Upon reflection, I said “six” because that was my earliest memory of learning the first bit about spending and holding on to money. Sure, I had learned about our coins, which were very useful in 1968 - a Hershey bar still cost a nickel and a quarter unlocked no end of possibilities - but I am fairly sure I had given no thought to fraught questions of saving money or blowing it.

My grandmother was, it must said, unusual. She had grown up in an affluent family with the rare and healthy habit of talking forthrightly about money, not in a bragging way but as a thoughtful exploration of a complicated and freighted subject. Perhaps as a result she became, according to lore, the only economics major in the class of 1922 at Vassar College.

Of course, back before Keynes and all those math-doing economists, “economics” was mostly political economy. My sense is that she read Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and all those other hip cats. I don’t think she drew a lot of graphs with curves.

Anyway, one day in 1968 we were together in line at a drug store, and I had a nickel burning a hole in my pocket. I was definitely going to spend that nickel on a chocolate bar. I made my move, grabbing the candy and handing the cashier the nickel.

My grandmother, who was a very sweet woman with a twinkle in her eye almost all the time, turned to me and said “A nickel is all a dollar can earn in a year.” That was it.

What?

I don’t recall asking her to elaborate, perhaps because I didn’t want to put my purchase at risk, but I remembered the moment.

Five years later I was in the 7th grade, now at Southeast Junior High in Iowa City. Somehow we all took a class called “Consumer Economics,” which on reflection probably ought to be reinstated. Mr. Embertsen,1 who also taught typing, would not have endorsed buying a private taxi for your burrito.

Anyway, one of the things we learned to do was to calculate simple interest, and since the point Mr. Embertsen wanted to make involved saving money, and since the interest rate paid on savings accounts at banks were capped at 5% by a very misguided regulation, it was literally the case that “a nickel [was] all a dollar [could] earn in a year,” at least in a bank account in 1973.2

My grandmother’s observation hit me like a thunderbolt. Suddenly it all made sense!

Like most kids in those years, even at age eleven I grubbed for money in countless ways: delivering papers, selling souveniers at Hawkeyes’ games, shoveling snow for the neighbors, and so forth. I had a modest allowance, but it did not come close to covering my need for comic books, going to movies, and buying war games. I had therefore reached the point that I would consider my purchases carefully, thinking about the work I would have to do to earn the money back. That is, I believe, how most responsible people think about spending well into adulthood, maybe their entire lives. How long do I have to work to afford this thing?

But if one thinks of money earning money, even at the rate of 5% a year, everything changes. Suddenly I thought about how much money I needed to earn the money I wanted to spend. At a 5% assumed return, that is an especially easy calculation - you need 20 times the money you are going to spend to earn it back. In a year.

Learning this lesson and taking it to heart early in life is incredibly powerful. I deliberated much more carefully over spending money, and began to save it. I could mentally calculate the interest I was earning per day on my savings, which of course came to pennies. At first.

To be fair, it also made me a fairly annoying person, insofar as I was something of a tightwad. Fortunately, my otherwise winning personality prevented me from alienating all my friends.

In addition to teaching thrift, my grandmother’s advice, framed as an observation about dollars earning nickels, opens the mind to the rest of the economy. It is the very essence of capitalism. Once one understands that capital must earn a return or it will flee or be destroyed, then the world of work makes sense. If it cultivates an interest in actively investing one’s savings, perhaps in a business or a rental property or the stock market, all the better for you and the rest of us. It forces you to think and act for the long term, and the more that people do that the better off we all are.3

My grandmother gave me many gifts, and this little lesson was but one of them. I do, however, wish that more people learned about nickels and dollars when they were six years old.

Appelbaum begins the piece with an anecdote about how he unwittingly said a completely normal thing and blew up an academic meeting convened to discuss what the “shared narrative” of the United States ought to be.

On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch.

In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division—but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name.1

Our first exercise, the facilitator explained, was intended to build trust—listing words or concepts that all Americans could endorse, even if our definitions might vary. He uncapped his marker and looked around expectantly. I sat there, surrounded by an uncomfortable silence, searching for a word so anodyne that no one could possibly object. I thought about the acute improbability of my own existence. One of my grandfathers was born to Greek immigrants from a village in the mountains above Sparta, the other to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Other ancestors had fled aboard the Mayflower from the persecution of Puritans in England, aboard a steamship from pogroms in Ukraine, aboard a schooner from Spanish repression in Cuba. Where else would a life like mine even be possible?

But my loyalty to this country is not merely biographical. I’ve traveled widely enough abroad to acquire real gratitude for the liberties that Americans enjoy, and for what its ideals have meant to those in other lands. I’ve also seen enough of the United States to be painfully aware of how often we fail to live up to those ideals at home. I knew that we were there to figure out how to reconcile those realities, but our common love for this country seemed like the right place to start.

“Patriotism,” I volunteered.

I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel….

Read the whole thing, although it isn’t uplifting. Appelbaum is not very optimistic that we will be able to arrive at a consensus narrative by conversation. The subtitle of his piece is gloomy: “Unable to agree on how to interpret the American story, the country’s schools, universities, and political institutions have stopped trying to tell it at all.”

That perhaps explains why some people on the right want to mandate a narrative via legislation or other coercive projects. That approach has several defects, one being it can only be done in states and localities with conservative majorities. Another is that political ideology in the teaching of history is what got us into this mess, and a countervailing political ideology - which has no chance of gaining real traction in the academy - is unlikely to get us out. More likely, it will polarize us even more, since we are no longer good at de-escalating stupid public arguments.

Don’t get me wrong - I am appalled by the weaponization of history. Don’t do it! And yet I am not optimistic that teachers and public school education policy people will stop doing it any time soon. Too many such people went into those careers because they wanted to promote certain political ends, such as “social justice,” and that leads them to telling American history in a way that makes it seem as though they don’t like our country very much. That Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been widely used in public schools is evidence for this.2

Not all teachers of history, probably not even most, are very political - I’ve encountered many exceptions, including in my family and among the listeners to my podcast. But enough teachers (as suggested by Appelbaum’s anecdote and the rest of his piece) are political that we are unlikely to persuade them to give up their purpose in life.

However, in doing the podcast for now more than 5 1/2 years I have also learned that many Americans are very interested in the national story and don’t want to be manipulated in the teaching of it. I get emails and online comments virtually every day to that effect. That The Rest is History podcast, which is only political to the most sensitive ears, is the 8th most popular podcast in all categories on Apple is better evidence.

In other words, a great many Americans are unhappy with the anti-American bent of much history pedagogy - the idea that an American educator would recoil at the word “patriotism” is appalling3 - but I also don’t think many of them would be happy with a “heritage” approach that whitewashes the ugly aspects of our past.

Most people who actually enjoy history and seek it out do not want it to be overtly political, from either right or left, because (among other reasons) all such history is manipulative and condescending by its nature, and people don’t like being manipulated and condescended to. (It is manipulative, in that it is trying to change your political opinions in the present; it is condescending, because it purports to tell you what you should believe about the past to have the approved politics today.)

We want to understand the good and the bad in our past, but we want it in its context and we do not want to be told what we ought to believe about it.

I’ve long thought that the credo of The History of the Americans reflects this reasonably well:

We believe there is dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, depravity, corruption, venality, inspiration, oppression, genius, defeat, and glory.

Everybody will have their quibbles with such a statement, but if you have a negative visceral reaction to that credo, whether from the left or right, you do not want to learn history. You want to gather facts to use them as weapons in your political arguments.

Now, obviously a credo, such as the one above, does not tell us what the “shared narrative” ought to be. It does not say whether it should emphasize oppression, glory, or anything else in the litany. Nor does it use the word “patriotic,” or suggest that we must love our country.

It merely calls for dignity. What is a dignified national story? One that does not express contempt, or scorn, but at some fundamental level conveys respect.

There is the old expression that “even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and kicked.”

Well, we all know the difference between criticism that that is meant to be constructive even if we sometimes feel stung by it, and criticism that is contemptuous. You know it when it happens in your family and, ideally, in your professional life.4 You can also see it in the teaching of history.

So, rather than starting with a contentious fight over establishing a national narrative, which I fear is doomed to be ammunition in the culture wars, my suggestion is that we start small, with a credo. Perhaps we can agree, maybe after some reordering of the words and such in my rough draft, that whatever the “narrative” we teach in our government schools, we should at least aspire for dignity, or perhaps even respect, in the telling of our national story. If so, I believe more Americans will become interested in learning our national history, and someday that might open a way toward a new shared understanding of our past.

There will, of course, be opponents of any credo that calls for dignity or respect in the telling of the national story. We should hear their arguments, if for no other reason than the debate will distinguish the kickers from the trippers.

The Council on Foreign Relations, an outfit that back in college I aspired to join when I briefly toyed with becoming an academic specializing in geopolitics, surveyed historians for the “ten best” U.S. Foreign Policy decisions1. They are, according to the collective - I use that term advisedly - wisdom of the polled historians, in order:

1. The Marshall Plan, 1948.

2. The Creation of the United Nations, 1945.

3. Treaty of Alliance with France, 1778.

4. The Louisiana Purchase, 1803.

5. The Lend-Lease Act, 1941.

6. The Creation of NATO, 1949.

7. The Creation of the Bretton Woods System, 1944.

8. Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, 1807.

9. Monroe Doctrine, 1823.

10. Handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962.

While I think some of the items on this list ought to be in the top ten - a couple are very dubious - the ordering of the list says a lot about the internationalist bent of historians of foreign policy. They love big organizations packed with internationalist diplomats, and are not much for foreign policy decisions that actually expanded American territory to the great benefit of all those Americans who live in that territory. Conspicuously missing are the Treaty of Paris of 1783 (which ended the American Revolution to our advantage), the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican War and added territory that became California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as major portions of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, and, of course, Seward’s Folly.

Had I been polled, my top ten list would have been as follows.

1. Treaty of Alliance with France. There is a very good argument, and it is impossible to prove wrong, that without the alliance with France, to which Spain was soon added, the American Revolution would have ended with many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence swinging from a gibbet. If so, “top ten lists of American foreign policy awesomeness” would not even exist.

2. Treaty of Paris. The genius of the treaty that ended the American Revolution is that our diplomats in its negotiation - Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay - were stone cold operators who basically cut a separate peace with Great Britain and left our allies, France and Spain, out on the cold. In so doing they opened the way to western expansion without any concern that Spain, for example, would have a big fort on the site of Chicago. It was a mean and harsh thing to do given that our independence probably would not have happened without France and Spain, but it paid off bigly.

3. Louisiana Purchase. Say no more. On this and the Treaty of Alliance with France I am fundamentally aligned with the CFR’s polled historians.

4. Annexation of Texas/Mexican War/Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. To save a slot, I’m willing to lump the confrontations with Mexico of the 1820s to 1840s into one big beautiful foreign policy bonanza. My picking bone with the CFR pollees is a simple one: If you’re OK with the Louisiana Purchase, and if you think it counts as a foreign policy decision, then you gotta be positively giddy over taking over more or less all of Mexico north of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of California. That was awesome, and a rare historical moment over which thoughtful Texans and Californians can agree.

5. Seward’s Folly: The Acquisition of Alaska from Russia (1867). Not to get lumped in with Sarah Palin or anything, but can you imagine how difficult the Cold War would have been if we hadn’t acquired Alaska? I’d love to hear any of these historians argue that “Seward’s Folly” wasn’t a game-changer. Seems like a huge miss.

6. The Lend-Lease Act. This was a bold decision, in which Franklin Roosevelt came up with a way to help the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and many lesser nations fight Nawzzis and such when our own isolationists were too numerous and influential to support our entry into the war on our initiative. It changed the shape of the postwar world, and therefore its impact on history was profound.

7. The Marshall Plan. Here’s how the CFR describes it:

From 1948 to 1951, the United States provided sixteen countries in Western Europe $13.2 billion in assistance—equivalent to roughly $180 billion today—to buy food and goods and to invest in their infrastructure and industry. The Marshall Plan revitalized postwar Europe, blunted Soviet influence in Western Europe, encouraged intra-European cooperation, and cemented the United States’ leadership of the transatlantic alliance. SHAFR Historians ranked the Marshall Plan as the best U.S. foreign-policy decision.

For those of you who are not much for foreign aid, I’ll say this: Without the Marshall Plan, there is a very good chance that the Soviet Union would have either taken over Western Europe or so profoundly subverted it - “Finlandized” was the perhaps unfair Cold War term back in the day - that the world would have looked very different for generations and not very pleasant for Americans. The Marshall Plan was incredibly creative, and tremendously effective. So effective, in fact, I’m a bit surprised J.D. Vance hasn’t demanded that Western Europe say “thank you” for it.

8. The Acquisition of Florida from Spain, 1819. In 1819 President John Quincy Adams negotiated the Adams–Onís Treaty with Spain, in which Spain conceded Florida (which was larger than the State of Florida today) and other disputed territory east and north of Texas. Florida was of great geopolitical significance, because it controls not only the Gulf but the Gulf Stream, which was critical during the age of sail.

9. The Creation of NATO. Whether or not one believes that today NATO has outlived its usefulness, it was a cornerstone of the long Cold War, and our European allies were absolutely critical players in that long, twilight struggle. I give the polled historians this one, albeit a bit lower.

10. The Creation of the United Nations. This one hurts, because I think the United Nations is not nearly so much to our advantage as it was during the Cold War, in part because it no longer does the bidding of a few Great Powers. It has become an incumbancy preservation society for some absolutely awful governments of countries that are not important enough to have any real influence on geopolitics, which is bad.2 However, even if one believes it has outlived its usefulness, for more than a generation it was central to American leadership of the containment of the Soviet Union, and the fact that the rest of the world had to conduct its business under the watchful eye of our spooks was no small benefit.

Careful readers will see that I agree with the polled historians on the first six of their top-ten, even if I do not rank them so highly. But what of the other four? Here I venture into dangerous territory, because I am quite sure that these historians know more than I do about every single one of the four moments I kick to the curb. However, in the spirit of Just Spitballing, herewith my rationale for cutting four of the alleged top ten from the team.

Bretton Woods. This was important for ushering in postwar prosperity, but it is not obvious to me that its institutions (including the IMF and the World Bank) have not also done a fair amount of damage in the world. I am not economist enough to know how the Bretton Woods balance sheet balances when taking into account its legacy in the 21st century, but the question seems close enough that I can’t imagine how the scholars rank it above, say, the acquisition of Alaska and the western United States.

Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves. I understand the moral argument for this law and its appeal to modern people, but I am not sure it had a big impact beyond the symbolic. Again, I’d need to do some deep reading on it, but I believe it is the case that by 1807 the American slave population was reproducing so rapidly that even many slaveholders wanted to ban the importation of slaves to increase the prices they would receive if they sold surplus slaves internally. The Act passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 113-5, which is consistent with the theory that much of its support was, fundamentally, protectionist.

The Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, which was an unenforceable pronouncement by James Monroe that European powers should not meddle in the Western Hemisphere, was famously violated routinely in the decades following its declaration. It came into its own in the 20th century when the United States was finally in a position to police the hemisphere, and has indeed been cited by many modern presidents, including Donald Trump. Yes, being able to cite a president’s pronouncement from 200 years ago has some mild propaganda value if we’re explaining why, say, the Chinese can’t run the Panama Canal, but that is it. Does anybody believe that we wouldn’t be acting the same way even if James Monroe had never doctrinized?

The Handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the most difficult of the CFR’s “top ten” for me to exclude, because in the moment the Kennedy Administration handled the crisis very well and if it had gone badly it might have started WWIII. However, the crisis - which involved the Soviet Union putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, a grave threat to the United States - was arguably catalyzed by our own famous blunder, the Bay of Pigs invasion and related pressure on Cuba. A secondary or tertiary cause may have been NATO’s placement of medium-range Jupiter missiles in Turkey, a similarly proximate threat. This is not to assign blame, but to observe that the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis was in effect the management of the downstream consequences of prior blunders by the Kennedy administration. Still, it was essential that the moment be handled perfectly, and on that basis I could be persuaded, over libations and cigars, to bump the creation of the United Nations in favor of the handling of the missile crisis.

There are obviously quite a few “also rans,” foreign policy decisions that might have made it in to a longer listicle. Off the top of my head, I would include the Reagan administration’s decision to ramp up defense spending and repeatedly demonstrate to the old and tired leaders of the Soviet Union that they could not possibly keep up with American economic and technical prowess. Since in my choices I obviously think that the acquisition of new territory for the United States is an important measure of historical significance3, one might plausibly claim that the Spanish-American War deserves a mention, insofar as we drove Spain out of our hemisphere and got Puerto Rico for our trouble. Unfortunately, we also got the Philippines, which was way more trouble than it was worth. On the same basis one might also include the subversion and annexation of Hawaii in 1893-1898, although I think we would have had tremendous influence over that kingdom in all events. It is, however, nice to be able to go there without a passport.

The polled historians, I suspect, excluded most of the territorial acquisitions I include because they think conquest and rank imperialism is icky, however well it may have worked out. How dare we go to war with Mexico and grab all that land! Yeah, well, there aren’t many people, even on the Berkeley faculty, who honestly believe that state would be better off if it were still governed from Mexico City.

Similarly, there is - understandably - no respect for the many Indian wars, which were certainly “foreign policy” and greatly benefited the United States at the expense of Indian nations, but nobody, or almost nobody, wants to come right out and say they were a “ten best” foreign policy moment.4 I know I don’t.

In any case, what do you think? Release the hounds in the comments!

If you are an unreconstructed partisan and make the grave error of hoping politics will provide meaning in your life (as opposed to considered policy preferences), then this post is not for you. You will find no affirmation here, only sympathy and best wishes for an eventual recovery.

If, however, you are a “double-hater,” and will vote for one party only to prevent the election of the other, and you therefore know that at some level the heretofore great boon of the franchise is now a curse - perhaps you will be voting for Senator in Texas - we are here to lift your burden. You should feel free to abstain, or vote for a third party, rather than voting for somebody marginally less awful. Arguably, it is your duty to do.

This is not to say that you should not show up and cast a ballot. You should. It is your duty as a citizen, of which a bit more below. But neither must you vote every line on that ballot, or for major party candidates on the lines you do vote. In every jurisdiction, there are many races with perfectly decent people with a mix of policy preferences that you ought to be able to live with, and you should vote for them.

There is the widespread view in our two-party “system” that in casting your ballot in any given race, failure to vote for one candidate is effectively voting for the other. The argument is essentially this: If A and B are detestable or unqualified (as is manifestly the case in the Texas Senate race)1, and if under duress to choose between only A and B you would vote for A on the basis that A is in some regard a “lesser evil,” or lower risk, than B, then any decision to vote for C or abstain is equivalent to voting for B. See, e.g., this piece, or around a grillion comments on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook pages.

In short, the “lesser evilists” claim that voting for a third party is “wasting” your vote because the collective action required to elect a third party candidate poses an insurmountable hurdle. It will never happen, hence the waste.

There are both philosophical and utilitarian reasons why this “lesser evil” calculus is just wrong. We will start with the utilitarian reasons, since they seem most persuasive to the despairing voters to whom we write this modest note.

The utilitarian argument against “lesser evil” voting

The utilitarian reason not to vote for the lesser evil is simply this: Your individual vote cannot, under any circumstances, affect the outcome of the election, so there is no reason not to vote for a candidate you actually like. Since this seems contrary to everything we might have learned from, er, politicians, our esteemed corporate media, and partisans concerned with turning out their base, we will take the argument from the ground up.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. Because of “the Big Sort” primarily and gerrymandering secondarily, most voters live in a decidedly “blue” or “red” district (or state in the case of statewide elections, including for president). If that is true for you, your vote cannot make a difference because almost all the time the outcome of the race in your district is effectively certain even before the voting begins. In the unlikely event your one-sided district or state is in play there’s also probably a national landslide or “realignment” going on at the same time. If your concern is national politics, if a red state or district goes blue or vice versa, it is almost certainly happening all over the country and your vote didn’t matter.

But what if you live in a “battleground” state or “purple” district? Sad to say, your individual vote still does not matter. There is no chance that a state, even the decisive marginal state, will be decided by your individual vote. And by no chance, we don’t mean a super-small highly improbable chance, we mean no chance.

So what about Florida 2000?

Florida 2000 is exactly the practical proof that the outcome of an election for a jurisdiction bigger than Dixville Notch, New Hampshire cannot turn on a single vote cast, and not only or even because the margin of Bush’s putative victory in Florida was by some indeterminate number bigger than one. The lesson of Florida, if we needed to learn it, is that there is a margin of error embedded in voting, and that there is no absolutely perfect counting of the results. Once an election is so close that it is within the margin of error, which is definitely more than one vote, political and judicial mechanisms kick in to determine the victor, who may or may not have received a plurality of votes cast and counted as such. Those political and judicial mechanisms are creatures of law and politics, and they do not necessarily arrive at the same answer as a theoretically perfect tabulation of ballots. Any individual vote, therefore, would never get to the point of significance at the margin, which is what matters.

But what about all those people who voted for Ralph Nader? Didn’t they cost Al Gore the presidency?

Lesser evilists of the left love bringing up Ralph Nader, who picked up more than 97,000 votes in Florida, presumably mostly from would-be Gore voters. (There were in fact no fewer than eight third-party candidates who collected more votes than the margin between Gore and Bush, but Nader and the Greens had by far the biggest tally among the also-rans.) Were not those third-party voters in some sense “responsible” for Bush’s election? Well, not individually. No one of them would have helped Gore. They only would have had an impact if they had acted collectively. But wait. Isn’t the collective action problem the big reason why a vote for a third party is “wasted”? You cannot magically erase the collective action problem in the case of Nader voters in 2000 and at the same time claim that it is an insurmountable obstacle for an otherwise credible third-party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, as, say, Gary Johnson was in 2016. So it remains the case that no individual voting for Ralph Nader tipped the election to George Bush, and you wouldn’t have either.

There is, therefore, no circumstance under which your vote can change the outcome of a presidential election, even if you happen to live in a swing state in a year when the national Electoral College majority comes down to a single state. Your vote also can’t change the outcome of a seat in the House of Representatives, or the United States Senate, or otherwise affect which party controls Congress. That should make you feel a lot better. You actually bear no responsibility and get none of the credit, depending on your point of view, and those “Don’t blame me I voted for [insert major party clown who lost]” stickers are just so much slop. But it does invite an interesting question…

Why bother to vote at all?

Philosophers, political scientists, and activists have written vast tracts on the question of voting, whether it is a right or a duty, that every vote is sacred (which nostrum, by now, you should have concluded is basically a religious claim rather than a statement of a vote’s real significance), and so forth. Our purpose is not to argue them all here, but to assert that among the many reasons for voting there is a dominant one: Voting is the act that gives democracy its legitimacy, and legitimacy is pretty much the only advantage that democracy has over other forms of government (there being no evidence that democracies are inherently less corrupt or more effective or efficient than than other systems). We believe our government is legitimate because we vote, and there is tremendous value in that. When you vote you help your country no matter whom you vote for, because win or lose you increase the legitimacy of the government that is eventually convened. And, it should be said, you as a citizen ratify that legitimacy by voting for someone you actually want to occupy the office in question, whether a major party nominee, a third party, or your cranky but potentially competent Uncle Fred. Otherwise, you are letting vested players in the system neutralize your sovereignty as a citizen.

Abstention, by the way, is fine to do as a deliberate act, rendered as such by showing up to vote in those races where you can find a candidate who is worth voting for. Abstention by repairing to a craft brewery on election day does not count.

(We should not pass this point without saying that politicians and activists who challenge or dilute the legitimacy of votes or elections with no real basis, such as Donald Trump for at least the last decade, Hillary Clinton and many Democrats after their debacle in 2016, or bitter partisans following the 2000 election, are hurting the country rather than helping it. Richard Nixon in 1960 was more concerned with “our democracy” than most of our political class and punditry today, and that is our fault for voting for the awful people that partisans and journalists, but I repeat myself, promote to us.)

Now that you are resolutely persuaded that your vote, as a factual matter, cannot change the outcome of any meaningful election but that your vote nonetheless matters, we should consider the philosophical or, rather, logical objection to lesser evilism.

I learned the logical objection to lesser evilism from Christopher Hitchens, who taught it to us in an essay written about the Clintons back in the fall of 1996, when leftier Democrats were to some degree in the position of traditional Republicans in the Trump era (insofar as Democrats then felt betrayed by Clinton’s center-right triangulations, and traditional Republicans now by Trump’s fiscal irresponsibility and disregard for American law and institutions). Apologies for the long quotation, but it makes for better reading than our poor effort to summarize it would do, partly because it begins with quoting George Orwell. Bold emphasis added.:

“Whenever A and B are in opposition to each other,” wrote George Orwell in 1945, in “Through a Glass, Rosily,” “anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B.” He added: “It is a tempting maneuver, and I have used it myself more than once, but it is dishonest.” Orwell lived and wrote in a period when the pressure on intellectuals to “take sides” was ostensibly much more palpable than it is now,2 and when with that pressure came a surreptitious invitation to moral blackmail: the element that tells thinking people that the less adventurous the use they make of their ratiocinative capacity, the better. When the big decision has already been taken, what need of paltry misgivings? Who desires to be called a wavering intellectual dilettante when grand enterprises are on foot, and when the engine of destiny has gone to all the trouble of revving itself up?

In our time, of course, the great question has become more banal. It is most commonly stated as the theory and practice of the “lesser evil.” And, as argued in its conventional form, it has become worn as smooth as a stone. Thus A will exhort B, how can you vote for Clinton when…(list of betrayals and depredations follows) and B replies, without the slightest rehearsal, do you suppose that the right wing (taxonomy of depredations and fell intentions ready to hand) would be preferable? And that’s the whole exchange. And not just in a nutshell either, since the amount of time and of mental effort expended is usually less than it has taken me to set it down. … Folded inside the “lesser evil” argument, there is a worthwhile confrontation waiting to be enacted. The smooth stone can become an effective projectile, to be employed with care by either antagonist.

If one divides the contending parties into the purists and rejectionists on the one hand, and the pragmatists and lesser-evilists on the other, one can discover at once that neither really means what they say. Out of respect for Orwell, and for the sake of sheer convenience, let us call these respective debaters A and B for now. A does not really maintain that it makes no difference which party wins the election. It must be agreed for one thing that no outcome is identical to any other. Nor does A usually like to argue that it would be better for “the other side” to win, because it is that “other side” that anchors the concept of “lesser evil” to begin with. … Thus, B starts with the advantage of being able to address A in pitying tones, as if A had a lesson still to learn from that great moral tutor, “the real world.” Yet B would never be caught arguing in favor of permanent one-party rule, in the real world or any other. One-party rule does not work in practice or in principle.3 Why, then, does B argue that it is always better for the Democratic party to win an election, whether congressional or presidential, and that it always has been better? If the “lesser evil” argument is not an axiom, it is nothing. It cannot be true only some of the time, without losing all or most of its force. Furthermore, surely B would generally scorn anyone whose vote was, so to speak, mortgaged in advance. How can you be an autonomous and free citizen if your franchise is pledged to one machine, without conditions, whatever happens in the course of the election or in the conduct of the argument?

In other words, “lesser evilists” are peddling a logical fallacy and are actually just unreconstructed partisans, which makes them narrowly oriented toward a result that benefits their tribe, rather than the legitimacy of the government to come. There is nothing wrong with that orientation, but it does mean that autonomous and free citizens need not, and ought not, pay lesser evilists any attention.

Where lesser-evilism has taken us

The legitimacy of American government seems as if it is in decline. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but among them is the idea that certain culturally influential or economically powerful interests have increased their stranglehold on the two major parties and alienated huge numbers of people, and (further) that the two major parties are the only device by which we may form a government. This alienation has led to the Sanders/Democratic Socialist insurgency in the Democratic Party, and the Trump revolution in the GOP.

Lesser-evil voting has helped take us to this sad place, because it confers greater legitimacy on the winners of elections than they otherwise earn or deserve. If you deplore our state of affairs, ask yourself whether casting your vote for the “lesser evil,” which cannot affect the outcome of the election, will have the unintended but real effect of increasing the legitimacy of the somewhat less awful winner and thereby strengthen the tendency of partisans to select awful people whose only virtue is that they can beat the other side.

If you are truly disgusted with many of the candidates of the duopoly parties, as I am, the only way in your capacity as a voter4 is to vote your conscience, and confer the legitimacy of the franchise only on leaders who have earned it, or at last have the prospect of doing so, and withhold your vote in elections where there is no such candidate. Otherwise, you are playing the game of the people who, deep down, believe in one party rule.5

I, for one, do not want to do that.

There are all sorts of reasons to oppose the trading of stocks by Members of Congress. Profiteering off “public service” is unseemly. It undermines respect for Congress, which certainly does not need any more respect-diminishment. It seems like a fraud on the market, which it can be if the information that drives such trades is truly non-public. It offends the sensibilities of our populist moment, another offense of the “Epstein Class.” These reasons and more make Congressional stock trading very unpopular with voters, and have put wind in the sales of those who would ban it, or regulate it more forcefully.

There are, however, a couple of good reasons for being wary of meaningful restrictions on Congressional stock trading. The first is that it will tend to deter the very people whom we - or at least I - want in Congress: Men and women who have been successful in the private sector, but are not yet so rich that they float above the concerns of most Americans. Even if such people can give up the trading of stock themselves, they almost always have spouses, and if those spouses have successful careers, especially in finance, a ban will make it impossible for such people to sit in Congress.

Second, we should want the information embedded in Congressional trades to get into the financial markets, because that will improve price discovery and make those markets more efficient. Right now, that information comes in much too slowly, because Members are required to report their trades within 45 days, which is a lifetime in the capital markets. All sorts of people can be trading for weeks blind to important information in the hands of Members of Congress. That is wasteful, and also undermines confidence.

Fortunately, we already have a system that could fix almost all of this. It allows for rapid public disclosure of stock trades, and it prohibits “short swing” trading. We just need to apply it to politicians.

Fast disclosure

Today, and for around 90 years, we have required executive officers and directors of publicly traded corporations to report trades in their own company’s securities to the SEC. The original requirement was for such trades to be reported within 10 days of the calendar month in which the trade occurred, but for years now corporate insiders have to report purchases and sales of their own company’s stock by the end of the second day after the trade occurred. It is not hard to do, what with computers and stuff.

The market therefore knows within two days whether corporate insiders are bullish or bearish on their own company’s stock. That is very useful to investors who are not insiders, and the price of a corporation’s stock rapidly adjusts to reflect that new information.

Of course, politicians might be privy to useful information concerning any public company, whether or not that information is legally “nonpublic,” or just obscure enough that few if any investors are likely to know about it. Therefore, I suggest that all Congressional stock trades be required to be filed on Form 4 (or perhaps a special version, Form 4C) by the end of the second trading day. That is a deadline we know it is possible to hit, because corporate America meets it every day, and it would get the relevant information into the market quickly, an important value that the SEC has promoted since its inception.

Finally, the penalty for a late-filing should be increased from $200 to $5000, accompanied by a mandatory press release2 from the relevant Congressional ethics committee noting the breach. I suspect avoiding the press release would be more motivating than the financial penalty, but both should be enough to keep people diligent.3

Ban “short swing” trading

Corporate insiders are not allowed to profit off of “short swing” trades, meaning purchases and sales4 of their company’s stock, in either order, within a six-month period. Neither should we allow Members to trade for short-term profit.

In the private sector, lawyers scan Form 4 filings to find short-swing profits (profits in trades in the corporation’s stock made less than six months apart), and if they see as much they can bring an action (or threaten to bring an action) that requires the insider to “disgorge” short-swing profits to the corporation. If they force such disgorgement, they get attorneys fees for having recovered those profits for the corporation’s shareholders.

My proposal is to deem American taxpayers the equivalent of “shareholders” for Congressional short-swing profit recovery, and allow the same private right of action. If a lawyer spots an alleged short-swing profit, he would have standing to bring a lawsuit against the Member (after making a demand with a prescribed opportunity to respond) to force the Member to disgorge short-swing profits to the United States Treasury. The Member would have to pay prescribed legal fees to the lawyer who brought and proved the claim, just as happens in the private sector now.

There you have it: Require Members (and, as noted, all other covered persons) to disclose their trades within 48 hours, and force them to disgorge “short-swing” profits to the taxpayers. Problem solved without unreasonably restricting the business affairs of Members or their families or requiring some deep factual inquiry into whether or not the Member has a “conflict,” as some of the current proposals for reform would require.

No doubt there are any number of ins and outs and what have yous that would need to be considered in the implementation of this proposal, including some spending on the SEC’s online database of filings. This Substack is, after all, “Just Spitballing!” However, adapting the system we already have to accelerate disclosure and flag short-swing profiteering seems like a more elegant solution than a ban or more complicated regulatory regime that would make it even harder to attract genuinely accomplished people into Congress.

Another reason was well-framed by a psychoanalyst I know (no, not in this case the wife of the pod), who told me that “people will do almost anything to resolve feelings of uncertainty and lack of control.”

Anxiety1 is, for my purpose in this post, fear of the future. If that fear is extremely short-term and fact-specific - “can I pay my rent this month?” or “will I survive this case of pancreatic cancer?” or “I’ll die if Iowa doesn’t beat Minnesota this afternoon” - there probably aren’t quick-fix helmet adjustments that will resolve your feelings.

If your non-clinical anxiety is of a more generalized and catastrophizing sort - “are we all going to die of climate change?” or “is the American republic incapable of recovering the civic norms that made us so successful?” or “will I ever be able to afford a house?” - you actually can reduce it with a helmet adjustment. I know, because I have.

I used to care a lot about politics. I knew all about state and federal politics, read all the stuff, talked about it a lot, and even wrote a fairly widely-read political blog (under a pen name) for almost ten years. I remember being very stressed during the long weeks in late 2000 when the presidential election was unresolved. You could say I was anxious about it.

Then at some point in my own middle age, I realized that virtually all predictions about the future, political or otherwise - which are, after all, the source of our “small a” anxiety - are wrong.

Even when they are directionally right, they are usually wrong in some material respect.

Yeah, there’s always some dude out there who predicted the thing that happened, and maybe even made money doing it. I respectfully submit that such people got lucky that one time. Among the grillions of predictions made every day, whether on cable TV or in tweets or in the trading of securities or commodites or crypto, a fair number are bound to be correct. If one predicts a lot whether in punditry or in the markets, one will get a subset of “a lot” correct. You will be correct at random, or just a hair better than random if you are uncommonly good at it, which by definition almost nobody is.

This can apply to very big things, such as wars. There’s a great piece (free link) in today’s Wall Street Journal about Ukraine’s surprising turn of fortune in its now long war with Russia, “How the War in Iran Helped Ukraine Go From Problem to Solution.”

Turns out, Ukraine has got cards.

Just last fall, Russia was inexorably advancing on the battlefield, money was running out and President Trump was pressing a peace deal on terms that favored Moscow.

Then, Trump’s war against Iran reshuffled the world. Drone warfare—the kind in which Ukraine has garnered four years of unmatched experience—went global with Iranian attacks throughout the Middle East. Instead of being seen as a problem to be solved, Ukraine became a sought-after solution—for Gulf monarchies, for European neighbors and increasingly for the U.S. military.

Point is, nobody in the entire world could have predicted this even 18 months ago. Sure, some people (including me) have long had the view that the United States should support Ukraine in part because its military was developing invaluable expertise about the modern battlefield, but that wasn’t a prediction so much as a stands-to-reason policy preference.

This was just one of many wrong catastrophizing predictions about the Ukraine war - that Russia would overrun the country in days or weeks, or that Putin might use nuclear weapons if Western powers supported Ukraine in the war, that Belarus might join the war on Russia’s side, and, oh, this:

I don’t believe any of these predictions was made in bad faith. Smart people who knew more than most2 said what they thought, they all stoked anxiety in somebody and drove a lot of clicks and contributions, and they were all wrong.

The problem is not confined to short-term geopolitical questions, but all of history. As you have heard me say many times, history teaches epistemic humility, the understanding and habit of thinking that we rarely if ever know what we do not know, especially about the future.

If history teaches anything, it is that the greatest and wisest and smartest among us were just wrong about an extraordinary number of things, whether they be outcomes on a battlefield or the durability of a particular moral or political judgment. Your results may vary, but among American presidents almost every one, even the great and wise (according to some people, not necessarily you!) blundered horrendously because they predicted the future incorrectly. What the hell was John Adams thinking with the Alien and Sedition Act, Wilson with the resegregation of the federal civil service, FDR when he interned Japanese-Americans, Ike when he authorized U2 surveillance over the Soviet Union just before a big summit, Nixon when he recorded himself obstructing justice, and Carter in letting the Shah of Iran into the country without evacuating the embassy first?

And don’t get me started on the Bay of Pigs, which had more smart people of both parties thinking an incredibly bad idea was a good one than almost anything else I can remember just sitting here spitballing.

But it wasn’t just presidents. How was it possible that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. got taken in by eugenics, or Napoleon thought invading Russia was not folly on stilts, or Neville Chamberlain believed he had negotiated peace with Hitler? And what about those anti-slavery framers of the constitution who believed that as an economic model it would die a natural death soon enough? Or the Plymouth colony hawks who thought it was a good idea to provoke the Narragansetts into joining King Philip? Or the priests in 17th century New Mexico who attacked the Puebloan kachina religion? (Those last two arcane examples will be familiar to fans of the History of the Americans Podcast!)

And don’t get me started on Nobel laureate Paul Krugman saying in 2008, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

These were all, or almost all, capable people in their chosen fields. They made bad decisions because they were wildly wrong in predicting the future.

Well, if such people were wrong in predicting the future and therefore made bad decisions, what about ordinary people? They predict badly all the time! What about people who bought a house on a zero-down loan in 2007, or backed up the truck to buy stocks in the summer of 1929, or even in 1966? Or who thought segregation by race made sense?

Know anybody who completely blew the choice of a spouse? The overwhelming majority of such people did so only after thinking about it carefully and in good faith.

The point is, none of us can predict the future with any confidence, whether the long-term consequences of a war, the future of the economy, the impact of a technology, or anything else that matters. And nobody has ever been able to do, including especially historians who go on television and make predictions based on some version of history repeating itself, which of course they would never actually say.

Well, if you can’t predict the future, and you know (now!) that nobody else can either with even a little reliability, why should you ever allow any pundit or politician to make you anxious about the future? They’re almost certainly wrong!

Knowing that everybody is almost always wrong does not make us feel better about something that in fact has already gone wrong - you do have to pay a lot more for gasoline and beef than was the case just a few months ago, and your rent is your rent - but we really have no clue whether we are on the brink of economic disaster or an epic boom, and never have known. Almost nobody anticipates either, and those very few who do become famous because of the fortunes they made.

Neither do we know whether the war on Iran will lead to World War III, result in long-term stability in the Middle East, or a diminution or enhancement of American power and influence. Even if you think the arrows point one way, remind yourself that you probably also believed at one point or another that Ukraine was going to get absorbed by Russia.

The only thing you know is that you do not know. That can either pour gasoline on your anxiety or reinforce your equanimity. That is your choice. I choose equanimity, and encourage you to do as well, even if you worry - as I still do - about the future of the world, my country, my family, and my stuff.

After all, a calm and emotionally stable person is far better prepared to handle what comes, whatever that unknown thing will be.

That is not the topic of this post, but I don’t like to pass through this nadir of mass transit, as I do at least 20 times a year, without expressing my opinion. So far I’m not influencing public policy, but as we’ve learned the Overton Window doesn’t budge until it moves bigly.

The topic of this post is the recent talking point among progressives that the problem with affluent Baby Boomers or billionaires or whomever is that they “hoard capital.” Here is a recent example that got a lot of traction, but you can find many more.

The charge that rich people or Boomers “hoard capital” has become so common that the people who throw the term around never explain themselves, at least not that I have found. For some people it brainlessly stands in for wealth inequality, which definitely exists. Others view capital accumulation as inherently exploitive, seemingly because they believe in the labor theory of value.1 Most, however, apparently believe that “hoarded” capital is somehow taken out of circulation. This post on X makes the point: “While millions face a cost-of-living crisis, these wealthy few hoard capital instead of creating jobs. The system is broken.”

Of course, with very few exceptions the wealth these people say is “hoarded” is actually invested. Even if the purported “hoarder” of the capital does not himself “create jobs” above the impact of his consumption, he does not stick it in a mattress.2 Most “hoarded capital” is invested in financial assets, which are the vehicles we use to provide capital for, you know, “creating jobs.” Now, it may be that a given wealthy person is not himself very good at “creating jobs.” I know several who aren’t. What does that person do? If he is willing to take risk for the possibility of high returns, he invests the money in vehicles that provide capital to new and speculative business ventures run by people who are good at “creating jobs.” We call this “venture capital.” If he is a bit risk averse, he invests the money in other private or public vehicles which provide capital for businesses that are somewhat more mature, but which nevertheless need money to grow and, er, “create jobs.” We call these vehicles “private equity” or “the stock market.”

If he is very risk averse, he buys government bonds, and thereby finances the government above and beyond its ability or inclination to raise taxes. Where would those taxes come from? First and foremost, before they are laundered through the paychecks of employees, they come from the people or enterprises which “create jobs.” If taxes were higher because risk averse capital hoarders weren’t buying government bonds, workers and job-creators alike would have less money for consumption or building up their own little capital hoard. You know, against the possibility that they might one day want to stop working.

The mere buying of government bonds also helps jobs creators indirectly. If such people didn’t buy government bonds, interest rates would be much higher. That would mean less capital at a higher price for people or corporations who “create jobs.”

In other words, so-called capital hoarders invest almost all of their capital, and by that means capital finds its way into the hands of people who will use it to “create jobs,” or who will use it to consume more, which in turn creates profits that turn into more capital which allows for more jobs.

None of this is to suggest that we ought not worry about the consequences of great financial inequality in our economy. Even most do-or-die capitalists would concede, at least when a bit in their cups, that at some point the concentration of capital into too few hands raises new risks, particularly around the perceived legitimacy of democratic governments. Fair enough. But there is no argument - none3 - that “hoarded” capital is not quickly shoved into the hands of people who have the talent, insight, and ambition to “create jobs.” That is what all those investment banks that leftists hate do. Indeed, there has probably never been a time in history when capital moved so quickly from people who cannot or do not put it to productive use to people who can and do.

In the writing of this, I was reminded of a lovely family moment from the spring of 1981, when I was a sophomore in college. My grandparents would go from New York to Sarasota for the winter, and they had a standing deal that they would buy air tickets for any grandchildren who wanted to visit. I went down for spring break, lugging along some assigned reading, The Marx-Engels Reader, which fittingly had a lurid red cover. This caught the attention of my grandmother, who had been by her own testimony the only economics major in her class (1922) at her college. At some point, while I was sitting out on their condo balcony reading about “estranged labor” or some such pointed-headed nonsense (I quickly learned I needed to take the course, “Radical Thought,” pass fail, but that is another story), my grandmother came out, sat down next to me with a concerned look, and said that while it was very nice that I was broadening my horizons, she wanted to have a conversation about the “importance of accumulating capital.”

She was too polite and too capitalist to say “hoarding,” but that is what she meant. The important thing was that it was always to be invested - she lived well within her means her entire life. Not surprisingly, another famous expression of hers was “a nickel is all a dollar can earn in a year.”

Exactly, especially when adjusted for inflation.

The “exclusion crisis” of 1679-81 (covered by the episode linked above) and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 (forthcoming) to a great degree were shaped by an explosion in the printing of pamphlets and the proliferation of coffeehouses in London in the 1670s. It was a pivotal moment in the history of free speech, less driven by philosophy than technology, and if one looks at it in the right light it resembles the debate we are having today about free speech in our own politics.

In reading Michael Barone’s book Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers to prepare for the next episode I came across a passage that described the moment so well I thought it worth excerpting, with a bit of commentary. The block quotes are from Barone’s book, with the exception of my interjections in bold.

As debate raged in the Commons and the Lords in May 1679 [over the question of excluding James, the Duke of York, from the line of succession because he was Catholic], something else happened, quietly, that would have noisy consequences: the Licensing Act of 1662 expired. The printing press, controlled by royal prerogative until 1640, had been a potent means of disseminating ideas in the heady days of the Civil War and Cromwellian rule. Charles II got first the House of Lords and then the Commons to limit it by the Licensing Act of 1662, but it extended only until the end of the Cavalier Parliament, and even before that it was never entirely effective.

The “Cavalier Parliament” was the heavily royalist Parliament that restored the Stuarts to the throne after the collapse of the Commonwealth of England. It sat for 18 years, but finally Charles II called new elections in the hope of securing a more pliant legislature. More on that in this episode.

William of Orange [the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and down the line of succession for the English throne], familiar with the free press of the Netherlands and the need to influence public opinion in a country with representative government, tried to influence English opinion against the Third [Anglo-Dutch] War in 1672 and 1673, and achieved considerable success with his agent Peter du Moulin’s England’s Appeal from the Private Cabal at Whitehall to the Great Council of the Nation. In 1677 [the Earl of] Shaftsbury’s agents - Shaftsbury was a leader of the opposition to James’ succession - were able to distribute pamphlets, Some Considerations Upon the Question whether the Parliament is dissolved and The Grand Question concern the prorogation of this Parliament. The official in charge of suppressing unlicensed pamphlets, Sir Roger L’Estrange, unable to suppress them, was careful to make sure that A Pacquet of Advices and Animadversions sent from London to the Men of Shaftesbury, sponsored by the government, could circulate unmolested. “Printed vindication or rejoinder, rather than censorship,” writes historian Mark Knights, “was recognized as the best means of countering an opposing viewpoint - a recognition that the mind could not be forced in politics any more than in religion.”

Pay close attention to that last bit.

This has been the American opinion since the colonial era (with some famous ebbing and flowing), but in the last decade or so our own consensus has been breaking down. There is a growing view, starting with elites on the left who wanted to enforce uniformity of opinion on such topics as racial diversity, norms of gender transition, climate change, and the policy responses to Covid-19, and then spreading to populists on the right hoping to chill cultural institutions such as public schools, universities, museums, and the performing arts1, that censorship may in fact be the answer. That royalists who shaped our own legal institutions thought differently almost 350 years ago suggests, at a minimum, that normative questions are rarely settled forever. There is no arc of history.

None of this meant that the elites of late 17th century England did not recognize that ideas could be dangerous.

“O Printing!” wrote Andrew Marvell, poet and member of Parliament. “How thou has disturbed the Peace of Mankind! That Lead, when moulded into Bullets, is not so mortal as when founded into Letters.” The political pamphlet, which would be such a powerful instrument in the making of the American Revolution, was a similarly powerful instrument in England a hundred years before.

It wasn’t merely the technology of the press, however, that was hard to suppress, but the political culture of the people.

England was too free and footloose a society for any government to impose conformity or suppress disagreement, and London, where perhaps 70 percent of adult males were literate, was too concentrated and too open to prevent people from congregating and talking. It was a giant city for its time, with nearly 500,000 people in a country of 5 million, and was probably already the largest city in Europe. But all these people were packed into a small area, along the Thames from a point just east of the Tower west through the burgeoning West End north of St. James’s Park, and south to Whitehall Palace and Westminster. In this small area it was easy for people to bump into each other. “The diaries of Pepys, Evelyn, Reresby and Hooke reveal the constant visits, the bumping into people at court and on the [Royal] Exchange, in the park or at a theater, the shared meals and coach journeys, the meeting and the mingling and the endless talk.” They could meet members of the Lords and Commons in the law courts of Westminster Hall and at the nearby stalls where refreshments were sold. They met in taverns and increasingly at a new venue, the coffeehouse. “A total of 29 different Whig clubs - political parties with the nicknames “Whig” and “Tory” came into existance at this time - have been found in London alone during the Exclusion crisis,” writes the historian Tim Harris. …

The first coffeehouse had been opened in Holborn in 1650; by 1663 there were 82 in London and, by 1700, 2000. London “was the metropolis of the nation: it was the linchpin of the networks through which information, ideas and culture were disseminated. London was the great talking shop of Restoration England, and it was in the buzz of the coffeehouses that deals were done, information exchanged, gossip spread and subversive thoughts unleashed.” Typically they contained the London Gazette, the twice-weekly government publication, but other journals as well, including the Amsterdam Gazette even while Britain was at war with the United Provinces, and letters from soldiers and sailors telling of the course of battle.

Coffeehouses were licensed after 1673, but this did not enable the government to control the printed material they disseminated; efforts by [the Earl of] Danby [the chief minister to Charles II] in 1675 and 1676 to persuade coffeehouse proprietors to suppress antigovernment pamphlets failed. As one supporter of the king wrote during the controversies of 1679-81, “[W]e have the Coffee House Tables continually spread with the noisome Excrements of diseased and laxative Scribblers.” In response the government began printing publications of its own. The coffeehouses in time became places where men did business - … stockbrokers traded shares at coffeehouses, while Edward Lloyd started underwriting insurance at his coffeehouise in 1700 - but in the late 1670s and early 1680s the coffeehosues were more important as political meeting places and as a form of mass media. So knowledge of the charges made in the Popish Plot [a manufactured conspiracy theory intended to stoke anti-Catholic sentiment], theoretically limited to the king, his ministers, and members of Parliament, now spread through the coffeehouses to London and from there out in the countryside. And with the expiration of the Licensing Act, there were even fewer limits on the printed word. As the historian John Kenyon writes, after 1679 the government “never felt strong enough to prohibit any publication that did not libel the King or his immediate family, and only the most daring of those.”

“The government never felt strong enough.” It should always be so.

Now, as then, the true guardian of freedom of speech is the widespread acceptance of the norm that government may not suppress it. Technology may make speech more difficult to suppress - the printing press, the photocopier, email and World Wide Web are all examples - or easier - see, e.g., the Biden administration’s unlawful jawboning of social media companies (especially Twitter and Facebook) during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the end, whether in London in 1679 or on X or Facebook in 2021, it is the norms and traditions of the people that make it impossible for the government to succeed in suppressing speech.

Protect those norms and traditions.

The plan is to share and excerpt what I learn as I pick my way through The Citizen and the Republic (TCATR). My purpose is not to imply that we ought to teach civics this way now (although sometimes we should) or revert to the policies and beliefs of 100 years ago, but to understand what that generation was taught. The “Old School Civics” posts are numbered, so you should be able to find the earlier ones on my page.

As always, there is good stuff in the footnotes!]

Whether primaries for the purpose of choosing the candidates of the major parties promote extremism, or at least create an incentive against moderation, is widely debated among both pundits and academics who study the question. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I tend to think they have done recently, especially among Republicans, but whether that can be proved to the satisfaction of a professor of political science is an open question.

Regardless, the debate about party nominating procedures is not quite age old, but certainly goes back more than a century. Back in 1918, The Citizen and the Republic taught high schoolers the origins of party primaries, the reasons for regularizing them into elections, and the arguments for and against them. In some respects, the arguments pro and con have not much changed, and in others we have resolved old problems with useful reforms, some of which have led to new problems, as solutions always do.

As usual, bold emphasis is in the original, and italicized emphasis is added by your Substacker.

Early in the life of political parties the word primary was used to indicate the group of voters, or the meeting of such voters, who nominated the candidates for office. It may have referred merely to a small caucus, or informal meeting of party managers or interested voters.1 Sometimes in local politics a mass meeting of party voters in the town or county was called for nominating a candidate or a ticket, or to appoint delegates to some party convention, and everybody was entitled to come who claimed membership in the party. Usually delegates to district and State conventions of the party were chosen by these irregular local primaries or causes or mass meetings. If a great many were present at the primary, or meeting, and there were contests or divisions among the party members, some kind of formal voting was permitted. Someone passed a hat for the “ballots” and a committee was appointed to count out the votes. But there was a good chance to “stuff” the hat and to commit fraud in the count. Everything depended on the chairman or the committees he appointed.

Sometimes the primaries would be called at inconvenient times and places, in saloons2 or livery stables, or in rooms which could not hold half the voters, so that many who came could not get in. Sometimes the party managers failed to give due public notice of the primary, and “snap primaries” were held, delegates were appointed and a ticket nominated before the people knew anything about it. Or, a group of men in a back room in secret conclave would “set things up” and the loyal party voter when he came to the open primary found that there had already been a primary - the bosses and the rings had arranged his ticket for him. These abuses and practices were especially prevalent in large cities where the people could not know one another. The consequence was that the bosses and their henchmen virtually directed the nominations. The party meeting, or “primary,” was in no way directed by law. The law took no notice of the party or its conduct, or the way in which its members brought out its ticket of candidates. Only the final election was regulated by law. But it was soon to be seen that the nomination was as important as the election.

So it was that a movement began to regulate primaries, whether in the form of primary elections, as we use the term today, or caucuses.

In consequence of these demands and conditions most of the States have passed primary election aws to regulate the making of nominations. When and how and where shall a primary election be called? Who shall conduct it? Who may take part in it? How shall its expenses by met? How shall the ballot be prepared and what candidates’ names may appear thereon? Shall the regular election laws apply to its conduct and what penalties shall be imposes for law violation? All such matters must be attended to by the States.

People who pay even a little attention to primaries today will recognize that these elements are essentially standardized across their State, which is good.

The most interesting commentary from TCATR is in its enumeration of the “essential features in party primaries,” which include answers to all those questions above, plus “a good registration law … so that illegal or fraudulent voting may be prevented.” Concern about the dilution of legitimate votes by unlawful voters was a thing among academics teaching good government in 1918, as it is now only on the American right.3

More curiously to we moderns, Professors Woodburn and Moran were absolutely opposed to tactical crossover voting by partisans.

The party affiliation or preferfence of all voters should be ascertained and recorded. No opponent of a party should be allowed to vote in its primary. The law should protect a party from its enemies who may seek to weaken or disrupt it.

The test of party membership or party fealty is a difficult matter in framing primary election laws. Sometimes a pledge is required of the voter that he will support the ticket nominated, or a statement that he voted the party ticket, or most of it, in the last election. Many independent voters cannot make such pledges or statements and do not care to announce their party allegiance. Party officers generally wish to be liberal in admitting the independent element within the party, and experience has shown that it is not the part of party wisdom to apply hard party tests or cast-iron pledges.4 A mere declaration of party preference may be sufficient. Self-respecting and honorable men will not attempt to vote in the primary of a party whose principles and policies they are unwilling to promote, and the unscrupulous will do so in the face of pledges.5 If a man wishes to be so idependent as not to acknowledge that he has any party allegiance at all, he may deny himself the privilege of taking part in a primary and merely confine himself to choosing between the parties after the nominations are made.

The authors close with a list of objections to the primary system, including:

1. Primaries promote election corruption, on the theory that “until our elections can be reformed we ought not have any more of them.” This seems a bit defeatist to me, and it is also a reminder that whatever our contemporary concerns about corruption in “our democracy,” they were pervasive a century ago.

2. Primaries allow for a “multiplicity of candidates to the confusion of the voters, and [are] likely to lead to a minority nomination.” Some of these scenarios have been dealt with by run-off elections and such. In general, this is a version of the old concern that voters are not particularly attentive, and increasing the choices in front of them, even if theoretically more “democratic,” does not improve the resulting governance. The authors do not take this to its logical end, which is that if voters cannot be trusted to pick effective leaders from a long list, maybe they can’t from a short list either.

The other objections remain with us now, with no real solution. They include the claim that primary elections weaken the parties in the general election because they promote factionalism, an idea that surely persists to this day. Candidates who face bruising primary challenges usually have a tougher road in the general election.6

Finally, “it is claimed that where the primary nominating method is applied to a whole State for State offices the expense of becoming a winning candidate is so great that only rich men may hope to succeed.” For most of my life we would have added “or people who are friends with rich men,” but that has now changed with millions of small dollar contributions driven by social media engagement, and national interest in local campaigns. The cure may not be a net improvement over the disease, but that is best left to another essay.

Extremism was not, apparently, one of the things we worried about, as least concerning party nominating processes, in 1918. There was indeed plenty of extremism in American politics then - more than now, for sure - but it operated outside or parallel to elective politics more than fought out between the parties. That is also a topic for another day.

This is why we desperately need to reinvest in civic education, right? I feel really strongly about that. I think we need to make sure that every graduating high school senior can take the same naturalization exam that new citizens do.

Fortunately, Avlon did not say my whole idea, leaving me some space to elaborate without being an absolute lightweight copycat.

Back in September, the Trump administration announced “First Changes to Naturalization Test in Multi-Step Overhaul of American Citizenship Standards,” which was positioned by the press in the most negative possible light (worst example here, which makes no sense whatsoever). Notwithstanding a brief spate of stories, there was relatively little discussion on social media and my sense is that even “very online” partisans haven’t much focused on it.

The test was not obviously made any more difficult, at least yet. Under the old version, you had to study 100 questions and answers. An applicant would then be given ten of those questions, and have to get six of them correct to pass. Now there are still 100 questions, and you have to get 12 out of 20 correct, also a 60% passing score. Several stories have positioned this as “harder,” but I’m not statistician enough to see how it is harder.

The new questions are not obviously more difficult than the old questions - both are almost laughably easy to any reasonably educated American, and certainly anyone who reads Substack posts. Perhaps more difficult questions are coming in a subsequent revision. I hope so. In a future post I’ll propose some improvements, which are obviously needed. See, e.g.:

Regardless, I agree with Avlon’s point about asking American students to take the same naturalization test that we require of immigrants.

I would not make a high school diploma turn on passing the naturalization test. That opens a very smelly can of worms - the federal government setting specific graduation requirements for public school students. I think that is a bad idea that could go all sorts of ugly places. Imagine the politician you most deplore with that power, and perhaps you’ll see it my way.

However, I (obviously) think it should be national policy to reinvigorate the teaching of civics. It was a big mistake to all but abandon it, and we’ve paid the price in the degradation of our national discourse and quality of our political leadership.

If I were making these decisions in the Trump administration, I’d propose simply requiring that public schools demonstrate that 75% of their graduating seniors have passed the naturalization test in order to receive any federal funds.

Of course, give schools a few years to catch up. Suggest they administer the test to 10th graders, and then re-administer it to those who fail it the next two years. Otherwise, do not dictate how to teach civics, or whether the diploma should hinge on it. That would do nothing more than provoke the usual thermostatic reaction, with the inevitable counterproductive result in the end. Tie a reasonably high pass rate to federal funds, however, and public schools will have all the incentive they need to make sure their students are at least up to the standard we demand of new citizens.

That, it seems to me, is something that most Americans who aren’t professors of education would endorse.

Until next time.

The plan is to share and excerpt what I learn as I pick my way through The Citizen and the Republic (TCATR). My purpose is not to imply that we ought to teach civics this way now (although sometimes we should) or revert to the policies and beliefs of 100 years ago, but to understand what that generation was taught. The “Old School Civics” posts are numbered, so you should be able to find the earlier ones on my page.

As always, there is good stuff in the footnotes!]

I am in India with my college travel pals, and have made an executive decision to refrain from “Minneapolis discourse,” insofar as I have nothing to add, no edge to bring to the debate, and getting into it will discombobulate my chakra. Nobody, least of all me, needs that.

TCATR (remember, published in 1918 for high school students) does have a section on immigration in a chapter on “present day problems in a democracy,” which I happened to photocopy and have along with me here in the Land of Bharata.1 It is interesting for how much has changed, and how much has not. One of the things that is eerily similar today is that in 1918 immigration had surged in the last couple of decades. While the percentage of the US population that was born in a foreign country was not as high as in 2024 (at 14-15 percent about the highest level ever), it was close - about 13% - and as we shall see the politics of immigration were shifting in response.2

As usual, bold emphasis is in the original, and italicized emphasis is added by your Substacker.

Since 1787 we have received into this country fully of thirty millions of people from foreign countries.3 In recent years immigrants have come at the rate of more than a million a year. The problem has been to take in these people from foreign lands, many of them speaking a different language, most of them of different modes of life from our own, to assimilate them, and make them true and patriotic American citizens.

This of course remains central to our discourse today, except that many, especially on the political left, believe either that (i) we ought not try “to make them true and patriotic American citizens,” or (ii) that it will happen automatically, simply by immersion. One of my most right-inflected opinions (although I do not understand why it is right-inflected) is that both of these ideas hurt our civic society.

“The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States shall think proper to admit” was not to be interfered with by any Congress prior to 1808. Since that date Congress has had full control of immigration.

The authors here cite the Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 9, and note that “this section of the Constitution applied chiefly to the foreign slave trade, but immigration was also included.” In other words, Congressional authority to control immigration into the United States sprang into existence derivative of its authority to ban the importation of enslaved people.

I am a little surprised that I have never seen that factoid bandied about ignorantly on social media. Go for it. Now may be your big chance. Just link this post!

The problem has been a subject of controversy for over a hundred years. There was an anti-alien movement in 1798, when the notorious Alien Law was passed.4 The Nativist Movement and the “Know-nothing” movement in the middle of the last century are other illustrations. Generally our policy has been one of liberality and hospitality toward the immigrants, keeping “the latch-string out,” or an open door to all comers. America is looked upon as a land of freedom, an asylum for the poor and oppressed of other lands, as “another name for opportunity,” where all may come, however poor, and find a chance to get on in the world. All the people who ever came to America (except the slaves) were immigrants and nearly all came for the same reason — namely, to better their condition in life and to find their children a better opportunity than their parents had. The descendants of the early comers have been disposed to be generous toward the later comers.

This has been the dominant view during my lifetime until roughly 2010, when the global financial crisis called into question many prevailing opinions.

Immigration increases in prosperous times and decreases in hard times, which shows that it is controlled by economic and industrial forces, if left unregulated by statute law. In 1864, in harmony with our liberal policy, Congress organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. It was not until 1882 that immigration restrictions began. In that year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and provided for the inspection of immigrants and for the deportation of the undesirables - the idiots, the insane, convicts, and paupers liable to become a public charge. All these were to be sent back at the expense of the steamship company bringing them over. In 1885 the Alien Contract Labor Law was passed by Congress to prohibit corporations from bringing over laborers under contract. The Immigration Act of 1910 provided a head tax of four dollars5 upon every immigrant, and it forbade the admission (in addition to the classes already mentioned) of epileptics, persons suffering from tuberculosis or other dangerous contagious diseases, polygamists, anarchists, immoral women, children under sixteen unaccompanied by their parents, and all Chinese, except Chinese students, merchants, professional men, and employees of exhibits or expositions.

Although we express them differently, most of these restrictions are still in force today, including particularly the ban on convicts and immigrants with tuberculosis. We have now narrowed the mental health exclusion - “the idiots, the insane” - to conditions that are linked to a behavior that could be harmful to others. In principle we still confirm that new immigrants have sufficient means and earnings capacity, including in sponsoring families, to stay off public support. While we do not exclude “anarchists” per se or anybody else because of a mere opinion,6 affiliation with a “terrorist organization” or a history of spying or sabotage will keep you out. Acts, not speech or opinions, are what matter today. Presumably it is obvious that we no longer single out Chinese or “immoral women” for exclusion.

Note as well the exceptional Chinese that we were still willing to admit, even in the late 19th century: “Chinese students, merchants, professional men, and employees of exhibits or expositions.” Our immigration policy, even when explicitly racist, has always allowed for exceptions that satisfied some or another economic interest. Bigotry has its own limits, which are often enforced by self-interested people.

Now let’s go to the rationale for the old restrictions. As always, look past the old fashioned language into the arguments being made, and consider whether they have contamporaneous analogues.

These provisions are sanitary measures designed to protect our country from crime and disease, or to prevent the lowering of the standard of living among American laboring men, or to prevent the coming of a class of people deemed incapable of assimilation, like the Chinese. A medical examination is made of all aliens at the port of arrival, the cost being paid for by the head tax of four dollars, which goes to the “Immigration Fund.” Less than one and a half percent of the immigrants examined are rejected and returned. If an immigrant is denied admission he may appeal to a board of inquiry. If this board decides against him he may appeal to the General Commission of Immigration.

The italicized arguments are still deployed today, in almost precisely the same language, by people who would have us assess immigrants on their own merits. Regarding immigrant competition in the labor market, the concern as expressed by the authors of TCATR was the lowering of the standard of living of laboring men, hence the rejection of, er, idiots. They were not suggesting that we should exclude potential college professors.

Note also the provision for appeals - due process mattered then, as now, and as it always should.

Within the last quarter of a century there has been a rising demand for more effective restriction on immigration. Three restrictive acts have been passed in Congress and have been vetoed by three successive Presidents.7 In February 1917, the Burnett Immigration Bill was passed by Congress over President Wilson’s veto. This act strengthens and extends the exclusion of aliens. It increases the head tax from $4.00 to $8.00; it imposes heavier penalties on steamship companies for bringing to America persons whom the law seeks to exclude;8 its provisions are more rigid as to contract labor; and it imposes the “literacy test” which requires all immigrants over 16 years of age (not blind or dumb) to be able to read in some language. This is the provision which makes large exclusions easy. This seems like a penalty imposed on the immigrant, not for any fault but for lack of opportunity in the country from which he came. The reading tests are to be taken from the Bible, as the only book which is printed in virtually every tongue on earth.

At the risk of alienating more than a few of you, I have no problem imposing a literacy test on adult immigrants. That is more than we ask of our own citizens, but ought not immigration raise us up, on average? If not, what would be the point?

Finally, professors Woodburn and Moran summarize the arguments in favor of restricting immigration back in 1918.

There have been three reasons for demanding restriction:

1. The desire to protect the labor market from being overcrowded. Organizations of labor have been urging restriction to save them from hard competition. Most of the immigrants are unskilled laborers who crowd into city occupations, or crowd the ranks of common labor in manufacturing, mining, building, with disastrous effect on American unskilled labor.

This is, of course, an argument that gained widespread currency on the populist right in recent years. As recently as 20 years ago, left-wing politicians (including Barack Obama as Senator) made this argument, but they have almost entirely stopped doing so. This is one of the most curious political flips in recent years.

Very few of them go to farms.

This, of course, has changed dramatically, since agriculture has been a famous source of jobs for poorer immigrants almost my entire life.9

2. The great increase of immigration in recent years. A million or more of new immigrants every year are more than we can reasonably be expected to assimilate and train for citizenship. When our land was unsettled we had need of and plenty of room for the immigrants; the restrictionists say we do not need them now when the pressure of population has begun to be felt.

Now for the hot button….

3. The change in the character of the immigration. Formerly the immigrants came from Germany, England, Ireland, Scandinavia, and the north of Europe. Now over eighty percent of the immigrants came fromsouthern and eastern Europe or western Asia - Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Russian Jews, Hungarians, Slovaks, Hunyaks,10 Poles, Croations, and others not allied to us in race or stock or language. This tends to make our people heterogeneous and conglomerate, without the national unity that came with the original and more voluntary settlers of our earlier years.

This paragraph would perhaps resonate with the more extreme nativists online today, although they would not doubt be a bit rattled by the inclusion of Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Croations, and others who are in their club in 2026. That we assimilated those groups and they are manifestly (in the main) patriotic Americans ought to make us at least a little reluctant to leap to a similar conclusion about newer groups, even if from the southern hemisphere.

If I were a new nativist, which I am not, I would argue that those groups succeeded, notwithstanding fears at the time, for two reasons. First, in the 20th century we still made a specific effort to assimilate new immigrants, and we no longer do to nearly the same degree (with many on the left opposed to the very idea as a matter of political philosophy). Second, we did in fact “pause” immigration from such places for roughly forty years, starting in the 1920s, and that may have made it easier for the “disfavored” groups to assimilate. They would be more likely to discard their own language and intermarry if ethnic neighborhoods slowly aged out of existence for want of new supply.

My own opinion, which will make me few friends, is that I am not sure if these were the reasons why the Eastern Europeans and such assimilated. However, I believe that the values behind our erstwhile approach to assimilating immigrants were (mostly) good, and that we should make a much more focused attempt to resume the practice. Unfortunately, we would probably need to rewire, or replace, a lot of public school administrators to pull it off.

As for immigration itself, I am not a restrictionist and oppose picking and choosing countries of national origin for immigrants. Sorry, it offends too many of my own tender sensibilities, and I cannot support that. I do, however, believe that when the foreign born population gets too high, as it did in the early 20th century and has again now, it is very destabilizing politically. I don’t know what the exact number is, but I think we would be wise to manage immigration so that the percentage of the foreign born doesn’t get much above 10%. We crossed that threshold most recently about 2002, and that feels like the point at which nativism and its attendant political destabilization started to ramp up (no doubt some of that, but I don’t think all, resulted from September 11). Also, 10% is a nice round number that Americans could get their heads around. That suggests setting a level for new immigrants that slowly reduces the percentage of the population that is foreign born over a period of (say) 25 years, until we get to 10%, and then managing it thereafter to that target. That would be the solution I would propose if I were hoping for a centrist compromise, which by temperament I almost always do.

TCATR finishes its section on immigration on a hopeful note.

Some of these problems have been before the people for many years. Some of them may continue for years to come, while others of them will become “dead issues.” Other problems will arise, or appear as old problems in new forms. The way they will all be met and solved will depend upon the intelligence, the public spirit, and the leadership of the people. There will be differences of opinion, but if discussion is free; if our political leaders are capable, upright, and outspoken; if the voters are uncorrupted and their citizenship is marked by honesty and integrity; and if voters and leaders are resolved to act in the public interest and not for private ends, then no problem will prove too serious for solution and the Republic will be safeguarded against any danger that may threaten.

Wise words, and true today. And we ought to teach this to our children explicitly.

Until next time.

Here are those links, and a few thoughts follow.

Back in December I was a guest on Alexander von Sternberg’s “History Impossible” podcast, and talked at length about the problem of “presentism” in history, and the weaponization of history for political gain. Alex and I also yacked about King Philip’s War, so two reasons to listen to that one! Apple link, and Spotify link.

I also appeared on the Fifth Column podcast’s special series on the American Revolution. That episode is “Members Only,” meaning for paid subscribers (and a greata reason to become one), but here is a nice clip on Twitter/X that captured my opinion of “presentism,” and why it is to be avoided!

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”), the nation’s leading free speech organization (disclosure, I sit on its board of directors), mined its data to identify the majors of college students who were the least and most open-minded regarding the opinions of others. History students were the second most open-minded, behind only philosophy majors. As far as I’m concerned, that is a useful if not definitive validation of my own opinion, which is that the most important benefit from studying history is that it teaches “epistemic humility,” the habit or reflex of remembering that there is a very good chance one is wrong about the things one believes is true.

That brings me to this very nice piece “Why History,” from University of Texas-Austin professor H. W. Brands, the welcoming remarks on the first day of his course on the History of the United States since 1865. By all means read the whole short post, but for those of you who are pressed for time here’s the excerpt that I loved:

One thing I won’t do is tell you how to think about the historical figures you encounter in the course. I won’t tell you who the good people are and who the bad. And I won’t ask you to decide who’s good and who’s bad, although if you want to do so on your own time, that’s your prerogative.

I avoid judging for two reasons, one personal and the other pedagogical.

The personal reason is that I think judging others is presumptuous. It’s often a cheap way for people today to feel superior to people in the past. My study of history causes me to conclude that people in the past were as sincere and honorable, according to their lights, as we are today, according to ours. Who am I to sit in judgment on them, especially when they’re not around to defend themselves?

The pedagogical reason for not judging others is that judging hinders understanding. It establishes a distance between me and the people I’m trying to understand. People generally think they’re doing the right thing. My job, when studying people from the past, is not to confirm or contradict their judgment but to figure out how they reached it.

Bold emphasis added.

If you learn how to step into the shoes of people in the past, including people who held opinions or did things that we consider awful today but were not necessarily so in the “foreign country” that is the past, and to see the world as they saw it, then you will also learn to walk in the shoes of other people in our own world right now. History will train you to be more open-minded toward opinions that challenge your own, precisely as FIRE discovered in its data.

That is an incredibly good reason to study history, exceeded only by the very best reason: It’s fun and interesting!

Until next time.

The plan is to share and excerpt what I learn as I pick my way through The Citizen and the Republic (TCATR). My purpose is not to imply that we ought to teach civics this way now (although sometimes we should) or revert to the policies and beliefs of 100 years ago, but to understand what that generation was taught. The “Old School Civics” posts are numbered, so you should be able to find the earlier ones on my page.]

In 1918, as the nation went to war in Europe for the first time, American schools taught our youngest citizens about the duties of citizenship. Voting, which we discussed last time, was one of those duties. Another was serving on juries. TCATR walks through the types of juries - petit and grand - and their functions, and then had this to say:

Jury service is sometimes a hard and disagreeable duty and most busy men shrink from it, making all sorts of excuses in order to get off. Inferior men who are willing to take a two-dollar-a-day sitting job, are about the court houses ready to do the work and the consequence is we have “professional jurymen,” whose verdicts are unsafe and unreliable and who are sometimes “tampered with” through the influence or bribery of interested parties.

All citizens are liable to be summoned for jury duty, and if the most competent men are to be excused the juries will be made up in large part of those less fit to perform intelligent and honest jury service. If justice is not done in court, the law is a failure and the law-abiding habit is undermined. If honest men will not help to administer justice their places will be taken by those much less desireable.

Some of the risks - jurymen in it for the big payday - have been addressed by reforms since. Ten states,1 for example, require employers to pay their employees (to some extent) for serving on juries. Daily payments from the court have risen from the $2/day mentioned above, but they are still so low they usually come to far less than the minimum wage so it isn’t attractive to serve for the money. And, of course, the process of compiling lists of prospective jurors and calling them to court often relies on driver’s licenses, which were not really a thing in 1918.

Unfortunately, it remains the case that many of our smartest and most experienced people - just the sort we should hope would sit on juries - do everything they can to get out of it, which is bad. During my professional career, which involved being in charge of both the law department and HR at a fairly large company, I refused to give employees the “work demands” excuse they could use (in New Jersey, at least) to get out of jury duty. I would have a friendly if not entirely welcome conversation about jury duty being part of being a good citizen! We did, however, pay people for days served, and maybe - unlikely, but maybe - I changed some minds on the topic.

TCATR, published just after the United States entered the awful war in Europe, devotes surprisingly little space to the citizen’s duty to serve the country in time of war. Its assumption, which prevailed in the United States during not only the Great War but the Second World War, was that war demanded national mobilization, and even those who could not bear arms had a duty to pitch in. National sacrifice should be spread widely (bold emphasis in the original, italicized emphasis added):

Universal service for military duty may also be an ideal of citizenship. In time of need the individual citizen is to sacrifice himself for the good of the whole community.2 To determine when the need exists and what the extent of the sacrifice shall be lies not with the citizen himself but with the community or the State or organized society. … All should bear the burdens and meet the needs of the nation alike, the willing and the unwilling, the patriotic, and the unpatriotic. In time of national need, of emergency and war, all should be in service and under direction, some doing one thing, some another; some in command, others in obedience. This is in harmony with democratic equality, that there should be no favors, no exemptions, no excuses, no slacking or shirking; but that all alike, high and low, “prince and peasant, plutocrat and pauper, shall serve their country together side by side, wearing the same uniform, submitting to the same discipline, showing the same triumphs or dying the same death.”3 It is this spirit that will unify us and make us a nation.

One is forced to wonder whether the authors of TCATR would have thought about the last bit - the State being in charge of determining the need for war - differently had they read George Orwell.

In any case, national mobilization has obviously not been our norm for the “limited” or “brushfire” wars fought since the invention of nuclear weapons, when it became impossible to persuade many Americans to make personal sacrifices for “wars of choice.” We have therefore repeatedly opted for guns and butter, and for the burden of war to be borne by the few, rather than the many. I think that limited wars are better than wars of national mobilization, and also that our nation is more divided because our wars are both frequent and limited.

TCATR then turns to the problem of the influence of public opinion in law enforcement, a topic of almost startling relevance today. See how much has changed, and how little….

Public opinion … is the chief factor in the enforcement, or non-enforcement, of law. One of the greatest evils in American life is the deplorable lack of efficient, vigorous, and constant law enforcement. America holds rather a unique position among nations in this respect. There were ninety-six lynchings in America in 1914. Ours is the only civilized country on the globe in which men are burnt alive by lawless and fiendish lynchers.4 Of course, to the extent that such savage and horrible practices are tolerated, we are not civilized, but barbarous. The community which practices or condones such lawless and public murders degrades itself and brings a reproach upon the State. It is difficult in America to execute a murderer according to law, but men may be put to death in every other conceivable way, by all kinds of homicides, by the so-called “unwritten law,” by criminal negligence, by reckless driving on the streets, by avoidable fires and accidents, by awful steamship disasters, by carrying deadly weapons, by saloon brawls and drunkeness, and in other ways. Most of these things come from lack of law enforcement. It frequently happens that when a guilty murderer has been convicted and executed a sickly and maudlin sentiment in the community seeks to make a “hero” out of him and thousands of people begin to condemn the officers of the law for his execution. This leads to a loss of respect for all law. Whether capital punishment should be inflicted by the State is a debatable question. A growing public sentiment is coming to oppose it. But this has no bearing on the matter of our respect for the law and its enforcement.

No doubt Professors Woodburn and Moran would have looked askance at the popular support for Luigi Mangione, the accused, apparent, and alleged murderer of United Healthcare boss Brian Thompson. However it comes out, the media and social media reactions to the result of his trial, whether conviction or conviction, are unlikely to make us feel better about our country. Sad to say.

TCATR points other fingers at long procedural delays in America’s courtrooms, the problem of bad guys going free because of “techicalities” that promote contempt for the system - plus ça change - and corruption in law enforcement, before holding voters accountable for electing incompetent people. Perhaps it isn’t climbing too far out on a limb to say there is a lesson in this part for Americans today.

It was Patrick Henry who said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” It is, also, the price of good government. The government of any community always depends upon the moral quality of its citizens. [There are] three obstacles to good citizenship: (1) Indolence or apathy on the part of the voter; (2) excess of party spirit; and (3) the tendency of the average citizen to place self-interest before the public interest. A community which elects incompetent and untrustworthy officials and is indifferent to the kind of government it gets, is very certain to get bad government. … The machinery of government will not count for much; it all depends upon the men in charge. Capable and upright men with bad machinery may get good results, while bad men with good machinery will always produce bad results. An intelligent and alert public opinion is the chief reliance. Our government is what its citizens make it. … So the moral sense of the citizen and the moral life of the community needs constant cultivation.

Allowing for a certain romanticism on the part of Professors Woodford and Moran, especially regarding (3) above, for my money they have pretty much nailed the problem with American politics in the 21st century. See especially (2) above, which I have helpfully emphasized in italics.

The question, of course, is how to cultivate the moral life of the community, which will have to wait … until next time.

The plan is to share and excerpt what I learn as I pick my way through The Citizen and the Republic (TCATR). My purpose is not to imply that we ought to teach civics this way now, or revert to the policies and beliefs of 100 years ago, but to understand what that generation was taught. The “Old School Civics” posts are numbered, so you should be able to find the earlier ones on my page.]

Happy Boxing Day! I’ll be driving to New Orleans with Hubbell when you see this for a few days of family time, and I hope you are doing something similarly enriching to close out the old year!

Sometimes one just needs to start at the beginning, so here’s the opening paragraph from TCATR in the section called “Citizenship and Suffrage.” It explains how we thought about voting in 1918, still a couple of years before women would gain the suffrage nationally:

Voters are those who take part in elections to choose the officers of the government or who, by the expression of their opinion or desire at the ballot box, help to determine the government’s policy. Voting has always been determined by the State, not by the United States. It was not until after the Civil War1 that any restriction was placed on the State in this respect; then by the Fifteenth Amendment it was decreed that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This was to prevent the Southern States from denying suffrage to the blacks who had been made citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, and who had been made voters in the seceding States by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress as a condition of the readmission of the ex-confederate States into the Union. The Fourteenth Amendment left suffrage entirely to the States, but it offered a premium for negro suffrage by providing that if any State denied the suffrage to any United States citizen above 21 (except for crime or participating in the Rebellion), its representation in Congress should be reduced accordingly. Barring these provisions of the Constitution, every State is free to makes its own suffrage laws.

It’s worth taking a look at Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, because it bears on so many things we still talk about. Emphasis in italics added.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The first emphasized clause, “counting the whole number of persons in each State,” ought to be interesting to people today who are worried that illegal aliens are counted in the census and used to calculate representation in the House (and thereby the electoral votes) for a State. Note, however, that the provision says “persons,” not “citizens.” That was not an error in drafting, insofar as the framers of the 14th were obviously perfectly capable of specifying “citizens” when they wanted to do, including elsewhere in that Section 2.2

The other three emphasized clauses bear on the point made by TCATR, that States remained free to narrow the suffrage if they were willing to take a hit to their representation. Now the States can do very little to restrict voting. The Fifteenth Amendment - obviously known to the authors of TCATR - closed the 14th’s loophole to the extent that it might have been used to bar a voter “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The modern Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned restrictions because of poll taxes, and the Twenty-Sixth lowered the voting age to 18, this time for all elections, not just those for federal seats.

The most severe restrictions on States, however, came with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was enacted pursuant to the expansive second section of the 15th Amendment, which provides “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The Voting Rights Act and subsequent amendments to it eliminated virtually every other device used to exclude African-Americans from voting, including literacy tests and other contrivances (mostly then prevalent in Southern States) designed to limit voting by blacks. But that is another story.

In 1918, the authors of TCATR observed that “citizenship and voting do not necessarily go together.” Not only were there many citizens who could not vote - women in many States and children - but in ten states males who were not citizens could vote if they declared their intention to become citizens.3

TCATR did not approve of non-citizens voting.

It would seem that a State should require a voter to be a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Many thousands of foreigners under the influence of political workers “declare their intention” merely for voting purposes without completing or really intending to complete their naturalized citizenship.

Emphasis added, to which many Republicans today would say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” If, you know, they were inclined to quote a French expression.

All of that said, the authors of TCATR told their high school readers a century ago that the best position was for widespread and unqualified suffrage, even if not to today’s standards. I liked this paragraph for its dual emphasis on voting as a right, and as a responsibility (bold emphasis in the original, italicized emphasis added):

Our democratic disposition is to look upon the suffrage not only as a political privilege but as a personal right. It belongs to the personality of citizens, not to their property or attainments or attainments or color or sex or creed. It is like a right of representation, belonging to every member of the nation who is a person. Formerly only the interests in the State were represented, meaning only property interests, but now we see that a man’s interest in the State and its laws is far wider than his property. The poorest man in town is interested in the way justice is administered. The woman who sends her children to school may have no property she can call her own, but she is interested in the safety of the streets and in the sanitary condition of the schoolhouse. So we think of representation in the State as belonging to a person. A person is one who has free will, who can think and act for himself. Children, the dependent, the demented, the insane, the idiot, the intoxicated, and convicts - these are not allowed to vote because they are not under their own control. The law does not hold them as responsible persons; the need of guardians for them is recognized. Their personality is lost, their power of self-direction. Aliens should not be allowed to vote, because voting involves allegiance and is an act of membership in the State. All the other classes named, together with those who are bribed or coerced in elections, are not free; their wills are subjected to the wills of others. Every intelligent member of the community who has a will of his own and who is free to vote as he wishes should have a vote. Ignorant people may be easily controlled by others, and therefore it is not undemocratic or unreasonable to impose an education qualification for the suffrage.

Regarding that last point, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests for voting. Even if the authors of TCATR were making a sound theoretical point about the problem of ignorant voters - and I happen to think they were - we now know from sad experience that the determination of ignorance will be made only rarely, if at all, in good faith. We have concluded, and I agree, that the undeniable hazard of corruption in the determination of ignorance outweighs the benefits of limiting the franchise to readers.

The scholars who wrote TCATR were very concerned about honesty in the conduct of elections.

Election bribery has been one of the greatest evils of American politics. A free ballot has been called “the right preservative of all rights.” If this right - the right of the people to honest elections - cannot be preserved, all other rights may be lost. To deprive the voter of the free expression of his will by bribery or intimidation is to rob him of his manhood and self-respect. It takes from him a power which has been given to him to defend not only his own rights of person and property but to promote the welfare of the State. It demoralizes and debases both the briber and the bribed. [Ed. note: Perhaps “demoralizes” is wishful thinking, presuming a conscience in people who do not have one.] To prevent the freedom of elections by bribery or force is to strike at the very root of free popular government. To carry elections by bribery and the use of money is one of the worst forms of anarchy. If elections and law-makers and judges are to be bought the laws will be no longer binding on the people. All respect for law and authority will be destroyed and the very foundations of the State will be undermined. If the rich may buy the poor, then the poor (if they have the power) may loot the rich, and this is anarchy.

Understood expansively, considering “bribery” as something more than money paid directly to voters, this strikes me as a warning that the rich of the last generation or so have not heeded as well as they ought to have. Perhaps that is why “socialism,”4 which in theory calls for the state-sanctioned confiscation of wealth, has again become popular in certain circles.

TCATR concludes its discussion of voting by examining the “Australian system,” which then had been implemented in its main elements in 46 of 48 states, excepting only South Carolina and Georgia. The key elements, which the authors considered essential to honest elections, included the following:

1. All ballots are printed and distributed by public officials at public expense.

2. Each ballot contains the names of all candidates that have been nominated by any party or by petition of any group of citizens…. [T]he election officers must certify to the genuineness of the ballot when it is given to the voter on election day….

3. Ballots may be obtained on election day only within the voting places and from the election officers. They are to be marked in private in the election booth; they may contain no distinguishing mark that might enable a voter’s ballot to be identified when it is being counted, and it must be so folded as to conceal the face of the ballot when it is handed to the election officer to be put into the box. The essential point in these requirements is that the voter shall not only have the privilege of voting in secret, but shall be required to do so.

4. Special provision is made to prevent ballots being lost or stolen. No one is allowed to have a genuine ballot outside the election booth….

The most arresting insight in this discussion is, as emphasized, the last sentence of the third point. In 1918, the secret ballot was not merely a right, it was a duty. The reason for this duty was to preserve confidence in the process of elections.

The discussion of voting concludes with a review of then-prevailing election procedures, which will be very familiar to anybody who voted in most of the United States during the 20th century and too tedious even for this post. Obviously, in many places voting has become more convenient in part by compromising those procedures (including the duty of secrecy of the ballot), mostly with the goal of encouraging turnout at the cost of decreased certainty.5 Suffice it to say that students in 1918 were taught that certainty was the more important value, and that in recent years we have, in the main, swung the other way. Whether that particular pendulum has reached its greatest amplitude remains to be seen. It certainly has in Republican states.

Until next time.

The plan is to share and excerpt what I learn as I pick my way through The Citizen and the Republic (TCATR). My purpose is not to imply that we ought to teach civics this way now, or revert to the policies and beliefs of 100 years ago, but to understand what that generation was taught. How did our ancestors, in many cases people we or our parents knew, learn to be Americans? This book shows the way, at least for people who made it as far as high school.1

In this piece we will start right at the beginning, with a look at the fraught question, “Who Are Citizens?”, as the idea was understood in 1918.

A citizen is a member of the nation who owes the nation allegiance and is entitled to its protection. Under the Old Confederation (1781-1789) there were no citizens of the United States; the people were citizens of the several States. The United States had nothing to do with citizens; it dealt with States. The nation had yet to grow. The central Government, under certain circumstances, might act on behalf of a State’s citizen, but it was understood that citizenship was entirely a State matter. Even after the Constitution was adopted there were doubts and arguments as to who were citizens of the United States and by what authority they became such. It was contended by those who held to the compact view of the Constitution that one could be a citizen of the United States only by having a local citizenship in some State or territory; that there was no such thing as a citizenship at large, without local citizenship, like being a sort of citizen of the world.

Notice the sophistication in this passage, including the reference to the “Old Confederation.” The target audience was high school students. Back to TCATR, with footnotes added:

This States rights view of citizenship, expressed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case2, while it recognized the right of Massachusetts or Vermont or any other State to confer the rights and privileges of its own State citizenship upon the negro3, asserted that these rights and privileges would be restricted to the State which gave them. The State could not make him a citizen of the United States or give him a right to become a citizen of any other State. The Court asserted that a man of African descent and slave birth could not, under the Constitution, become a citizen of the United States.

It was evident that citizenship ought to be made certain; that it should be determined by some common authority. So, after the Civil War, when the slaves had been set free and the national view of citizenship and the Constitution had prevailed, in order to settle all controversy and to give equal rights to all men alike, white or black, the Constitution was amended and for the first time clearly defined American citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

That clause in the 14th Amendment was, therefore, understood to undo the tortured finding of Dred Scott, among other things.

This is a part of the Fourteenth Amendment and it makes clear who are citizens of the United States. No State has any right to deny the privileges of its citizenship to any American citizen, of whatever creed, color, or nationality. “Born in the United States” is broadly construed. A child of an American ambassador, if born in the ambassador’s residence in a foreign country, is considered a “natural born” citizen of the United States, as also would be a child born to an American sea captain on his vessel in a foreign port. A national vessel is like “a bit of the national soil afloat.” Also all children born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States whose fathers are American citizens at the time of the children’s birth are declared to be citizens of the United States. If they continue to reside abroad they must, upon reaching the age of 18, register their intention to remain citizens and become residents of the United States and at 21 they must take the oath of allegiance to the United States. But the rights of citizenship do not descend to children whose fathers have never resided in the United States. Children born of aliens in the United States are citizens of the United States unless and until they renounce their citizenship by expatriation.

Emphasis added. And cool your jets! I appreciate the nuances in the debate over birthright citizenship. More to come on the perspective from 1918, but first let’s go to the sexist part.

An alien woman if married to an American citizen (native or naturalized) becomes thereby herself a citizen. The wife is by law a citizen of her husband’s country. Therefore when an alien husband becomes naturalized his acquired citizenship carries with it citizenship for his wife, provided she belongs to the classes allowed by law to become citizens of the United States. The wife has no necessity to apply for naturalization, though an unmarried woman may do so. On the other hand, if an American woman, being a citizen, marries an alien she loses her American citizenship. By widowhood or divorce she may recover her American citizenship, by her own declaration.

Suffice it to say that those rules have been repealed by subsequent legislation. Ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote throughout the United States, quickly led to the Cable Act of 1922, which went a long way (although not all the way) toward severing a woman’s citizenship from her husband’s.

Some are born citizens, others acquire citizenship. The population of a country consists of citizens and aliens. Naturalization is the process by which aliens become citizens. In order to become naturalized the alien applicant for American citizenship must “declare his intention” at least two years before citizenship can be fully required.

There then follows a lot of details about the papers to file and such, with two critical requirements. First, the aspiring citizen in 1918 had to renounce all allegiance to any foreign country of which he had been a subject. Second, an applicant for naturalization “must be able to read and write his own language and be able to read and speak English.” Hammering it home: One needed to be literate in one’s native tongue, and able to read and speak English. There was no requirement to write English.

Now for the racist part, or at least one of them, again remembering this is as of 1918.

Certain foreigners are prevented from acquiring American citizenship by naturalization. Only Caucasians and Africans are given the privilege, only “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity and African descent.” We go to the extremes in colors, including the whites and the blacks, but leaving out the yellows and the browns. This seems like an absurd distinction in our law. Yet no Asiatics may be naturalized. No Mongolians or Malays, Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, or East Indians can become citizens of the United States unless they are born here or are permitted to become citizens by a special act of Congress. The Turk is not excluded or the Armenians, and an exception has been made in favor of the Filipinos and Samoans. Polygamists, anarchists, and certain other classes of criminals may not be naturalized; they are not considered worthy of our citizenship.

It would be 1943 before Congress would allow small numbers of Chinese people to immigrate lawfully and naturalize, a gesture toward one of our allies during World War II. Note, however, that American born children of Chinese people were considered native citizens. Given that Chinese had been barred from lawful immigration into the United States since 1882 with the first of the several “Exclusion Acts,” it was nevertheless understood by these professors, writing in 1918, that their children born on our soil were citizens. The Supreme Court has, however, not ruled on the precise point.

TCATR describes the process by which the United States may confer citizenship via the acquisition of territory by treaty, which it did in the cases of the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, California, Alaska, and Hawaii. The aquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War did not lead to citizenship for the people in either place, but the Puerto Ricans won it via an act of Congress signed by Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917. The authors note that the same might be “done by Congress for the Philippines at any time,” which would have had quite the impact on geopolitics today if Congress had so done.

American Indians living in tribal nations in 1918 were not citizens of the United States, but Congress had “repeatedly conferred citizenship upon whole tribes of Indians on breaking up their tribal relations.” Congress would grant citizenship to members of the various tribes only a few years later, with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

In 1918, people everywhere were extremely concerned with national allegiance and loyalty, and that informed ideas about citizenship. However, the philosophy of the United States broke sharply with that of Europe from the get-go for the perhaps obvious reason that we were building our citizenry by immigration. This tension led to changes in international law. Back to TCATR:

An American may renounce his citizenship and become a citizen or subject of a foreign power. “Once a citizen always a citizen” was a familiar saying a hundred years ago.4 It meant that citizenship was indelible - it could not be erased, destroyed, or renounced. The idea was opposed in America as it was desired to have Europeans become naturalized in the United States. Great Britain favored the principle, as she wished to maintain a claim upon the services of her citizens. Now most European nations admit the right of expatriation, that is, the right of a citizen or subject to renounce his country and become the adopted citizen of another country. This is agreed to by treaties between nations.

Different countries have different laws relating to nationality and allegiance. On this account the terms “dual nationality” and “double allegiance” have been used in international law. May a citizen’s allegiance and service be claimed by two countries? This would seem to be inconsistent, if not absurd. As a man cannot serve two masters, so two nations may not claim a citizen’s allegiance. No person can be a citizen of two countries.

Why would two perfectly sharp academic historians believe that the concept of dual citizenship was “absurd” a century ago, when it is accepted as normal today? The United States has allowed dual citizenship with any other country that allows it - a list that includes most countries that matter - since roughly the 1970s.5 How did “absurd” become “of course” in 60 years?

Just spitballin’ here - no claims to expertise on this topic - but I suspect that it has a lot to do with our changing sense of citizenship. In 1918, when we had gone to war in Europe to save democracy and whatnot, it was very clear that citizenship demanded that one do one’s duty, a topic to which we shall return in a future post. It was as much a burden, or at least a responsibility, as it was a bundle of privileges. Today, fewer Americans see it that way. Most of us think of the benefits of citizenship a lot more than the responsibilities. When was the last time you met somebody who truly acted as though it was their duty to serve on a jury?6

After some discussion of the conflict of laws inherent in dual citizenship, the authors of TCATR plant their stake in the ground, hard.

It is certain that a “double allegiance” cannot be tolerated in America. Subjects of European nations who come to this country, take the oath of allegiance to America and become naturalized citizens cannot be allowed to acknowledge allegiance to any European nation. Such “hyphenated citizens” would be dangerous in any country. Loyalty to America is expected of all.

This was a doctrine that was almost disgraceful in certain circles for the last sixty years, but it is certainly enjoying a resurgence now. There is a great deal to be said about it (including that the term “hyphenated citizens” is usually applied to delightful cultural traditions, like Oktoberfest or tacos, and not to tests of loyalty), which it is not my purpose to do in this post. However, the authors of TCATR make the philosophical case as well as it might have been made in 1918, and that is worth thinking about.

America contends, as it has always contended, for the doctrine of voluntary expatriation and that a European who has migrated to this country and become a citizen here owes allegiance to America only. And their children born in this country owe their first and only allegiance to America. To admit a “double allegiance” in such cases would be to deny the validity of the long-standing American position against the doctrine, “once a citizen always a citizen.” A citizen of America may forswear his allegiance and become a citizen of another country. His status and allegiance would then be clear. Likewise, when aliens become citizens of the United States by naturalization they forswear their old allegiance and take on a new. They may not acknowledge both. So, when the goernment of Austria-Hungary forbade former subjects of that country who had been naturalized in America to work in American munition factories, or when it was stated that under the German law of nationality (of January 1, 1914) Germans who may have acquired naturalization in America may under certain conditions retain their German allegiance, these powers made a demand that no foreign nation had any power to enforce or any right to claim. Foreigners living and working in America without having been naturalized are subject to the call of their former government only to the extent that they themselves may voluntarily recognize; no foreign government can exercise jurisdiction or in any way compel any action over aliens while they are domiciled in this country. …

The Republic can recognize in its citizenship but one standard - the standard of loyalty to one country, one government, one flag, one allegiance. This unity and loyalty in citizenship requires but one language, “the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington’s Farewell Address, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech.” (Emphasis in the original) …

[I]t is the binding duty on every citizen of this country in every important crisis to act solidly with all his fellow Americans, having regard only to the honor and interest of America, treating every other nation purely on its conduct in that crisis, without reference to his ancestral predilections or antipathies. If he does not so act he is false to the teachings and the lives of Washington and Lincoln; he is not entitled to any part or lot in our country and he should be sent out of it.

That is some tough wartime love from Professor James Albert Woodburn and Professor Thomas Francis Moran, Indiana University and Purdue University respectively.

My questions - please comment! - are these: If you agree with Woodburn and Moran, why do you agree? If you recoil from their stern patriotism, why do you? What are the best arguments against it?

Also, please let me know whether this exploration of high school civics a century ago is interesting, or at least instructive. I’m going to keep at it, but it would be good to know whether you enjoy it, or not.

Until next time.

The main source for this episode is Melanie Kirkpatrick’s fun book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, but you’ll see other references in the notes, including to The History of the Americans podcast.

As most people who went to elementary school in the United States know, or at least knew, the “First Thanksgiving” occurred at Plymouth Colony in the fall of 1621. Edward Winslow, one of the Mayflower settlers who had survived that first arduous year in the Wampanoag Indian territory, described it in a letter that reached England in 1622. Here’s Winslow’s account, in full:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men in fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time among other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That’s it. And here’s the surprising bit – Winslow’s letter was lost to history until 1820, and not widely accessible until it was published in 1841 by a fellow named Alexander Young in a book called Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. The only other evidence we have of the First Thanksgiving is a short and fairly obscure passage from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, which had vanished from history until 1855.

Even though Americans did not have an account of the First Thanksgiving until the middle of the 19^th century, the ancestors of European Americans celebrated days of thanksgiving that looked a lot like Thanksgiving, from very nearly the beginning. Indeed, the idea that a day be set aside for the giving of thanks, which might include prayer, conviviality, and feasting, is older than European settlement of North America.

The roots of the tradition among Europeans can be seen in the various claims for the “first Thanksgiving” that compete with Plymouth Colony/Patuxet1 in 1621. There are actually numerous such claims.

In late April, 1598, the entrada of Don Juan de Onate y Salazar crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico at the site of the present-day San Elizario, Texas, just a bit southeast of El Paso. Onate’s expedition was chasing down the old rumors of a vast Indian civilization with lots of gold and whatnot somewhere north of today’s Mexico. Why, precisely, the myth of the Seven Cities of Gold had not died with the failure of the expeditions Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado almost sixty years before … I have no idea.2

In any case, the Onate entrada had had a very rough go of things just getting to the Rio Grande. They were starving, and very short on water, and according to the leading chronicler of the mission their suffering was such they were “almost all wishing for death.” Their thirst was so great that when they saw the river they fell into it drinking until they appeared drunk. Two horses drank so much that they died when their stomachs literally burst from the pressure of the water.

The expedition recovered under the cottonwood trees that grew on the banks of the Rio Grande, and during their ten days there the Spanish got to know some of the local Indians, who were friendly to them. Onate called for a day of thanksgiving, commanded that a temporary chapel be set up for a thanksgiving Mass, and invited the Indians to a feast. The Spanish shot cranes, ducks, and geese – probably some doves, too – and the Indians caught fish in the river. They built a huge fire, and cooked all that delicious stuff together. The Spanish put on a play – “a great drama” according to the chronicler – quite possibly the first European play performed in today’s United States.

Candidly, the transplanted Texan in me – we modern colonists try to fit in – is pretty persuaded that Onate’s feast of thanksgiving was every bit as legitimate as the “first Thanksgiving” in Plymouth 23 years later. Indeed, the Texas House passed a resolution in 1990 proclaiming that the First Thanksgiving in the United States had been at San Elizario, and governor Ann Richards officially proclaimed that, QUOTE:

Although we are grateful to the English pilgrims who endured hardships and faced formidable risks to help colonize America, the Thanksgiving decreed by the Spaniard Don Juan de Onate deserves equal credit and its own place in American history.

All of this was followed up by a bit of Texan showmanship. In November 1991, a bunch of Texans dressed up as conquistadors and marched down the streets of Plymouth, Massachusetts, declaring Texas the home of the first American Thanksgiving. The good citizens of Plymouth jokingly arrested them, tossed them in the clink, and charged the Texan conquistadors with spreading “malicious and false rumors and blasphemy.” After a mock trial, they were acquitted on a technicality. Texan showmanship had found its match in Massachusetts.

While I think the historical record of the Onate expedition and therefore the claim of Texas is pretty solid, it never captured the American imagination because people with English heritage ended up running the place, and as we shall see that made all the difference.

It must be said that there is another reason why Spanish Thanksgiving never took off: Onate was a dirtbag, especially in his treatment of the Indians of the southwest. The Pilgrims, by comparison, lived in peace with the Wampanoag in Massachusetts for more than fifty years, until the start of King Philip’s War in 1675, a track record that was never repeated during the four hundred years that Europeans and their descendants were spreading across the United States. Most Americans would rather think of themselves as carrying on the tradition of the Pilgrims than of the conquistadors, even if in fact they carry both.

There are several other more tenuous claims to the first Thanksgiving. The French Huguenots at Fort Caroline in 1564 celebrated religious feasts with Indians, and Pedro Menendez de Aviles, the founder of St. Augustine (and, it must be said, the murderer of those same Huguenots) celebrated a thanksgiving Mass with Indians in September 1565. There are also competing claims made for the Popham Colony, which started on the coast of Maine in 1607, at the same time as the founding of Jamestown, but which failed within fourteen months, and the Berkeley Plantation on the James River, which established an annual day of Thanksgiving in 1619, two years before that feast at Plymouth. That plantation was, sadly from a certain point of view, wiped out by the Powhatans only a few years later. All these claims strike me as weaker than Onate’s, but they add up to the key point, that European settlers and soldiers, who endured extreme privation in North America, had numerous feasts of Thanksgiving that derived from European custom.

I shall come back to this point, because it explains why there were “thanksgivings” and local and state thanksgiving holidays and feasts and presidential and gubernatorial proclamations in recognition of such all across early America, even though that First Thanksgiving in Plymouth was lost to history for more than two hundred years.

It must also be said that apart from the overt Christianity of European American Thanksgivings, nothing about them would have been alien to many of the indigenous peoples of North America. There are no contemporaneous written records of Indian celebrations akin to Thanksgiving because Indians at that point could not write stuff down, but Kirkpatrick writes that QUOTE

tribal traditions and ethnological research indicate that Native American tribes practiced thanksgiving rituals at the harvest season as well as at other times of the year. The Green Corn Festival still celebrated by a number of tribes is one example.

The Pilgrim Edward Winslow, the same man whose contemporaneous letter to England described that First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, wrote a book in 1624 called Good Newes from New England in which he described a conversation with local Indians about giving thanks by prayer for abundance, concluding that their indigenous practices were close to those of the English.

Of course, it has only been in the last fifty or sixty years that Americans descended from Europeans and other non-indigenous groups paid much attention to ancient Indian practices in this or any other realm. The first president to mention Indian “thanksgiving” ceremonies in his annual proclamation was Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Fitzgerald reviews the long history of celebrating thanksgiving day in the lands that are now the United States. Long before the United States was a thing, towns and states would declare days of thanksgiving, which were given over to prayer, feasting, family time, and as the years went by, sports. I am not going to go into this at length, but one very recent story published by the New England Historical Society bears recounting. It seems that in 1704, towns across New England had decided to celebrate thanksgiving on November 4, but the feast had to be delayed in Colchester because of a shortage of molasses. An arctic blast right out of the Little Ice Age had frozen the rivers in the region, and the people of the town had not been able to lay in the essential supplies:

In 1705, November 4 had been proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving. But as the day approached, Colchester had almost no molasses. Worse, nothing could be delivered on the frozen river to the settlement.

Why molasses?

New England colonists used molasses imported from the West Indies because it didn’t cost as much as sugar. A byproduct of sugar refining, colonists used it in baked beans, brown bread and pumpkin pie. By 1750, colonists consumed an average of three quarts of molasses a year.

The English colonists had learned from the Native Americans about the pumpkin, called pompion, and adapted it to their own cuisine.

The pumpkin pie came to symbolize the New World bounty celebrated by Thanksgiving. By the time Colchester discovered its molasses shortage in 1705, pumpkin pie had been a well-established dessert for half a century.

The weather turned unusually frigid for the Connecticut Valley town that fall. In mid-October a terrible cold snap lasted for three days, followed by mild weather, and then a blast of even colder weather.

The river froze, a frigid wind blew and a storm blanketed Colchester under three feet of snow. Because the river rarely froze so early, the settlers hadn’t laid in winter provisions usually shipped from Norwich and New London….

Colchester relied on boats to deliver supplies along a tributary of the Connecticut River, 10 miles away.

In 1705, November 4 had been proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving. But as the day approached, Colchester had almost no molasses. Worse, nothing could be delivered on the frozen river to the settlement….

[W]ithout molasses, the townsfolk of Colchester couldn’t make pumpkin pie. Nor could they have baked beans, molasses cake or sweetener for rum. The bottom line: No molasses, no Thanksgiving.

And so Colchester’s town fathers postponed Thanksgiving [for a week] because they couldn’t hold it “with convenience” on November 4.

Today many of us struggle with price inflation and even occasional shortages of things, but at least we don’t have to worry about running out of food because the river froze early.

When the states finally united to become the United States, presidents proclaimed Thanksgiving. Five of the first presidents – the presidents of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation – issued Thanksgiving proclamations, all with a gracious and deeply religious bent. But they had no power, and therefore provoked no controversy. It would be George Washington who would establish the practices of American presidents proclaiming Thanksgiving. He did so twice, the first time in answer to a Congressional resolution in 1789 that sparked considerable controversy.

On September 25, 1789, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey rose just before Congress was about to recess, and proposed that the Congress resolve to ask the president to declare a day of public thanksgiving and prayer in recognition of ratification of the Constitution the previous year. Boudinot was not new in this idea, insofar as the Continental Congress, during the war and under the Articles of Confederation, had done so repeatedly. This time, however, two representatives from South Carolina, Aedanus Burke and Thomas Tudor Tucker, rose in opposition. Their objections were three, all of which would be recognizable to Americans who managed to learn a bit of civics along the way. First, they argued that a national proclamation of Thanksgiving went beyond the scope of the enumerated powers of the Presidency under the new Constitution. Second, making a sort of “Freedom Fries” argument, the South Carolinians argued that a day of thanksgiving was “too European.” In other words, they objected to an American thanksgiving precisely because it had roots in European customs. Finally, they argued that it violated the separation of church and state, Thanksgiving being an overtly religious holiday. In this context it should be said that the Bill of Rights had not been passed, but the Congress had just approved the language of the First Amendment, which provides for that separation, and a national day of Thanksgiving would make a mockery of it.

I have seen all of these arguments raised in one context or another during the course of my life, which so far has amounted to roughly one quarter of the history of the United States since 1776. I find it both comforting and appropriate that they had all been raised in 1789, by South Carolinians! There is little new under the sun.

In the end, the resolution passed the House and sailed through the Senate, and on October 3, 1789, George Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789, “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” The capital then being in New York City, Washington sent $25, then a meaningful sum, to a Presbyterian church in the city, directly that it be “applied towards relieving the poor of the Presbyterian Churches.” This is a rare example of Washington making his gifts to charity public so we can trust that he had a purpose. We can indeed thank President Washington for establishing the national example of charity on Thanksgiving Day, which continues even now. The record shows that Thanksgiving was celebrated throughout our young country that year.

Washington also established the closing of the presidential proclamation in 1795, which read “Done at the city of Philadelphia, the 1st day of January, 1795, and of the Independence of the United States of America the nineteenth.” That reference to the independence of the United States would also continue to the present day. Donald Trump’s proclamation of 2020, at a time when he was otherwise departing from custom, closed the same way: “IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fifth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.”

John Adams and James Madison would continue the practice, but Thomas Jefferson would not in 1808. This was not because he was against Thanksgiving. He had issued Thanksgiving proclamations as governor of Virginia. Jefferson, however, believed that Thanksgiving proclamations violated the separation of church and state,3 and explained in a letter that he “did not consider himself authorized” to issue a proclamation because the Constitution prohibits a president from “intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, disciplines, or exercises.” Further, he believed – as those South Carolinian representatives had nineteen years before -- that the Constitution reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the central government, and surely the declaration of a thanksgiving holiday was not so delegated.

Presidential proclamations disappeared between Madison in 1815, and Abraham Lincoln, in 1863. Lincoln revived the practice and re-established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in practice, even though it would not become one in fact until the 1940s. To be sure, it was practiced on various dates, mostly in November, all over the country, but presidents remained silent. The story of its return just after the turning of the tide of the Civil War involves an extraordinarily gifted woman, one of the most popular writers of her day.

We have already seen how the story of the Pilgrims’ First Thanksgiving vanished until the middle of the 19^th century, during this long period when our presidents did not proclaim it. We owe our modern, national Thanksgiving holiday to a brilliant woman named Sarah Josepha Hale.

Hale was born Sarah Josepha Buell in Newport, New Hampshire in 1788, and was by all measure remarkable. Over the course of her career she was a prolific author, editor, social reformer, abolitionist, and, above all, a relentless advocate for women’s rights, especially to an education. Kirkpatrick:

A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women includes leading the right for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day-care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College, the first college for women. She invented the term “domestic science” as part of her effort to elevate the status of housekeeping.

Hale had an arrestingly modern marriage. At the then relatively late age of 25, she married a New Hampshire lawyer by the name of David Hale. The couple had a routine of nightly study – they would sit together every evening from eight o’clock until ten reading classics, studying language and the sciences, and examining the prose style of the great English writers. She and her husband were fantastic polymaths, and her story makes me remember that most of us, including me, have wasted too much time in our lives.

In the course of her life, Hale published seven volumes of poetry, one of which included “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She wrote six novels, including an anti-slavery novel in 1827 called Northwood: A Tale of New England. That novel would go on to be a national bestseller and published in London, which Fitzpatrick describes as “a rare honor for an American writer.” She also wrote a nine hundred page reference book about women in history.

Hale’s writing eventually landed her the job, in 1837, when she was 49 years old, as editor of the immensely popular women’s magazine “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” She would edit it for forty more years, and by the eve of the Civil War Godey’s Lady’s Book would be the most widely circulated periodical in the United States. Along the way she would recruit some of the most famous American writers of the 19^th century, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote that Hale was “a lady of fine genius and masculine energy and ability.”

There’s a compliment that has surely gone out of style, but a compliment nonetheless.

From the 1840s to the 1860s, as the stories of the Pilgrim fathers’ “First Thanksgiving” spread with the publication of Edward Winslow’s letter and William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Hale used the huge platform of Godey’s Lady’s Book to advocate for a national Thanksgiving holiday, among her many other causes. She argued tirelessly for the old New England custom of Thanksgiving, and tracked the states that proclaimed and celebrated the holiday. In 1846, for example, twenty two of the twenty eight states observed Thanksgiving, and seventeen of those did so on the same day. In 1847, Arkansas and Mississippi joined up, and California declared its first Thanksgiving in 1849, even before it was a state. The Republic of Texas had beaten the newcomers to the punch, however. Sam Houston named a Thanksgiving day in 1842, and the State of Texas declared its first Thanksgiving in 1848. Contra Ann Richards, it was in November.

Hale wrote to presidents tirelessly, almost relentlessly, asking for national recognition of Thanksgiving, and no doubt they had to listen to her. Zachary Taylor and James Polk, however, both demurred on the same old grounds, that Thanksgiving was not a federal question. Abraham Lincoln, in the fall of 1863, after the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg that summer, agreed with Hale and made it national, and in all but the most technical sense there it remained. Every president since, including at least one TV president, has proclaimed Thanksgiving.

Hale’s letter to Lincoln is republished at the end of Fitzpatrick’s book, which I again recommend as a bracing read, with far more than this modest post. Thanksgiving would go on to memorialize national unity in the increasingly diverse United States. For early and telling evidence of this ideal, take a look at Thomas Nast’s 1869 cartoon, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner.”

The matter of Thanksgiving in the history and culture of the Americans is vast, and we cannot do it justice in this modest note. We cannot, however, pass over the role of football.

Thanksgiving football did not begin with the Detroit Lions. Not by a long shot.

On Thanksgiving Day, November 30, 1873, Princeton beat Yale 3-0 in Hoboken, New Jersey. The game was a hit, and a few years later moved to New York City. The Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving Day game became an annual tradition, and by the 1890s was drawing 40,000 spectators. Back to Fitzgerald:

The game was not just an athletic contest. It was a major social event in which all levels of New York society – old and young, male and female, rich and poor – took part. In the words of Richard Harding Davis, writing in Harper’s Weekly about the 1893 game, it didn’t matter whether New Yorkers could tell “a touchdown from a three-base hit” or knew whether “Yale is a city, state, or club.” They knew that “the Yales” and “the Princetons” were going to fight it out in New York, and they wanted to join in the fun even if they couldn’t afford to buy a ticket to the game. Yes, the Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving was a spectacle, he concluded, but it was “still the greatest sporting event … this country has to show.”

….

The Princeton-Yale game in New York was a catalyst for the creation of a popular audience for Thanksgiving football. In 1893, one hundred twenty thousand athletes played in five thousand Thanksgiving games across the country, demonstrating an enthusiasm for the sport that stretched far beyond the Ivy League.

Your humble Substacker, as it happens, is an alumnus of Princeton, and could not be happier that beating Yale was the foundational moment of a great American tradition.

Professional football was relatively late to the Thanksgiving party, even if it dominates television today. The first professional leagues emerged in the early 20^th century and regularly played Thanksgiving games. In 1920, the first year of the National Football League, there were six games that Thanksgiving Day. Fitzgerald goes on in some detail over the Detroit Lions establishing their long tradition in 1934. Among my many fond memories is seeing the Detroit Lions play in the old Pontiac Silverdome on Thanksgiving 1983, when I was a law student in Ann Arbor with no time to get home.

American Thanksgiving has, until recently, marked the launch of the commercial side of the Christmas season. The day after Thanksgiving, known as “Black Friday” for reasons that are not quite clear – Fitzgerald parses this question as some length, so go read her book if you are interested – had achieved such importance to the success of the retail game by the end of the 1930s that it became the object of one of the least successful New Deal economic interventions. In 1939, Thanksgiving would have fallen so late that the Christmas shopping season would only have been twenty or so days; remember, Sundays were off limits back then. In an episode that came to be known rather hilariously as “Franksgiving,” Franklin Roosevelt hit upon the idea of moving Thanksgiving back a week to lengthen the Christmas shopping season and thereby stimulate the moribund economy. Unfortunately, FDR did not think of this idea until August 14, far too late to reschedule Thanksgiving events, including most importantly football games all around the country. The result was chaos and partisan divide. Thanksgiving remained, technically, a matter for the states to proclaim and organize, even if they had been in almost complete lockstep between Lincoln and FDR’s impulsive rescheduling. Democratic governors, with a few exceptions, supported the president, but Republican governors, listening to the football fans, held the line.4 That year, the several states had two different Thanksgivings, and national unity became national division. Worse, subsequent economic analysis showed that the added shopping days did not result in incremental spending. As a stimulus package, moving Thanksgiving was an epic fail, and within a couple of years FDR threw in the towel and reverted to the traditional timing.

The question of food on Thanksgiving arouses passions, as it should, so I’ll close by reporting my own bit of bomb-throwing around the table. Years ago, at a large family gathering that involved all the usual Thanksgiving food various relatives started gushing about how great the Thanksgiving dinner food is. Truth be told, it’s not my favorite food, and in my callow late youth I thought it would be a good idea to ask whether it was really true that we liked Thanksgiving dinner so much, and if it were true why was it that almost no fine restaurants, or even family casual dining chains, offer it as an entrée. This provoked outrage – convivial, but with the scorn-heaping in which that my family has been known to traffic – and I was denounced. I did have one supporter, however. My younger sister, who very sadly passed in 2014, spoke up in my defense. Trust me when I say that this very rarely happened, but my sister was, like me, a bit of an iconoclast. Actually, more so. Thanksgiving is for the iconoclasts too.5

Even though I am not a huge fan of the traditional food served on Thanksgiving, I do appreciate its ceremonial importance. In this regard, I think the closest and most ancient analogue to our Thanksgiving is the Passover Seder, in which people eat food they only sorta like because of its ceremonial importance. Jews who celebrate the Passover eat specific foods to remember and in so doing feel the presence of God, and that is, in the end, the original basis of our own unique national holiday. Thanksgiving is the American Passover, plus football.

I’ll wrap up with this last observation. It is traditional in many American families to ask the family and loved ones gathered together to say what they are thankful for. Notwithstanding the current times, in which it is fashionable to worry that America is not living up to its ideals and is in the midst of something of a national crisis of faith in its institutions and traditions, I believe there remains a great deal for which we all ought to be thankful. If that tradition of giving thanks is fading in your family, as it has to some degree in mine, consider reviving it this Thanksgiving. Assuming, of course, that you managed to squeeze in reading this post before you serve the dinner.

The catalyst for much of the controversy centered on the opening sequences.

[Explosion] [Drum beating slow rhythm] Voice: We know our lands are now become more valuable.

The White people think we do not know their value, but we are sensible that the land is everlasting.

Canasatego, Spokesman for the Six Nations.

[Woman singing in Native American language] Narrator: Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy-- Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk-- had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee-- a democracy that had flourished for centuries.

Voice: We heartily recommend union.

We are a powerful confederacy.

And by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power.

Therefore, whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.

[Canasatego] ♪ Narrator: In the spring of 1754, the celebrated scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin proposed that the British colonies form a similar union.

He printed a cartoon of a snake cut into pieces above the dire warning “Join, or Die.”

A few weeks later at Albany, New York, Franklin and other delegates from 7 colonies agreed to his Plan of Union-- and then went home to try and sell it.

Now, when the wife and I watch a documentary, it is a norm in our union that either of us can hit the pause button and comment, which I did in this instance. My lawyer’s ears had picked up that Burns made some claims about the Iroquois, and then said a thing about Franklin and the Albany Plan, which Burns suggests “proposed … a similar union.” Burns had said nothing about the first causing the second, and I pointed this out to the wife and pronounced it “a bit sneaky.” My wife now refers to this as “a Burns body swerve.”

The reason it was sneaky is that a great many people today passionately believe that Iroquois civil governance influenced the Albany Plan, which then influenced the Articles of Confederation, which then because of something-something the Constitution. Burns was, I think, trying to avoid irritating either the many people who believe in the Iroquois origin story, or those - including the majority of actual historians - who argue it is claptrap. His script said there was this one thing about the Iroquois, and then another thing about Franklin and the Albany Plan, but not one single word about whether B was a consequence of A. Burns obviously hoped his swerve would mollify both sides.

Oops. I’ll spare you screencaps of the tendentious posts on X this week - in short, no mollification occurred. It was a mollification fail.

Anyway, yesterday morning I burned a few hours and a nice Churchill cigar reading four academic articles on the substantive debate, which erupted in the late 20th century. My plan was to write an extended piece on the topic this weekend, but the far more qualified William Hogeland put out the first of two on the topic yesterday afternoon while I was watching the Hawkeyes. Go read his post and the promised next post for thinking from an actual expert on the founding era, and perhaps I’ll comment here if I see anything to expand upon or quibble about.

I do want to pass along two examples of the extent to which the “Iroquois origin story” has spread into popular history. The first is from yesterday’s “Flashback Quiz,” a fun game for history dorks that The New York Times publishes every Saturday.

Note that the Newspaper of Record does a thing Burns did not do - with the word “inspires,” it asserts cause and effect. Ironically, the NYT cites Burns’ documentary as its source, falling for the sneaky trap he set. I found that amusing, but not LOL.

For LOL, you have to take a look at the United States Naturalization Civics Test,1 which is given to immigrants who want to become citizens. The important thing to know about the current version is that it was specifically revised by the Trump Administration just a couple of months back, presumably to make it a bit more difficult to pass. Here’s the relevant question, for which any of the answers given score correct:

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny!

Apart from the rank hilarity of the Iroquois origin theory getting past the MAGA folks at USCIS (which says a thing or two about their command of American history, or at least their attention to detail), even the most expansive of the academics who argue for Iroquoian “inspiration” or “influence” in our founding documents cannot, by and large, bring themselves to extend it to the Constitution except in the extremely attenuated sense that the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, which was in turn influenced by Franklin’s Albany Plan of 1754, which maybe the Iroquois inspired. No doubt unwittingly, Trump’s naturalization test is more committed to the Iroquois-origins theory than even most of its academic proponents.

I kill me.

Anyway, I do suggest you read Hogeland’s piece and the promised next one (assuming he doesn’t paywall it, which would hurt my feelings), and maybe I’ll have a bit more to say after.

Until next time.

If you know something of how government in the United States is supposed to work and perhaps a bit about how it once did work and how it came into being, and if you are also fairly attentive to politics, whether on cable news or via the socials or Substackers, then you have probably grumped, or just worried, about people today not knowing enough civics. If so, you are not alone. A quick search turns up lots of think pieces about the problem, which is real. Americans just do not understand how our government works and how to make it work for them the way they used to do.

I could go on ad nauseum documenting the basic point that Americans know a lot less about how their political system is supposed to work than they used to do, but I won’t.1 Too tedious. And, anyway, if you listen to my podcast or follow me on the socials you’re definitely engaged enough with history and American government that you probably feel the same way. So let’s just go with our gut on this.

One can find many definitions of civics and labor mightily to synthesize them, or one can ask a robot. I asked a robot for “a good working definition of civics,” and in a short exchange it produced the following:

Civics is the study of the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizens and the workings of government and public institutions in a democratic society.

In essence, civics encompasses how citizens relate to their government, how government functions, and how individuals can participate effectively and responsibly in civic life. It blends knowledge (how laws are made, what rights citizens possess, how elections function) with skills (critical thinking, deliberation, and participation) and civic dispositions (respect for others, concern for the common good, and commitment to democracy).

Emphasis added by me - remember those three components, because they are important to this story.

If we accept that Americans know less about their own system of government than they used to, the knowledge component at least is in jeopardy. One of the reasons may be that public schools are teaching much less knowledge of civics than in days of old. In September 2024 the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy - that sounds like an outfit worth learning more about - published a piece titled “When and Why Did America Stop Teaching Civics?” It found that:

[W]hereas until the 1960s American public high-school students were typically required to take three courses in civics—Civics, Problems of Democracy, and U.S. Government—today most get by with a single semester-long class. Even when civics is taught many teachers avoid teaching it robustly. For example, in the 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey 65 percent of respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever decided on your own, without being directed by school or district leaders, to limit discussions about political and social issues in class?” When this 65 percent was asked why they had made such a decision, the most common first-choice response was, “I am not sure that my school or district leaders would support me if parents expressed concerns.”

So, basically, we’ve cut the time spent teaching civics by two-thirds, and fear of parental backlash has sucked the life out of the last third.

The O’Connor Institute piece is heavily footnoted, and that led me to an article by Jeffrey Mirel, a historian of education in the United States and before his retirement at the University of Michigan, published in the Summer 2002 issue of the journal Daedalus, “The Decline of Civic Education.”2 Mirel observes that American public schools have understood since their real beginning in the 19th century that they will fail in their mission if they anger parents too much, so there has long been a bias in favor of avoiding controversy - “when in doubt, leave it out.” Now to Mirel:

In behaving in this way, educators and publishers have tried to balance three legitimate but competing goals: To ensure the survival of public schools by shielding them from political controversy; to promote national unity through a civic education that teaches students a shared language, shared democratic ideals, and a shared understanding of American culture and history; and to acknowledge the demands of ever more diverse groups of American citizens with new ideas about how best to organize the politicies, practices, and curriculua of the public schools.

According to Mirel, the balancing of those three goals has been in almost constant renegotiation for well over a hundred years, and in it we can see at least some of the reasons why the teaching of civics in America has become so impoverished.3 It is also interesting in and of itself.

All the way back in 1848, Horace Mann, the much-celebrated “father of American education,” warned against exposing schools to political controversy: “It is obvious … that if the tempest of political strife were to be let loose upon our Common Schools, they would be overwhelmed with sudden ruin.” To avoid the tempest, Mann and his allies argued that public schools must practice political and confessional neutrality. In their day, the former meant that schools should not advocate any specific party or party platform. Mann’s Common Schools taught civic values with lessons on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and, later in the century, American history and culture, but they stayed out of politics. This was, of course, possible to do in the nineteenth century, long before post-modernists taught that one’s opinion about our foundational documents was in and of itself politically charged.

Confessional neutrality did not (then) preclude the teaching of Bible-based morality, but it did prohibit the teaching of any specific Christian sect.4 In the nineteenth century that meant setting aside time for prayer and perhaps reading from the Bible, but schools stayed out of potentially inflammatory debates among Protestant denominations. Approve of it or not, the religious aspect of the Common School curriculum at least aspired to teach both the skills and the disposition useful for performing the duties of citizenship in our democratic republic.

Not surprisingly, the aspiration of political and religious neutrality was easier to profess than to achieve, and Common Schools got sucked into controversy much as happens today. Mirel gives the example of the abolition of slavery, which was as emotionally fraught and consequential - more so - than any of the culture war issues of our own time, even abortion. “Supporters of … abolition … recoiled at the nonpartisan principle that kept teachers from promoting abolitionist ideals in northern classrooms.”

Well, of course they did.

As more Catholics came to the United States during the 19th century, the ideal of religious neutrality in Common Schools also cracked. Catholic leaders, for example, viewed the reading of the Bible without reference to Church doctrine as essentially Protestant evangelism. That, according to Mirel, led to nineteenth century “‘school wars’ in cities across the country in which school practices, curricula, and funding policies came under attack.” Catholics mostly lost that argument, which is why they opened their own schools all over the country.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the surge of Catholic, Eastern rite, and Jewish immigrants made it impossible for public schools to continue teaching generic Protestantism. Schools in the North, particularly, washed religion per se out of the curriculum, and substituted a secular moral education designed to promote the assimilation of all those strange new immigrants. “Americanization,” as it was known, offered literature and history lessons that stressed the nation’s triumphs, largely ignored its failures, tragedies, and oppression, and inculcated republican values and practices. Americanization was fundamentally civics, and it was by and large welcomed by the new immigrants of that era, who were eager to embrace the values of their new country in their outer lives, even if they preserved what they could of culture at home. So it was in the cities of the North.

At the turn of the 20th century, however, the changes in public education in the North infuriated the South, which had no big influx of non-Protestant immigrants with whom it needed to negotiate new terms. Mirel:

The assimilationist impulse that had encouraged northern school leaders to strive to integrate new groups into the broader American culture had virtually no resonance among white southerners whose educational, political, and social policies toward African Americans were specifically designed to exclude them from such integration. … Moreover, having stripped African Americans of their voting rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white southerners were not about to adopt policies regarding civic education for black children akin to those that white northerners had adopted for immigrants. As far as most white and some black southern educational leaders were concerned, religiously based, Protestant moral education was and should remain among the most vital and enduring features of public schooling.

The South not only resisted the teaching of “republican values” in the Northern style, but also diverged in the teaching of science, particularly Darwinism, as everyone who has seen Inherit the Wind well knows. By 1930, fundamentalist Protestants had secured legislation banning the teaching of evolution in most of the old Confederacy. This was relevant to the teaching of civics because the anti-evolution laws eventually provoked litigation, and in 1968 the Supreme Court struck them down in the case Eperson v. Arkansas.5

There followed a series of SCOTUS decisions that banished school prayer and sponsored Bible readings from public schools. The Court was careful to note that these decisions did not substitute a “religion of secularism,” and that schools could certainly teach comparative religion, the history of religion, or the Bible as literature. It didn’t matter. The long controversy-avoiding tradition of “when in doubt leave it out” effectively expunged even references to religion from the public schools by the 1970s, and with it virtually any attempt at moral education. Without moral education, it is harder and perhaps impossible to teach the dispositions - respect for others, concern for the common good, and commitment to democracy - important to a democratic republic. None of those dispositions can survive moral relativism.6

Also in the 1970s, the original purpose of teaching civics - to promote assimilation and to teach republican values - came under attack from left-wing academics, Black and indigenous activists, and supporters of bilingual education. Assimilationism was, such people argued, “cultural imperialism,” which in turn actually contributed to the poor performance of minority and immigrant children because of its inherently oppressive nature. To these attacks were added charges that traditional history and civics instruction were classist, sexist, and homophobic. Mirel:

[T]here appeared to be widespread agreement that the civic mission of public schools was a form of oppression. From that perspective, the old nonpartisan policy of preparing future citizens by educating them in the kinds of knowledge, skills, ideals, and values that had been traditionally taught in public schools had to be either radically redesigned or abandoned. As they had in the past, school leaders faced the problem of balancing the protection of the schools with competing pressures to promote unity or diversity.7

Emphasis added.

Of course, the “culture wars” since roughly 2014, amplified by click-driven media, social and otherwise, have only increased the need for public schools to protect themselves from the unremitting political controversy that now pervades American life. They do this, as always, by sterilizing the curriculum of anything problematical - “if in doubt, leave it out” - which has two baleful consequences. First, American history and government are rendered boring, even by the standards of high school, which is, as Ferris Bueller reminds us, the most boring time in the lives of many Americans. When a subject is boring it simply is not well learned. So much for the knowledge component.

Second, and perhaps more tragically, the avoidance of controversy in the discussion of civics means that students don’t get to practice contending with controversy in the actual safety8 of a high school classroom. What if it turns out that a functioning democratic republic requires people to engage with political controversy with empathy and, dare I say, epistemic humility?9 Are not these the skills and dispositions of civics? What if the decline in talking about history and government and morality in school is one of the reasons why our civil discourse today is so ineffective and painful? If so, not only are we as a people losing our understanding of the nuts and bolts of our government, what with people thinking that they elect mayors for their foreign policy or presidents to fill potholes, but we are failing to teach the emotional regulation necessary to manage our political disagreements in the real world.

Jeffrey Mirel certainly thought so when he wrote his paper in 2002:

Democracy depends on the ability to manage conflict constructively. Learning how to deal with conflict in a civil manner is one of the great lessons that schools in a democracy must teach.

Mirel then points to research that finds that “classes dealing directly and openingly with controversial issues and materials are among the most effective in demonstrating democratic values and in developing behaviors in students that sustain those values.” But the schools mostly don’t do that, because the political risk for them is too high, as we have seen in recent election cycles. Schools are themselves democratic institutions run by people who are highly sensitive to the opinions of voters, especially parents.

This may be the great paradox of teaching civics in a democracy: In an age when politics and controversy are unbounded, when anything can become fodder for opprobrium, humiliation, and political fundraising, it does not seem possible that schools produced by democracy can afford to teach civics essential to democracy.

I hate that conclusion, and I hope that you, our faithful readers, can talk me out of it. Unload in the comments below.

Until next time.

The answer, of course, is “because Minnesota sucks.” Murrin, surprisingly enough even in 1983, had not heard that one. Even then we were, apparently, prisoners of our own echo chambers.

I think of that every year when Iowa and Minnesota meet to play their annual rivalry game, which will happen this afternoon.

Having grown up in Iowa City and cheered for the Hawkeyes since I was a little boy, I will don my black and gold gear and watch the game with the enthusiasm of my youth, except I will probably not cry if Iowa loses.

Most college football fans know the game is played for a bronze pig named “Floyd of Rosedale.” Many fans even know that Floyd was once a real pig, the wager in a bet between the governors of Iowa and Minnesota in 1935. In the last few years, the origin story of that bet has become better known, because it had to do with Minnesota beating the hell out of Iowa star player in the 1934 game, a Black man named Ozzie Simmons.

It is also a story about how two wise governors diffused an explosive situation through humor, which is a bit less well known.

Also, there is a lot of random trivia in the story which, as fans of The History of the Americans Podcast well know, always distracts me.

History always begins in the middle of something, as it does with the Iowa-Minnesota rivalry, Floyd, and Ozzie Simmons. One recent account from the Cedar Rapids Gazette claims that “the story begins” in 1830, with the first importation of Hampshire hogs from England into Kentucky. Apparently they took a long time to catch on, but they liked corn so Hawkeye State pig farmers liked them. By 1915 there were more than 1500 herds of Hampshire hogs comprising 100,000 head in Iowa alone. One of those herds was at Rosedale Farms, near Fort Dodge, which was winning awards for its outstanding pigs by the late 1920s.

There are today more than 23 million hogs in Iowa, outnumbering people by 7:11, so it is no wonder that the Gazette stands alone in starting the story of Ozzie Simmons and Floyd with this important background information.

The next place one might start the story of Floyd of Rosedale is, curiously enough, in Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University, 110 miles west by northwest of Iowa City as the super crow flies. Iowa State’s football stadium is named after Jack Trice, Iowa State’s first African-American intercollegiate athlete. Trice died on October 8, 1923 from injuries sustained two days before against … Minnesota. The Gophers beat Trice up so badly on the field - all good fun, no doubt - that he died within 48 hours. Iowa State canceled classes the next day in his honor, and 4000 Iowans attended his funeral on October 16, 1923.2

From a distance, and as one who spent his formative years in Iowa, I don’t think one can understand the Ozzie Simmons affair without knowing about Trice.

Jack Trice Stadium remains the only Division 1 FBS stadium or arena named after an African-American.

Another place to start is with the football. Minnesota was, hard as it may be for we moderns to believe, one of the best programs in the country, and in the mid-1930s were one of the best teams ever, winning the national championship in 1934 and twice more in the next two seasons. Iowa, however, sucked as badly in the 1930s as it did in the 1970s, at least until Nile Kinnick arrived at the end of the decade. In 1931 and ‘32, the Hawkeyes went 2-13-1 combined. The situation was so bad that Iowa was at risk of being booted from the Big 10. Iowa hired a new coach, Ossie Solem, in 1932, but the Depression had so hammered the farm economy that the university couldn’t pay Solem his full salary. He coached anyway.

The most usual place start is in Gainesville, Texas, where Oze “Ozzie” E. Simmons was born on June 22, 19153. Gainesville sits just south of the Oklahoma border, and today Interstate 35 runs right through it, many hundreds of miles before that road reaches Iowa. In 1914, there were a few more than 7000 people in Gainesville, and the State of Texas had only about four million. Today, Gainesville has only about 18,000 people compared to 30 million Texans, so in some respects it is smaller today than it was more than a century ago. The same can be said for many towns in Iowa.

Ozzie Simmons and his brother Don played football in a segregated high school in Forth Worth, which competed in a segregated league. Ozzie was an all-state quarterback and halfback. He won eleven varsity letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track, and was state champion in the 100-yard dash. Today - or anytime in the last sixty years - Ozzie would have been recruited by top programs in his own part of the country. Then, the chances were very high that he would have vanished into obscurity, as happened with so many brilliant Black players in all sports 90 years ago.

As it happened, in 1933 a graduate of the University of Iowa, a white man4, saw the Simmons brothers play and suggested that the two of them go to Iowa City, where Blacks like Archie Alexander and Duke Slater - after whom the field at Kinnick Stadium is now named - had been playing football since the 1890s. Ozzie and his brother were well aware of Slater, who had played on Iowa’s 1921 national championship team and gone pro, back before the NFL’s “informal agreement” to exclude Black players.5

The two brothers hopped a freight train and stowed away in a box car, as one did back then, and got off in Iowa City. There are no doubt missing details here - for starters, how would these kids have figured out that a particular car was going from Fort Worth to Iowa City? Nevermind, though, it is all part of the lore.

The two brothers supposedly made their way from the boxcar to Coach Solem’s office and asked for a tryout. Solem sent them out to the practice field, and there Ozzie - who had apparently eaten essentially nothing for five days - blew their minds. Teammate Dick Bolin described the moment:

His first day out for practice he was playing safety, handling punt returns. Every time he caught a punt he would run it in for a touchdown - he would just snake through everybody - he had three touchdowns that day. the last time he scored, he sort of knelt down in the end zone for a minute and then fell over.

Iowa has had its share of good punt returners, and Ozzie Simmons was one of them.

When Ozzie’s new teammates learned he hadn’t eaten, they arranged for him to get regular meals. There was no training table for the football team then, so they persuaded the owner of a local diner to feed him for free. Then, as now, everybody in Iowa City wanted to see the Hawks win.

The Simmons brothers got a lot of favorable pre-season publicity in both the mainstream and Black press. That publicity seemed justified when the customarily hapless Hawkeyes of that decade opened the 1934 conference season at Northwestern on October 6. Simmons ran back a kickoff for a touchdown, rushed for 166 yards in 24 carries - more than six yards per try - and returned 7 punts for 124 yards, leading the Hawks to a 20-7 victory. Ralph Cannon of the Chicago Daily News wrote:

This slithery, rubbery, oozy flyer … can make his legs talk more languages than even Red Grange’s could when he was a sophomore … Most of it seems to come naturally to Simmons, as such things must come to the genius of any line.

After that game and Cannon’s report Ozzie was known as “the Ebony Eel,” which - cringy as it sounds today - was what passed for a respectful compliment in 1934. His other nickname, also obviously with Chicago roots, was “the Wizard of Oz,” which I think would hold up even on network television today.

Unfortunately, Simmons alone was not enough to make a big difference for the Hawkeyes that season. They lost at Nebraska the next week by a point, and the Clones whalloped them in Ames 31-6 on October 20. Now the 2-2 Hawkeyes were to host Minnesota, on its way to the first of three consecutive national championships, in Iowa City on October 27.

Ahead of the game, Simmons and his potential to frustrate “the Goliaths of the Northland” got a lot of attention in both states, but particularly in Minnesota. According to Jaime Schultz, “In anticipation of the ‘unusually elusive running back’ Minnesota’s team included a special practice dedicated to tackling, and [Minnesota Coach] Bierman changed the kicking strategy in order to keep the ball out of Simmons’ hands.”

In the event, Ozzie Simmons had little chance to affect the outcome of the game, a 48-12 victory for Minnesota. The Gophers hit him so hard and so often, even after the whistle had blown, all the while hurling the N-word, that Simmons was knocked unconscious three times in the first half, the third time - the third time! - sending him to the hospital. But there were no flags. In that awful moment, every Hawkeye fan at the game that day would have remembered what Minnesota had done to Jack Trice.

Fortunately, Simmons would survive and live to play again, but the Iowa faithful burned with rage.

Fast forward to 1935, when due to a scheduling glitch Minnesota returned to Iowa City. Minnesota, the defending national champs, were again favored, although under the circumstances the bookies gave Iowa fans only 3:1 odds. Then Iowa Governor Clyde L. Herring stepped in, addressing the treatment of Simmons:

The University of Iowa football team will defeat the University of Minnesota. Those Minnesotans will find 10 other top-notch players besides Ozzie Simmons agains them this year. Moreover, if the officials stand for any rough tactics like Minnesota last year, I’m sure the crowd won’t.

Some might say that last line is a dog whistle.

When asked if he thought that Ozzie Simmons had been singled out by Minnesota the previous year, Governor Herring said “Yes, I do. I saw the game myself and I saw that boy come off the field with tears streaming down his face. I think [the] Minnesota players were pretty hard on him.”6

Minnesota Coach Bierman heard the whistle, and said “I will instruct my boys to go out and play their usual game. If the spectators get tough with them, it will probably be the last game between Minnesota and Iowa as long as I am coach.”

Surviving accounts do not explore what Coach Bierman meant by “their usual game.”7

Minnesota’s Governor Floyd B Olson, who, unlike most politicians today, apparently had a flair for diffusing tense situations, sent a telegram to Governor Herring (emphasis added by me):

Dear Clyde, Minnesota folks excited over your statement about the Iowa crowd lynching the Minnesota football team. I have assured them that you are a law-abiding gentleman and are only trying to get our goat. The Minnesota team will tackle clean, but, oh! how hard, Clyde. If you seriously think Iowa has any chance to win, I will bet you a Minnesota prize hog against an Iowa prize hog that Minnesota wins today. The loser must deliver the hog in person to the winner. Accept my bet through a reporter. You are getting odds because Minnesota raises better hogs than Iowa. My best personal regards and condolences. Floyd B. Olson Governor of Minnesota.

Governor Olson cracked Governor Olson up!

Herring told a reporter “it’s a bet” and the game was on. Herring wrote back that Iowa fans had “not lynched an entire football team in years” (again emphasis added).

That both governors used the word “lynch” at a time when lynching of Blacks in the South was a topic of national debate - a Federal anti-lynching statute had been stalled in the Senate since it had passed the House in 1922 - has been a topic of some hanky-twisting. Did Olson accuse Herring of proposing lynching as a sly and specific reference to the beating of Simmons, or was the word in such common use that he just reached for it as a colorful response to Herring’s dog whistle? There is no way to know.

Governor Herring played along, though, and observed that it would be hard to find a prize hog in Minnesota since “they are all so scrawny.” Word of the bet reached Iowa City on the day of the game, November 9, 1935. This year, by all accounts the Gophers played a much cleaner game; press accounts afterward suggested that Simmons was treated fairly, neither carefully nor with excessive roughness. The generally friendly Iowa fans responded kind. Indeed, I can report that losing only 13-6 to the defending and future national champions is the kind of thing that leaves Hawkeye fans - the least entitled fans in college sports - with a strange mix of resignation, pride, and cynical grumping over beer.

The following week, Governor Herring delivered a live pig to the Minnesota Capitol, taking him right inside to meet Governor Olson. The pig’s name was “Floyd” - named by Herring after Olson - “of Rosedale” - after the farm near Fort Dodge. That’s Herring on the left and Olson on the right.

Jaime Schultz digested the press accounts in her paper from 2005:8

Regional and local press reported slapstick renditions of Governor Herring’s personal delivery of Floyd of Rosedale to the Minnesota state capitol in which the hog was released from a crate into the office and promptly forced his way under the governor’s mahogany desk. Journalists reported that “Governor Olson tackled him and caught him near the tail. Governor Herring, who herded pigs back in 1907, was more deft and grabbed an ear.”

Olson proposed to Herring that the bet become an annual tradition, but that the “hog would die of old age before you got possession of him again.” To solve the mortality problem, Olson commissioned a Minnesota artist to craft a 1/3 scale likeness of Floyd of Rosedale, which became the stakes for the annual rivalry game starting in 1936.

Sadly, Floyd Olson would never see another Minnesota-Iowa game. He died on August 22, 1936 of stomach cancer, at age 44. He had been a well-regarded left-wing populist of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, and was thought to have such political talent that he might one day be president.

Clyde Herring, a dozen years older than Olson, would go on to be elected to the United States Senate, and would live until September 1945. Herring’s record in the Senate is most known for his reaction to Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Herring declared that “radio has no more right to present programs like that than someone has to come knocking on our door and screaming,” and proposed legislation requiring that all radio programs be submitted to the FCC before airing.9 This suggests to me, at least, that Floyd Olson had the better sense of humor of the two.

Ozzie Simmons almost quit football after Minnesota beat down Iowa 52-0 in 1936, carrying the bronze Floyd off the field for the first time, but his teammates pulled him back. He would go on to play pro ball, but not in the National Football League, which had gone all white just about the time that Simmons arrived in Iowa City. He would spend most of his life teaching phys ed in Chicago’s public schools, which he interrupted only during the war, joining the Navy in 1943. The remarkable Wizard of Oz would live until age 87, dying September 26, 2001 of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

I did find one last note that I am not sure has been published before (thank you ChatGPT) - a letter from Ronald Reagan to Ozzie Simmons dated March 9, 1982. Reagan, you probably know, had called Iowa games on Des Moines radio station WHO, and had known Simmons back in the day. So here you go.10

Until next time.

It is not my purpose in this post to judge the merits of the arguments for and against awarding Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize. The nominations for this year’s award closed on January 31, long before President Trump did any of the things that he keeps mentioning as reasons for deserving the prize, so the debate is premature if you’re not a rank partisan.

Now, we know that the people who hand out the Peace Prize have long done so for aspirational or manipulative reasons. Because I’m just spitballing, I asked ChatGPT the following question:

Among the historical winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace, are there examples of people who won seemingly for the purpose of advancing the cause for peace, rather than as recognition for actually having done so?

Suffice it to say that the AI had a lot to say on the subject, offering up Woodrow Wilson (1919, for the League of Nations, which the US did not join), Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ (1973, for the Paris Peace Accords that were supposed to end the Vietnam War, but didn’t), Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres (1994, for the Oslo Accords), and Barack Obama (2009, apparently just for being so farookin’ cool). Here the link to the bot’s full answer to the question. As always with AI output, handle with care.

Point is, the Nobel people have been using the prestige of their award to encourage leaders to behave in the interests of peace in the future, not only for having already done peacemaking things.

So let’s imagine the members of the committee shooting the breeze about Trump. In him they see an unpredictable man, which Trump and his fans see as a feature but which the Norwegian academics and NGO leaders who serve on the selection committee probably consider a bug (we are, after all, talking about Norwegians). That unpredictability leads to paradoxes. Trump purports to hate war and I think a lot of people, including some Europeans, believe that he does, and he seems to have a talent for diplomatic, um, innovation to end fighting. Then again, he has bombed Iran, droned Qassem Soleimani, and skyhosed speedboats from Venezuela. To the extent the members of the committee are at least open-minded about giving President Trump the Peace Prize (perhaps because he does enough actual peace), they also must be worried that if they give Trump the prize too early in his presidency he could beclown them instantaneously by bombing someone the next afternoon. If they have full-blown TDS and sufficiently inflated self-importance (which seems at least possible), they might even think that Trump would be more likely to bomb someone because he had already won the prize.

Now, suppose they recognize that notwithstanding their substantive or aesthetic objections to the American Orange Man, they may one day be OK with giving him the damn thing if he does enough peaceful stuff. If so, they would have at least three reasons for deferring that decision until late in his presidency. First, it reduces the chances that Trump beclowns them after the fact. Second, it keeps him focused on doing peaceful things, which is good! If he really is motivated by his desire for the Peace Prize, keeping him working for peace longer instead of shorter is better. Doing peaceful things for four years is better than doing them for one. Finally, waiting until (say) the fall of 2028 delays the moment in which they, or anybody else, has to sit through Trump’s acceptance speech, during which he will probably say things that make European academics and NGO people grimace. Nobody wants to rush that day.

Of course, this strategy depends on the Selection Committee letting it be known that they are open to Trump winning the prize. The carrot is the point. If they leak it out that “no way no hell” will Trump get the prize, then please disregard this post for it will have been wildly wrong.

Your results may vary, so if you see it differently by all means unload in the comments below.

Until next time.