up in the same district instead of benefitting from a process that is suspected of protecting incumbents or at least their party majorities?  As far as the demographer coming up with screwball districts, surely that person couldn’t do worse than the creation of the present Fifth Congressional District that I dubbed the “dead lizard” district after the last congressional redistricting (it looks like a dead lizard lying on its back with its feet in the air) that has a former Mayor of Kansas City representing a rural area as far east as Marshall.

What the heck.  We can always change the constitution back to the present system if the legislative districts after the 2020 census are as bad as some interest groups forecast they will be, can’t we?

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Elections almost always have issues created by petition campaigns.  It’s an important freedom we have as citizens to propose laws or to ask for a statewide vote on something the legislature did that raises questions in the minds of enough people that they want citizens to have the final say.  But that freedom can carry with it unintended consequences because petitions don’t go through the refining process of legislative committee hearings, debates, votes, and compromises where possible.   Of course the legislature sometimes fumbles an issue and in both cases ballot issues can be issues financially backed by a special interest if not an individual.

Voters have an often-overlooked responsibility to get out the spy glass and read all the fine print in the election legal notices.  We haven’t talked to very many folks who have done that. So we get what we get and the courts often have to figure out what we got regardless of what we thought we were getting.

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The best part of election day is that all of the junk mail campaign propaganda that goes straight to our waste baskets will be replaced by Christmas catalogues.  We prefer Christmas catalogs for several reasons.  They don’t forecast national or international catastrophes if we buy something offered by another catalog.  They usually are honest about their products (the pictures usually are more accurate than the pictures of the hamburgers at fast foot joints). We have never gotten an L. L. Bean catalogue that suggests the products in a Land’s End catalogue are dangerous to our well-being because of who wears them or because of who the wearers hang out with.

And they don’t proclaim exclusive knowledge of what our “values” are.  The Vermont Country Store is filled with traditional values—soap on a rope, Adams Clove chewing gum, old-fashioned popcorn makers or hand-cranked ice-cream makers, or dresses whose styles are timeless.  Coldwater Creek is for people whose values tend toward the stylish with a little “bling” thrown in.   We have yet to see the Vermont Country Store catalogue that says the Coldwater Creek catalogue is too liberal to be good for us.

In short, the catalogues have a lot more things that we will buy than most of the campaign junk mail that winds up in landfills instead of recycle bins.

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Jefferson City is building a new fire station, replacing an older one in the east end of town (the building will be for sale, by the way, in case you want a unique home, assuming you can get a zoning change).  News of the planned sale of the old fire house brings to mind our old friend Derry Brownfield, who used to occasionally remind us why fire engines are red:

“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is 12, and there are 12 inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always ‘russian’ around.”

Uh-huh.

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Go vote next Tuesday.  Do yourself and your state a favor and spend the next seven days with your reading glass studying all that fine print.

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