Isaac Laquedem

This Key question from 1814 has a different meaning today

Fifteen years ago I wrote this short essay about how unusual our national anthem is when compared to those of other nations.  Instead of offering pious hopes for our leaders (Great Britain) or warning citizens of the bloodthirsty armies of the enemy (France), it mostly asks and answers a single question: last night our flag was flying over Fort McHenry.  Did the British army capture the fort, or is the flag still flying this morning?

Francis Scott Key wrote the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1814, though we didn't adopt the song as our anthem until 1931.  At the end of this first verse he phrased the question thusly:  "O say, does our star-spangled banner yet wave / O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

His words take for granted that the land below the flag is the "land of the free and the home of the brave."  Isaac hears the last couplet differently today.  Perhaps you do too.  Instead of asking whether the flag is still flying, the anthem now questions whether the land below the flag is still the land of the free and the home of the brave.  The Trump administration's slide from antics to autocracy suggests that it is not.

This song from 50 years ago is strangely relevant today

Robert Lamm's 50-year-old call to Harry Truman to rescue the nation resonates again today.  Mr. Truman, three years deceased, didn't answer.  Now would be a good time for him to break his silence or propose a successor.

"Comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe is Donald Trump's modern-day Samuel D. Burchard. Oopsie!

The 1884 presidential contest between James G. Blaine (the Republican nominee) and Grover Cleveland (the Democratic nominee) came down to the wire.  The polls (such as they were then) placed Blaine slightly ahead, and most observers expected that Blaine would defeat Cleveland and become the president in 1885.

Then, 140 years ago yesterday, six days before Election Day, a delegation of local clergymen met with Senator Blaine at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  The chairman, the Reverend Samuel D. Burchard, included these three sentences in his welcome remarks:

"We have a higher expectation, which is that you will be the President of the United States, and that you will do honor to our name, to the United States and to the high office you will occupy.  We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.  We are loyal to our flag, we are loyal to you." 

"Rum" meant alcohol, on which attitudes crossed party lines.  "Rebellion" meant the late Civil War, when Republicans stood for the union and Democrats for secession and slavery.  "Romanism," however, meant the Roman Catholic church, which the Protestant ministers opposed on theological grounds and Blaine opposed on political grounds.  (In 1875 Blaine had proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit all government aid to religious institutions, which for him meant mainly Catholic schools.)

Blaine heard Dr. Burchard call the Democratic Party the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," and did not dissent.  The national Democratic campaign committee and some of the state Democratic committees printed signs with Dr. Burchard's remarks to swing Catholic votes from the Republican candidate to the Democratic candidate.  "Here's what Blaine thinks of you," the signs implied, "so vote for his opponent."

I should add that in 1884 Catholicism was New York City's largest religious denomination.

Cleveland defeated Blaine by 23,000 votes nationwide and by a scant 1,149 votes in New York State.  He received 219 electoral votes to Blaine's 182.  If 575 New Yorkers had voted for Blaine instead of for Cleveland, Blaine would have won the state and its 36 electoral votes, and would have defeated Cleveland in the Electoral College, 218 to 183. 

On October 27, 2024 at a rally for republican candidate Donald Trump, almost exactly 140 years to the day after Dr. Burchard torpedoed the Blaine campaign, a speaker named Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico "a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,"  Several of his other attempts at humor were based on racist or religious tropes.  Mr. Trump heard Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks and said nothing about them in his own speech shortly afterward.

Tony Hinchcliffe has given Donald Trump a modern "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" moment.  Residents of Puerto Rico are citizens of the United States, but they don't vote in the general presidential election  . . . until they move to one of the states, where as citizens they are immediately eligible to register to vote.  Over 200,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the United States after President Trump and FEMA botched the response to Hurricane Maria in 2017, including a large contingent to Pennsylvania, one of the swing states in 2024.  It would be a delicious irony if President Trump's mishandling of Hurricane Maria has combined with his modern-day Burchard moment to switch just enough Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania to give the state, and likely the national election, to Kamala Harris.

A remembrance of Zachary Taylor, inaugurated on this day in 1849

From John Adams's term until late in the era of Franklin Roosevelt, elected presidents were inaugurated on March 4.  Today is the 175th anniversary of the inauguration of Zachary Taylor, who took office on March 4, 1849 and served until his death from cholera on July 9, 1850. 

But was it cholera that killed President Taylor?  Some ascribed his death to contaminated milk that he drank at a celebration of Independence Day that took place at the Washington Monument, which (unlike Zachary Taylor) was more than five days away from being finished.  Stephen Vincent Benet rendered Taylor's career into light verse:

Zachary Taylor was gallant and gruff,
A general rugged and heady,
He fought like a trump in the Mexican war
And his troops called him "Old Rough and Ready."
For he didn't much mind if their buttons weren't shined
As long as no man was a quailer
And the Mexicans found that their best bit the ground
When faced by old Zachary Taylor.

Zachary Taylor was President T.
One very warm day in July,
When he called for a bowl of ripe cherries and milk,
With a greedy old gleam in his eye,
Now cherries and milk on a very hot day
Make even the strongest turn paler,
And they proved more effective than Mexican shot,
For they finished off Zachary Taylor.

 

 

One of Donald Trump's upcoming trials commemorates Benjamin Harrison's "spectacularly corrupt administration"

Donald Trump will go to trial on March 4, 2024 in federal court in the District of Columbia on the charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.  Why March 4?  It's a Monday, and long trials often start on Mondays.  But Judge Tanya Chutkan, who chose the date, may have intended to make a sly historical reference.  Elected presidents are inaugurated on January 20 now, but before 1937 they were inaugurated on March 4.  March 4 is thus the anniversary of the inauguration of all the elected presidents from John Adams to Franklin Roosevelt in his first term (1933).  It was on March 4, 1889 that Benjamin Harrison (5'6", 160 pounds) was inaugurated.  Harrison's "spectacularly corrupt administration" (the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson) produced a collapse of the stock market and the Panic of 1893.

Celebrations of Benjamin Harrison are few and far between.  Judge Chutkan has figured out an appropriate commemoration, and Mr. Trump will get to play the leading part.

Wendell Phillips reminds us that history sometimes rhymes

The recent stalemate among the House republicans over their choice of speaker and the current threats of Speaker McCarthy to refuse to raise the ceiling on the national debt so that the nation can pay its bills brought to mind this delightful observation from a while back:

"A few years ago * * * the Republican party dared to refuse the appropriations for support of government - the most daring act ever ventured in a land that holds Bunker Hill and Brandywine.  They dared to persevere some twenty or thirty days.  It seems a trifle; but it is a very significant straw.  Then for weeks when Banks was elected, and a year ago, again, the whole government was checked till the Republicans put their Speaker in the chair."

Does that bring to mind Newt Gingrich shutting down the government, or Lauren Boebert holding up the organization of the House in January?  The author of the quoted words was Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), the famous orator and abolitionist.  They're from a speech that he gave in Boston on February 17, 1861.  The four omitted words represented by the three asterisks give the joke away: they are "while Pierce was President."

An ode to Alex Jones's recent court losses

It was a solemn rite as e’er
Was seen by mortal man.
The celebrants, the people there,
Were all Republican.

Ed Rollins bent his grizzled head,
And Ari Fleischer too,
And one⁠—’twas Tucker, someone said,
Though no one clearly knew.

I saw the priest, white-robed and tall
Of strictly right-wing views
He was the pious man men call
To cast blessings on Fox News.

Ah, ’twas a high and holy rite
As anyone could swear.
“What does it mean?” I asked a wight
Who knelt apart in prayer.

“A mass for the repose,” he said,
“Of Alex Jones's ⁠—“What,
Is Alex Jones now dead?
’Tis sad, ’tis sad, God wot!”

“A mass”⁠—repeated he, and rose
To go and kneel among
The worshipers⁠—“for the repose
Of Alex Jones's tongue.”

-- Ambrose Bierce, brought up to date

Clarence Thomas points the way to the future - and to the past

I wrote on June 24 about the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which a majority of the court overruled Roe v. Wade, and argued that the two important opinions are not the majority opinion and the dissent, but Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion concurring in the decision but not the reasoning, and Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion concurring in both the decision and the reasoning.  I discussed the chief justice's opinion.  Justice Thomas's opinion also merits scrutiny.

Justice Thomas wrote his concurring opinion not so much for the rest of the court - none of the other justices agreed with his views - but as a guide to state legislatures and the Federalist Society on what to challenge next. He focused on the doctrine of substantive due process, and listed several cases that he wants the supreme court to overrule when it gets the chance, among them the Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), protecting same-sex marriage, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), protecting married persons' access to contraceptives, and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), preventing Texas from criminalizing private sexual acts between consenting adults.  He gives his game away in his two closing sentences: "Substantive due process conflicts with that textual command [the due process clause] and has harmed our country in many ways. Accordingly, we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity."

What he means by substantive due process is this. If you are indicted for murder, the state cannot take away your life or liberty (i.e., execute or imprison you) without affording you the due process of law: the right to a lawyer, the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to be tried by a jury of unbiased persons, and so on. These are all rights to have a fair process, not rights to have a fair result. The idea of substantive due process is that as a citizen you have a constitutional right to have not just a fair process, but also a fair result.

In other words, if you are actually innocent of the murder, then you have a substantive due process right not to have the state execute you anyway - at least, you used to have that right. The court started 29 years ago to go down the path to which Clarence Thomas now points. In Herrera v. Collins (1993), a case from Texas, a majority of the supreme court held that a state does not violate the federal constitutional right to due process of a United States citizen if the state convicts and executes him for a murder that he did not commit, as long as the state provided the defendant with a fair trial and a proper appeal. 

Justice Thomas has shown the nation the legal future, and it looks a lot like the past.

Theodore Roosevelt had the root causes of today's inflation pegged -- in 1907

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of American History at Boston College who is now one of the most followed persons on Facebook, today tied together the consolidation of American and international industry into a few large combines that have an outsize effect on prices (i.e., inflation at the consumer level), against which President Biden now fights.  Do corporations charge high prices to cover their high costs?  Professor Richardson points out that in May Shell reported its largest quarterly profits ever, more than $9 billion.  (Pro tip: instead of buying gasoline, buy the stock.)

Where, then, do the causes of inflation come from?  Let's go back to August 20, 1907, and a speech that President Theodore Roosevelt gave in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the dedication of a monument to the Pilgrims.  The speech itself wouldn't be much remembered today (even Isaac isn't old enough to have been there) but for President Roosevelt having unveiled a phrase that echoes to this day: "malefactors of great wealth."  He meant the robber barons of the era and their successors such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.  He talked about his administration's efforts to break up industrial combines, of the sorts that Professor Richardson wrote about today.  Here's his descriptor, in context: "It may well be that the determination of the Government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver), to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the Government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing."

A modern politician wouldn't speak in such complex sentences, but would nevertheless recognize the thought: the oligarchs of the United States seek to strain the public's finances as much as possible so that they can discredit the government and line their pockets, untroubled by subpoenas, surveillance, society, and surtax.

Is William Baxter (1929-1998) the culprit behind today's shortage of baby formula? History and economics say "yes"

On May 12 Heather Cox Richardson published this incisive essay, one of her "Letters from an American" series.  She starts her essay with a short discussion of the involvement of members of the Trump administration in the planning of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and then moves into a report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis.  The committee's name doesn't describe its full ambit, which is to look into anything related to the federal government's response to the pandemic, including waste and fraud.  Professor Richardson then describes Tyson Foods pushing Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and through him Vice President Pence and President Trump, to keep meatpacking workers on the job.  As she reports, "Industry leaders wrote a proposed executive order for Trump to issue, declaring a meat shortage and invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that the plants continued to operate.  Less than a week later, Trump issued a similar executive order." 

Professor Richardson then ties the consolidation of meat production into the hands of a few gigantic businesses to the shortage of infant formula in the United States that resulted when one producer, Abbott, recalled its production from one factory after test samples were found to be contaminated, and describes the situation as the "larger problem of the consolidation of food production."

The "larger problem of the consolidation of food production" that Professor Richardson describes is significant, but it's only one facet of the very large problem of the consolidation of American and transnational industries in general, which started in the early years of the Reagan Administration.  Having successfully broken up American Telephone & Telegraph on antitrust grounds, the Reagan Administration and its chief antitrust enforcer, William Baxter, declared victory and went home, leaving the rest of American industry to merge and consolidate as it wished on the modest condition of paying a small toll to the government pursuant to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976, but unfettered by Section 2 of the Sherman Act of 1890.  Benign neglect remained the policy of the enforcers (the "enablers"?) until 1998 when the Clinton Administration sought to fracture Microsoft - a case that the government won at trial and then ignominiously settled in the second year of the Bush (43) administration.

Since then antitrust enforcement in the context of corporate mergers has ceased to play an important part in corporate America.  By 2017 business professors Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, and Roni Michaely could write that market concentration as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (the one the Justice Department uses, when it's on the job) "has systematically increased in over 75% of U.S. industries, and the average increase in concentration levels has reached 90%" measured since about 2000. They also found that in real-dollar terms the average and median size of public corporations ("the largest players in the economy," they wrote) had tripled.  As they demurely put it, "Profit margins and shareholders' wealth gains have increased in proportion to the increase in industry concentration... Increased profit margins are mainly driven by wider operating margins rather than higher operational efficiency."

Translation: as the big got bigger, they used their concentrated market power not to be more efficient, nor to innovate, but to charge higher prices and make more money.  Food production is just one of the industries where the increase in concentration has brought new opportunities for the poor to subsidize the rich.