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77 Million

Before the election, a post on a neighborhood social media site praised the Electoral College. That spurred me on to write about that institution on this blog. However, I also responded directly to the post saying that it would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative presidential candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. I averred further that we were unlikely to find out because the probability was low that a conservative would win the most votes. The original poster replied that he did not care about the popular vote as long as Trump won. After the election, he gloated that the “conservative” Donald Trump had won the popular vote.

I do confess that I was wrong in suggesting that Trump could not win the most votes, but it was a victory with caveats.

The news analyses shortly after the election were often about groups that had swung to Trump giving him his win. I saw stories indicating that Texas Hispanics shifted to Trump as did more voters in New York City, and that young men went for Trump at a higher rate than young women did for Harris. And so on. The implications were that Trump’s victory was a landslide demonstrating the country’s hard shift to the right.

Is that so?

Trump did win the most votes, garnering at the latest count 76.8 million votes, but it appears that he did not obtain a majority. A few more votes may trickle in, but he did not get above 50%. Harris was not far behind, with 48.3% of the vote. If the country has shifted right, the tilt is less than that of the Pisa tower. In terms of the popular vote, this was the closest election since 2000. The Electoral College may have been a landslide but the popular vote was not, and it is noteworthy that Trump won some of the swing states by tiny margins.

Trump did get 2.5 million more votes than his 2020 total of 74.2 million, but the U.S. population increased by about five million during that span, or 1.5%. Trump’s votes should have increased by 1.1 million from 2020 to 2024 merely because of population growth. He did somewhat better than that and shifts to him are outcomes worth analyzing. But there was a more significant factor.

The real difference in the election was not the collection of new Trump voters but the loss of those who did not vote for Harris. Biden in 2020 got over 81 million votes; Harris had about five million fewer. While some of Harris’s shortfall may have voted for Trump, most of them did not. Many voters, in essence, disappeared, and Trump was the beneficiary. And that, not the new Trump voters, is really the big story.

Many touted the importance of the election, so it is somewhat surprising that the turnout was less by at least a couple of percentage points, than it was four years ago. Ballotpedia.org says the turnout in 2020 was 66.6 % of eligible voters and this year it was three points less.

The fluctuating size of the electorate is a complicated American story. We may pledge allegiance to our democracy or republic, whatever your ideology dictates, but we don’t always value the vote as much as our patriotic proclamations imply. I learned from The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy (2021) by Jon Grinspan that the turnout in the 1896 presidential election was 79.3% of eligible voters. But in the early twentieth century, the percentages fell, bottoming out in 1924 at 48.8%. (Grinspan suggests several reasons for the decline. Surprisingly to me, turnout fell most in the states that had adopted the secret ballot, a late nineteenth-century innovation.)

The percentage of eligible voters who vote has changed throughout our history, and the recent drop perhaps indicates the most important conclusion from the last election: A conservative can win the popular vote if the number of voters, by hook or by crook, is lowered.

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A Direct Election Would Be Different

The person who gets the most votes in next week’s presidential election may not be our next president. With our Electoral College, if a candidate loses by large margins in some states but narrowly wins states with 270 electoral votes, that person can win the presidency while losing the nationwide vote. “We the people” then takes on an ironic twist.

We should not assume, however, that if we directly elected the president that the winner of the popular vote in our present system would necessarily have won even without the Electoral College. Incentives to vote would be different. Campaigns would be different. And voting rules might change.

With a direct election, all voters would have an equal incentive to vote because all votes would matter equally. That does not exist now. An additional 50,000 votes for Trump or Harris in New York or California or Missouri or many other states would change nothing under our present system. There is little incentive to vote for president in a “safe” state. However, with the direct election of the president, voters in safe states would have more incentive to go to the polls than now. We would probably have more voters in some states than we do now.

The incentives for campaigners would also change. Now, candidates are mostly concerned with the swing states. A one percent increase for Harris or Trump could determine all the electoral votes from Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. However, a one percent increase for a candidate in the Badger State is about 30,000 votes. Now a one percent increase for a candidate in California changes nothing. All of the electoral votes will go to Harris with or without the increase. However, such a California increase means about 100,000 more nationwide popular votes. If the popular vote controlled, candidates would focus on all of the country not just a few states.

Campaign promises would also become different. Think about Iowa and the primaries. Don’t all candidates swear to support ethanol because they think defending the corn crop is high on the list of Iowa voters? If Michigan is viewed as a swing state, candidates appearing in Detroit or Battle Creek can be expected to make promises that especially appeal to Michigan voters. In safe states, such as Alabama, Mississippi, New York, California, or Louisiana, candidates do not now have to make the kind of pandering promises they make in swing states. If, however, each vote truly mattered as much in Mississippi as in Michigan, candidates would have the same incentive to pander in both places.

States would have different incentives than now for setting voter standards. We have some national voter standards. The Constitution guarantees that Blacks, women, and eighteen-year-olds can vote and that there can’t be a poll tax. Federal law says that only citizens can vote. But much that affects how many people will vote is left to the states. For example, states have different laws concerning the disenfranchisement of convicted felons. A few states allow all to vote. Some states permanently bar convicts from voting. Some states prohibit those in prison from voting. And so on. As a result, a higher percentage of the population can be eligible to vote in State A than in State B. And of course, states differ on such things as when the polls are open, who can use a mail-in ballot, rules on registration, and identity requirements, all of which can affect voter turnout, which would be important in a truly national election. Now many states do things to make voting harder with the knowledge that fewer voters will not affect the state’s power in the Electoral College. Fewer voters, however, will negatively affect the state’s power if the presidential election went to the winner of the popular vote. At least some states might reconsider their voting requirements if the Electoral College were abolished.

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Snippets

It’s been a long time. In 1841, fifty-two years after the Constitution went into effect, John Tyler became the first vice-president to ascend to a vacant presidency. Only two dozen years later, Andrew Johnson succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln. In 1881, Vice-President Chester A. Arthur became President as the result of the murder of James A. Garfield. Two decades later, Theodore Roosevelt became President because of the assassination of William McKinley. Twenty-two years later, Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency after Warren G. Harding’s death. After another twenty-two years, Harry S. Truman became President upon the death of FDR. Eighteen years later, in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson became President after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And only eleven years later, after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Vice-President Gerald Ford became President. Since then, however, no Veep has moved up to a vacant presidency, the longest stretch in our history since Tyler took the high office. With the possibility of an aged president who seems to indicate declining cognitive powers and a gun-toting population, are we due again for a vice-present to become president?

The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution lists procedures for declaring a president unable to carry out the powers and duties of the office. The Vice-President then becomes Acting President. Rumor has it that people around JD Vance, perhaps funded by Peter Thiel, are already studying this provision so if Trump wins, six months later Vance can be president.

A perceptive analyst said: “The people for public trusts are the people who can be trusted in private.”

Some Trump supporters, who, when asked about some of Trump’s problematic, sometimes frightening statements, say that Trump does not really mean it when he says that he will use the army against Americans, get rid of Obamacare, impose 100% or higher tariffs, etc. In other words, these Trumpistas support Trump because theyse don’t believe what he says. Amazing.

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Bertrand Russell.

I have friends and acquaintances who ask how, at this point, anyone could vote for Trump. Many of these people, however, would find it close to impossible to vote for a Republican even if the Democratic candidate were Bob Menendez or Eric Adams. Of course, there are many people who truly support Trump, but there are many who simply can’t vote for a Democrat. Some are voters who we might call hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Trump, but since Trump heads the Republican ticket, they will vote for him. The crucial time is not now. It was in 2016 when he became the Republican standard bearer. Trump did get more votes than any other single candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries, but he did not get a majority of the ballots cast. However, under Republican rules, he got the majority of the delegates. Eight years ago, a majority of Republicans did not want Trump, and since then, a majority of Americans overall have not wanted him. But he may be our president again.

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The World Series of the Electoral College

A recent post on a local social media site drew on an analogy to the World Series to defend the Electoral College. The poster referred to a decades-old article recently reprinted in Discover magazine that discusses the theories of Alan Natapoff, a physicist, who favored voting by districts instead of in one mass. Natapoff, thus, seemed to be defending the Electoral College over a nationwide popular vote, as the poster clearly did.

The baseball analogy refers to the 1960 World Series where the New York Yankees won three blowouts but lost four close games to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees scored more runs, but the Pirates won the series. The poster and the article (https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-the-archive-math-against-tyranny) both noted, “Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That was fair, they maintain. “A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available–bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” Natapoff decided that “nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”

There is much wrong with this reasoning. If the 60s Yankees had won the fourth game in another blowout (they scored nine runs in the final game), they would have been recognized as champs without having won a close game. Moreover, winning single games or their equivalents is not always the rule in sports. Cricket, e.g., has multi-day contests. The winner is not decided by who “won” each day, but by the total score. Had it been set up this way, baseball could be a contest decided inning by inning, or football quarter by quarter, but those are not the rules of the game. The rules are not inherent in the way the game is played and certainly not divinely inspired. They are man-made and can be changed. At one time the team that had the most wins after 154 games was in the World Series. The end. That is no longer true. The season is now longer and there are multiple playoff rounds that allow, many believe, for the possibility that a lesser team can become champions.

The poster quoting Natapoff asserts that the “popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That is not a requirement in all our elections. E.g., we use the total vote to pick our governors and don’t require the victor to have won a majority of counties or parishes. It is only because of the Electoral College that winning a state is required in our presidential elections. (I have no idea what is meant when the poster says, “A presidential candidate worthy of office should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” I don’t know of a successful candidate who runs on only one issue, and when I look at the maps that will be produced of red and blue states because of our Electoral College, I see something like isolated blocs of voters. We would not have that with a nationwide vote.)

I seldom respond to any posts except occasionally to point out easily checkable misinformation. (For example, I might respond: Fact-checking sites have made it clear that FEMA workers are not eating the cats and dogs of isolated North Carolina hill folk.) I did, however, reply to this post by saying, “It would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. We are unlikely to find out. A conservative winning the popular vote???” Almost immediately someone who had already declared the post “great” said, “I couldn’t give a damn what the popular vote says as long as Trump is elected.”

This comment, of course, typifies why discussions of the way we select our president are fruitless. Alan Natapoff may have been sincerely exploring the best way to hold our elections, but most of the rest of us only want reasons for a system that will select our preferred candidate. Electoral College discussions these days are partisan ones with conservatives, like the poster, defending the Electoral College. They want the status quo because they believe it favors Republicans while reformers believe Democrats would benefit from a national popular vote. Recent history fuels these positions. Twice in the last generation we have inaugurated presidents who did not get the largest popular vote, and both were Republicans.

We did not always have this particular partisan divide. In the summer of 1968, polls indicated that 66 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats believed that the Electoral College should be replaced with a national popular vote. After the election where the popular vote was close, but the Electoral College was not, 80 percent of Americans supported changing the electoral system. In 1969, the House passed by a wide majority (339 to 70) a constitutional amendment to select the president by popular vote. The proposal, however, opposed strongly by Senators from small states, could not get the necessary two-thirds vote in the upper house.

If such an amendment could not make it through the Senate when the populace overwhelmingly favored it, a similar amendment has no chance today. Instead, those who wish to retain or change the Electoral College search for plausible reasons for their positions. The standpatters often refer to the goals of the founding generations, which, I am positive, did not use Mickey Mantle sports analogies. Many defenders contend that the point to the Electoral College was to preserve the powers of the small states in the presidential selection. Reading such comments, I pulled out The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Farrand, and The Federalist Papers to see what these sources said about the discussion over the methods of choosing the president.

The issue was debated again and again in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The delegates would agree to a method, but potential flaws in that method would circulate. A different scheme would be proposed and problems with the new proposal would be pointed out. This merry-go-round continued until near the end of the convention when the delegates finally settled on the Electoral College as it appears in the original Constitution.

The convention first voted to have Congress choose the President, but criticisms soon emerged. In James Madison’s words: “If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title to the appointment.” Madison and others maintained that an Electoral College, however selected, would obviate some of the concerns of a congressional selection. The electors would be chosen for only one purpose and would gather just once. In the adopted version they would not meet together in one place but in the separate states so that there would be little opportunity for cabals, intrigues, and foreign influence. The congressional selection of the president, they said, would also upset a basic goal of the Constitution — the separation of powers — since the President would be beholden to Congress for his selection.

Many other methods of choosing the president were proposed and rejected: The state governors should select the President; electors selected by Congress should make the choice; electors drawn by lot from Congress should choose the President. Madison did state that the “fittest” way to select the President was to have a direct election, but he then noted two problems: “The first arose from the disposition of the people to prefer a Citizen of their own State, and the disadvantage this would throw on the smaller States.” Madison did not find this problem insurmountable and said “that some expedient might be hit upon that would obviate it.” The next speaker, however, differed with Madison’s optimism by saying, “The objection drawn from the different size of the States, is unanswerable. The Citizens of the largest states would invariably prefer the Candidate within the State; and the largest States would invariably have the man.” The delegates thought that a direct election would prejudice the smaller states, but what concerned them was that candidates from small states could not get elected. (Reminder. In 2016, Trump was a lifelong resident of a large state, but New York overwhelmingly voted against the hometown boy. Perhaps the Founders were not familiar with the adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”)

Madison also maintained that a direct vote would undermine the South. Many northern states had eased the traditional requirement that only white male citizens who owned real property could vote by allowing white males who paid taxes to also have the franchise. Thus, a higher proportion of people in the North could vote than in the South, and the South’s power would be diluted by a direct election. The Electoral College would prevent this calamitous possibility. It was not suggested that extension of the franchise might benefit the South as well.

Today many assert that the founders were protecting the small states by giving them a slightly greater number of electors than was justified by their populations. However, the founders addressed the small-state problem in a different way. The concern was that a candidate from a small state, even if worthy, would inevitably lose because the large-state electors would vote for one of their own. The solution: each elector would vote for two people, one of whom must not be from the elector’s state. The delegates thought that while one vote may go to the home state favorite, the second vote would be for the person seen as the best in the rest of the country. If that person was from a small state, he could be elected with a collection of second-choice votes.

The Founders added another “accommodation to the anxiety of the smaller States,” as Madison wrote in a letter in 1823. If no person got a majority of the appointed electors, then the House of Representatives would choose the President from the five highest on the electoral list with each state having one vote. The largest and smallest states would be equal in this process, which, according to Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, would be “a case which it cannot be doubted will sometimes, if not frequently, happen.”

The constitutional convention delegates knew that the large states would dominate the Electoral College, and they did. Luther Martin writing to the Maryland Legislature after the draft Constitution was promulgated but before it was adopted said that the “large states have a very undue influence in the appointment of the President.” Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, writing in 1803, noted that it was recognized that the large states would dominate the Electoral College. Only if the matter went to the House of Representatives did the small states have a substantial voice in the presidential selection.

The major effect of the original Electoral College was not to give power to the small states but to the slaveholding states. Madison had said that a direct presidential election was “fittest,” but it would harm the South, citing the more “diffusive” franchise in the North, but the Virginian slaveholder continued with the curious comment that with a direct election the South would “have no influence on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty….” The “difficulty” was avoided by basing the number of electors on representation in the House of Representatives. The apportionment of the House, of course, incorporated the three-fifths clause where that percentage of slaves was used in the allocation of House seats.

The three-fifths clause was, therefore, incorporated into the Electoral College giving extra power to the large slaveholding states. The first census in 1790 found that New York had a free white population of 313,000 and North Carolina had a free white population of 289,000. Each state had the same electors, however—twelve—after that first census. While New York had 21,324 slaves, North Carolina had 100,572.  However, when 60% of the slaves were included to determine representation in the House, North Carolina’s “population” was larger than New York’s. South Carolina had a free white population of 139,000, but New Jersey had thirty thousand more. Even so, South Carolina had twelve electors and New Jersey eleven. South Carolina had 107,094 slaves and New Jersey 11,423. (New Jersey is the starkest example of why Madison feared for the effect on the South were there to be a direct election of the President. As Madison had to know, New Jersey alone among the states then allowed white women to vote, and its total vote might have been twice that of South Carolina’s. With the Electoral College as adopted, even though South Carolina had the smaller white population, it had more power in the presidential selection than did New Jersey.)

Virginia had a free white population of 441,000; Pennsylvania had 422,000, about a four percent difference. Virginia had 292,627 slaves and Pennsylvania had 3,731. Even though the enslaved people could not vote, because of them Virginia had forty percent more electors than Pennsylvania—twenty-one to fifteen.

A direct vote for President would have lessened the power of the South; instead, the Electoral College as adopted magnified it. Founders recognized and said that large states would dominate the vote in the Electoral College, but Southern states would have special influence in picking a President because of the peculiar way in which slaves were counted.

The Founders did not protect small states via the Electoral College, and their sop of requiring electors to vote for two people with one not from the state of the elector proved to be laughable. The Framers in adopting the Electoral College did not foresee the rise of political parties even though parties were in place only a few years after the Constitution was adopted. Partisanship was evident in the first contested presidential election, after Washington retired in 1796.* By then, two men ran as a team with one running for President and the other as Vice-President. The country made it through 1796 without a major problem, but the Electoral College caused a crisis in 1800.

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a Republican team in the presidential election. The widespread understanding was that Jefferson was running for President and Burr for Vice President. John Adams, the Federalist incumbent, ran with his vice-presidential running mate Thomas Pinckney against Jefferson and Burr. Jefferson got seventy-three electoral votes to Adams sixty-five, making Jefferson the apparent victor, but of course, because each elector had two votes, Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson. With two candidates yoked together by party affiliation, it was not a surprise that they would get the same number of electoral votes. A tie, which was not foreseen by the Framers, was close to inevitable with the rise of political parties.

The selection of the President in 1800 went to the lame-duck Federalist-dominated House, even though the Federalists had lost the election. That losing party had to decide which Republican, Jefferson or Burr, was the lesser evil. Thirty-six ballots later, Jefferson became the third President. And we got the Twelfth Amendment to fix this major flaw. That Amendment required electors to cast separate votes for President and Vice-President.**

At least when it came to the method of selecting the president, the Framers’ wisdom was faulty. Perhaps there are good reasons today to have the Electoral College but not because the founding generation created a perfect system. It did not protect the integrity or sovereignty of the small states. Our first six presidents all came from large states. Four of them were Virginians. This was not a surprise for the original Constitution through the Electoral College gave the major slaveholding states the dominant power in picking the President.

——————

*The Framers also did not foresee that electoral votes would be allocated by a winner-takes-all approach where the candidate with the most votes in each state would get all of that state’s electoral votes. That development, however, did not come quite as quickly as the rise of political parties. In 1796, even though Jefferson won the most votes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, one elector in each of those states voted for John Adams instead, and those three votes made Adams president. He received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. Jefferson received the second most votes. Adams’s running mate, Thomas Pinckney, garnered 59 electoral votes. Thus, under the electoral system then in place, Jefferson became Vice-President under his political enemy, Adams, an uncomfortable result.

**Elections might be more fun if we still had the original electoral scheme as indicated by Alexander Hamilton’s devious actions in 1796. Although Adams and Hamilton were both Federalists, Hamilton did not want Adams to become President. Supposedly Hamilton approached electors in states Jefferson had won and urged those electors, after voting for Jefferson, to give their second vote to Thomas Pinckney. Hamilton was hoping that Jefferson-Pinckney votes plus Adams-Pinckney votes would give Pinckney the most electoral votes and the Presidency. Hamilton’s machinations seem to have borne some fruit, most notably in South Carolina where both Jefferson and Pinckney received eight electoral votes. The scheme failed because in several states that Adams won, the electors divided their second votes between Pinckney and other candidates or did not give any second votes to Pinckney. For example, Adams received nine votes in Connecticut, but Pinckney got only four, with five votes going to John Jay. New Hampshire gave six votes to Adams, but none to Pinckney. Pinckney received twelve fewer electoral votes than Adams. But think of the gamesmanship we might have if this original electoral edifice still existed.

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First Sentences

“Jean McConville was thirty-eight when she disappeared, and she had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.” Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

“I didn’t believe them. They had said that it was going to be easy and, like the fool I am, I believed them.” Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

“Two Pennsylvania State Police troopers sat inside an unmarked car waiting for the go-ahead to do something they had never done before, arrest a Catholic priest for lying to a grand jury.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer—they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is a member of Congress.” Bill Maher, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

“In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me.

“In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“As dawn broke over New York City on Friday morning, April 6, 1917, newsboys hawked the city’s paper from street corners up and down Manhattan.” Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America.

“I approached Texas Monthly’s cover story on ‘The Top 50 BBQ Joints in Texas’ this summer the way a regular of People might approach that magazine’s annual ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ feature—with the expectation of seeing some familiar names.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas.

“With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

“Her majesty disliked what she considered to be overheated homes.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“In the spring of 1994, I first traveled though China’s Xinjiang Province, a region inhabited by 11 million Turkic Uighur Muslims who, as learned from interview after interview, were even then trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression by the Chinese authorities.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.

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Snippets

A Methodist church near my Pennsylvania cottage is having one of its regular spaghetti dinners. I have never gone. I have assumed that in this tiny Poconos town, the meal will consist of overboiled pasta covered in Hunt’s tomato sauce with chopped-up cocktail franks and topped with “parmesan” from a reclosable bag. I don’t imagine that rural Methodists do anything like the Sunday gravy of my Italian friends. I could be wrong; the good ladies of the greater community often come up with some sumptuous spreads after local events that I have attended.

The New York Times anointed The Bee Sting by Paul Murray as one of the best novels of 2023. Perhaps that is why I pulled it from the library shelves despite its heft. I noted the blurb on the back from Gary Shteyngart, who said the book was a “hilarious whirlwind.” Shteyngart, a writer whom I admire, has written stuff that made me laugh out loud. The Bee Sting, on the other hand, is the saga of an Irish family that falls into economic distress from the recession of 2008. It may be a remarkable book, but hilarity is not one of the attributes I would ascribe to it. I read its almost 650 pages with but a slight smile on occasion and certainly without a laugh.

Perhaps I just don’t understand hilarity. After all, The Bear, the FX show that I watch streaming on Hulu, is frequently listed as a comedy. I don’t get that. On occasion I smile during it, but more often I feel tension as I watch. The Bear is marvelous, but it is not a comedy.

A friend referred to a couple who had “been married for forty fucking years.” I thought that they may have been husband and wife for four decades, but I doubted that they were married for forty fucking years.

JD Vance has said that if he had been Vice-President on January 6, 2020, he would not have certified the results of the electoral college. For your discussion group: Under what circumstances should Vice President Kamala Harris refuse to certify election results in January 2024?

An astute observer said: “A conservative is one who wants the rules enforced so no one can take his pile the way he got it.”

We learned this year that Presidents have absolute immunity for some official presidential acts and presumptive immunity for the rest. For your discussion group: If you were Biden, what acts would you be emboldened to take because of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision?

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Snippets

Isn’t this the best time of the year? I mean, after all, it is Fat Bear Week.

I have sometimes asked them for directions, most often to the restroom. And I have wondered about how wearying it must be for a museum guard to stand for hour after hour. But now, after reading All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley, who was a guard at the Met for ten years, I will see them differently. The book is an outstanding meditation on grief and art and life.

Rob Bresnahan, a candidate for Congress running in northeast Pennsylvania, has ads indicating that he will make the border secure. I wondered how a first-time Representative would do that and went to his website. Under “Issues,” he has a border section, which states in its entirety: “We must secure the border, build the wall, and reverse the Biden/Harris failed policies to stop the flow of illegal drugs and criminals into our communities.” Under “Economy,” however, Rob plans “to stop reckless spending . . . and cut taxes.” I guess in his view a border wall is not “reckless spending,” but he does not explain how he would pay for the construction. Estimates vary widely, but ones I have seen say the wall would cost from $20 billion to $70 billion to construct with hundreds of millions annually to maintain it. But, according to the politician, we can have the wall and lower taxes.

Some people mistake having an opinion for having a sensible idea.

New York City government is awash in scandals. The mayor has been indicted. Many high-level officials have been served with subpoenas, had their homes and offices searched, and their electronic devices seized. Several officials have resigned. I have not followed this closely, but one factoid caught my eye. The twin brother of the police commissioner (who has now left office) has been described as a “nightlife consultant.” I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get paid for advising clubs to ditch the red banquettes and lower the lighting, but I am not sure what such a consultant actually does.

I would like some simple but significant changes to political ads. The identification of whoever is paying for the ad should be prominent enough so that I can learn the organization’s name and research it if I wish. In addition, all claims should give me a source for any of the ad’s assertions, and it should be large enough and long enough that I can write it down and check it out if I wish. Or perhaps, the sponsoring organization should prominently display a website that contains the source material or links to it.

Many of us after Hurricane Helene are giving money to relief agencies to assist those in distress. Surprisingly, however, I haven’t heard that Trump, who we are told is bigly rich, has donated such money. I guess he must do it anonymously.

“No man can be wise on an empty stomach.” George Eliot.

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The Assimilation of the Scum of Southern Europe (concluded from Sept. 26)

When considering our present immigration policies, it is useful to examine the history of Italian immigration in this country.  

Immigration from Italy to the United States soared at the beginning of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1905, the numbers increased from 171,735 to 479,349. Between 1880 and 1921, 4.2 million Italians, most from southern Italy, entered the country. Many Americans thought this flood of immigrants was harmful. The 1911 Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on immigration, seemingly referring to all those Neapolitans, Calabrians, and Sicilians, put it delicately: “The influx of millions of persons of different nationalities, often of a foreign language and generally of the lower classes, would seem to be a danger to the homogeneity of a community. The United States, for instance, has felt some inconvenience from constant addition of foreigners to its electorate and population.” Though citing no reference, the essay goes on, “The foreign-born are more numerously represented among the criminal, defective and dependent classes than their numerical strength would justify. They also tend to segregate more or less, especially in large cities.”

Almost none of the Italian immigrants — largely illiterate rural peasants who professed a religion that was still not considered acceptable by many Americans — spoke English. Many made little effort to learn it. These Italian immigrants, 75% of whom were male, did not plan to become Americans. As the Britannica put it: “It is notorious that the Italians who emigrate to the United States largely return.” Aristide Zolberg reports that while roughly 35% of all immigrants to the United States from1908-1923 returned to their homelands, more than 50% of Italians did. Other estimates of returnees are as high as 78%. (These “birds of passage”—young Italian men who migrated alone, earned money, and returned to Italy—have regularly popped up in histories, novels, and memoirs. For example, a character in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is a man born in Italy who had been a cabdriver in Chicago and, after saving money, moved back to Italy. Daphne Phelps in her charming A House in Sicily refers to “a diminutive Sicilian barber who had spent nine years in New York before returning with his savings.”)

Thus, the arriving Italians did not appear to contribute much to the American economy. After all, they were destitute upon entry. A 1902 report said arrivals at Ellis Island from southern Italy came with the least amount of savings of any immigrant group, $8.67. They worked and saved, but not to invest or spend it in America. They sent or took their savings back to Italy.

In addition, many Americans believed about southern Italy what the Encyclopedia Brittanica said: “Countries sometimes aid or assist immigration, including the assisted emigration of paupers, criminals or persons in the effort to get rid of undesirable members of the community.” (That Eleventh Edition also contains this rather discomfiting statement: “Finally, we have the expulsion of Jews from Russia as an example of the effort of a community to get rid of an element which has made itself obnoxious to the local sentiment.”)

Certainly, the Italian arrivals seemed dangerous. Michael Dash reports in The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia, “Nineteen Italians in every twenty of those passing through Ellis Island were found to be carrying weapons, either knives or revolvers, and there was nothing in American law to stop them from taking this arsenal into the city. The Sicilian police were said to be issuing passports to known murderers to get them out of the country.”

Even if the issuing of such passports was untrue (Dash does make clear that the many of the founders of the American mafia fled Sicily after convictions or charges for murder and other crimes), the American populace was led to believe that Italian criminality was rampant in the U.S. The sensational American press of the time played up murders and other crimes committed by Italians in New York and New Orleans and focused on the killing in Sicily of New York police lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, who was seeking Italian criminal records of Italians living in the United States. Not surprisingly, the 1903 New York Herald gave this warning: “The boot [of Italy] unloads its criminals upon the United States. Statistics prove that the scum of southern Europe is dumped at the nation’s door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.”

Many American citizens believed that Italian immigrants should never be naturalized. This led to the question, “Are Italians white?”, an issue discussed in many places including by Isabel Wilkerson in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (2020), and by Paul Morland in The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World (2019). One of my favorite meditations on the topic is in the must-see movie Sorry to Bother You. The film’s characters are discussing how blacks make pasta differently from whites and how it should be made. In an attempt to end the discussion, the protagonist states that spaghetti is Italian. Another character incredulously asks, “Italians are white?” “Yes.” “For how long?” The protagonist replies, “For about sixty years.”

The whiteness of Italians was an issue because of our naturalization law, which in 1790 allowed only free white persons to become citizens. This was slightly modified in 1870 to allow the naturalization of former enslaved people, but otherwise a person in the early twentieth had to be white to become a naturalized citizen. (“White” was not defined, and this restriction led to some bizarre court cases. In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that a high caste Sikh, who pointed out that his ethnicity was Aryan and who had fought for the United States in World War I, was neither white nor black and could not be naturalized. A Court of Appeals case in 1915, however, ruled that a Syrian could become an American citizen.)

Instead of grappling with the issue of Italian whiteness, Congress, concerned about the Italian influx and the immigration from eastern Europe, changed the law to make it harder to immigrate to the U.S. from “undesirable” places. After this 1924 act, Italian immigration dropped from 283,000 in 1914 to 15,000.

And the moral? The Italian immigrants, seen by many as lawless, destitute, illiterate thugs who could not speak English and did not try to learn it, who were a danger to the American fabric and a drain on the economy, and who smelled bad because they ate — God help us! — garlic, are now as American as an American can be. When we discuss immigration today, we should remember this history. As the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannic said about the difficulties for the host country from immigration, “Nevertheless, the process of assimilation goes on with great rapidity.”

Posted on by rjonakait

The Assimilation of the Scum of Southern Europe

Stump speeches, social media, and ads by politicians announce without supporting evidence that countries including Venezuela and some in Africa are emptying their prisons and mental hospitals and sending the inmates over our southern border into the United States. Of course, rapists and other criminals, the same sources maintain, have been coming over that border for years. On the other hand, these migrants must not be full-time criminals because they take jobs away from Americans, especially “Black jobs.” And these border crashers fuel our fentanyl crisis.

This makes little sense. People don’t cross deserts and evade armed U.S. agents and circumvent walls to commit random rapes and murders, and I have not seen evidence that illegal aliens have come to rob banks or pursue the kinds of crimes done at the likes of Goldman Sachs. They have come as laborers expecting to do hard menial work. They hope to send money back to their families. They want to stay out of trouble so as not to be jailed or deported. Not surprisingly, study after study has concluded that the undocumented commit serious crimes at a lesser rate than American citizens and that documented aliens commit those crimes at a much lesser rate than our citizenry.

If the undocumented come to work, then it seems to follow that they must be taking jobs from Americans. On the other hand, the undocumented are not in a position to negotiate for higher pay or better working conditions, and it is often said that these immigrants do the jobs that Americans won’t take. Of course, if you believe in the law of supply and demand and free enterprise, Americans should take the jobs if pay and working conditions are improved sufficiently. At some price point–$25 per hour or perhaps $40 per hour–American citizens should be willing to pick lettuce, and perhaps even kale, slaughter chickens, plant bushes, and hang drywall. If all the undocumented are deported, as one presidential candidate vows, we will have to change our immigration laws to let workers back in legally or the costs of many goods and services will increase.

And “securing” the border is unlikely to significantly affect the flow of fentanyl into this country. Many people may successfully cross our southern border illegally, but many get stopped. If those apprehended had been carrying significant amounts of fentanyl, this information would have been trumpeted so loudly on Fox News and the New York Post that it would not have escaped our attention. And yet, the apprehension of those drug couriers has not made much news. Perhaps, just perhaps, that is because not much fentanyl enters the country that way. Imagine that you were importing fentanyl into this country. Would you have it come in via backpacks carried by those crossing the border illegally? The apprehension rate for the undocumented has gone from 50% ten years ago to 70% in 2021. In other words, the odds are strong that even if the carrier makes it to the border, the drugs will not make it into the country. And then, of course, you have to find a good way to offload those drugs from the mule, which can be an iffy business.

Meanwhile, many, many vehicles cross the southern border legally. Fentanyl does not take up much space. There are many ways to hide the drug in vehicles. And it is easy to arrange for delivery once the drug-laden car or truck or plane makes it into the U.S.

Border patrol officials maintain that 90% of the fentanyl that enters from Mexico comes in at legal crossings. Furthermore, most apprehended couriers are American citizens, which, of course, makes sense. If you were running the drug smuggling operation, wouldn’t you think that a Mexican or Honduran would be more likely stopped and searched at the border than an American citizen? “Securing” the border, if that means stopping illegal crossings, will do little to change our fentanyl crisis. And, of course, as long as there is a demand for the product, those laws of supply and demand mean someone will find a way to bring the opioid into the country.

If you continue to maintain that the “Biden/Harris border policies” are a major cause of the overdoses, consider this fact: The fentanyl deaths doubled during the Trump years, and the rate of increase since then has lessened. If Biden is to be blamed, then more blame should be heaped on his predecessor.

The widespread hysteria over undocumented immigrants, however, does not seem to be about all of the undocumented. We mostly fear those brown people who cross the southern border. There are many others, often of the lighter persuasions, who are living in this country without proper authorization. They have often come legally, as students or tourists, for example, and stayed in the United States instead of returning to their homeland at the proper time. I have met such people from Ukraine, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and, of course, Ireland. Aristide R. Zolberg, in his book, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2008), states that while the notion of “illegal immigrants” may evoke images of Mexicans and Central Americans, many Irish working in construction and child care—perhaps as many as 100,000—are here illegally. When we were looking for nannies to help with our newly-arrived child, we were advised to advertise in the Irish Echo, and to do so in such a way as to indicate we would not be asking to see a green card. Years later, I asked our contractor, who had assimilated so well as to lose almost all his brogue, when he came to the country. He gave a date. I smiled and jokingly asked, but when did you come legally? The spouse shouted that I couldn’t ask such a thing. Sean only smiled and gave a time several years later. (No matter how well you can sing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” or know the music of The Pogues or praise Jimmy Ferguson, don’t go into a Bronx bar filled with ruddy faces and start talking about immigration or citizenship.)

However, whatever we do to secure our southern border and whatever we do to remove the undocumented from the country, we will continue to have “foreigners” among us. The classic Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1911 stated what is still a truism: “Migration in general may be described as a natural function of social development. It has taken place at all times and in the greatest variety of circumstances. It has been tribal, national, class and individual. Its causes have been political, economic, religious, or mere love of adventure.” As long as conditions are harsh in other lands and America beacons as a better place to live, some will find a way to enter this country. (For the history of our copy of the EB, see the posts of August 1 and 3, 2022, Rule Encyclopedia Brittanica—Eleventh Edition.)

And just as assuredly, a portion of our populace will see danger from this migration. If you have an Italian ancestor, or a friend or relative does, or perhaps if you just like pizza, pasta, or a latte (Italian, meaning you paid too much for the coffee)–that is, just about everyone–and you are concerned about immigration now, you should reflect on some of our history.

(concluded October 1)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

For almost four years, conservative news sources told me about the deficiencies of the Biden administration. Apparently, however, the government has changed because now they tell me about the failure of the Biden-Harris administration. Meanwhile, they tell me about the supposed glories of the Trump administration. Poor Mike Pence.

The news last week reported on a space walk by the first civilian. It is always gratifying to learn about the new experiences afforded billionaires.

Most summers we hang an American flag between the upper windows of our summer place. It is the burial flag of the spouse’s uncle and namesake. He was an Army pilot who crashed and was killed in the waning months of World War II. This year the spouse thought we should not display the flag because people might think that we were Trump supporters. I insisted we put it out. I said that I did not want to cede this symbol of American liberties and equality to those who claim patriotism but too often seek to obstruct the freedoms and aspirations that the flag stands for.

I was outstanding at trivia. No longer, for several reasons. Many of the questions are rooted in the last twenty or thirty years, and much of this knowledge I never learned. This makes me feel old. Furthermore, many of trivial things I once learned, I have now forgotten. This makes me feel old. And often I have an answer on the tip of my tongue that I can no longer get out in time. This makes me feel old. Even so, recently I have frequently watched Jeopardy!, and I test myself in a new way. I will watch it on Channel 6 at 7 PM. Then the very same episode is on Channel 8 at 7:30. I watch it again and am proud whenever I can remember an answer from a half hour earlier.

All U.S. presidents since Andrew Johnson have had a pet. Except for Donald Trump. Rumor has it that he has eaten all his cats and dogs.

“The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.” Thomas Carlyle.

I feel privileged to have seen James Earl Jones on the stage, including in Othello and Fences. He was amazing. Rest in peace.