Whose Emancipation Is Next?

Via Northwest History, a selection of negative ads for the presidential race of 1864: The Ads that Could Have Won George McClellan the Presidency. I believe I recognize the organization that paid for this ad in particular.

Alexander Hamilton

Writer and star of the Broadway musical In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda performs "The Hamilton Mixtape" at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Accompanied by Alex Lacamoire.

I'm not sure where I first saw this, but it's so cool, I thought I should file it here where I can find it again, and you can see it if you haven't already.

Smithsonian to Put an Entire Collection On Line

Because I'm involved in a local history project with ambitions of putting Pocahontas County collections and archives on line, I was very interested to see this article about a Smithsonian Museum: Going to Meet Its Public--Indian Museum Will Put Entire Collection Online By Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post, January 30, 2009.

Even with three locations in its empire, the National Museum of the American Indian can display barely 1 percent of its 800,000 objects. To help close that gap, the museum has decided to set up a digital showcase.

On Monday, the museum plans to launch its "Fourth Museum" to give scholars, students, teachers, cultural historians and those far away from the museum's homes in Washington and New York the opportunity to look into its archives.

The move has been in the works for nearly three years, as staff reexamined each item and its scholarship. The online project, part of the museum's regular Web site, will begin with 5,500 items and photographs. The goal is to have all 800,000 objects on the Web site, but it will take at least four years to achieve that.

I immediately looked up the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, but there is no hint there of what is to come. At present, it's a singing and dancing brochure for the physical museums in Washington D.C. and New York City. We'll have to check back on Monday.

Near the Relief Office I See My People

It's wonderful to hear Pete Seeger singing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" at yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial. I got all choked up watching this, and tonight, I'll probably dream I see Joe Hill again, alive as you and me. Here are all the lyrics, including the last two gritty ones Pete sings here, from Arlo.net, Arlo Guthrie's web site.

It seems HBO had this removed from YouTube. You may be able to watch the video here, but I can't tell--no computer here will play that format.

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND 
words and music by Woody Guthrie

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin'  -  I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side  .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Chorus (2x)

Here's a Wikipedia image showing Pete, entertaining at the opening of the Washington labor canteen, sponsored by the United Federal Labor Canteen, sponsored by the Federal Workers of American, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Photograph by Joseph A. Horne, February 1944. There's Eleanor Roosevelt seated between two sailors, near the center.

James Weaver: Campaign Trail Blazer

When TV political commentators make historical comparisons with current events, it seems to me they seldom venture back before the Reagan administration. (I know some of them are at least as old as I am, and I remember Dwight Eisenhower, albeit vaguely. The vice-president had a little dog named Checkers....) This is too shallow a dip into the history lesson well. I'm thinking Teapot Dome comparisons would be valuable, as would railroad monopolies, miners' wars, the International Workers of the World, etc. I was heartened to hear John McCain define himself as a conservative in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. At least we're breaking out of the anomalous bubble of the last 30 years.

That's why I was pleased to see this article: Egad! He Moved His Feet When He Ran: James Weaver, the First To 'Run' in a Presidential Race by Robert B. Mitchell, Washington Post, July 5, 2008, adapted from "Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver," to be published this fall by Edinborough Press. While the emphasis is on Weaver's innovation in presidential campaigns, I was pleased to see mentioned some hard times that put modern day troubles in perspective, including the Panic of 1893, the violence of the Pullman strike and the legions of unemployed who marched on Washington under the banner of Coxey's Army....

In the early hours of July 5, 1892, before an enthusiastic convention of radical farmers and their allies in Omaha, a 59-year-old Civil War veteran from Iowa made a solemn pledge that helped give birth to the modern presidential campaign.

Gen. James B. Weaver...had just won the nomination of the People's Party. Looking out over the assembled Populist delegates, Weaver predictably declared his fealty to the party's platform in the campaign ahead against Republican President Benjamin Harrison and the Democratic nominee, former president Grover Cleveland.....Weaver vowed to campaign on his own behalf for the White House. "I wish to make you here and now a promise that if God spares me and gives me strength, I shall visit every state in the Union and carry the banner of the people into the enemy's camp," he declared to the convention.

Such a promise hardly seems unique today, but in the 1800s it challenged prevailing political custom....presidential candidates of the period usually avoided soliciting votes in person because -- in a textbook example of 19th-century hypocrisy -- they were not supposed to appear too eager to hold the highest office in the land.

....Weaver's pledge in Omaha injected an element of drama into what was shaping up as a tedious rerun of the campaign of 1888. With Harrison paired against Cleveland, yet another election fought over the dreary terrain of tariffs, the tired Civil War symbolism of "waving the bloody shirt" and states' rights appeared inevitable. The cynicism engendered by the prospect of another contest between Cleveland and Harrison was so pervasive, one observer joked, "either party would have been glad to defeat the other if it could do so without electing its own candidate."

....Energetic, articulate (though given to occasional flights of florid rhetoric) and combative, the blue-eyed, mustachioed Weaver had spent the better part of the previous two decades campaigning for the economic and political reforms advocated by agrarian radicals. Before the Civil War, Weaver addressed anti-slavery rallies across southern Iowa in support of the Republican Party. A lifetime of stump speeches and schoolhouse debates provided ideal preparation for the presidential campaign ahead.

In the West, where miners strongly supported the Populists' commitment to expand use of silver in the money supply, the People's Party campaign generated enormous excitement. Appearing with Populist firebrand Mary E. Lease, and accompanied by his wife, Clarissa, Weaver drew wildly enthusiastic crowds in Denver and Pueblo. He spoke to a large and friendly audience in Los Angeles. Bands and celebratory cannon fire greeted the Populists as they toured the small towns of Nevada.

In an unusual and quite possibly painful fundraising stunt, Lease invited the crowd in Denver to hurl coins at her. The invitation prompted laughter, applause and "a rain of silver dollars," according to a Washington Post account.

....Weaver and Lease campaigned in Lincoln, Neb., where Rep. William Jennings Bryan was running for reelection and had endorsed Weaver instead of Cleveland. Nebraska voters returned their young congressman to Washington, but by a narrow margin of 140 votes. In the end, Cleveland returned to the White House, but his second term -- marred by the Panic of 1893, the violence of the Pullman strike and the legions of unemployed who marched on Washington under the banner of Coxey's Army -- was hardly triumphant.

As for Weaver, his Populist campaign proved stunningly successful; for the first time since 1860, a third party won electoral votes. He carried Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho and won additional electoral votes in Oregon and North Dakota. Despite the intensely negative campaign against him by Southern Democrats, he received 36 percent of the vote in Alabama and 23 percent in Texas. Overall, it was a vast improvement over the dismal third-party showings of the 1880s.

Counting Our Skunk Blessings

Skunks drop by the house pretty regularly in warm weather. They like sunflower seeds, the compost pile, and grubs, and sometimes they spend a day or two under our house, where we hope they never hit their little heads on the floor joists. Apparently, we're lucky to have plentiful skunks here on Droop Mountain. No Skunks in Arlington Isn't Good News for Humans appeared in the Washington Post Sunday, May 11, 2008. (I have quite a backlog of unfinished weblog posts, even though school's been out for over a month now.)

...Skunks, known far and wide for their stinky spray, can survive in urban areas on garbage, bugs and pet food. But for years, no one has seen a skunk in Arlington. And Zell, a county naturalist, fears that they might be gone for good.

"We're 40 percent paved over, so there's not much nature left," he said, shrugging. With a growing population of 200,000, the 26-square-mile county might be reaching a "critical mass" of dense urban landscape, he said, where even the hardiest wild survivors, such as skunks, can no longer make it.

I lived in Arlington over 20 years ago, and at the time, I was amazed by how much wildlife you could see in the odd little overgrown corners. 40% paved? No skunks at all? Perhaps my migration outward sprang from the same impulse that moved the skunks. I'd like to think I have sense equivalent to a skunk, but I may flatter myself.

West Virginia Politics and Reality-Based Stuff

Lincoln Walks At Midnight points to several articles on the presidential race in West Virginia, including The Washington Post's A New Political Geography: Role Reversals in Virginias Reflect National Shifts By Alec MacGillis (Sunday, June 29, 2008). While cable TV news seemed content to write off West Virginian support for Hillary Clinton as redneck racism (redneck sexism having died off, I reckon), the print journalists are analyzing demographic trends. (Bless their hearts.)

....As the gap grows between places that are prospering and those that are not, Democrats are strengthening their hold in major metropolitan areas, particularly in places faring well in the technology-driven economy.

The trend generally bodes well for Democrats. Major metro areas are growing faster than the country as a whole, the party's strength with young voters promises a lasting edge, and well-off, highly educated urban voters are valuable campaign contributors in the Internet age. The weak economy and soaring gas prices could accelerate the shift if more Americans move closer to urban hubs in search of good jobs and shorter commutes.

But the Democrats' ascendance in prosperous areas leaves them with weak spots in key swing states such as Ohio. And it presents questions about their identity: The party that fought for the little guy against the party of the wealthy has, while still representing racial minorities, increasingly become defined by the metropolitan middle and upper-middle class....

The transformation goes beyond politics. As the distance between the rich and the poor grows, so too does the gap between regions. In places such as Northern Virginia, success has fed on itself, as firms seek educated workers and proximity to rivals and clients, and people with college degrees flock to the opportunities. Such areas are also seeing a surge in foreign-born residents, who favor Democrats.

In places such as West Virginia, manufacturing and mining have been decimated by automation and foreign competition, and hopes for reinvention are undermined by the stream of young people leaving. "There is a realignment going on here. It's a long-term shift that has to do with the economic decline in some areas in the modern economy," said Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton University.

The presidential campaigns seem ready to write West Virginia off, both parties. We don't expect to see much money spent on advertising, or see candidates and their surrogates appearing in person, now that the Clinton campaign is out of the race.

....Obama barely campaigned in West Virginia, lost it by 41 points and will probably spend little time campaigning there.

Leading Democrats in West Virginia lament Obama's lack of effort, contrasting it with the campaign of John F. Kennedy, who, like Obama, faced hurdles as a minority in West Virginia -- in Kennedy's case, as a Roman Catholic -- but set out to win the 1960 primary there.

....Democrats still control state government and all but one of the state's seats in Congress, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans. But the state voted for Bush by six points over Gore and 13 points over Kerry. Its pro-Democrat unions have declined.

Since 2000, an argument has raged over why voters in West Virginia and elsewhere have voted against Democrats who offered health-care and tax plans that favor them. In his 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank argued that Republicans have used social issues such as abortion to win poorer voters.

Bartels, at Princeton, disputed Frank with data showing that higher-income voters are more likely than poorer ones to cite issues such as abortion. Outside the South, low-income whites have stayed loyal to Democrats, he said.

These demographic shifts leave me feeling confused. My dad was a member of the Merchant Seaman's Union (busted as a bunch of Commies by Joseph McCarthy and his lawyer-for-hire Bobby Kennedy), and The New Deal and The Great Society made it possible for me to have an education. When I finally landed in the "liberal elite" world of academe, I didn't fit in, and eventually moved away from all that. I was rather miffed when the quiz Sherry Chandler posted called me "Reality Based Intellectualist."

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what's known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

It's just a silly quiz, I told myself, but I went back and changed answers until I qualified as "Working Class Warrior." It was the science-related material that sent me into that "liberal elite." Evolution is just a theory, like gravity. (That's not even funny, just true. After teaching sixth grade science for a semester, I can tell you that many Americans don't believe in Newtonian physics, either.) And I'd save The Origin of Species over those other books because it's more interesting and better written. (Darwin was an excellent prose stylist.) I don't even know what "non-Jesus-based thought" means.

Which Dust Bowl Were You Talking About?

Sometimes I read something that makes me wonder if I live on the same planet as the writer. This Dust Bowl reverie, hot on the heels of yesterday's dust storm analysis, continues to stick in my mind. Wasn't It Great? Absolutely Not. But Oddly Enough, It's Comforting to Think About by Hank Stuever, (Washington Post, February 10, 2008) begins with a fantasy about modern day families made homeless by bad mortgages and jobless by a recession. Stuever imagines what long-term, wide-spread homelessness would be like. I'm surprised a resident of Our Nation's Capitol doesn't have a realistic mental picture of homelessness based on first-hand observation of people panhandling outside the Washington Post's downtown offices. Of course, it's been a long time since I worked in that part of town; perhaps those people have been driven from view of reporters and lawyers by now. The romantic nomads Stuever imagines are

...loosely based on the somewhat disputed back story of Florence Owens Thompson, who, in 1936 at the age of 32, was stranded with her children at a muddy fieldworker's encampment near San Luis Obispo, Calif., waiting for her male companion and son to return with parts for their broken car. She was photographed by Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange....

Here's a secret about loving the past too much: A longing to know what it felt like gives way to a slight sense of envy. In any exploration of the Great Depression -- whether taught by the history or humanities department, or across campus at the biz school, or thoughtfully curated at a museum -- the take-away is that it can never happen again, that there are federal safeguards in place, however flawed, that keep things from getting that bad.

We don't envy the suffering. What we marvel at is the togetherness. The idea (propaganda or otherwise) that people cooperated, persevered and figured out a way to cope. The business news in the last month has been about the hesitation of the consumer. It's about an economic pause, holding still, listening for trouble. In this century, when people have bought houses for no money, where the answer to any economic stumble is to buy more retail merchandise to put into those houses, wouldn't a little bit of Great Depression be just the medicine we need?

Wasn't it always?

Isn't that the voice of your own grandfather, in Heaven now and with full access to your credit report, clucking in disapproval?

My parents were adults when the banks failed in 1929, and they held onto farms through the bitter drought of the early 1930's. Family reminiscences inevitably got around to the Dust Bowl sooner or later, but no one ever gave me the impression it was something that "can never happen again, that there are federal safeguards in place...that keep things from getting that bad." My parents themselves grew up listening to first-hand accounts of hard times in Europe. My dad's granny was a child of six in Sligo during the famine of "Black '47." "Pick up that little potato," he would echo her to me in the fall garden. "You might be hungry some day and wish you had it." My mom's grandparents had Highland Clearance and Hapsburg Empire stories to let little girls know how lucky they are.

I still pick up the potatoes, even the little ones. They taste just fine.

Conspiracy Theory Contest

When I saw the cable news tape showing smoke rolling out of a window in the Old Executive Office Building in D.C. this week, I just hoped one of my favorite old buildings wouldn't be seriously damaged. It took Terry to remind me that lots of important things could be lost in the fire. Her first guess was CIA interrogation tapes. Now, the Washington Post's Al Kamen is having a contest to guess "What Was in That Office, Anyway?"

That fire in Vice President Cheney's digs in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday naturally has everyone in Washington speculating about its origin. Arson might seem a bit far-fetched to folks outside the Beltway, but it would not be the first time a small conflagration was planned by a White House official.

We recall that Watergate burglary mastermind G. Gordon Liddy plotted firebombing the Brookings Institution -- "as a diversion," he writes in his memoirs -- to get into the security vault and steal Daniel Ellsberg's Vietnam War papers.

I think this contest will be worth watching--nobody can spin a conspiracy theory like a government worker.