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Whither Populism? Marxism? No, wait, Nationalism? No, wait…

I have been trying to understand terms I hear in current political discourse.

Let’s take, e.g., “Populism.” Okay. Populism, government for the people, opposes elites. Originally that meant economic elites, which were seen as controlling both society and the government. Populists were against corporate power, the banks, and the rich generally. That has changed. Now Elon Musk and Donald Trump are labeled Populists. Really? There seems now to be little of the traditional concern about the power of obscene wealth, and the populist movement–certainly not that of Trump and Musk–does not seek to break up or restrict corporate greed or banks. 

Modern populism now targets the cultural elite. This change may have been initiated in the 1960s by George Wallace, who denounced “pointy headed liberals” and Ivy League intellectuals (read, the Kennedys) telling ordinary people what to do. In his case it was the “cultural elite” telling his southern constituents what to do about civil rights. The modern populist has little concern about the economic elites getting more and more while ordinary people cling to their modest means. Instead, the concern is that they may be dislodged by an undeserving class of people (read, Blacks and immigrants) who have been anointed and protected by the cultural elites. In modern populism, the economic elites have won and go unchallenged.

Now. What about Marxism? Marxism was originally a movement to shield workers from the economic inequality created by an aristocratic ruling class. However, this concept, too, has changed. Terms like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “means of production” have disappeared. Now, at least in the U.S., “Marxism” is preceded by “cultural.” [Many right-wing people see it as a Jewish conspiracy to subvert Western civilization.] A report published by the American Heritage foundation offers its definition of this ism: “Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, [cultural Marxists] now seek to dismantle the foundations of the American republic by rewriting history; reintroducing racism; creating privileged classes; and determining what can be said in public discourse, the military, and houses of worship. Unless Marxist thought is defeated again, today’s cultural Marxists will achieve what the Soviet Union never could: the subjugation of the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology.” Those protecting me from the presumed dangers of cultural Marxism, surprisingly, believe that the presentation of history and discourse in various forums can have enough power to destroy Western culture. Presumably these stalwarts know the “correct” history. How did they learn it? And their coy definition does not spell out what they mean by the reintroduction of racism (i.e., racism against whites?) or what privileged classes are being created. They certainly don’t mean economic elites.

The oxymoronic ism known as Christian Nationalism is somewhat new to me. Christian Nationalism, which is really American Christian Nationalism, which is really white American Christian Nationalism, maintains that this country was founded on Christian principles, or, despite the downfall of DEI, more inclusively, Judeo-Christian principles. First of all, there weren’t many Jews in the country at our founding. Ironically (and confusingly), those opposing cultural Marxism are often allied with Christian Nationalists even though those Nationalists are rewriting history. Historians who don’t just make things up maintain that Christianity, Judeo or otherwise, had little effect on our formation. For example,Thomas E. Ricks in First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped our Country (2020) reports that Christianity and religious influence in general was low in colonial America and remained subdued until 1815. Despite the first so-called Great Awakening in America in the 1730’s, in 1776 the states had only one minister for every 1500. Robert Putnam with Shaylan Romney Garrett in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020) similarly tell us that colonial era was not as religiously observant as myths would have it. At the Revolution perhaps twenty percent were members of a religious body, which had increased to thirty-four percent by 1850. Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) also concludes that this country was founded in one of its most secular eras.

Give yourself a little test. Think of all the Founders who were known for their devout Christianity. The list is not short; it is nonexistent. Instead, perhaps you thought of Thomas Jefferson who famously did a cut-and-paste job on his Bible to remove all the supernatural elements from the New Testament including the resurrection. Or consider Fergus M. Bordewich in The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (2016) who said that while Washington was raised as an Anglican and had some sort of belief in God, “it is doubtful that he believed in the divinity of and resurrection of Christ, and he certainly did not consider the US government based on the Christian religion.” Many of the founding fathers were, in fact, proponents of Deism, a rational theology that acknowledges the existence of a creative force but does not recognize a supernatural deity directing the lives of humans.

Apparently, however, to the (white)(American) Christian Nationalists all this historical evidence is fake history, and they continue to maintain that the country was founded on Christian principles. They point to the Declaration of Independence which does refer to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” They fail to realize that both are given a decidedly un-Christian equal billing, and they ignore that referencing “Nature’s God” does not evoke Christianity. The Declaration also goes on to say “that all men are . . . endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is an unimaginable stretch to believe that that unambiguously refers to Yahweh or the Father or anything else Judeo-Christian. Note the Deist-like reference to “the Creator.” And, of course, neither God, Jesus, or even the Creator appear in the Constitution.

In addition, the notion that the country was founded on Christian principles takes a delusional reading of the Bible. At least I can’t find a hint of separation of powers in the Good Book. Or that Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Or that only Congress can declare war. Or that the president can be removed upon a conviction for impeachment. Etc. Etc.

(John Butman and Simon Targett in New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurersdestroy another myth when they report that when Puritan leader William Bradford gave reasons for Pilgrims to go to the new world, he did not include religious freedom. The Pilgrims already enjoyed that in Holland. As has been true throughout our history for people immigrating here, they came seeking work.)

A second tenet of Christian Nationalism is that America, by divine inspiration, is superior to other nations. Many of these “Christians” come from religious traditions that proclaim that the Bible must be taken literally, but I have not found anywhere references to Jesus the Patriot or Jesus the (white) (American) Christian Nationalism. If Jehovah has whispered America’s superiority into some ears, could you tell Him to speak up so the rest of the world can hear it?

While present populists, opponents of cultural Marxism (significantly, no one seems to advocate for cultural Marxism), and Christian Nationalists all seem to come from the same right-wing pool, Democratic Socialists come from elsewhere. Some leading politicians give themselves this label, but I am struggling to understand their philosophy as well. (Many more politicians call themselves Democrats, but I have little idea what they stand for either. Republicans are easier to understand. They have no mind of their own, and back whatever Trump wants.) I look up definitions of Democratic Socialism, and I get different answers, not all of them consistent with each other. Some sources indicate that Democratic Socialists wish to have socialism achieved through democratic means, but then the definers quickly say that the Democratic Socialists don’t agree what “socialism” is. So far I have not heard the DS politicians seeking state control of all businesses or institutions (uh, no, that seems to be the bailiwick of Trump, see below). Instead, I hear them proclaim that government should commit to affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, food, and transportation; increases in the minimum wage; reversing the widening income inequality; and higher taxes on the super-rich. (If populism means “for the people,” this kinda sounds like populism to me.) At one time, these concerns would have been called liberal. Now they are labeled “left wing,” which indicates how far our country has lurched to the right.

Whatever Democratic Socialists do stand for, it is clear that they are in opposition to the widespread, Candide-like notion that a laissez faire government is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

However, there is another movement that rejects government neutrality in picking winners and losers so that efficient markets and only efficient markets can drive the economy and the rest of society. Surprisingly, this movement comes from our current president.

The president and a small, unelected group around him–let’s call them the Deep State–have sought or demanded control over many institutions including universities, cultural entities, think tanks, historical associations, and NGOs. Because of fear of or desire for government actions controlled by the president and his deep state, traditional and social media have altered their behaviors. Because of government power to affect them, individuals and companies have felt compelled to donate money to favored Trump projects, such as his inauguration or the ballroom. (None dare call it extortion, but then again, the Supreme Court says that the president can’t be prosecuted.) Corporations have felt compelled to expunge any traces of DEI and have gone well beyond avoiding affirmative action. In spite of proclaimed conservative principles, the current government wants to be involved in shaping corporate decisions. Despite the government’s saying that it is a threat to national security to sell chips to China, the president says you can do it if you give us a share of the profits. Give the president a “golden share” and you can buy the company.

This is not the capitalism that conservatives have touted as essential. This is not the laissez-faire in which markets control outcomes. It is the widespread intervention by a few into society and corporate economies. The decisions made by these billionaires and a few piker multimillionaires is beginning to feel a lot like a Russian-style government takeover ruled by oligarchs, but we dare not call it socialism. What would you call it? Suggestions?

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Snippets

My main exposure to farming in Maine came from my friend and colleague Don. His grandfather had a farm near the New Brunswick border, and Don spent part of his high school summers helping out there. The grandfather seemed to be the last of the New England Yankees. He heated his house with wood, and without power tools he cut and split cords upon cords to be ready for the winter. The grandfather may have grown several crops, but Don only talked about the potatoes and the hard work of tilling the soil, burying the seed potatoes, and then later pulling them out. Unpredictable rainfall made the onerous work even harder some years. Don, who had sensitive skin, did not have to worry about the dangerous sun when he was out in the field. He said that the notorious Maine black flies were so bad that he would only go out in full beekeeper’s regalia, which kept the flies from biting but made the hot work even hotter. When Don told me about these summers, he made clear how miserable he had been.

I thought again about Maine farm work when reading The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters for a book group at my residence. The book’s core is a group of Mi’kmaq people who came from Nova Scotia to pick blueberries in Maine. Haad I even been aware that a lot of blueberries are grown in Maine, I had never thought about how they were harvested. My images of migrant workers are people from south of border cutting lettuce or plucking strawberries, not people from the north harvesting fruit in New England. But now those images include those Canadians, and I wonder about other crops. Who harvests cherries in Michigan or wild rice in Minnesota?

The No Kings protest I attended was peaceful, like the others, but small. It was in suburban New York City. A few hundred people lined an intersection waving signs. (The one I saw most often: “No Faux King Way.”) I wore my tee shirt with the faded lettering: “Trump: His Mother Did Not Have Him Tested.” Maybe one or two people understood it. (N.B.: you have to be a fan of “The Big Bang Theory” TV show.) Perhaps I was hoping to be energized, and perhaps that would have happened if I had attended a truly mass rally of thousands like the ones elsewhere in the country. But mostly I was bored and wondered why I was there.

Nevertheless:

“For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” Thomas Paine.

“The links in the chains of tyranny are usually forged, singly and silently, and sometimes unconsciously, by those who are destined to wear them.” Tully Scott.

“A king can stand people’s fighting but he can’t last long if people start thinking.” Will Rogers.

“Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson.

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” James Madison.

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Cup or Cone

The spouse and I have been together for so long because we are in sync on many of life’s important issues. For example, we agree that in an ice cream shop you should always buy ice cream in a cone and not a cup. (We also agree that you should not even go into a place called a “shoppe.”)

When I ruminate on an ice cream cone, my thoughts naturally turn to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Don’t yours? Some may know of this event from the movie Meet Me in St. Louis. That classical musical gave us some standards including “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” “The Boy Next Door,” and the melancholy, somewhat disturbing holiday song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The movie is set – don’t be surprised if you haven’t seen it – in St. Louis mostly during the 1903 Christmas season. The planning for next summer’s World’s Fair is underway.

Of course, all musicals are fantasies on some level but Meet Me even more so. The family at the core of the movie learns that the father may have to relocate them all to New York City. I can grasp that the family is upset that it might miss the fair, especially as everyone is abuzz with excitement about it. However, it is hard for me — a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker — to suspend my disbelief so much as to accept that the family would rather stay in St. Louis than move to New York, but, nevertheless, that is the plot. Of course, they stay along the Mississippi. The movie’s last scene is in the summer of 1904 with the cheerful family at the brightly lit World’s Fair. However, that scene is incomplete since no one, as far as I can remember, is holding an ice cream cone.

(Meet Me in St. Louis not only gave us some treasured musical standards, it also in essence gave us Liza. During the filming, its director, Vincente Minnelli, met the movie’s star, Judy Garland. The two would later produce Liza Minnelli. I won’t digress to the time I saw — along with Jackie Kennedy Onassis — Liza Minelli in concert.)

Perhaps when you think of the St. Louis World’s Fair, in addition to ice cream cones you think of Thomas Jefferson and early American history. That Fair was officially the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. It commemorated the centennial of President Jefferson’s purchase from France of what is now the heartland of the United States. Of course, since the Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1803, the centennial celebration should have been before 1904. However, while St. Louis, the Gateway to the West, may have had many go-getters, apparently not all participating in the fair could get going in time for the one-hundred-year mark, and the Exposition was held a year late. St. Louis might not often acknowledge taking inspiration from its rival city, but it did seem to be following Chicago’s calendar. The World’s Columbian Exposition also known as the Chicago World’s Fair commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the new world. However, it was held in 1893, also a year late, as all of us who remember our grade school poetry know.

With the Louisiana Purchase, the size of the United States instantly doubled. That territory encompasses all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and North Dakota and portions of nine other states. Many of these places form our conservative heartland, and I wonder, as I am sure you do, too, if the people there reflect on the Louisiana Purchase, to which they are indebted.

France inhabited or held by occupation very little of the land it sold. Governing control of the area was not turned over to the U.S. because France did not in fact govern it. Instead, as a matter of international law — which really meant European law — the Purchase gave America the right to inhabit and control the land and to exclude foreign — meaning European — countries from it. Of course, indigenous Americans were there, but they did not participate in the deal, and their rights were disregarded. Perhaps the Purchase should be seen as a green light (ok, that is anachronistic, so give me something better) for American imperialism.

The Louisiana Purchase provoked one of the country’s first constitutional conflicts. Indeed, Jefferson himself doubted its constitutionality. Nothing in the Constitution authorized the kind of transaction Jefferson made. Those who truly believe that our Constitution sets out a government limited to enumerated powers, as Jefferson supposedly did, have to doubt the Purchase’s legality. As with many Constitutional disputes in our history, however, hypocrisy abounded. Those around Jefferson who believed in a limited government supported the deal while the Federalists, who were the big government folk, opposed it. Apparently, Jefferson was convinced that since nothing in the Constitution prohibited the purchase, it could go forward. That’s a long way, Tom, from maintaining that the government only could exercise powers enumerated in the document.

Something else should be noted. The Purchase occurred only fifteen years after the Constitution was ratified, and the meaning of the document was already unclear even to many who had been active in drafting and adopting it. When they went looking for the original meaning of the Constitution, they could not agree on what it was. Yet today, more than eleven score years later, some with wondrous certitude and amazing hubris will tell us what was originally meant by the fundamental charter.

The Supreme Court these days will resolve constitutional issues much as Jefferson did in 1803. Jefferson accepted the interpretation that allowed him to do what he wanted to do anyway. Similarly, the current conservative members of the Supreme Court will “reason” to a result that fits their philosophy and politics. The desired result drove Jefferson’s reasoning, as it does for a majority of the Supreme Court today.

There is also an irony in the fact that America did not have the money to pay France for the Louisiana Purchase. The United States borrowed the funds from Great Britain, which exacted a hefty 6% interest fee. In other words, the Louisiana Purchase, of suspect constitutionality, depended on deficit financing. Even so, many in today’s Congress from the states whose lands were obtained in the Purchase have supported a balanced budget amendment. I wonder if they ever pause to reflect on the fact that if such a provision had originally been in the Constitution, they might have had to do their grandstanding in French (or some other language), assuming that it were even allowed in whatever country Iowa and Nebraska would now be part of.

So. While some might think of the movie Meet Me in St. Louis when they think of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Others might reflect on the Louisiana Purchase, which the Fair commemorated. Nevertheless, the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 really should be honored for it its role in ice cream history, which is what I’ve been wanting to get to all along.

There may have been something like ice cream cones before 1904, but the Fair made them an American icon. There are competing versions about which vendor started using cones for ice cream at the Fair. (Origin stories are often disputed except by conservative Supreme Court judges who know with precision the original meanings of constitutional provisions.) But thousands upon thousands of ice cream cones were sold in St. Louis that summer. Soon they were appearing everywhere in the United States and new, ingenious machines were made and perfected in the United States for the fabrication of cones. We may say something is “as American as apple pie,” but saying something is “as American as an ice cream cone” would be even more accurate. And that stems from that St. Louis World’s Fair.

In spite of what Heywood Broun said (“I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.”), I don’t remember my first taste of ice cream. I do know that I have enjoyed it in many ways. It has given me pleasure on top of a brownie or a slice of cherry pie or chocolate cake or peach cobbler. (The spouse makes a great peach cobbler.) I have loved ice cream in the eponymous ice cream sandwich. I have enjoyed it covered with chocolate or salty caramel sauce or Kahlua. It has been great with strawberries in season and in a banana split. Even though it is stupid, I have had admiration for it in a Baked Alaska. I have enjoyed it straight out of the carton with the light from an open freezer door. (A sage person has said, Never ask a woman who is eating ice cream from a carton how her day was.) I have enjoyed it in many flavors and in soft-serve and hard versions.

And, yes, I have enjoyed ice cream simply spooned out of a bowl. But if you want that, use a real bowl and a real spoon. Ice cream from a disposable cup with a little plastic spoon or worse, one of those wooden paddles, is not the same thing. (Yes, I have had many Dixie Cup ice creams, but they came from convenience stores where an ice cream cone was not an option.) And at home, the bowl and spoon can be washed and used again unlike disposable cups from an ice cream shop. A cone does not contribute to landfill problems. If you want to spoon ice cream into your mouth, buy some, go home, and enjoy it out of a real bowl.

You should buy an ice cream cone when you can, not only because it is the American way (Do Russians stand around the Kremlin with a cone?), but also for the sensory experience. Licking ice cream from a cone is a different sensual pleasure from the other ways to enjoy it, and when a cone is available, take the opportunity. The ice cream cone, not that prissy cardboard cup and plastic spoon, is not only the American way, it affords pleasure in a way other servings of ice cream do not.

I can already imagine the rejoinder. I don’t buy an ice cream cone for my kid because I don’t want my dear little Mackenzie or Madison to experience that feeling when a scoop falls off and splats on the pavement. A kid who has not experienced a skinned knee has not truly experienced childhood. A child who has not suffered the tragedy of melting ice cream on the sidewalk is not ready for adulthood. Your snowflake will suffer worse than an ice cream cone mishap in life. Train them now.

So. Buy yourself an ice cream cone. Buy your kids ice cream cones. Be an American. We all scream for ice cream! Enjoy all that life offers.

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Presidential Rock

No president has performed heavy metal or even any good rock. Or rap. We have had some insipid piano playing, some mediocre saxophone, and a good version of Amazing Grace. But no real rock ‘n’ roll. Or rap. And I believe the country would be better if the president rocked. Or rapped. However, after extensive, made-up research, I have found that many presidents did make music. Some examples:

Of course, the hits began with George Washington and his surprising novelty, Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor in the Dentures Overnight?

This was followed by Thomas Jefferson’s unclassifiable, but revealing, song that was huge in the South, Love in Chains. The third president had a follow-up success in the North, Set My Love Free?  

It was Dolley Madison who had a hit that referred to her husband’s constitutional amendment career with a refrain still resonating today: “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy Mad, Are those rights just a fad?”

Andrew Jackson sang now forgotten plaintive Appalachian songs accompanying himself on the acoustic dulcimer.

Then there was Millard Fillmore.  No one knew who he was, so no one knew if he sang anything.

Abraham Lincoln accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln on the concertina as she sang, Re-United. Lincoln himself on the late-night tavern circuit tried to set With Malice Toward None to music, but, of course, he never finished it.

Rutherford B. Hayes performed with disastrous consequences still felt today, Reconstruction is for Suckas.

The insomniac William McKinley sang with some success his Mr. Tariffing Man. It was only after the full effects of Smoot-Hawley were seen in the Depression that the lyrics were expanded to include: “that evenings empire has returned into sand/Vanished from my hand/Left me blindly here to stand. . . .”

William Taft, who could not lie, was too obvious when he sang,”I like big butts.” The country back then, however, apparently did not.

Woodrow Wilson seemed convincing when in 1916 he sang “War! What is it good for?” And then he led us into war.

Warren Harding sang old family “darky” songs that would be considered offensive by many today but would be banned by others as DEI.

Calvin Coolidge did not sing but he was a trained mime. He did not get enough recognition for his Man Walking Backwards Against Heavy Wind although he was overpraised for miming handcuffing the Boston Police strikers.

Not surprisingly, FDR could not rock. His only memorable song was The Wheels on the Chair Go ‘Round and ‘Round.

Eisenhower avoided music. He thought that the public would demand from him martial tunes, which he hated.

Kennedy largely spared us those Irish jigs where four or eight bars are endlessly repeated until the fiddler gets tired and stops.

Not many people know that W wrote many lyrics, but they were so filled with malapropisms that no one could understand them.

And now under Trump we have endlessly repeated I Am Just a Fool (in Love) ((with Myself.))

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The Inclusive Declaration of Independence and the Founding of America

The Fourth of July celebrates the United States of America and its birth, but with our current mood many only want to point out the country’s current and historical shortcomings. Every Fourth, I urge all to read the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so, it is natural to focus on the multiple ironies of its most famous phrase: “all Men are created equal.” However, as we know, in eighteenth century America, women, Native Americans, and indentured servants were not seen as equal. And, of course, slaves were not equal. Any fair assessment of our history acknowledges, as Thomas E. Ricks states in First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped our Country (2020), that slavery was not a “stain” on the country; it was woven into the original fabric. And that weft and warp made the celebration of liberty painful to many Americans throughout our history, which was perhaps most powerfully stated by Frederic Douglass on July 5, 1852. Just as the Declaration should be regularly read, so too should this speech. (Africans in America/Part 4/Frederick Douglass speech (pbs.org.)

The Fourth of July is our birthday, however. Some might temper a child’s birthday celebration with a discussion of the child’s shortcomings, but I would hope that the major thrust of the party is, in fact, to celebrate the kid. We should be realistic in assessing our country, but there has always been much to celebrate, and the Fourth is a time of celebration. Because it is so easy to mock the Declaration’s equality statement, it is too easy to overlook the many ways that in its founding the country also furthered egalitarianism and inclusiveness.

We know many of the Declaration’s phrases—“When in the Course of human Events”; “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; and others. But we often miss something about the tenor of the Declaration as a whole. There are no classical allusions or references. By eighteenth century standards, the language is simple. The document was not written for the elite peers of those who signed the document but for a wide swath of what were to become Americans.

Its logic demanded an inclusive appeal. The Declaration asserts that a government derives “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed” not from the Divine Right of Kings. It declared “the Right of the People” to change government. The Declaration with these contentions could not just be addressed to an elite, aristocratic audience. It +was not directed to the enslaved, but it was seeking the approval of almost everyone else—the farmer, the joiner, the tavern owner, the schoolteacher, the sailors, the ship captain, the log splitter, and yes, the slave owner and trader. For an eighteenth-century document, its intended audience was remarkably inclusive.

The notion of the consent of the governed was a radical, egalitarian break from America’s English roots, and the emerging country’s conception of “the people” was much broader than almost anywhere else in the world. This is reflected in who could vote. Today we note the shortcomings of a franchise limited to propertied white males, but we seldom consider, as Jill Lepore does in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), that a higher percentage of people could vote in the colonies than in England. The franchise was narrow by modern standards, but it was broad for its time.

Part of the reason for the inclusiveness of the Founding Era’s America was the high rate of literacy among its people, perhaps the highest of any country of its times. The seventeenth-century Pilgrims, Puritans, and others who settled here held beliefs that rejected an authoritarian church. They believed that the eternal truths came from the Bible, not from an authoritarian church, and, therefore, it was important that people could read the Holy Book. Literacy was stressed as well as the ability of each person to reason. Jefferson and the others may have expected that the Declaration would be read out to those assembled in taverns and inns, but they also knew that many people would read it for themselves, and all were expected to think and reason about the document, which led to its inclusive appeal to the people.

The Declaration did mention “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and the signers said that they had acted with “a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence,” but it did not beseech God, a god, or Jesus Christ for independence. Just as some only criticize the Declaration for its hypocrisies without recognizing its advances, some focus on the listing of God and divine providence and conclude erroneously that the Declaration was an act of religious faith, or, more particularly, the signers’ Christianity. But these references, which include the almost pagan formulation of “Nature’s God,” were not invocations of any particular divinity to grant them a new country. Government depended on the consent of the governed, not on divine will, and the appeal was to the people, not to some version of God. The Declaration’s wording was inclusive; it did not exclude any particular believer or any nonbeliever from its ambit. It rejected the too-often divisiveness of religion and relied on the reason of the people.

This lack of a religious appeal is not surprising. Thomas Ricks shows in First Principles that neither Christianity nor any other religious influence was prominent in the Revolutionary period. This only began to change in 1815. He reports that there was one minister for every 1500 people in 1775 America while there was one for every 500 by 1845. Scott L. Malcomson writes in One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventures of Race that in 1790 only one in ten white Americans was a member of a formal church. Jill Lepore in These Truths agrees that the country was founded in one of its most secular eras.

Of course, slavery existed throughout the country when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and we should not forget how that institution shaped our country. Nevertheless, for their time, the Founders also created an egalitarian and inclusive government in ways we now seldom appreciate. For example, unlike many of the state and foreign governments of the time, the United States had no property qualifications to hold office. In an era when they were common, no religious tests were required for holding office. And we seldom notice that the new country paid its officials. Many governments did not, so only the rich who could afford to be uncompensated could hold office. Unlike in other countries, all whites, or at least all white males, could hold office.

The new country also broke from history and the practices of most countries by having no hereditary offices. A formal aristocracy died in the United States. Revolutionary America also moved to a more equal society by repealing primogeniture laws, which dictated that the firstborn male child would inherit his parent’s entire estate. This extraordinarily egalitarian reform, whose importance is seldom noticed today, was led by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia.

A related change in property law was also happening during this time. Under English law, aliens could buy property, but they could not inherit it. Aliens could sell the land they owned, but they could not grant it in a will. Instead, on death, an alien’s property went to the state. Revolutionary America began to repeal such inegalitarian laws, helping to make the country more inclusive and prosperous.

The country’s first naturalization law had some of the same characteristics as the Declaration of Independence. It showed simultaneously both racial restriction and social inclusiveness. The law limited naturalization to free, white citizens who had lived in the country for two years. We, of course, notice that nonwhites were excluded. (“Free” meant indentured servants could not be naturalized until they completed their periods of indenture.) Blacks could not be naturalized until 1870, and other nonwhites could not be naturalized until well into the twentieth century. There was no legal definition of whiteness. When areas of Mexico became part of the United States in the early1850s, the former Mexicans of those lands were made citizens, and there was an implicit recognition that they were white. The Supreme Court dealt with whiteness and naturalization several times and concluded that Asians and South Asians were not white but that Syrians and Armenians were. In 1922 the Supreme Court held that a high caste Sikh was neither white nor black and could not be naturalized. He had fought for this country in World War I.

However, in addition to noting the racial restriction, we should also consider the inclusiveness of this law. It did not impose a property requirement for citizenship. The rich and the not rich could become citizens. Aristocratic origins did not matter. There was the racial limitation, but no national origin requirement. There was no religious test. At a time when Catholics could not hold office in England and Jews could not become citizens in many places, they could in the United States.

We should keep both racial restrictions as well as these inclusions in mind when we consider this country’s origins. The founding era accepted an institution whose ramifications have troubled us throughout our history, but it also gave us foundations for much of what is good in this country.

I am sure that some will mostly criticize America on the Fourth, which is their right. And I am sure that some will call such critics unpatriotic, which is their right.

Patriotism has often been a contentious concept. Vicksburg, Mississippi, offers an example of its fragility. Exactly four score and seven years ago to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to American General Ulysses S. Grant after a forty-seven–day siege. This was certainly one of the most important actions of the war because it gave control of the Mississippi River to the Americans and severed the confederacy.

Thus, July 4, 1863, was another Fourth of July for patriotic Americans to celebrate, but Vicksburg didn’t see it that way. The town did not honor the Fourth of July for the next eight decades. They continued to identify as confederates, not as Americans. Vicksburg simply ignored Independence Day until after World War II when General Dwight Eisenhower visited the town on the Fourth. Even so, Vicksburg did not want to celebrate the United States. It called the celebrations during Eisenhower’s visit a “Carnival of the Confederacy,” a title I am told that was dropped only when the country and Vicksburg celebrated the Bicentennial in 1976. I’m not sure what to make of their tenacious grasp of a different brand of “patriotism.” I guess I’m just glad that they finally celebrate along with the rest of us.

And I hope all Americans can find something to celebrate this Fourth of July.

Posted on by rjonakait

Our Rubicon Moment?

Friends asked me to discuss the “constitutional crisis” that the media seems to think is imminent.

My starting point is to explain that the Constitution is not static. It has changed in big and small ways; scholars have identified three major constitutional transformations.

The first came before we even had a national constitution. The newly-independent states were bound together by the Articles of Confederation, which were not considered adequate for governing the emerging nation. Therefore, men got together in 1787 in Philadelphia ostensibly to reform those Articles. Instead, they drafted a new constitution which was adopted by the requisite nine states the next year. A new government came into being. Our government today depends on that eighteenth century document, and it is controlled by the constitution much as it was back then.

Early on that founding document was seen as needing changes. Some states only ratified the Constitution with the understanding that a Bill of Rights would be added. The first Congress proposed twelve amendments, ten of which were adopted and went into effect in 1791. These additions mostly announced rights people assumed they already had and did not change the structure of the government. However, a decade later a major flaw in the document was exposed by the election of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. As a result, the Twelfth Amendment was adopted modifying the electoral college. From its inception, therefore, the Constitution has been subject to change.

The first significant transformation of the Constitution, however, came from the Civil War and its aftermath. The war occurred partly because of a major flaw in the document itself. Instead of confronting the issue of slavery, the founders tried to avoid it or make feeble compromises about it. As a result, slavery was not merely a stain on the fabric of the Constitution but woven into it. Various factions pulling at the threads and cords of slavery from all directions challenged the constitution, and war came.

In the war’s aftermath, three amendments to the Constitution were passed. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fifteenth Amendment granted Black males, but not women of any color, the right to vote. These two amendments were transformative, but they were only partially successful. Slave-like practices continued to exist in the country, and within a decade of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, the right to vote was stripped from most Blacks.

The Fourteenth Amendment, although it has several provisions, reshaped our Constitution by commanding that no state “shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The original Constitution did little to constrain the states in their treatment of inhabitants. The Fourteenth Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, changed that. For example, the Court held that the amendment’s due process clause prevented a state from taking a person’s property without just compensation. In the early twentieth century it held that the state could not abridge free speech. Over time, the Court increasingly prohibited the states from interfering with rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The Court, relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, also said segregated state schools were unconstitutional and that states must afford one person, one vote. The constitutional crisis of the Civil War produced a Fourteenth Amendment that transformed the relationship between courts and individuals by expanding and clarifying constitutional rights.

The next major constitutional transformation came during the Great Depression. The Supreme Court had found unconstitutional many state and federal laws regulating businesses. This crescendoed during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term when the Court deemed unconstitutional much New Deal legislation that had been passed by Congress to alleviate the harsh economic conditions. FDR responded by proposing that the Court be expanded. Critics called it “court-packing.” Although the causes are debated by historians, lo and behold, after the court-packing proposal, some justices modified their opinions and now upheld federal powers to regulate business and other activities. The Civil War transformation expanded judicial powers to protect individuals and entities from the government. The Great Depression transformation expanded the power of the federal government to regulate activities affecting “interstate commerce,” which has been broadly defined. The decisions of the New Deal Supreme Court provide the basis for much of the federal government’s regulatory power today.

So. Are we now in the midst of another constitutional crisis? Are we due for another constitutional transformation? I see not one possible scenario, but several.

Conservatives look at our government and see a bloated bureaucracy that was not contemplated by the Constitution. It is entrenched but not elected. That bureaucracy, though authorized by Congress and the president, often seems to act independently of Congress and, more importantly, the president. Although it appears to be part of the executive branch of the government, the bureaucracy often sets and follows its own guidelines and policies. Thus, conservatives see a bureaucracy that is too often resistant to the policies of the president, and they find this in violation of the constitution. This unconstitutionality in the conservative eye must be put to rights. A constitutional transformation is needed to restore the balance that our Constitution contemplates where the president sets and enforces executive branch policies. And, under Trump, conservatives maintain we are seeing the beginning of that needed constitutional transformation.

On the other hand, some, but not all, liberals see a different potential constitutional crisis. Many of Trump’s actions and orders, they claim, have been in direct conflict with specific provisions of the Constitution (e.g., birthright citizenship), have been in violation of the separation of powers, or have violated the constitutional duty of the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”  And while conservatives see a constitutional crisis in an unelected bureaucracy, liberals see a crisis in the unfettered authority exercised by an unelected Elon Musk who has not been appointed to a Senate-confirmed position the Constitution seemingly requires.

Other liberals may be concerned about the administration’s actions, but they don’t see a present constitutional crisis. They see the system working because the courts have been hearing challenges to Trump’s and Musk’s orders. This is the normal constitutional process, and Trump has said that he will follow the judicial process. Almost all the court rulings have been in the federal district courts, which are the lowest level of federal courts. Following decisions in the district courts, those findings can be appealed to the Court of Appeals. Then the losing litigant may seek to have the Supreme Court hear the matter. (There is no right to have the Supreme Court hear these cases; it is in the Court’s discretion.) Many maintain that as long as this process is being followed, there is no constitutional crisis.

Even so, liberals who don’t see a present crisis, are concerned about a future constitutional transformation. Many, probably most, constitutional scholars believe that under existing Supreme Court rulings, many of Trump’s actions violate the Constitution or existing laws. The first fear is that the current conservative Supreme Court will ignore or overturn the precedents and uphold Trump’s actions. That is, that the Supreme Court will reinterpret the Constitution and laws to give the president even more power than he now has. This will, in effect, remake the Constitution by taking away congressional authority and individual rights and make an already powerful president even more powerful. As it did with its presidential immunity decision, the Supreme Court could transform our government to make the president more kingly, more authoritarian.

The other liberal fear is not of the Supreme Court but of Trump himself. Even though he has said otherwise, the fear is that Trump will either not use the appellate process and just keep bulldozing ahead, or even if he does follow normal procedures, he will not obey Court orders that go against him. He will ignore or defy the judiciary. Of course, he said he wouldn’t do that, and he did not disobey the courts in his first term. However, those around him have suggested that he will this time if courts don’t rule his way. And just as you can find Trump statements that he will honor the judicial process, like the devil quoting the Bible, you can find other Trump pronouncements, such as his recent statement: “He who saves his Country does not violate any laws.”

Presidential defiance of the courts would be a true constitutional crisis, perhaps a fatal one. His recent statement about not committing illegalities when saving the country is ascribed to Napoleon, but precedents go back further into history. Julius Caesar broke the law and illegally marched his troops, loyal to him more than to the nation, across the Rubicon and into Rome. The fall of the Roman Republic began, and a dictatorship took its place.

Posted on by rjonakait

Honor the Founders, But . . .

On the Fourth of July we honor the founding of our country. The country has always been imperfect, but it is worth honoring.

On the Fourth we honor our Founders, who, being human, were imperfect, but they are worth honoring.

On the Fourth we should also honor all the many people who brought about the Spirt if ’76. When the imperfections of revered people are pointed out, we often say that they were a product of their times. However, the good also comes from the age in which they lived. Jefferson could not have drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1736 because the times were not ready for it. And he would not have drafted it in 1816 because it would have already been written by someone else. As Pauline Maier in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence reports, many localities had drafted Declarations of Independence in the months before July 4, 1776. If Jefferson had not lived, a national Declaration of Independence, perhaps with not the same eloquence, would still have been adopted. On the Fourth, we should honor more than just the few Founders, but all the Americans who produced the spirit of the times that demanded independence.

On the Fourth of July we honor our warriors, and we should honor those who have performed military service, especially now when an increasingly smaller portion of our population serves to protect the rest of us. Warriors have fought to make us freer and safer.

Those who defend our country are patriots, but so are those who seek to make America better, who strive for an even stronger and freer country today, tomorrow, and for future generations. Improvement, however, requires understanding America’s strengths and America’s weaknesses. Critics of this country are also patriots and should be honored. This includes those who have questioned our wars. Not every one of our armed conflicts has made us freer and safer. The prevention of the needless death or maiming of a soldier is at least as patriotic as honoring the fallen and disabled.

Have hot dogs and hamburgers, ice cream and watermelon. Read the Declaration. Honor Hancock, Jefferson, Franklin and other Founders. But honor many others also.

Posted on by rjonakait

Cup or Cone

The spouse and I have been together for so long because we are in sync on many important issues. For example, we agree that in an ice cream shop you should always buy a ice cream in a cone and not a cup. (We also agree that you should not even go in if the place says it is a shoppe.)

When I ruminate on an ice cream cone, my thoughts naturally turn to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Some may know the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 from the movie Meet Me in St. Louis. That classical musical gave us some standards including “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” “The Boy Next Door,” and the melancholy, somewhat disturbing holiday song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The movie is set–don’t be surprised if you haven’t seen it–in St. Louis mostly in the 1903 Christmas season. The planning for next summer’s World’s Fair is underway.

Of course, all musicals are fantasies on some level, but Meet Me even more so. The family at the core of the movie learns that the father may have to relocate them all to New York City. I can grasp that the family is upset that it might miss the fair, especially as everyone is abuzz with excitement about it. However, it is hard for me to suspend my disbelief so much to accept that the family would rather stay in St. Louis permanently than move to New York, but that is the plot. Of course, they stay along the Mississippi. The movie’s last scene is in the summer of 1904 with the family at the brightly lit World’s Fair. However, that scene is incomplete since no one, as far as I can remember, is holding an ice cream cone.

(Meet Me in St. Louis not only gave us some treasured musical standards, it also in essence gave us Liza. During the filming, the director, Vincente Minnelli, met the movie’s star, Judy Garland. The two would later produce Liza Minnelli, treasured by some, perhaps even many. I won’t digress to the time I saw — along with Jackie Kennedy Onassis — Liza Minelli in concert.)

Perhaps when you think of the St. Louis World’s Fair, in addition to ice cream cones you think of Thomas Jefferson and early American history. That Fair was officially the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. It commemorated the centennial of President Jefferson’s purchase from France of what is now the heartland of the United States. Of course, since the Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1803, the centennial celebration should have been before 1904. However, while St. Louis, the Gateway to the West, may have had many go-getters, apparently not all participating in the fair could get going in time for the one-hundred-year mark and the Exposition started a year late. St. Louis might not often acknowledge taking inspiration from its rival city, but it did seem to be following Chicago’s calendar. The World’s Columbian Exposition also known as the Chicago World’s Fair commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the new world. However, it was held in 1893, a year late, as all of us who remember our grade school poetry know.

With the Louisiana Purchase, the size of the United States instantly doubled. That territory encompasses all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and North Dakota and portions of nine other states. Many of these places form our conservative heartland, and I wonder, as I am sure you do, too, if the people there reflect on the Louisiana Purchase, to which they are indebted.

France inhabited or held by occupation little of the land it sold. Governing control of the area was not turned over to the U.S. because France did not in fact govern it. Instead, as a matter of international law — which really meant European law — the Purchase gave America the right to try and inhabit and control the land and to exclude foreign — meaning European — countries from it. Of course, indigenous Americans were there, but they did not participate in the deal, and their rights were disregarded. Perhaps the Purchase should be seen as a green light (ok, that is anachronistic, so give me something better) for American imperialism.

The Louisiana Purchase provoked one of the country’s first constitutional conflicts. Indeed, Jefferson himself doubted its constitutionality. Nothing in the Constitution authorized the kind of transaction Jefferson made. Those who truly believe that our Constitution sets out a government limited to enumerated powers, as Jefferson supposedly did, have to doubt the Purchase’s legality. But as with many Constitutional disputes in our history, hypocrisy abounded. Those around Jefferson who supposedly believed in a limited government supported the deal while the Federalists, who were the big government folk, opposed it. Apparently, Jefferson was convinced that since nothing in the Constitution prohibited the purchase, it could go forward. That’s a long way from maintaining that the government only could exercise powers enumerated in the document.

Something else should be noted. The Purchase occurred only fifteen years after the Constitution was ratified, and the meaning of the document was already unclear even to many who had been active in drafting and adopting it. When they went looking for the original meaning of the Constitution, they could not agree on what it was. Yet today, more than eleven score years later, some with wondrous certitude and amazing hubris will tell us what was originally meant by the document.

The Supreme Court these days will resolve constitutional issues much as Jefferson did in 1803. Jefferson accepted the interpretation that allowed him to do what he wanted to do, and the conservative members of the Supreme Court will “reason” to a result that fits their philosophy and politics. The desired result drove Jefferson’s reasoning, as it will for a majority of the Supreme Court today.

There is also an irony in the fact that America did not have the money to pay France for the Louisiana Purchase. The United States borrowed the funds from Great Britain, which exacted a hefty 6% interest fee. In other words, the Louisiana Purchase, of suspect constitutionality, depended on deficit financing. Even so, many in Congress from the states whose lands were obtained in the Purchase have supported a balanced budget amendment. I wonder if they ever pause to reflect on the fact that if such a provision had originally been in the Constitution, they might have had to do their grandstanding, even if it were allowed in whatever country Iowa and Nebraska would now be in, in French or some other language than English.

So. While some might think of the movie Meet Me in St. Louis when they think of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Others might reflect on the Louisiana Purchase, which the Fair commemorated. However, the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 should be most honored for it its role in ice cream history.

There may have been something like ice cream cones before 1904, but the Fair made them an American icon. Different versions circulate about which vendor started using cones for ice cream at the Fair. (Origin stories are often disputed except by conservative Supreme Court judges who know with precision the original meanings of constitutional provisions.) But thousands upon thousands of ice cream cones were sold in St. Louis that summer. Soon they were appearing everywhere in the United States and new, ingenious machines were made and perfected in the United States for the fabrication of cones. Within a few years of 1904, the ice cream cone became an America icon. We may say something is as American as apple pie, but saying something is as American as an ice cream cone would be even better. And that stems from that St. Louis World’s Fair

In spite of what Heywood Broun said (“I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.”), I don’t remember my first taste of ice cream. I do know that I have enjoyed it in many ways. It has given me pleasure on top of a brownie or a slice of cherry pie or chocolate cake or peach cobbler. (The spouse makes a great peach cobbler.) I have loved ice cream in the eponymous ice cream sandwich. I have enjoyed it covered with chocolate or salty caramel sauce. It has been great with strawberries in season and in a banana split. Even though it is stupid, I have had admiration for it in a Baked Alaska. I have enjoyed it straight out of the carton with the light from an open freezer door. (A sage person has said, Never ask a woman who is eating ice cream from a carton how her day was.) I have enjoyed it in many flavors and in soft-serve and hard versions.

And, yes, I have enjoyed ice cream simply spooned out of a bowl. But if you want that, use a real bowl and a real spoon. Ice cream from a disposable cup with a little plastic spoon or worse, one of those wooden paddles, is not the same thing. (Yes, I have had many Dixie Cup ice creams, but they came from convenience stores where an ice cream cone was not an option.) And at home, the bowl and spoon can be washed and used again unlike disposable cups from an ice cream shop. A cone does not contribute to landfill problems. If you want to spoon ice cream into your mouth, buy some, go home, and enjoy it out of a real bowl.

You should buy an ice cream cone when you can not only because it is the American way (Do Russians stand around the Kremlin with a cone?), but also for the sensory experience. Licking ice cream from a cone is a different sensual pleasure from the other ways to enjoy it, and when a cone is available, take the opportunity. The ice cream cone, not that prissy cardboard cup and plastic spoon, is not only the American way, it affords pleasure in a way other servings of ice cream do not.

I can already imagine the rejoinder. I don’t buy an ice cream cone for my kid because I don’t want my Mackenzie or Madison to experience that feeling when a scoop falls off and splats on the pavement. A kid who has not experienced a skinned knee has not truly experienced childhood. A child who has not suffered the tragedy of melting ice cream on the sidewalk is not ready for adulthood. Your snowflake will suffer worse than an ice cream cone mishap in life. They may have already by drawing overprotective parents.

Buy yourself an ice cream cone. Buy your kids ice cream cones. Be an American. Enjoy all that life offers.

Posted on by rjonakait

No Public Defender Need Apply . . . (concluded)

          Republicans have attacked judicial nominees for having been public defenders, that is, for having defended poor people charged with crimes. These critics may be trying to raise a soft-on-crime banner, but they aren’t pledging fealty to the Constitution when they do so. These “conservatives” do not seem to know an important decision made by our Founders about defense counsel and our fundamental rights.

          You might take it for granted that those accused of crimes can have a lawyer to aid with their defense and assume that that right goes back to time immemorial, but when our country was formed, English law did not permit a defense counsel in criminal cases. It was not just that English law did not provide a lawyer for a person who could not hire one. Instead, those charged with felonies, even those facing execution, were forbidden from having an attorney.

          Our founders rejected those English restrictions. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which followed state constitutions that had already granted the right, guaranteed the right to a defense lawyer in criminal cases: “In all criminal prosecutions,” it states, “the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.”

          This was not some abstract right for the founders for they acted as those lawyers to defend unpopular clients charged with crimes. For example, there was this one future president….

          On March 5, 1770, while British soldiers were occupying Boston, a dispute erupted at the Custom House. The soldiers, led by Captain Thomas Preston, opened fire. Three Bostonians were instantly killed, and two others died soon afterwards. The event became known as the Boston Massacre.

          The soldiers were tried for murder in two separate trials. Captain Preston was prosecuted first, and the rest of the soldiers jointly tried later. With the defendants claiming self-defense as justification, Preston and five of the other soldiers were acquitted by juries, while two others were convicted only of manslaughter. 

          The lead counsel for the reviled defendants was John Adams—yes, that same John Adams who was our first vice-president and our second president. His defense did not stand in the way of these later political successes even if today some Republican senators would try to use his  advocacy to prevent him from serving in the federal government. Adams, however, was proud of his action. Three years after the trials, as the drums of the Revolution beat ever louder, Adams wrote that a “Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently.” The right to defense counsel that existed in Massachusetts had helped prevent that blot.

          John Adams was not the only lawyer of the founding generation to act as a defense counsel for the unpopular. Gulielma Sands lived in a New York City boarding house run by her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Catherine and Elias Ring. On December 22, 1799, Sands left that house never to return. On January 2, 1800, her body was fished out of the Manhattan Well. Newspapers flooded the town with rumors suggesting that fellow boarder, Levi Weeks, had killed her.

          Public titillation ran high and only a fraction of those seeking to attend the subsequent trial of Weeks got into the crowded courtroom. The case seemed simple but damning for Weeks. The prosecution maintained that he and Sands had become intimate. He had promised to marry her. People in the boardinghouse thought that the two had left the house together on December 22 for their marriage. Weeks returned later that evening, however, and claimed not to have been with her. A few days later, a boy found Sands’s muff in the Manhattan Well, and on January 2 her body was recovered. Doctors said that she had been strangled before being thrown into the well, and Weeks had intimated that her body was there before that fact was publicly known.

          The defense attorneys brilliantly shredded every part of the prosecution case, and Weeks was acquitted by a jury after five minutes of deliberations despite the publicity against him. The acquittal, however, did not return his standing in New York. He remained despised as a seducer and murderer and soon left for Mississippi.

          While the accused did not recover his reputation, the defense of this unpopular person did not tarnish his lawyers. People may have had many negative thoughts today and back then about Aaron Burr, soon to be vice-president, and Alexander Hamilton, but none stem from their defense of Levi Weeks. (Although they were political enemies, Burr and Hamilton appeared in the same courtroom, sometimes on the same side as in the Weeks trial and sometimes as opponents, during nearly every important legal case in New York City after the Revolution.) A third lawyer, Brockholst Livingston, joined them at the defense table. His participation did not stop Thomas Jefferson from nominating him to the Supreme Court, where he served for seventeen years. (Don’t take all your history from musicals. Hamilton refers to the Weeks trial, but has it set at an incorrect time.)

          The founders guaranteed a right to counsel. The founders acted as defense counsel. Today they would be attacked for this.

          Conservatives, however, attack public defenders for another reason. Those defenders do not just represent those accused of crimes. They represent the poor, the outcast, the powerless, and that also makes the defenders dangerous to Republican senators who apparently think that only those who have served the rich and powerful should be in the government, and that is especially true for the Supreme Court.

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Baptists–American, South, and Right

          The Southern Baptist Convention gathered last month. It got a good bit of media attention because controversies are raging within the group over sex and race—volatile topics to say the least. The issues concern how the Baptists have handled sex abuse claims within its ranks and over the presentation of racial issues, particularly Critical Race Theory. A third issue–“sermongate”–has emerged over the “borrowing” without attribution by one prominent Southern Baptist minister of the sermons of other religious leaders.

The election of the head of the SBC was fiercely fought between a candidate labeled as conservative and another called a moderate with the moderate winning. “Moderate,” however, should be viewed in the context of current Southern Baptists. Elsewhere he might be seen as an extreme conservative. The controversies are especially important because Southern Baptist Churches have been losing parishioners, especially young adults. Southern Baptists are also concerned about waning political influence in a time when political power might mean choosing between conscience, religious principles, and alliance with Donald Trump, a person not well known for his conscience or religiosity.

Southern Baptists are an important institution because they are the largest American Protestant denomination, but I am especially interested in them because I was raised a Baptist. My family’s strain was that of the American Baptist Convention, which now has the name American Baptist Churches. (Earlier it was Northern Baptists.) There are many different versions of Baptists, but all practice adult, not infantile (ok, infant) baptism, and baptism not by merely the sprinkling of water but by full immersion of the believer.

          Baptists practice adult baptism by immersion because of the Bible. The Bible is divinely inspired, Baptists believe, and the ultimate authority for leading a Christian life. Baptists find no scriptural support for infant baptism. The biblical baptisms of Jesus by John the Baptist and one performed by Phillip were of adults, and there is nothing to indicate that John the Baptist’s other baptisms were not also of adults.

          According to Baptists infant baptism is a man-made ritual, and it is not Christian to use man’s rituals over those of the Bible. And while it takes some extrapolation to conclude that immersion is required, the Bible does say that Jesus and others came out of the water. Other passages also seem to support that the biblical baptism was by dunking, including the verse–I think it is in one of the Romans–that says baptism symbolizes life, death, and resurrection. Sprinkling or the thumb’s spreading of water on a forehead doesn’t really seem to be a good symbol of that.

          Baptists maintained that the only biblically-based rituals were adult baptism and the Lord’s Supper. So on the first Sunday of every month we had communion. Little cubes of Wonder Bread and shot glasses of Welch’s Grape Juice were passed around. (As frugal as the church and its congregants were, it might not have been Welch’s, but an off brand.) I liked communion, but it raised some of my first doubts. I was told to take the Bible literally, but our church also commanded teetotaling. When I asked why communion served no wine, I was told that when the Bible said “wine,” it meant grape juice. Hmmm, I thought to myself.

          Adult baptism and communion and the Bible. Any other ritual or source comes from man and not God. No genuflecting. No stations of the cross. No Book of Common Prayer. No required kneeling. No incense. No icons. No required head covering. No rosary. No “mandatory” church attendance. No prayers other than to the Trinity. No saints. (It still bothers me to hear “The Gospel According to St. Mark.” No, it is the Gospel according to Mark.)

          Baptists are not only separated from other denominations by the lack of ritual but also by the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The only churches Jesus and his apostles recognized were no larger than a congregation, and Baptists maintain that is what the Christian church should still be. Nothing is above an individual church. No one imposes a minister, priest, or vicar on a Baptist church; the congregation selects its leader. No bishops; no presbytery. Each congregation is supreme.

          American Baptists did not have saints, but there was a theological progenitor—Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island after he was “asked” to leave Puritan Massachusetts. He established the first American Baptist church in Providence. Williams should be considered one of our most important Founding Fathers, but he seems to be almost unknown today. When I used to walk by the Roger Williams Hotel on Madison and 31st Street in Manhattan, I wondered how many of my fellow passersby had any idea who Roger Williams was. The hotel was built on land leased from the neighboring Baptist church, and, I once heard, was owned by the American Baptist Church. Times change. The hotel was sold, and now has what seems like a brand-tested name, The Roger.

          Williams was a remarkable man. Unlike many of his American contemporaries of the early seventeenth century, he treated the Indians with respect maintaining that the Native’s land had to be purchased not just seized for the English to have lawful title to it. He produced a primer of the complex Algonquian language. (Bill Bryson in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language states that this work “is a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame.”) But Williams should be better known because so much of his thought, expressed in his voluminous writings, broke from conventional thinking and was the foundation for many of the bedrock principles of this country—sovereignty in the people, equality of people, liberty of individual conscience, and separation of church and state.

          Williams made the radical argument for his time that governments were not divinely inspired. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus pick a government or endow rulers with authority. Instead, Williams contended, sovereignty is with the people. Just as people come together and join with God to form a church and then pick its ministers, the people come together to form a government and grant authority to its rulers.

          This led Williams to reject the common notion of his time that the state must enforce God’s laws to prevent religious errors. Instead, since the state gets its powers from the people, government is invested with all the errors of the people. Any attempt to enforce religion by the state will always be error-filled and will, in essence, be an attempt for people to have sovereignty over God. Thus, long before Jefferson, Williams called for a “wall of separation” between church and state, a wall he called for to protect not the state, but religion. He believed that religion always suffered when it was protected or required by the state. For Williams, the church is sheltered by spiritual weapons and harmed by government efforts to enforce religion. God makes Christians, not a government. When religion and politics are mixed, the result is not true religion, but politics.

          For Williams, the progenitor of American Baptists, religion was a personal thing. A person’s conscience is God’s line of communication to the individual. Because humans are imperfect, they might be wrong about what conscience demands, but since conscience comes from God, it is a sin for a person to act contrary to her conscience, even a mistaken one. If I (or the state or a religious leader) forces you to act in opposition to your conscience, I am forcing you to sin, and by forcing you to sin, I am sinning.

          In other words, all must be allowed to worship as their conscience dictates, and no one should be required to worship or support religious practices against his conscience. Jesus did not force or coerce anyone to God. Man, then, can’t force anyone to faith.

          A mistaken conscience can be corrected only by persuasion, not by force or coercion. An appeal to conscience, for Williams, required the related God-given ability of reasoning. Conscience demands proof, and proof comes from intellectual rigor. Proof has to satisfy reason or be from the Bible or from a writing that convinces an individual that it was divinely inspired. Thus, Williams rejected the Quakers who were led to Christ by a movement of an ill-defined spirit within the person. Such movement did not, could not, satisfy reason.

          These views led not just to liberty of conscience and toleration on religious matters, but on all subjects. And since Jesus did not indicate that one soul mattered more than another and that all individual consciences should be respected, it meant that society should treat all equally.

          (I have refreshed my understanding of Williams’s life and teachings primarily from Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund S. Morgan; Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry; and Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.)

These Baptist precepts have led me both to my religious sensibilities as a youth and to my political thinking as an adult. The religious and the American neatly coincided. Just as people come together with God to form a church, the people of America came together to form a country—“We the People . . .” Sovereignty does not belong to the authorities, but starts with ordinary individuals. Both the church and America are founded on freedom of conscience. Religion cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of individual reason and persuasion. In America, a political view cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of an individual decision.

(continued June 19)