Founding Father vs. Founding Father

READING RON CHRENOW’S Alexander Hamilton, I was struck again by how little has changed in the last two hundred years—a point I always tried to hammer home with students. 

(I’m  now retired.)

Much as I admire the handiwork of the Founding Fathers, I have always believed we should take them off their pedestal. There are, for example, interesting parallels between the political battles of their era and those of our own. Theyhad their own “Fake News” issues, Pizzagate rumors, financial corruptions and fears of foreign meddling in elections.

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Looking back on that era, most Americans imagine our young nation was led by giants. (That assumes they give the matter any thought at all.) George Washington, James Madison, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton all played roles in creating a system of government we cherish.

(Don’t forget James Wilson. He was one of the most influential thinkers of all during the Constitutional Convention.)

 

Yeah, nobody remembers him.

It is my theory, that when it comes to political division, history proves we’re all extras in a Hollywood remake. The title and plot of the movie are the same. Only the actors and director have changed.

Whenever I hear some expert talking about what the Founding Fathers believed—and how we can’t do anything they wouldn’t have done—and, just by chance, how what the Founding Fathers believed is exactly what the modern speaker believes now—I have to wonder. Shouldn’t we remember that the Founding Fathers often disagreed vehemently with other Founding Fathers?

Certainly, Hamilton understood that he lived in no golden era. As an army officer he was horrified to find that contractors were cheating the Continental Army when it came to delivering supplies. “When avarice takes the lead in a state,” he grumbled in 1778, “it is commonly the forerunner of its fall. How shocking it is to discover among ourselves, even at this early period, the strongest symptoms of this fatal disease?”

(Drain the swamp!)

In 1780, he questioned whether Americans were even ready to govern themselves. Our “countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their composition,” he grumbled.

It seems to me, we should make clear to students that the Founding Fathers had their own fiery fights over policy, their ridiculous conspiracy theories and sordid sexual escapades. Hamilton, of course, carried on a lengthy extramarital affair with a young woman named Maria Reynolds. Mrs. Reynolds and her husband—who connived at the affair—used Hamilton’s failings to blackmail the lascivious Founding Father. At the same time Hamilton’s peccadillos were being revealed, like a semen-stained blue dress or an Access Hollywood tape, Jefferson was scuffling to cover up his own lustful sinning. He was deep into a long-term sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave woman, which began when his chattel was fifteen.

Fifteen!

(Think Anthony Weiner sending “dick pictures” to teenage girls. Wait. Blot that out of your memory.)

The Founding Fathers really had no idea what to do about slavery.
So they punted.

Plus, there was dueling! And not just the famous duel that led to Alexander Hamilton’s demise. Hamilton once challenged James Monroe, the future president, to a duel. A witness to their heated exchange reported that Monroe shouted angrily, “I am ready, get your pistols.”

The man who cooled the potential duelists down?

Aaron Burr.

(Think how much more interesting current political debates might be if Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer were prone to reach for their pistols. I might even start watching C-SPAN.)

The Founding Fathers were as bitterly divided among themselves as our political classes are today. Robert Yates, and John Lansing Jr., two of three New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention (Hamilton being the third), opposed almost every change suggested in the Articles of Confederation. Both left Philadelphia in a huff. Fifty-five men convened that summer. Only 39 agreed to support the final blueprint that became our Constitution.

Reacting to the departure of Yates and Lansing, Washington wrote Hamilton to complain about “narrow-minded politicians…under the influence of local views.” Such men would block “a strong and energetic government” out of naked self-interest. Then they’d claim to have done so in the name of liberty.

Fundamental disagreements divided delegates at the Convention. Franklin argued that members of the executive branch in the new government should serve without pay. Then only “civic-minded” individuals would run for office. Early on, a proposal was put forward to limit the president to a single seven-year term in office—meaning Donald J. Trump would be serving till 2024. This proposal was voted on and adopted. It was not until much later that delegates reconsidered and opted for four-year terms. And we know they failed to set a limit to how many terms a president could serve. They weren’t prescient, any more than George W. Bush or Barrack Obama in our time.

If anything, politically-charged violence was more common in their era. A July 4, 1788 clash between supporters and opponents of ratification of the Constitution left one dead and eighteen injured. An opponent of the new government and a foe of an overly-powerful government it created (in his opinion), called it “a monster with open mouth and monstrous teeth ready to devour all before it.”

Supporters of the new Constitution honor Hamilton's efforts in winning ratification.

Following ratification, as all history teachers know, the new government struggled with debt left from the Revolutionary War. The Founding Fathers might have feared “factions” in politics but factions quickly coalesced into parties, whether they liked it or not. A sharp divide developed during debate about how to handle the debt. Politicians on both sides accused rivals of nefarious motives. Jefferson believed Hamilton and his minions wished to create a perpetual national debt, “because they find it an engine for the corrupting the legislature.”

If there was debt, taxes would need to be levied to pay for it. Newspapers for Jefferson’s faction—soon to be known as the Democratic-Republicans—complained loudly about the tax placed on whiskey. “The government of the United States,” said one angry editor, “in all things wishing to imitate the corrupt principles of the court of Great Britain, has commenced the disgraceful career by an excise law.”

Tax agents tasked with collecting the duty ran into serious problems in western Pennsylvania, where farmers turned corn into alcohol to ship east for sale and make a living. “They drew a knife on him,” a reporter said of one unlucky tax collector, “threatened to scalp him, tar and feather him, and finally to reduce his house and property to ashes” if he did not agree to cease enforcing the hated tax.

Bone-deep political distrust was common even then. The Democratic-Republican press warned that Hamilton was plotting to make the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III, the first king of the United States. Even George Washington sometimes faced blistering criticism. The newspaper editor, Benjamin Franklin Bache, lambasted him for failing to side with France against England. “The world,” said Bache of the president, “will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.” Washington complained in his Farewell Address (but had these lines excised by Hamilton) about newspapers filled “with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.”

Another critical question facing the Founding Fathers was how to respond in the face of the French Revolution. John Adams, who was not supportive of the revolutionaries, feared pro-French mobs might attack his home, family and friends. To be safe he ordered a cache of arms and ammunition delivered to his house through back lanes. In one unpublished essay, Hamilton wrote of “wily hypocrites,” and “crafty and abandoned imposters” who filled the pro-French camp.

Certainly, the Founding Fathers were not timid about turning to invective. Adams described Hamilton as “the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable and unprincipled intriguer in the United States.” Hamilton slammed Jefferson. Beware, he told a friend, the machinations of the master of Monticello, “the criminal, the ignoble aim of so seditious, so prostitute a character.” Burr described Monroe as, “Naturally dull and stupid, extremely illiterate; indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him.” Abigail Adams (Founding Mother!) chimed in, offering this assessment of Hamilton for her husband’s pleasure. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them.” At news of a possible duel involving his father—one not fought—Hamilton’s son later wrote that opposition politicians having wine at dinner, toasted, “A speedy immortality to Hamilton.”

As always, greed was a problem. “My soul arises indignant at the avaricious and immoral turpitude which so vile a conduct displays,” James Madison wrote, describing speculators in government bonds. Jefferson warned against crooks in Congress. Even “in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests and to look after personal rather than public good.” President John Adams referred to bankers as “swindlers and thieves” and warned that Hamilton had introduced the “gangrene of avarice” into government. Jefferson described the business of high finance in that era as “an infinity of successive felonious larcenies.”

The same kind of personal attacks we see launched today were to be seen in the early days of our Republic. In private, Adams often referred to Hamilton, whose birth was illegitimate, as a “Creole bastard.” He gave credence to a rumor that Hamilton “never wrote or spoke at the bar or elsewhere in public without a bit of opium in his mouth.” Hamilton complained of Adams’s “disgusting egotism” and “distempered jealousy.” Adams labeled Washington “Old Muttonhead,” faulting his intelligence. The poor man “could not write a sentence without misspelling some word,” Adams complained. Washington was “but very superficially read in the history of any age, nation, or country.” As for Franklin, Adams was shocked by his peer’s licentiousness. As for Ben, he had doubts about Adams. “He means well for his country,” Franklin wrote, “is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

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Bitter policy disagreements are nothing new and one Founding Father was often at the throat of another. When Washington threw his support behind the unpopular Jay’s Treaty, the House of Representatives tried to interfere with his ability to conduct foreign policy. First, James Madison, then a member of the House of Representatives, argued that since the treaty touched on commerce between Britain and the United States, the House should vote on ratification. When that plan failed, he suggested the House refuse to appropriate money to implement the agreement. His suggestion—which might have circumscribed the power of not just Washington but all future presidents—was only narrowly defeated by a 51-48 vote.

Feelings were so bitter in regard to Jay’s Treaty that feared opponents might follow the example of the French Revolution, set up guillotines in New York City, and lead supporters of the treaty to their doom. On one occasion, when he attempted to speak to an anti-treaty crowd, Hamilton was greeted by a barrage of stones. After one struck him in the forehead, an ally complained that foes of ratification had endeavored “to knock out Hamilton’s brains to reduce him to an equality with themselves.”

The Founding Fathers were neither sages nor saints. Indeed, they were just as prone to compromise their principles as our leaders today. One particular facet of Jay’s Treaty angered Southern lawmakers. The British were not obligated to pay “damages” for the thousands of slaves they helped escape during the Revolution. Hamilton, who was fiercely opposed to slavery, considered the idea that the U.S. government should consider requiring payment “odious and immoral.”

Nothing ever seems to change. Who among us now will ever forget that moment in debate when Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump took turns accusing each other of being Putin’s puppet?

The Aurora, a newspaper supporting the party of Jefferson, intimated that Washington was a “puppet” controlled by Hamilton. As for Hamilton, the editor of the Aurora claimed the Secretary of the Treasury had lived a life “spent in wickedness and which must terminate in shame and dishonor.”

Noah Webster, of eventual dictionary fame, labeled Hamilton “the evil genius of this country.”

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Even worse turmoil followed after Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act was aimed at diluting the impact immigrants had in American politics. Most immigrants supported the Democrat-Republicans. So Federalists set out to limit their numbers coming into the country and extend the period required to become a citizen to fourteen years. America, one Federalist leader insisted, should no longer “wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments.” Hamilton was equally blunt. “My opinion is that the mass [of aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the country.”

Of all the laws ever passed by Congress, the Sedition Act stands as one of the worst. And it was the work of several of the Founding Fathers we are supposed to revere. Once it was made law, it was illegal to speak or publish “any false, scandalous, or malicious” words or articles against the President or members of Congress “with the intent to defame…or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute.” Fines could range as high as $2,000, at that time equal to almost four years of pay for average worker. Conviction could mean two years in jail.

Whatever the flaws of our current leaders, we seem to have moved beyond such crude devices for silencing dissent as the Sedition Act. Ann Greenleaf, who edited her husband’s newspaper after he died, was prosecuted for saying “the federal government was corrupt and inimical to the preservation of liberty.” Greenleaf avoided jail time. Her editor did not. He paid a fine of $100 and spent four months behind bars. A second editor spent eighteen months in prison for suggesting that the government was operating in the interests of the wealthy, at the expense of ordinary citizens. A third newspaper man got into trouble after suggesting that President John Adams had a fat butt. James T. Callender, whose newspaper was also unfriendly to Adams, said of the second president: “The reign of Mr. Adams has been one continued tempest of malignant passions.” Callender spent nine months in prison for his trouble.

There are those who believe the Founding Fathers had a purity we now lack. Politics has never been pure. In January 1798, for example, an argument between Matthew Lyon of the Democratic-Republican Party and Roger Griswold of the Federalist Party descended into mayhem. On the floor of Congress, Lyon taunted Griswold for cowardice during the Revolution. To accentuate his point, he spat in Girswold’s face. Griswold responded by pounding his foe with a hickory cane. Lyon countered by battering Griswold with fire tongs. As Chernow writes, the two lawmakers ended up “fighting on the floor like common ruffians.”

On another occasion a Federalist pounced upon a Republican as his political foe was walking down a public street and beat his victim with a cane. For good measure, he gave the man’s nose a twist—a preferred insult of that period. The subject of the attack recovered, challenged his assailant to a duel, and shot him dead.

Duels were far more common than most of us remember. Aaron Burr faced off against a man named John B. Church, again a result of heated rhetoric. Burr missed completely with his shot. Church clipped a button off Burr’s coat; but the affair of “honor” ended without bloodshed.

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As the presidential election of 1800 approached—and it seemed clear a transfer of power was imminent—Federalists despaired. One party leader grumbled privately about President Adams’ “studied neglect and naked contempt” for the advice of his cabinet. Adams’ age, he added, had “enfeebled his mental faculties.” Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of that very cabinet, attacked the president behind his back. “We know the temper of his mind to be…violent and vindictive….The people believe the president is crazy.” Hamilton tore into Adams, as well. “The man is more mad than I ever thought,” he told a friend, “and I shall soon be led to say as wicked as he is mad.” A Delaware Congressman described Adams as one “liable to gusts of passion little short of frenzy, which drive him beyond the control of any rational reflection. I speak of what I have seen. At such moments the interest of those who support him or the interest of the nation would be outweighed by a single impulse of rage.”

Adams was so disgusted by what he saw as the disloyalty of his own political party that he eventually fled Washington for his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. There he remained for seven months. One South Carolina Federalist told friends that on the way north he hoped the president’s horse would run away with him and Adams would break his neck.

As Election Day approached wild rumors circulated. There were stories that Adams had gone insane. Many feared civil war if the Democratic-Republican Party took power. A Federalist was heard to groan “that a civil war would be preferable to having Jefferson.” Hamilton warned that the Virginian was “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics.” Clergymen predicted that if Thomas Jefferson took office he would force Christians to hide their Bibles. John Quincy Adams, who later joined the party of Jefferson, said of the winner in 1800, that Jefferson had been “pimping to the popular passions” in a bid to unseat his father. Hamilton feared that an “influx of foreigners” would “change and corrupt the national spirit.” In the end he claimed immigrant votes propelled the Democrat-Republican Party to victory.

When a flaw in the Electoral College system left Burr and Jefferson tied with 73 votes each, it appeared the crafty Burr might steal the top office. The future of the United States hung in an uneasy balance. Many clergymen expressed a willingness to overlook Burr’s lack of morals rather than confront Thomas Jefferson’s “atheism.” Hamilton, no fan of Jefferson, was opposed. “The appointment of Burr would disgrace our country abroad,” he warned. Burr, he told friends, “is sanguine enough to hope everything, daring enough to attempt everything, wicked enough to scruple nothing” and prone to play upon “the floating passions of the multitude.”

In the end, of course, Jefferson prevailed. Adams boycotted his successor’s inauguration in a fit of pique, leaving town early that morning.

“The golden age is past,” Abigail Adams mourned. “God grant that it may not be succeeded by an age of terror.”

In his first Inaugural Address, President Jefferson tried to bridge the bitter political divide. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he said magnanimously.

In private, however, he promised a friend he would “sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection.”

On the other side, William Coleman, a Federalist editor, sent the president an angry letter. He accused Jefferson of pulling down a house of virtues and replacing it with “a foul and filthy temple consecrated to atheism and lewdness.”

Lewdness indeed!

James T. Callender, who had previously supported Jefferson and gone to jail after attacking Adams, now switched sides. On September 1, 1802, he broke the following story in his Richmond, Virginia newspaper:

It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally…By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it…The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.

Callendar labeled her as “Dusky Sally,” and said her son Tom, “yellow Tom,” bore a striking resemblance to the president. (By the time he finished his two terms in office, President Jefferson would be complaining about the newspapers’ “abandoned prostitution to falsehood.”)

Callender, like so many of us, then and now, was battling his own demons. After a night of heavy drinking, in the summer of 1803, his body was found bobbing in three feet of water in the James River.

Fortunately, the Sedition Acts soon fell out of favor. Jefferson did prosecute two Federalist editors, however. Harry Croswell, of New York, ran a paper whose banner bore the motto: “To lash the rascals naked through the world.” When Croswell attacked the Democratic-Republicans in print he was arrested. A jury found him guilty, after a judge instructed them to adhere to the old standard of libel—that it was libel if statements made against a plaintiff were defamatory.

Hamilton, by now returned to private life, served as Croswell’s attorney. If statements were true, he argued, they could not be defamatory. When the jury convicted Croswell, despite this plea, Hamilton decided to appeal the ruling. “The liberty of the press consists, in my idea, in publishing the truth from good motives and or justifiable ends, though it reflect on the government, on magistrates, or individuals,” Hamilton insisted. “Its being a truth is reason to infer that there was no design to injure another.”

“I never did think the truth was a crime,” he added. “I am glad the day is come in which it is to be decided, for my soul has ever abhorred the thought that a free man dared not speak the truth.”

It was, Hamilton pointed out rightly, the primary job of newspapers to hold the powerful to account. “To watch the progress of such endeavours [i.e. the actions of our leaders] is the office of the free press. To give us early alarm and put us on our guard against the encroachments of power. This then is a right of the utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up, we ought rather to spill our blood.”

On appeal, the appeals court split 2-2. Croswell was denied a second trial. In the end, he was never sentenced for his crimes. In April 1805 the State of New York passed a libel law that incorporated Hamilton’s idea. The truth, lawmakers now agreed, was protected under the First Amendment.

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Today, we may feel that America has never been more politically divided. Our ancestors in the time of the Founding Fathers would surely disagree. It was a Republican editor, James Cheetham, after all, who goaded Hamilton and Burr into a duel. Cheetham wrote that Hamilton had privately accused Burr of heinous misdeeds.

Cheetham also claimed to have a list of “upwards of twenty women of ill fame with whom [Burr] has been connected.” He had another list of married women Burr had managed to bed. And he had a third list of “chaste and respectable ladies whom he has attempted to seduce.” Even worse, in those days of rampant racial prejudice, Cheetham accused Burr of holding a “nigger ball” at his estate, dancing with a voluptuous black woman, and sleeping with her too.

Burr blamed Hamilton for these attacks and challenged him to a fight. Late in life, Hamilton had become a devoted Christian. He could not kill Burr, in good conscience, he said. When the duel did play out, it is believed he meant to fire his pistol in the air, rather than shoot to kill. Burr had no such compunctions and struck his opponent down. Badly wounded, Hamilton was carried home by friends. As death approached, he remained calm. “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ,” he told his doctor and family.

Near the end, with the fate of the United States still foremost in mind, he muttered, “If they break this union, they will break my heart.”

In his final letter he told his wife Eliza,

With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.    

Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me.

Ever yours,

A H

Burr prevailed on the dueling ground but fled south to avoid prosecution. He was indicted for murder in New Jersey, but presided over the U.S. Senate when it opened on November 4, 1804. He later headed to Europe where he traveled widely and continued to seduce various women.

He returned to the States in 1812. That summer his only grandchild died. His only child, Theodosia, sailed from her home in South Carolina soon after. She vanished at age 29, the victim of storm or pirates. Burr described himself at the time as “severed from the human race.” He became a famous recluse. In 1833, at age 77, however, he married Eliza Jumel, 58, a fabulously rich widow. She herself had been a courtesan and had borne an illegitimate son before marrying a rich wine merchant, Stephen Jumel. Burr now set about spending all her money. Within a year she filed for divorce.

On what grounds: Adultery! 

The Sum of All Right-Wing Fears

IN THE WAKE OF THE BLOODBATH at Newtown, Connecticut and the strange year that was 2012, it seems we might need to try to interpret a little conservative thinking.

I’ve been studying the matter and believe I’ve got it down. I think—if I understand it right—that Mr. Obama has been having illicit sex with circus clowns.

I think that’s about the level of most of what has been passing for conservative logic in recent months.

What else have conservatives been trying to tell us? Where are they going at the start of this new year? For starters: Obama is a tyrant. Since he took office the Bill of Rights has been turned into fast food wrapping paper. (Angry white guys can hardly watch Fox News excoriate the President on a daily basis any more.)

So conservatives must rise up and…take back America...and buy guns and vote. Because nothing says tyranny like allowing political opponents to cast ballots and stock up on ammo. It didn’t really matter though, because everyone on their side knew they were going to kick butt in the 2012 election. That’s what Fox News said; and the polls were all wrong, because only gay people care about percentages. What? Obama won???

Obama is like Hitler!

Under Obamacare insurance companies can no longer refuse coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. This includes toddlers with rare genetic disorders and type-1 diabetic teens. What’s the next step, you ask?

Gas chambers for granny.

If taxes go up on the superrich, like the Koch brothers, then we are one step from a communist takeover. This is why the Koch brothers, worth $31 billion apiece, donate tens of millions of dollars to right wing causes, including smashing labor unions. Nothing says “communism” like teachers and fire fighters and bakers of Twinkies trying to win improved wages and benefits. These people want to remain in the great American middle class?

Yep: to the right, that’s “communism.”

Speaking of unions, how greedy can those thugs be? All they want to do is kill good jobs in this country. This is why job creators—here we are thinking, people just like Mitt Romney—have no choice but to create jobs in Bangladesh, where the minimum wage is $37 per month.

Gun sales in this country reached record highs in 2012, with 16.8 million background checks carried out by the F.B.I. You can’t fool conservatives—even if that does mean 45,902 guns were sold daily (it was a Leap Year). Obama plans to take away all their guns.

Glenn Beck says there may be giant magnets.

If anyone (even NASA scientists) mentions global warming or climate change or even says, “Boy, it’s a hot one today,” clearly they are part of a plot to destroy capitalism. They want to create a world government where BP and Shell Oil are denied their inalienable rights—since corporations are now people—to drill in Arctic waters and Americans are forced to eat vegan.

If gay people marry, traditional marriage will be dead, because gay people want to marry in a traditional way. Wedding cakes will no longer be baked.

Tuxedo sales will plummet.

The Chicken Dance will be only a memory.

Anyone who says, “Happy holidays,” in the weeks leading up to Christmas secretly hopes Christians spontaneously combust. (Yeah: some psychologist on Fox News explained it! Obama hates Christmas because when he was a boy his father never gave him a pony.)

We don’t need gun control to keep kids in school safe. We need to put God back in the schools. That means everyone reads the King James Bible—even Buddhists and Mormons and Jews. We need to arm teachers or maybe issue Kevlar-covered Bibles because nothing says “happy children” quite like defensive weaponry stacked near the reading center in a second grade classroom.

SPEAKING OF GOD, IF YOU GET RAPED and end up pregnant that’s His way of showing He loves you. If a mugger crushes your skull and you wind up with no health insurance and stuck in an emergency room it’s His way of saying Obamacare is socialized medicine.

And don’t say He didn’t warn you.

God believes all fifty states need concealed carry laws and He doesn’t like the 47% either.

The Founding Fathers knew everything and you couldn’t possibly beat any of them if you played them in Jeopardy. If the Founding Fathers were for freedom of religion then freedom of religion is still good enough for Christians today. Liberals, those people who hate America, insist that American citizens who happen to be Muslim should be able to build mosques where they want, such as in towns where they live. The Founding Fathers weren’t a pack of Muslims. They weren’t gay, either.

Okay, they weren’t black or female or poor white males either; but that’s not the point.

The Founding Fathers wanted pregnant women who were considering abortions to undergo invasive vaginal probes. It’s all laid out in Article III, Section 3 of the U. S. Constitution.

And you know why Obama is a tyrant? He’s planning to ignore the 22nd Amendment, which limits the chief executive to two terms—because the Founding Fathers never thought to limit a president’s tenure. You can’t fool right-wing thinkers! They know evolution and Hawaiian birth certificates can be faked. They know Obama plans to seize power and run for a third term in 2016, a fourth in 2020, a fifth in 2024, a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth!

My God, how long can that man last?

In summation, have we mentioned that Obama sends Kwanza cards to terrorists? And what about those circus clowns? Sean Hannity says Obama is a lepidopterist. 

And if you hear it on Fox News it has to be true.

 

You can't fool conservatives, they know he's plotting for 2016 and beyond.
Well beyond! Time to stock up on more guns.

Problem Solved? Arm All the Teachers?

I GUESS I’M FINALLY CONVINCED. Those who cherish Second Amendment rights and guard against all limitations have shown me I’m wrong. I’ve been trying to argue that we can limit gun sales and ban military-style assault rifles and high capacity of ammunition clips. Now I understand. Tyranny is just one unsold pistol or rifle or shotgun away.  

I didn’t realize until now that we needed more guns. (We also need to turn our schools into forts, it would seem.) 

Here, I thought, we were talking about children like Madeline Hsu, Charlotte Bacon and Olivia Engel, all 6, who died Friday after being hit in a spray of gunfire. Now I know. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This is an absolute truth, is it not? Or, as one no-limits-on-guns thinker sagely noted, we might as well ban forks and spoons as ban guns. People in America are fat and obesity kills. 

True. SO true. If we start banning guns, what comes next? I think that’s what he was trying to say. Are we ready to ban donuts? 

I’m not being sarcastic at all. I’m not saying this kind of thinking is for idiots. I’m saying these absolutists are right. There’s no other way to address the incredible carnage.

Except to get our hands on more guns. 

Madeliene F. Hsu,
one of twenty children cut down at Sandy Hook

You want to protect first graders in schools? You can’t do it by limiting guns. How could you think that? Now our greatest leaders are stepping forward to offer solutions. A member of Congress has already expressed sorrow to learn that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was unarmed at the time of attack. If only Hochsprung had had an assault rifle hanging on the wall in her office! (I’m not joking. That’s what he said.) Then she might have engaged the shooter and possibly won. 

I’m embarrassed to say I’m a retired teacher—and all those years I spent in a classroom I never saw the logic of this kind of position. I had a student who brought a gun to school to shoot me and at least one of his classmates back in 1985. Now I see. The gun that troubled young man picked up so easily at home, that wasn’t the problem. No, I needed my own gun for protection. He had a loaded pistol in his book bag. I should have had one holstered on my hip. It would have been hard to teach without turning my back to the class; but, hey, if it means protecting the Second Amendment, I could have adjusted. 

NO WAY CAN WE LIMIT GUNS. We don’t limit freedoms in America. No sir. The Founding Fathers knew their freedom shit. (Okay, true, maybe some did own slaves.) Ignore that. We are talking here about teachers fighting back. 

Fight fire with return fire, you might say. 

Yes, it’s the deepest kind of human tragedy that Noah Pozner, 6, had to die, hit by gunfire unleashed by a disturbed individual with a military-style assault rifle. According to his mother, Noah hoped to grow up to become a doctor or maybe own a taco factory. He loved tacos, that wonderful little boy, and that way he could have tacos whenever he wanted. 

He’d be alive today, according to gun-rights absolutists, if only his teacher, Lauren Rousseau, 30, had been armed. 

Why didn’t we see this before it was too late? You can’t arm just one teacher in every building. What if that teacher is out sick? What if the shooter enters from a different direction? If we want children to be safe we have to arm every educator in the land. We do it for the kids, or the gun companies, at least. Until recently, Ms. Rousseau had been a substitute teacher and before Friday she had to feel fortunate to land a regular job. What if the school had provided her gun training? Sure. We train every teacher in America in the handling of heavy weapons. Because, let’s face it, we all have Second Amendment rights and they cannot be infringed. Read your Second Amendment. Don’t make me quote it, now that I’ve seen the light: 

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”


We can’t infringe on freedom. Not a spec. If we do we’re open to invasion by Iranians or North Koreans or maybe Redcoats. I know some no-limits Americans worry about invasion by U. N. inspectors coming to take their weapons away; or agents in black helicopters sent by Mr. Obama. What if they’re right! We can’t limit guns. In one fell swoop, U. N. inspectors could grab them all, all 300 million currently in private hands. We can’t do psychological profiling, either, before we put assault rifles in private hands. 

That would be crazy, right? 

It may seem incomprehensible to most of us to think that Allison Wyatt, age 6, died with most of her friends in a room blown to bits like a set in a Rambo movie. But guns don’t kill people. Don't you see? Lack of guns kills people. Her teacher, Ms. Rousseau, would be alive today if she’d been armed and ready. In fact, I apologize to NRA leaders who love America and freedom ten times more than I do. I see now that they don’t have foul blood dripping from their hands. A first grade classroom in an elementary school in a peaceful town in Connecticut was turned into a slaughterhouse.  

Well, it was my fault.  

It was yours, if you think there’s a way to limit guns.  

One of the first responders on the scene was a veteran of two combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq; and he told friends what he saw in that room, with the torn bodies of twenty little children strewn about, was worse than anything he could have imagined in wartime. And look, we have to have guns to stop guns.

ROUSSEAU SHOULD HAVE HAD AN ASSAULT RIFLE lying atop her desk, loaded and ready. She’d never hit any pupils. She’d be trained, don’t you see? Now that you think about it, she should have been wearing body armor. It’s perfectly clear. In the future all teachers shall be issued body armor. This is America and we believe in freedom without limits. I am not being sarcastic. We can only expect safety in theaters and malls and on college campuses if every citizen has weapons within immediate reach. 

We’re Americans. We don’t joke about freedom. If we ban clips that hold twenty or thirty or a hundred bullets, only criminals will have clips that hold enough bullets to take out an entire first grade classroom; and then our teachers will have no chance to fend off attacks by maniacal intruders (or Redcoats). 

The logic is clear. Cannon don’t kill people, people kill people. If there had been a cannon in the hallway, trained on the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary School, the principal could have stopped that killer cold. James Mattioli, age 6, and Chase Kowalski, age 7, would still be alive today and excited about the presents wrapped and already under the family trees. Victoria Soto, 27, who dived in front of students to shield them, allowing some to escape, might be looking forward to the holidays to rest up and recharge—since working with first graders requires limitless energy. Too bad she didn’t have a rifle. 

Or a cannon. 

I’m not angry, except with myself. Those poor children, each hit at least three times, some as many as eleven, they’d be alive if we all had more guns. 

What can we do, then, to insure that these kinds of tragedies don't happen again? Let’s follow the lead of the strident no-limits NRA types. There are six shopping days left until Christmas. Go out and get your child’s favorite teacher an assault rifle. After all, you’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem. 

SAY A PRAYER FOR THE INNOCENT VICTIMS.


(I just had to write a similar column about the slaughter in Las Vegas; only the pools of blood seem to change.)



P. S. If anyone thinks that I’m being serious read this post again. Arming teachers is a ludicrous idea; I thought that was crystal clear.

Cut off guns before they reach the schools.

Who Knew? Rupert Murdoch is a Flaming Liberal

Lt. Colonel Wesley Brown, the first black graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (Class of 1949) died last month. Even many Fox News affiliates took note of his story.

A handful of black students had enrolled at the Academy before, but quit in the face of intense race-based hatred and hazing. Brown, a member of the entering class of 1945, barely made it. Most white cadets refused to sit next to him in the cafeteria or classroom. He was barred from joining the choir and admitted to a biographer years later that not a day went by during his stay at Annapolis that he didn't think about quitting. But with the World War II just ended, attitudes about discrimination were changing. It was hard to argue that Hitler was a monster if a brand of racism virtually indistinguishable from Nazi ideology was going to continue to thrive in this country. Luckily, a few cadets (including Jimmy Carter) encouraged Brown to “hang in there” and he did and went on to make a career of the Navy.

More about Brown in a moment; but for now it’s interesting to consider his story in light of recent polls that show 40% of Americans identify themselves as “conservative,” outnumbering liberals 2-1. Here in Cincinnati it can feel like it’s closer to 10-1.

Many of my friends tell me they’re conservative. I tell them I’m liberal. What’s odd is that they sometimes tell me I’m not.

I say I am and say I can prove it. They say I’m not and walk away feeling a little too smug in their beliefs. They don’t believe in global warming nor in evolution. They don’t gasp when Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann put themselves forward as serious contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. They don’t notice that Sarah Palin is an intellectual lightweight or that Glenn Beck often sounds nutty. They believe in the Bible, though, and really, really, really believe in the Founding Fathers and don’t think there has been a good political idea hatched out of anyone’s head since 1787.

The Brown story makes you wonder if Americans still understand what labels like “liberal” and “conservative” mean. A “conservative” has always been someone who wants to keep society as it is. A liberal has always been a person who wants to see society change and improve. Both views have their strengths. Yet, for two decades, the loudest voices on the far-right, people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and the crew at Fox News, have done everything they could to turn the word “liberal” into a pejorative.

It might help all good Americans, then, liberal and conservative, to consider a few examples and explain how liberals really think and we’ll circle back to Brown before we finish.

Recently, the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law compiled a database of all individuals wrongly convicted of serious crimes in this country and later exonerated, starting in 1989. Records show that more than 2,000 men and women have been unjustly convicted of very serious crimes, including rape and murder. Many have been freed only as a result of improvements in the use of DNA evidence, which has often conclusively established their innocence.

The database, however, looked at only 873 individuals (not surprisingly, half were black), for whom the best records existed. Collectively, they spent 10,000 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

One hundred and one innocent people were facing death sentences.

If you’re a liberal you consider this a travesty. You believe courts must do a better job of insuring that innocent people are not sent to prison. You might also oppose the death penalty, though not all liberals do.

Last September, when Rick Perry defended the 234 executions carried out in Texas during his time as governor, and said he wasn’t worried about mistakes, because his state had such a fine justice system, you had a sinking feeling. You knew, for instance, that the State of Illinois admitted it condemned at least 13 innocent men to death in years following the decision by the United States Supreme Court to reinstitute the penalty in 1977.

Go back farther and you can see plenty of reasons to be “liberal.” Do you believe a defendant on trial for murder should have legal counsel if he cannot afford it? You’re a liberal if you do because the Founding Fathers never thought to address that issue and the U. S. Supreme Court had to determine that the answer was “yes” in a series of decisions in the 1930s and 40s.

What about a defendant on trial for armed robbery? Should that individual have a lawyer if he can’t afford one? Or should he defend himself, try to stay out of jail for five or six years, relying only on his own native wit? He might be innocent, after all. If you say “he deserves a lawyer,” click your ruby slippers together and repeat three times, “There's no place so perfect for conservatives as the past” and be transported back to 1963. Up until then defendants on trial in non-capital felony cases had no lawyers unless they could pay for them.

If you think that’s wrong and claim you’re conservative, it’s time to come out of the closet.

You, madam or sir, are a flaming liberal!

What about the whole matter of Brown and the idea that all Americans deserve equal treatment? Should Wesley Brown have been allowed to enroll at the U. S. Naval Academy in the first place? Should Herman Cain be allowed to run for higher office? Should Colin Powell be a general? Should black and white soldiers fighting today in Afghanistan serve in integrated military units? They couldn’t until President Harry Truman took a liberal stance and ordered U. S. armed forces to eliminate the color line in 1948. At the time, Strom Thurmond, U. S. senator from South Carolina, and a red, white and blue conservative till the day he died in 2003, called the new policy “un-American.”

He was opposed to race-mixing and warned: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” Good old Strom Thurmond! Served 48 years in the Senate. Ran in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate for president on an anti-integration platform. Switched to the Republican Party sixteen years later because Barry Goldwater, the conservative candidate for president, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A conservative, good and true, was Senator Thurmond.

Keep blacks out of the swimming pools, the schools (including Annapolis), and, for sure, voting booths. Not necessarily your bedroom though. In 2003 after seventy-eight years of secrets and silence, it was revealed that Strom Thurmond had fathered a child by his family’s black teenage maid in 1925. Down South they call that miscegenation.

And Thurmond was against it.

You’d think our political opponents on the right might see the irony and be a bit more humble. “Conservatism,” after all, has often meant standing directly in the path of human advancement. In 1521 it meant believing it was acceptable to burn church critics at the stake. In 1611, when the King James Bible was published, you supported King James when he claimed to rule by divine right. In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, conservatives called it justice to hang men and women for witchcraft, and no defense lawyers required. In 1775 you considered George Washington and all those who would later become the Founding Fathers traitors. In 1861 you stood with the slave owners. In 1920 you predicted disaster if women voted and said it would lead to increases in the divorce rate.

In 1967, like Senator Thurmond, you opposed interracial marriage. So you knew it was a dark day in American history when a few “activist” judges on the United States Supreme Court stepped in that summer and voted 9-0 in favor of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia. The court ruled that if two people loved each other they could marry. (Police officers had invaded the Loving’s home at night, had apprehended the criminals in their own bed, with a wedding certificate from another state affixed to the bedroom wall). For decades the laws of the State of Virginia had held that a racially mixed marriage was a felony (again: no lawyer needed at trial if you couldn’t pay for one yourself), and conservatives heartily approved, just as they imagined the Founding Fathers must have intended. So: you’re a true conservative if you believe the government should be able to tell people who they can and cannot marry. And you’re a liberal if you believe marriage between races is acceptable.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the most conservative TV network on the face of the planet? Why that curmudgeon is a liberal! Divorced twice. Old white fellow. Married to a woman of Chinese extraction.

Conservatives used to call that miscegenation.

A Liberal Comes Out of the Closet: Will Mitt and Newt Follow?

Okay, Edwards tuned out to be a slime ball.
I admit.

It's probably not accurate to say I'm a liberal coming out of the closet.  Here, in conservative Cincinnati, I'm more a "flaming liberal" than anything else. I still have my Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on my Honda Civic, because I want people to know I didn't vote for George W. in 2004.
So:  If I'm liberal, does that make me a bad person?  Many of my friends are conservatives and I still like them. 

I guess I'm confused.

Part of the problem with being a liberal in 2012, is that liberals lost a grip on the discussion when we let far-right types start to define us.  You can't use the "N" word in polite company these dasy; but you can vilify opponents by sneering, "He's a liberal."  Too often, that epithet means, even to people who ought to know better:  unpatriotic, advocating socialism/communism, and big, big fans of more government.  Our foes see us not as honest doubters, but in an evil light, as "union thugs," "libertards," "zombies" and the like.  In the mind of Sarah Palin, I'm afraid, we're not even really Americans. 

Oh yeah, and God is on the conservative side, too.

I've got nothing against God, if He's listening, by the way.  But I'm a liberal in part because of my roots as an American history teacher.  I love the U. S. Constitution as much as any conservative, maybe even more than Michelle Bachmann.  A liberal, defined in the proper sense, I believe, is a person "favoring individual liberty and political and social reform."  Or, as I used to explain to students, a liberal looked at the world, saw problems, and "wanted to make the world better."  You could make a rather tidy argument that the Founding Fathers were "liberals" themselves. (And yet:  conservatives love to claim a lineal descent from Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton.)

Let me stress then, that I am both a liberal and a huge, huge fan of Founding Fathers Gunning Bedford Jr., Richard Dobbs Spaight and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, too.

In fact, I believe the Bill of Rights, alone, assures the Founding Fathers a glorious place in history.  It's the devil in the details of what those rights mean, that divides us today.

We live in perhaps the freest society in human history and conservatives want to insure that it remains that way.  So, for example, they fear any kind of gun control. They believe our nation is rooted in Judeo-Christian teachings.  In both positions they are likely half right, at least.

So why am I a liberal?  Well, liberals are full of doubts and prone to question accepted social and religious thinking. I know Massachusetts required tax support of an established church long after the U. S. Constitution was approved.  I know that when the Irish began pouring into this country in the 1840s they were seen as a threat to the American way of life, with their funny religious ideas.  I know Mormons were driven out of New York, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois by conservatives who despised their faith, that their founder, Joseph Smith was murdered.  It wasn't liberals--who have honest doubts about religion--who did it, by the way.

I remember, more recently, when conservatives said John F. Kennedy couldn't be president because of his Catholicism and his insidious ties to the pope.  That very thought ought to make Mitt and Newt and Rick Santorum sit bolt upright in their beds at night.  I mean:  are those three boys actually liberals, believing as they do, that any person of any faith can run for president?  Do they just not know what liberal ground they stand on?

Are they liberals, still hiding in the closet?  My god, what's next? 

A Muslim president? 

I'm old enough to remember the U. S. Supreme Court decision in 1965, overturning Connecticut law, rooted in religious thinking, which held that sending birth control information through the mail was the equivalent of sending pornography through the mails.  I remember the Loving decision, too, which overturned laws in several states, banning interracial marriage.  I remember conservatives standing in college doors and vowing that no Negro would ever enroll at the University of Alabama, except maybe over a few conservative dead bodies.  So, I'm a liberal.  I think if Trent Richardson wants to tote the pigskin for the Crimson Tide, well, then, he's entitled.

In other words, liberals have often stood against big government and conservatives have often stood for it.  I know Newt and some of the folks on the conservative end of the spectrum believe gay-rights activism is going to undermine the American way of life.  But I'm a liberal and tempted to call that paranoia.  I'd like to point out that in the Old Testament both sodomy and adultery were equally offenses in God's eyes and adultery was meant to be punished with stoning.

Newt, be thankful, Man on the Moon GOP presidential candidate (and, yes, Perfect Hair John Edwards, too), that liberals triumphed on that issue long ago.

We might also consider Ms. Michele Bachmann, the rightest of the right candidates in this primary season.  I seem to remember that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were liberals when they launched the fight for womens' rights in 1848.

In fact, if you believe women should be assertive, and that they can work for a living, and that they don't have to get married, yep, Ann Coulter, you, too, are a flaming liberal.

It's funny, actually, because Representative Bachmann is probably the biggest fan of the Founding Fathers now alive.  Yet, in 1789, even those god-like men could not determine how far liberty truly extended.  Unlike Representative Bachmann, I might point out the Three-Fifth's Compromise, which said five slaves equaled three whites in determining state population for purposes--oh, the irony--of state representation in Congress.  I also note the absence of the word, "women" in the document; conservative thinking at the time having no doubt that, like gay people in conservative thinking today, females were second-class citizens.  

Some people serve heroically.
Others serve in their own fashion.
The blogger in "action."

Actually, you don't have to go that far back to argue that liberals are Americans in good standing.  Liberals, again, are full of doubt--even when it comes down to the matter of "patriotism."  A good liberal might argue that if "patriotism" is always right, then Hitler's followers were right and those flaming liberals, Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis were traitors and probably flag-burners outright.  That concept ought to make a few heads in conservative South Carolina spin.

I enlisted in the Marines, myself, in 1968 and volunteered to go to Vietnam, twice.  (I wasn't sent, though, and maybe this actually proves conservative thinking that all liberals are dumb). 

In fact, I love America for what it stands for:  freedom for all.  I didn't cry liberal  tears when we were attacked on 9/11, I cried red, white and blue.  And I thought, in 2003, that conservatives idealogues were wrong to drag us into war in Iraq, when Osama bin Laden was hiding farther east. 

I hated to see good American boys, of any religion or political persuasion, die, when I thought our government had made a mistake.  See:  I don't trust big government, either. 

Hell, I remember Watergate.

I'm not saying I was right about everything, of course.  I'm a liberal; and liberals always have those doubts.  But I didn't like the idea that some conservatives blamed all Muslims for the 9/11 attack by 19 followers of that faith, either.  I taught history, you see; and I remember that we locked up 110,000 Japanese-Americans, including 77,000 U. S. citizens, after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.  Call me a "libertard," I guess, but when I hear people say that all Muslims are terrorists, I think it's like saying Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich bear guilt for the Irish Republican Army bombings in Belfast in the 80s.

The way I see it, you don't have to be a conservative to be a very good American.