The state lawyer for poor people accused of crimes has made the annual pilgrimage to the Capitol to go reiterate his plea for the money needed to give poor Missourians anything approaching the defense wealthier people accused of crimes can afford.

This time it was Michael Barrett sacrificing his forehead against the masonry, hoping our elected legislators would increase financing for this part of the criminal justice system by $25 million.  Governor Nixon has recommended a $1.5 million increase in funding but has not proposed adding any more lawyers.  Barrett uses the word “crisis,” a word used by his predecessors year after year.  Although legislators have nodded sympathetically each year as they already are doing this year, the crisis remains.

The idea that poor people had the same rights as wealthier people to be defended is more than 225 years old.  It’s part of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution as a general statement that everybody is entitled to a legal defense in court.   But the idea that poor people deserved equal protection might have its origin in an 1853 Indiana Supreme Court case that held publicly-financed criminal defense was one of the “principles of a civilized society.”   The Indiana Supreme Court opinion said, “It is not to be thought of in a civilized community for a moment that any citizen put in jeopardy of life or liberty should be debarred of counsel because he is too poor to employ such aid.  No court could be expected to respect itself to sit and hear such a trial.  The defense of the poor in such cases is a duty which will at once be conceded as essential to the accused, to the court and to the public.”

That was a recognition by one state.   But it was eleven decades before that principle of a civilized society was recognized as a national right.   This is the man from Missouri who is the face of that right.

This fellow who might easily be dismissed as a person of little consequence if we passed him on the street is Hannibal native Clarence Earl Gideon.  His father died when he was three.  His mother remarried but Clarence lived an aimless and sometimes troubling life that led him to drop out of school after the eighth grade and run away from home to live as a drifter at the age of 14.  He returned about a year later and lived with his mother’s brother until she learned he was back in town and had him jailed. He escaped one day later, broke into a store and stole some clothes. His mother asked a judge to send him to the Boonville Reformatory.  He later recalled, “Of all the prisons I have been in that was the worst. I still have a scar on my body form the whippings I received.”  He was paroled after a year, got a job in a shoe factory, and got married.  But he lost his job and was arrested on several charges not long after that.  A judge appointed a lawyer to represent him but he was sent to prison for ten years for burglary, larceny, and robbery. He was 18. He got out in 1932, after serving three of those years.  He went back to the penitentiary for stealing, larceny and escape and did prison time at Leavenworth for stealing government property and more time in a Texas prison for theft.

Gideon married four women during those troubled years, the last time a woman named Ruth in 1955, when he was 45 years old.  They lived in Texas where he worked from time to time as a tugboat deckhand and as a bartender until tuberculosis put him in bed for three years.  He and Ruth moved to Florida where child welfare authorities eventually took away their six children (three that Ruth brought to the marriage and the three they had together).  Gideon got a low-paying job as an electrician and started gambling to get extra money.

About three weeks before Gideon’s 51^st birthday, he was accused of stealing money and beer from a pool room in Panama City.  In the space of two weeks, a judge refused to appoint a lawyer to represent him because Florida law allowed court-appointed lawyers only in capital cases. He was convicted of breaking and entering and was given the maximum sentence, five years.

Gideon, remembering that years earlier a Missouri judge had appointed a lawyer to represent him, began reading law books in prison and decided the Florida judge had violated his Sixth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights.  The Florida Supreme Court refused to do anything.  So he went straight to the United States Supreme Court with a five-page handwritten petition in which he wrote, “It makes no difference how old I am or what color I am or what church I belong to if any. The question is I did not get a fair trial. The question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me an attorney and the court refused.” The Supreme Court decided to hear his case and assigned future Justice Abe Fortas to represent Gideon.  The state of Florida argued that the issue was a state matter, not a federal one and that upholding Gideon’s position would result in thousands of convictions being thrown out.  Fortas argued that the average person untrained in the law had no hope of winning when arguing against a trained attorney.

The court’s opinion issued fifty-three years ago this month ordering a new trial for Gideon was unanimous. One line in the opinion bluntly stated, “Lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries.”

While Gideon was preparing for his second trial, two-thousand Florida prisoners were released.

His attorney, W. Fred Turner, destroyed the prosecution’s case in the second trial and the jury acquitted Gideon after only one hour of deliberation.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy observed, “If an obscure Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon had not sat down in prison with a pencil and paper to write a letter to the Supreme Court; and if the Supreme Court had not taken the trouble to look at the merits in that one crude petition among all the bundles of mail it must receive every day, the vast machinery of American law would have gone on functioning undisturbed. But Gideon did write that letter; the court did look into his case; he was re-tried with the help of competent defense counsel; found not guilty and released from prison after two years of punishment for a crime he did not commit. And the whole course of legal history has been changed.”

Gideon married a fifth time and died of cancer in Fort Lauderdale early in 1972, still a pauper.  His family returned his body to Hannibal and buried him in a grave that remained unmarked until the American Civil Liberties union placed a stone in 1984.  The stone contains a quote from Justice Fortas, “Each era finds an improvement in law for the benefit of mankind.”

A little more than one-hundred miles from Clarence Earl Gideon’s grave, almost half a century after his death and more than a half-century after the U. S. Supreme Court said poor people have the right to adequate representation in the criminal cases, Michael Barrett is pleading for the state to give his office the resources it needs to let today’s Clarence Gideons have that right.  And in a year when millions of dollars will be spent to influence public policy or to influence those who write public policy, the office that symbolizes a basic right all of us have is begging for nickels and dimes from a legislature that year in, year out, gives it a few pennies and nods sympathetically

We’re about six weeks past Halloween and you might think all of the Halloween stuff in stores has been put away.  But it’s surprisingly easy to still find masks.   And masks are in some demand in Jefferson City because tomorrow night (Saturday, December 12), several hundred people are going to don masks and invade the Capitol.

I’m going to be one of them, which has meant Nancy has either had to find out where there are still masks for sale or she’s going to have to make one.   She had some ideas about where to find some to consider.

One store had some basic Lone Ranger-type masks (although if the Lone Ranger showed up in the gold one or the red one, he’d probably surely be lone).  They cost twenty-five cents each so we bought four.  Now we have to wonder whether it’s worthwhile to take a dollar’s worth of cheap masks back or just keep them around for grandchildren to play with.  Grandchildren are going to win. Unless—-

Another store had two bizarre creations, one looking like some kind of a feathered iguana mask and another that is a mass of feathers that a performer might wear in some weird Las Vegas stage show.   They cost enough that returning them for a refund is practical.

A third store had the mask that seemed appropriate. We’re not going to show it to you because then people at the Caring for Missouri event tomorrow night will know who the person is in that mask.   One good thing about it is that it does not rely on a cheap elastic band that could break at any moment—which is why we bought four of the first set of masks—and it fits over glasses that are necessary because I have to read some stuff.

The event starts at 7 p.m. in the Capitol rotunda.  Tickets start at $100.  Some folks think this is a pretty snooty event.  Others see it as an important way to raise money and to increase visibility for the organizations and their causes.  All other things aside, it’s intended to be a fun event for worthwhile causes.  Let’s talk about the causes.

We’ve talked about the goals of the Missouri Capitol Commission to raise money to preserve and restore Capitol art.  Regular readers of these posts know that’s a favorite issue for your faithful scribe.  But let’s focus on the other two groups involved: The Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and the Missouri Association for Community Action.  Frankly, dealing with art issues pales in comparison to the issues these two groups deal with every day.

Let’s start with MACA, which reminds us that 932,066 Missourians live below the federal poverty line.  A total of 417,151 peopled have incomes less than half the poverty-line level. About one-third of those people are children.  What’s the poverty line?   The federal government says a Missourian who earns less than $11,700 a year is living in poverty.  A family of four with an income of #24,200 is living in poverty.  MACA counters those who dismiss such conditions by suggesting people just go out and get jobs with this statistic: Almost thirty percent of Missouri jobs do not pay enough for the wage earner to live above the poverty line.  Thirty percent.

Almost seventeen percent of Missourians have low food security because of their earning situation. That means they have to reduce the quality, variety, and desirability of the food they eat.  Missouri is one of ten states with a food insecurity level higher than the national average, and has the sixth highest percent of food insecure households.

MACA cites government figures showing almost 7300 people are homeless in Missouri; 652 of them veterans.

When it comes to providing help to those people, MACA doesn’t really care if the Caring For Missouri Capitol Masquerade Ball is seen as a snooty event by some people.

Most of those attending the event will probably be old enough to remember when “domestic violence didn’t even have a name, let alone a legal identity,” as the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence says on its webpage.  The Coalition recalls that rape was legal within marriage and wasn’t even a crime until the mid 90s.  There was no law allowing a judge to order an abusive husband and father to move out of the family living quarters.  Remember when reports that a husband was beating his wife were considered “family matters?”  The folks at the party were living at a time when there were no rape crisis centers, no shelters for battered women.

. There were no shelters for battered women in Missouri, no rape crisis centers, no hotlines, no task forces, no Coalition.  Missouri had no domestic violence shelters until 1976, no legal protections for domestic violence victims until 1979.  That was about the time the Coalition was created. Since then the number of domestic and sexual violence programs has increased tenfold.

The coalition, like MACA, is a presence in the Capitol during legislative sessions working for more protections for the poor and the abused.   In four decades of watching representatives of organizations like these, this observer saw nothing snooty about their work.  There was little celebration when an effort was successful because there is always another issue for the poor and the abused of Missouri.

Tomorrow night’s event will involve some food and music and a silent and not-silent (they hope) auctions of all kinds of things that we mentioned in an earlier entry here.  Some folks will be wearing formal attire. Others will be in business attire.  They’ll be dressed much better than most of the people this event is designed to help can afford to dress..

Tickets will be available at the door.  There are places where you still can buy a mask.

Got a quarter?   I’ll sell you one of mine.

Your observer of the passing scene has had a year to ponder the things he witnessed in all those hours observing the Missouri Legislature from his perch in the House Press Gallery or from his seat at the press table on the Senate floor.  And he has come to the conclusion after the year away from the tumult and the shouting that one of the most regrettable trends he watched was the decline—and seeming death—of a quality we call “class.”

The thought hit home several days ago when legislative leaders decided to hold hearings to examine Missouri programs that help refugees, a decision reached after the histrionics accompanying their demands that the Governor keep Syrians from coming to our state. Governor Nixon threw a bucket of ice water on those demands, leading to the examination of what the state does with immigrants.

A legislature that still operated with at least a certain amount of “class’ would have decided to hold the hearings BEFORE trying to whip up public emotions on the subject, of course.  From what we have heard and read, the hearings would not have justified the earlier reactions.  But in an era where dignity takes a back seat to demonization, we seem to be left with those whose philosophy is heavily laced with the adage, “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”  Herman Wouk used the adage in The Caine Mutiny and said it was an ancient saying.   It’s all too current today.

In announcing the hearings, Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard put out a statement saying, “Because of our governor’s lack of leadership and this administration’s failed federal foreign policies, we will try to find ways to protect the safety and well-being of the citizens of the Show-Me State.”

Sheesh!   Everything seems to be couched in language these days that tries to throw a kidney punch at somebody, doesn’t it?  Parents recognize the trend.

“It’s all his fault1”

“Is not”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

Normally about this time, the adult in the room says “Stop it!” and threatens to send people to their rooms until they can behave in a civil manner.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a noticeable lack of adults when it comes to modern politics.  “Class” is one of the casualties of the presence of term limits and absence of high ethical standards.

We dislike wallowing in nostalgia because nostalgia often recalls an unrealistic picture.  But there WERE days when people in government could do things without being so dang-nabbed disagreeable.  Of course, that was back in the days before term limits when legislators had time to grow up.  And when there were adults in the room who could help them do it.

Maybe it will dawn on some people someday that Lord of the Flies is not a political textbook.

(We have been asked to clarify a couple of things in our original version of this post. You’ll find the changes if you read through this post again. And you should.  Read through it again.

Your honorable scribe has not decided what mask he will wear although he is considering what a T-Red head would look like on top of a tuxedo)

Thousands of people each year are stunned when they walk into the House Lounge at the Capitol and find themselves surrounded by Thomas Hart Benton’s “Social History of Missouri” mural.  It’s hard to determine how much it’s worth because of its size and its location.  The state of Missouri paid Benton $16,000 to paint it in 1936. Some of the lithographs of some of the images sell for thousands of dollars today.  Through the years, this frequent visitor to that room has heard estimates of the value of the mural as being more than the cost of building the capitol (which was about $4 million) to multiples of that.

Do we ever have a deal for you!!!

You can own a copy of the Benton mural for a fraction of its value.  In fact, I know some folks who would be glad to sell you one for, oh, say, one-tenth of the value of the original.  And don’t worry. You won’t have to build a 25×50-foot addition to your house.

A panoramic five-foot long photo of the mural is one of several reproductions of Capitol art that will be auctioned at the Capitol Masquerade Ball on December 12.  It will be in the rotunda, starting at 7 p.m.  The proceeds will benefit three organizations: The Missouri State Capitol Commission, the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, and Missouri Association for Community Action.

All you need is a mask and a ticket.

General ticket donations are $100.  If you want to be a Very Important Person—and you are, you know, admit it—you can get a VIP ticket for $250.  Those who buy the VIP tickets will have get a commemorative gift and you can hang out with other VIPs in the VIP lounge.

Just let the organizers know you’re going to be there and reserve your ticket at www.caring4missouri.org.

You might get to rub elbows with a whole bunch of important folks.  The top state office-holders and both of our U. S. Senators are honorary co-hosts.  The organizers can’t promise all of them will be there, but it will be worth the price of your ticket to find out who is.  And besides, you’ll have a chance to rub elbows with a lot of other good folks and you’ll be supporting three fine organizations.

Mike Michelson will be there to tickle the ivories.  The Norm Ruebling Band will play music anybody can dance to.  There will be a Redlight Photobooth to commemorate your presence in any way you’d like.  There will be beverages and Hors d’oeuvres.

And organizers will sell things.  There will be a silent auction.   AND there will be what the sponsoring groups hope will be a really, really NOISY auction.

And this is where you can get some really great things for your home or your office.

Just imagine that five-foot long Benton Mural hanging in the lobby of your office or behind your desk or above your bed or—well, just imagine.

There are also a couple of other prints of parts of the mural.  They’ll also be auctioning off photos of the portraits of Mark Twain and Susan Elizabeth Blow that most people see only if they get into the Governor’s office.   Mark, of course, is Missouri’s most famous writer.  Susan is the founder of the kindergarten in America.

Are you a Civil War person?  How about reproductions of the N. C. Wyeth murals depicting the Battle of Wilson’s Creek and the Battle of Westport?  (This is one of the changes. The Wyeth prints won’t be sold at this event. They’re being saved for a later event so if you had your heart and your checkbook prepared to buy them, save both for a later event. We don’t know if masks will be involved).

And a print of another of the monumental murals in the Capitol also will be auctioned:  Charles Hoffbauer’s “The Glory of Missouri in War” mural from the House of Representatives.

All of these can be yours if you (a) buy a ticket and (b) outbid somebody else who also wants these unique decorations for home or office.  Folks, you won’t have a chance to buy these images anywhere else. Nowhere.

The pictures are photographs by Lloyd Grotjan, the Jefferson City photographer who did the outstanding photographs for The Art of the Missouri Capitol: History in Canvas, Bronze, and Stone took for the book.   The five-foot long Benton mural panoramic view originally was intended to be a fold-out in the book but we had to leave it out because, well, a five-foot long book wouldn’t fit on many coffee tables.

There needs to be a noble purpose for this fund-raiser.  Support for MACA and MCADSV is vital in helping them fight domestic and sexual violence and helping the 930,000 Missourians living below the poverty line.   Support for the Capitol Commission will continue its efforts to assess and restore the art of the Capitol, most of which has gone years without care.

Last year the commission held a wine-tasting event that included a great discussion of how wine tastes differently in different glasses (and tasters got to take home a set of glasses).  The money raised from that event has financed assessments on 55 paintings.  The Office of Administration is moving forward with restoration/repair of the art that’s been assessed.  The commission wants to continue that important work.

Just a few days ago commission chairman Dana Miller hired ICA Art Conservation to assess the condition of the Benton mural.  ICA is a nonprofit group that specializes in conservation and repair of the works of Midwest artists.  It has been highly recommended to the commission by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

So get in the closet and dig out the kids’ Halloween masks, or get busy with some cloth and feathers and make something outrageous,

or go out and buy something.   Most folks probably will be in business attire but the sponsors sure won’t mind if you want to show up fully-costumed.  (Actually, the sponsors hope you’ll NOT wear business attire because this is a high-class event.  Dana would like to see people in formal attire although she says business attire is acceptable.  But formal attire is preferable. Even if you wear a T-Rex head for your mask.)

You should be that Masked Man.  Or Masked Woman.

Right to Work is a big issue in this year’s veto session that starts today at the Capitol. The legislature passed it last May and the governor vetoed it.  The arguments on both sides last May were soooo familiar.  And sooooo old.

How old?

We’ve been digging into the papers of Governor Herbert Hadley as we wrap up the first, rough, draft of a new book about the history of the Capitol.  We came across one from W. A. Layman (at least that’s what we think his signature says) who was a Vice President and General Management for Wagner Electric in St. Louis when the Board of Public Buildings announced in July, 1911 that the new Capitol would be built with union labor.  Within hours, the Citizens Industrial Association, in St. Louis, organized a letter-writing campaign against the announcement.  Many of the letters from St. Louis businesses—and a few from Kansas City—are in the Hadley papers at the State Historical Society in Columbia.

Here’s part of Layman’s letter:

“To apply the Closed Shop principle…is not only fundamentally wrong in principle, in our opinion, but it will be seriously harmful to all substantial business interests in the State and will have particularly the tendency to place all manufacturing institutions of the State at a great disadvantage in the competitive markets of the country as a whole.

“You are aware that certain leading cities of the country are to-day employing the “Open Shop” principle in all industrial and building operations and the result is not only a condition of social peace and harmony in the industrial life of the community, but in great industrial prosperity for the employer and the employee alike.”  

The phrase “paycheck protection” was about a century away from creation when he wrote his letter on July 6, 1911.  That’s the current buzz phrase to describe what for several decades has been called Right to Work.  But the arguments haven’t changed, have they?  Mandatory union membership hurts business and places manufacturers (and the State) in a competitive disadvantage.  Open Shop leads to economic prosperity and several other entities are flourishing because they’ve adopted the practice.

The Capitol was built with union labor.  It seems to have turned out okay.  That’s not to say it couldn’t have been built as well with an open shop.  It’s just that some of the stuff that goes on inside it never goes away.  And nobody seems to have found any fresh and creative arguments. It gets so tiresome but the issue will always be with us as long as there is labor and there is management and each seeks a politically-protected status.   But, gosh, folks, wouldn’t you think that after more than a century of these same arguments, somebody would be able to provide some conclusive evidence that one side or the other REALLY does create some kind of economic nirvana?

Morale of the story:  No issue is too old to flog. Especially if it plays to the advantage of one party or another and helps undermine the losing side.

We recently came across a write-up about early Missouri called, “Affairs of Government, etc.,” and enjoyed it so much that we wanted to pass it along because of the breezy way it was written, which was unusual for the time, and because some of the things it said seem familiar to those of us who watch affairs of government, etc.

Besides, how can a person avoid finding literary treasures in a book called, A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri, With Numerous Sketches, Anecdotes, adventures, etc., Relating to Early Days in Missouri. Also the Lives of Daniel Boone and the celebrated Indian Chief Black Hawk With Numerous Biographies and Histories of Primitive Institutions.

You can take a breath now.

The book was written by William S. Bryan and Robert Rose and published in 1876.  The author’s acknowledge, “We do not expect the reader to believe all the remarkable yarns related under ‘Anecdotes and Adventures.’  Some of them were given to us merely as caricatures of early times, and they can easily be distinguished from the real adventures.’”

Here is their Affairs of Government, Etc.

“The pioneers of Missouri…were not a lawless or vicious class of people, but, nevertheless, some sort of a government was required to restrain the reckless characters that lived in the country.  When the territory came into possession of the United States, one of the most intelligent and influential men in each community was appointed Justice of the Peace, before whom all transgressions were tried and all legal disputes adjusted.  Very few of these men knew anything about law, and some of their decisions and legal documents would be regarded as curiosities in these modern times.  But if they knew but little law, they understood the meaning of justice, and their decisions did not often miss the mark.

“As there were no jails to confine offenders in, breaches of the peace, thefts, and other light misdemeanors were punished by fines, or if flagrant in character, by whipping.  The fined were generally paid with furs and peltry, which were sold for the benefit of the government; but where whipping was the penalty, it was administered in a summary manner, and the offender was permitted to go about his business as though nothing uniusual had occurred.  On one occasion a man who had stolen a hog was taken before Daniel Bone for examination.  His trial and the infliction of the punishment occupied half an hour, and while returning home he was met by an acquaintance, who inquired how he had come out. ‘Eh gad! Whipped and cleared,’ was his laconic reply.   In those days when men fell out of and fought, they never thought of taking their cases into court, but the one who got whipped yielded with as good a grace as he could command, to the superior strength or dexterity of his, and after taking a drink and shaking hands in token of friendship, let the matter drop until he got an opportunity to pay off his score with interest.

“But few murders were committed, and generally the murderer made his escape, and was never heard of again; for it he remained in the community he was almost certain to be killed by the friends of the man he had murdered, even if he escaped immediate lynching.

“We give below a literal copy of the first indictment found in St. Charles county, by the first American grand jury that sat under the United States government, in the territory of Louisiana.  It was signed by twelve men, all of whom, except the foreman, had to make their marks being unable to write.  It will be seen from the wording of the instrument that considerable effort was made to give it a legal and solemn sound, in order, no doubt, that it might make a deep impression on the minds of all concerned. It reads as follows:

‘That one James Davis, late of the District of St. Charles, in the Territory of Louisiana, Laborer, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, on the 13^th day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and four (1804), at a place called Femme Osage, in the said District of St. Charles, with force and arms, in and upon William Hays, in the peace of God and the United States, there and then being Feloniously, willfully, and with his malice aforethought, did make an assault, andthat the said James Davis, with a certain rifle gun, four feet long, and of the value of five dollars, then and there loaded and charged with gunpowder one leaden bullet, with said rifle gun the said James Davis, then and there in his hands had and held, fired and killed William Hays.’

“Davis gave bond in the sum of $3,000 for his appearance at court, and Daniel Boone went his security.  He stood his trial and was cleared.

“As the country settled up and the population increased, the number of civil suits grew larger, and people began to feel the need of educated attorneys.  At first, a few pettifoggers, possessing a little learning and vast pretensions, were imported from other localities, and they came expecting to have everything their own way, and to astonish the natives by their profundity. But they soon found themselves eclipsed by the practical, common-sense backwoodsmen, and very naturally settled down to their proper places.  There were others, however, who possessed fine talents and a liberal amount of learning, and these were respected by the people, and soone gained a large influence.  Among the first prominent attorneys was Edward Hempsted, an unlettered man, but one who possessed strong sense and a fine talent for special pleading.  He had a sharp, fierce, and barking manner of speaking, which had a great effect upon jurors, and generally awed them into acquiescence with his own views.  His style became very popular, and was widely imitated by young attorneys.  At the head of the profession stood Col. Thomas H. Benton, whose fame afterward extended over the whole country, and who represented Missouri for thirty years in the U. S. Senate.  One who knew him in the early days of his practice here, thus described him: ‘He is acute, labored, florid, rather sophomorical, but a man of strong sense.  There flashes ‘strange fire’ from the eyes and all that he does ‘smells of the lamp.’

“Edward Bates also became prominent at an early day, and he was probably the most learned of any of the lawyers of that time.  He was a classical scholar, and exhibited the fruits of his attainments in his arrangement and choice of language.  His manners were gentlemanly and pleasing, and his language concise and to the point; but these were often thrown away upon the jury in a region where noise and flourish were sometimes mistaken for sense and reason.

“Unlimited puffing was resorted to then as now, and with like success.  The man who could make the finest show and induce the greatest number of people to talk about him, in the right way, generally won fame and distinction, and became the leader of his portion of the country.  But these things gradually passed away as the country became more enlightened, and men were esteemed for their real worth and integrity rather than for shallow display and great pretensions, unsupported by genuine merit.”

Unlimited puffery, noise and flourish that is mistaken for sense and reason, and the need to find candidates or elected officials whose shallow displays and great pretensions are unsupported by genuine merit remain part of our political fabric today.

Are we any closer to finding or demanding leaders who are esteemed for their real worth and integrity than those pioneer families were almost fourteen decades ago?

Elson Floyd died June 20. He was 59. Complications from colon cancer.

A lot of people have recalled his four years as University of Missouri System President as a progressive administration at a time when the legislature was deciding higher education wasn’t worth the financial support it had been getting. The economy was in bad shape after the 2001 terrorist attacks, you might remember.

The student newspaper at the University of Missouri-Columbia, The Maneater, takes credit for giving Floyd his nickname, E-Flo. Floyd was a personable president who enjoyed his relationships with students. He left in 2007 to become the President of Washington State University.

He took over at Missouri when the legislature was cutting the university budget by $200 million. Floyd made painful cuts and worked hard to keep tuition as affordable as possible under the circumstances but the university still increased tuition by twenty percent in his first year in office.

Floyd is remembered by many because he tried to get Northwest Missouri State into the University of Missouri System. He convinced the university system to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Two university research parks were started while he was there. Scholarships were increased for disadvantaged students. Enrollment increased. He elevated the university’s image as a significant part of state economic development.

His tenure was blemished by basketball player Ricky Clemons, who left a Columbia halfway house to attend a July 4^th party at the Floyd house. He had to deal with a faculty mutiny at UMKC because of the behavior of the campus chancellor.

But I remember him because he made a phone call real early one morning.

Southwest Missouri State University for years had wanted to change its name to Missouri State University and the push intensified in 2005. The University of Missouri quickly adopted a bunker mentality and started forecasting that the sky would fall if the second-largest university in the state were allowed to change its name. Forget that most other states have a ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­”­­­­­________ State.” Forget that Southwest Missouri State had long ago outgrown its regional name. Columbia campus partisans were convinced the University of Missouri would be devastated if not destroyed if Southwest Missouri State changed its name. Mizzou was the state’s foremost research university and its status would be threatened if that bunch in Springfield were allowed to change the school name and keep growing in influence.

The Mizzou Alumni Association tried to mobilize the alumni to overwhelm lawmakers with opposition. Heck, ten members of the Senate in 2005 had degrees from the Columbia campus. Five more had degrees from UMKC or UMSL. Only four were graduates of Southwest Missouri State. If all of the Missouri system graduates in the Senate opposed the idea, it wouldn’t fly.  But not all of them did.

The Alumni Association showed no interest in rational discussion of the issues. It became an accelerator-to-the-firewall opposition organ for UMC. This MU grad who got the fevered letters and the alumni magazine with its over-the-top condemnation of the very idea of a name change for Southwest Missouri State wondered if the folks in Columbia were suffering a worrying decline in rationality. Some pointed letters to the association went back from an address that coincides with the house where I live or from my email address in response to the “fire in the theatre” emails I was getting.

Those exchanges are probably in a file somewhere. In one of them I suggested it would be more proper for the state’s leading university to support the efforts of all institutions of higher education to lift themselves to a higher standing and standard instead of trying to pound one growing university back into its place.   I thought Southwest Missouri State president Charles Keiser had a good point when he said, “The name doesn’t describe something the University wants to become; it describes what we are,”  Keiser and Elson Floyd had been discussing the issue for some time.

Late in the game, UMC partisans came up with the most outlandish claim of all. UMC’s status is carved in stone and cannot be changed, they claimed. They pointed to the words “State University” carved into part of the stone wall of the resources museum at the capitol to mean that the University of Missouri is THE state university and therefore no other school can call itself Missouri State University.

The words were carved about 1915 when Missouri had one state university and a series of regional normal schools, or teachers colleges. It was not important in 2005 that Missouri’s normal school were or had been re-named (Region) STATE UNIVERSITY. I pointed out that the words were carved in the same wing of the state museum that listed the state’s other resources then, some of which had lost their status as primary resources in the years since. The folks in Columbia also didn’t take too kindly to the idea that if opponents of Southwest Missouri State’s name change wanted things to stay as they had been in 1915 they should be glad for the legislature to cut funding for UMC to 1915 levels, including salaries of faculty and administrators.

All of the alarms UMC was sounding didn’t keep the House from passing the name change bill, overwhelmingly, 120-35. When it got to the Senate, Columbia Senator Chuck Graham (a University of Illinois graduate representing the University of Missouri) launched a filibuster, hoping to kill the bill. He seized the floor about 7:30 on a February night.

While Graham and a few friends rattled on and on about what a terrible thing this would be, negotiations were going on behind the scenes. SMS had a couple of people trying to find some language that would make sure SMS would not gobble up the Columbia campus if the bill passed. I was at the press table watching all of this play out, hoping the talkathon would end before I had to drag myself to the Missourinet newsroom to do my morning newscasts.

About 3:30 a.m., Graham or one of his cohorts—I think it was Graham—said he’d relinquish the floor if Floyd asked him to. That led one of the SMS negotiators to call Floyd, who called the University curators. That’s when he called the capitol and said it was time to end all of this. Stop the filibuster. Let the bill come to a vote. I was in the newsroom by then, listening to the ongoing debate on the internet while preparing the morning’s newscasts.

But Mizzou wanted a pound or two of flesh. About 5:30 a.m., Graham—as I recall—met with one of the SMS folks and demanded some protective wording be added to the bill that limited what Missouri State University could do. SMS could never become a land-grant university, which meant that the school could not get federal funding that goes with the designation. It couldn’t offer professional programs duplicating those in Columbia. It can’t call itself a research institution. In retrospect, the changes appear to be more about saving some face for the Columbia interests than burdening Missouri State University.

So the bill was passed at about 7 a.m.  The House approved the amendment and sent the bill to Governor Matt Blunt who signed it on March 17, saying “There was a real spirit of cooperation on this. President Keiser and Dr. Floyd were able to understand that they could work together to provide the degree programs that will be beneficial to Missouri students.”

I don’t recall the University Alumni Association making any such graceful statements afterward.

That was ten years ago this year.   And what do we see this decade later?

Well, the columns are still standing in Columbia. Jesse Hall has not collapsed. The University of Missouri-Columbia has built a lot of new buildings and is fixing up old ones and the student population has boomed so much that student apartments are being thrown up all over the place, and there are no pieces of the sky laying on the ground.

Claudette Riley looked at what has happened to Missouri State in the decade since that long night and the months of overwrought rhetoric coming out of the Columbia campus in an article in the Springfield News-Leader on June 22, two days after Elson Floyd’s death. “The new moniker is widely credited with raising the profile of Springfield’s largest education institution. It has also been credited with fueling the university’s ongoing ush to grow and diversity enrollment, expand academic offerings, and increase private giving—which, in turn, helps pay for better buildings,” she wrote.

Today’s school president, Clif Smart, is quoted as saying, “It would be hard for you to pick a factor that the name change didn’t impact.” And the VP for research and economic development and international programs, jim Baker, told her, “There is a status attached to the name. There is a pride that goes with it. I don’t think we’d have 24,000 students now if we didn’t change the name.”

One result that Columbia partisans would have shuddered at the thought of a decade ago is what Riley calls “MSU’s strong, collaborative relationship with the University of Missouri system.”   Smart says MSU and UMC are now closer to being partners, noting, “We are a statewide university and they’re much more comfortable interacting with us.”

At a time when the University of Missouri was at its blustering, intimidating best, its president said it was time to stop, and let another school call itself what it already was.

The tributes to E-Flo that this scribe has seen haven’t mentioned what might be his greatest and still growing legacy. He was the man who made a phone call early one morning that changed higher education in Missouri. A statesman called a politician one day and generations will benefit from the opportunities they will have because he did.

Sixteen days before Christmas when I was a high school freshman, I dashed out the front door of my central Illinois farmhouse, avoided falling over Mac the dog who liked to run alongside of me when I ran for the school bus, and headed to Sullivan High School for the day’s class.  

I was called out of PE class that afternoon and taken to the principal’s office where Augie Adams, a family friend who rented our pasture for his horses, met me. “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked. “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I said. Dad had had a heart attack the previous summer and was not yet cleared to drive to visit the farm equipment dealers in his territory. A relieved look came over Augie’s face. “Well, your house just burned down and we found your mother’s car in the garage but we couldn’t find her,” he said.      

That was how I learned that the only things I had left in the world were my parents, the clothes I was wearing, and the things I had in the gym bag I had carried to the bus that morning.  

As I grow older and consider the things I want my grandchildren to know about the family, I think of all that was lost in that fire. Pictures mostly, but also letters and trinkets that meant something to the family. My father built C-54s at the Douglas Aircraft factory near Chicago during World War II and I remember some of the keepsakes he had of those days (the factory is now O’Hare Field). I think of my great-grandfather’s little Civil War pistol that he carried when he was a fifer at Vicksburg for the 126^th Illinois Infantry. I think of a baseball card collection. People think of all kinds of little things as well as the big things when there’s nothing left after a disaster.

This life experience is why I have anxiously followed the several-year effort of the State Historical Society to get a legislative appropriation for a new Center for Missouri Studies that the society wants to build in Columbia. Executive Director Gary Kremer has led that effort through a lot of disappointments until this year when the legislature included $35 million in a bond issue bill for the center. During the time it took Gary and others working closely with him to convince the legislature and the governor to pass and sign the bill, the estimated costs have gone up a few million dollars. The society trustees have voted to contribute and help raise the amount needed to fill the gap. If things go smoothly, the new facility will open in 2018 on some land between the University of Missouri-Columbia and the downtown area of the city. It will be on Elm Street, across from Peace Park.

(Truth in advertising moment: I am a vice-president of the society)

The State Historical Society of Missouri has been housed in the Elmer Ellis Library at the University of Missouri-Columbia since the library was opened 99 years ago. It has been a resource for tens of thousands of students from dozens of disciplines, not just those majoring in history, and for thousands of other researchers looking for stories and lessons that the past can tell. The Center for Missouri Studies will be an even more important resource giving all who seek to put their careers, their lives, their communities, in context.

We have lived in fear for some time that something would happen in that library basement that is the society’s home that would damage or destroy records that tell us how we came to be the state—and the people of the state—that we are. A broken steam pipe, a water leak, a fire—we have experienced these things in recent years which adds to the urgency of this project. A few years ago, you might recall, a disenchanted young man set several fires in the library in the middle of the night. Although the fires caused no damage in our quarters, the water used to put them out caused extensive damage to our facilities. A few pages of important old documents were damaged but somehow our archives escaped the flow that made our administrative offices unusable for months. Thankfully the water did not pour into the storage area where we have more than $100-milion in art works by Bingham, Benton, and others. The bullet missed us, but just barely. We have lived with elevated fear since then.

The society headquarters, and thus Missouri history, now are tucked away at the end of a shaded sidewalk, almost unnoticeable to the thousands of people who walk through the area. Our history deserves better than a precarious existence in an obscure location. And Missouri history finally is getting that something better.                                         

This isn’t just a building. It’s a statement. It says history isn’t just a bunch of musty, dusty records; it’s life. The society is not a storehouse, a place in a basement where we keep old stuff that’s no longer used. It is, instead, a place of discovery, of adventure, and learning who we are and how we got to be who we are.   The building will be US. It says Missouri history has value. It says Missouri history is a dynamic story still being written. It says Missouri history is central to understanding who we are as a people, as a state, as a nation. This is the state that was the opening door to everything that is the American West.

Missouri history is American history. The Revolution? Records of the people who lived in what became Missouri in those years will be here. War of 1812? It wasn’t all fought in the east and the northeast. It was here in Missouri, too. The words of Lewis and Clark will be here. The personal passion and tragedy of the Civil War are in the letters, journals, diaries, and other records that will be here. Records of the cruelty of slavery will be preserved here as will be the cruelty of Reconstruction.

The growth of our towns, the highways that connect them, and the businesses that gave and give us jobs will be in this building. The world wars, the depression, the civil rights movements—all of them will be here. Missouri in all of its nobility and narrowness, in all of its heroism and its cowardice, in its compassion and its hate will be in this building.

Dedicated staff guide visitors to that information in today’s inadequate quarters, hoping nothing bad happens until that great moving day into the Center for Missouri Studies. No other building in the state will be able to tell the stories of the state and its people as emphatically as this one will be able to tell them.  

Our history deserves to come out of the shadows and into the sunlight. And the sunlight will be bright for the future of our past with this new building.