Monthly Archives: January 2022

NPHET has advised the Cabinet that it can remove almost every covid-19 restriction from social distancing to covid passes and hospitality curfews in the coming days Extra.ie can reveal.

As early as tomorrow the Government will be able to announce an end of grinding restrictions that have been imposed on the Irish population at various degrees of severity for almost two years.

NPHET advised the Government this evening that guidance on household visiting; early closing for hospitality and events; capacity restrictions for indoor and outdoor events and even social distancing can be ended as soon as the Government decides it is appropriate. In a major surprise, NPHET has advised that covid passes will not be required in venues and activities.

NPHET has also advised that the work from home advice can be eased on a phased basis.

Cabinet meets on Friday and is likely to consult with Dr Tony Holohan to decide the exact sequencing but pubs, restaurants and even nightclubs are likely to reopen fully as early as Monday. NPHET has set no timeline and has left that open to Government Extra.ie has learned.

The guidance from NPHET sent to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly by letter said the Government should remove the majority of current restrictions, to include: Guidance in relation to household visits; early closing for hospitality and events; capacity restrictions for outdoor events. In consultation with the HSE, the public health doctors have also said that the covid-19 capacity restrictions should end for all indoor events, including weddings.

The sweeping breath of the abolition of measures recommended by NPHET is breathtaking when compared to the draconian restrictions endured by the Irish population, in varying degrees for almost two years. Further advice to Government also recommends: the ending of formal requirements for physical distancing of 2m and 1m distancing requirements in hospitality. All hospitality measures, like table service, 1m between tables, six per table etc will be ended.

Nightclubs will be permitted to open again. And, crucially for the economic health of city centres, public health advice to work from home will be removed, allowing a return to physical attendance in workplaces on a phased basis. Public health doctors and the HSE have advised that the return to work should be done on a phased basis.

The Government has also been advised, Extra.ie understands, that there should be an end to all curtailment of health services. NPHET has said it does not believe that there should be any further limiting of visiting in health care facilities, including nursing homes.

According to briefings to Extra.ie, from political and HSE sources, NPHET had not determined a timeline.

A senior Government source said: It is expected that Dr Holohan and perhaps HSE CEO Paul Reid will brief the three party leaders first. They will tell the Taoiseach that they believe that the lifting of restrictions can begin as soon as they believe is pragmatic.

It may be necessary to delay the reopening of hospitality until Monday, say, to give restaurants and bars time to get their staff rosters ready.

However, another Government source pointed out difficulties with delaying the mass reopening: Well once people hear of the extent of the lifting of restrictions, well it will be very hard to hold everyone back. Social distancing for instance will just go out the window immediately.

It is understood that there has been more extensive interaction between senior Government Ministers and NPHET in recent days. Government sources said the comparative weakness of the Omicron variant and the effectiveness of vaccines means that the pandemic is almost certainly in endemic stage.

However, NPHET has also recommended that some basic covid measures remain in place. For instance, if a person finds that they are symptomatic they should self-isolate, even if fully vaccinated.

Also wearing of masks and restrictions in schools should remain in place until 28 February. Also people will be reminded to continue to make individual risk assessment and if they believe they are at risk they should take appropriate action.

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Exclusive: Sweeping abolition of COVID-19 restrictions proposed by NPHET revealed - Extra.ie

The first popularly elected government led by B P Koirala enacted the Birta Abolition Act in 1959, that required zamindars formerly granted land by the state to pay full tax. Feudal landlords opposed the move, and it became one of the reasons why King Mahendra ousted Koirala in a coup detat on 12 December 1960.

B P believed that only genuine land reform would ensure that all Nepalis prospered together, and also deflect the Communism tide. But in justifying his coup, Mahendra declared that Nepals first democratically elected government had to be overthrown because it had failed to work in the interest of the poor.

Today, more than six decades later, BPs Nepali Congress that espoused social democracy is leading a governing coalition.Sher Bahadur Deuba,who once led the partys student union, is prime minister for the fifth time.

Yet, 1.5 million families representing a quarter of Nepals households, are still landless or have land issues. Some 53% of Nepals farmers own only 18% of the total cultivable land.

After ousting B P, King Mahendra continued the land reform to retain international support and quell domestic discontent. But the effort was half-hearted: the landed kept their land. Mahendra and his sonBirendraruled through a partyless Panchayat system for the next 30 years.

Ironically, unequal land ownership (the very reason that pushed Mahendra to stage his coup) became one of the factors that led to the Peoples Movement and the downfall of the Panchayat in 1990.

But even after the multi-party system was restored, there was only tokenism for land rights. In 1991, a commission set up to resolve the issue was dissolved even before it could complete its work. In the past three decades, 18 more land reform commissions have been formed by democratic governments, only to fizzle out.

Land ownership and rights have been weaponised time and again at election time since 1990 to win votes, but there has been no real change on the ground. The Nepali Congress, UML and Maoists are all guilty of making false promises to the landless.

The Maoists made land to the tiller and just land distribution a major point in their 40-point demand to Deuba in 1996 during his first tenure as prime minister. Their main slogan to recruit young men and women to take up arms was to promise land.

After all this, the landless have stopped trusting politicians who promise land. Disputes over land make up one-third of all cases in Nepals courts.

Various factors have changed the dynamics of land today. While educated Nepalis do not want to farm and migration is leaving arable land fallow, remittances fuel the market in real estate, the price of which has risen exponentially.

This unorganised and uncontrolled buying and selling of land has once again concentrated ownership in the hands of richer Nepalis, who have grown pheonmenally richer as property values escalate. There is a whole class of new-rich who have made their fortune through real estate speculation.

This is why we have the farce of the Baluwatar real estate scandal that involves the mightiest in the land, even while a quarter of the countrys population is landless.

The Gorkha empires expansion in the 18th century was financed by land, generals and soldiers were granted ownership of portions of the land they conquered. During the Shah reign, the royalty and courtiers could take what they wanted. During the Rana period, at least one-third of the total cultivable land in Nepal was distributed among those close to them. The Birta system may have been repealed six decades ago, but it is still intact in other forms through landlords, traders and brokers owning most property.

Real estate today is booming business, and a major source of revenue for the state from taxes. Urban land value appreciation has made it possible for some Nepalis to become fabulously rich overnight.

It is not productive when real estate speculation becomes a mainstay of the economy. It does not create jobs, and it exacerbates inequality. Private property rights effectively legitimise past injustices that parcelled out large swathes of the country to the privileged. It perpetuates discrimination and inequality, laying the seeds for future conflict.

To be sure, distributing land to the landless alone does not solve their problem, nor does it erase historical discrimination. Self-respect comes from belonging to the land, giving them a sense of purpose and responsibility. It is a start. But it should be without any condition, it cannot be a publicity stunt, or ploy to pad up vote banks.

If we are to safeguard the gains of the 2017 Constitution and build the pillars of the federal democratic republic from the ground up, we must pick up where B P Koirala left off 61 years ago.

Translated from an Editorial in the January-February 2022 issue of Himal Khabarpatrika dedicated to the issue of land.

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Ground reality of landlessness in Nepal - Nepali times

Acclaimed educator, author and activist Angela Davis will keynote SUNY Oswegos 33rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration on Wednesday, Feb. 9.

The event -- which also will feature student performances and readings -- is free and open to the public. Sponsored by the colleges Division of Student Affairs, the celebration will begin at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 9 in Tyler Halls Waterman Theatre, with doors opening at 6 p.m.

"You should consider attending the MLK Celebration if one of your goals in life is to live with no regrets," said Takayla Beckon, the Student Association president and a member of the event's organizing committee."Get ready to show up and show out to an amazing celebration of Dr. Martin L. King Jr.!"

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator - both at the university level and in the larger public sphere - has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice.

Her teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at Stanford University, UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University and the Claremont Colleges. Most recently she spent 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of history of consciousness - an interdisciplinary Ph.D program -and of feminist studies.

Davis is the author of 10 books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 70s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBIs Ten Most Wanted List.

She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy" and "Are Prisons Obsolete?, about the abolition of the prison industrial complex; a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and collections of essays including The Meaning of Freedom and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement.

Like many educators, Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a prison industrial complex, she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge what she terms a 21st-century abolitionist movement.

Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.

"I believe Angela Davis is an amazing choice as the keynote speaker because of her versatility in advocacy," Beckon said.

Beckon noted that Davis has been an advocate for the oppressed for decades and left her mark on the world in ways ranging from her activism to the grassroots effort for freeing Davis from prison to taking part in the Black Power Movement. Davis has also authored many influential books including the most recent "Abolition. Feminism. Now.," Beckon said.

Attendance information

Free tickets are available for students starting today (Jan. 24).

Tickets will be available online attickets.oswego.edufor:

In addition, a livestream will be broadcast to the SUNY Oswego Syracuse campus, any needed overflow rooms on the Oswego campus and in a password-protected manner to remote learners as well as faculty, staff and alumni.More information on this to come as arrangements continue.

To continue to ensure the health and safety of the campus community, all spectators ages 5 and up) must show proof of having completed a full COVID-19 vaccination series or recent proof of a negative COVID-19 test. Visit oswego.edu/oswego-forward for more information.

Persons with disabilities needing accommodations to attend this event should contact the SUNY Oswego Office of Campus Life at 315-312-2301 or campuslife@oswego.edu.

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Educator, author and activist Angela Davis to speak at Oswego on Feb. 9 - SUNY Oswego

There are thoughts moving through my mind like a murmuration of birds, and I believe that if I share them out loud, you can help me see the patterns, particularly those patterns which can help us avoid predation and extinction. That is the spirit with which I will be approaching this space, a column inches wide and miles deep, for YES! Media.

My name is adrienne maree brown. I am the writer in residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, which is a collective of facilitators, mediators, artists, healers, and curious human beings interested in how we, as a species, align with each other, this planet, and the future.

My work and thinking are rooted in emergent strategy, which is the way we get in right relationship with the constant force of changespecifically, how we build patterns and relationships that can hold our complex nature through relatively simple interactions. It is a way to remember we are earthlings, we are of this place, and we can learn to earn our place here from the adaptive practices of everything around us. Emergent strategy includes adaptation with intention, interdependence and decentralization, fractals, nonlinearity and iteration, resilience through transformative justice, and creating more possibilities. How do we change in ways that increase our freedom and our compatibility with Earth?

My work is also informed by visionary fiction and radical imagination. I believe we are living in a world imagined by ancestors who didnt love us, who didnt believe in an abundant earth and our collective power to steward it. It is time for us to imagine beyond the current oppressive construct. My work is powered by pleasure activism, the belief that justice and liberation must become the most pleasurable experiences we can have, and that we must reclaim for everyone the experience of joy and satisfaction. How do we build the future on a deep yes, a deep longing for what we want?

Attention is the difference between a life you observe from a distance (sometimes within your own bodymind) and a life you live.

My writing is informed by over two decades of experience as a facilitator of movements for social and environmental justice and more than four decades of being alive in late-stage racial capitalism and a rapidly expanding climate catastrophe. I have stepped back from facilitation in the past year to rest, train emergent strategy facilitation, make room for other incredible facilitators, write, and make meaning of the patterns I have observed in human behavior. How do we keep returning to a beginners mind about our species survival?

This column will be a space to ask these questions and share what I am seeing and feeling as potential answers or directions.

What do we mean when we say abolition, accountability, interdependence, community, liberation, and compelling futures? These are the kinds of topics I want to explore here.

I want to ask aloud a lot of questions that I thought I had answers to. So many of us speak as if we have answers, but we arent free yet, so I suspect we would all benefit from a period of listening and shifting in nuanced but distinct ways, together.

Lets write and inspire all manner of fan fiction and fan poetics for the future as our collectively channeled answers to questions beyond our comprehension.

Lets explore how the justice we mete out interpersonally connects to the way we treat our own bodies and the planet. Lets explore how we consider justice for those who have less power than us, and those who have more. Justice for babies and children, for elders, for species who speak in ways we have not yet learned to understand.

Lets examine hopelessness as a tool of our oppressors. And cynicism and meanness. And capitalism, which nourishes death in all these ways and so many others. Can we slip the fatal grip of the economic system of our lives?

How do our relationships reflect and shift our economic conditions? Our survival of gender and race constructs? Can everyone learn to be in healthy relationships? Can we learn these things without captivityI mean, without the armed guard under which we currently all live, tithing our overseers?

How do we face the children we love? And the children in our imaginations? What do we owe them as stewards of their futures? That was the other possible title for this column, you know: Stewards of the Future. Its aspirational. I shamelessly want to cultivate that sensibility in everyone who reads this and in everyone they tell about this column.

There will be prose, with some gifts from poetry. The emphasis here is on experiential learning, observation of patterns, and what to practice. And how to be loyal to the miracle of our lives. The emphasis here is also on being more than doing. I deeply believe you can live a completely worthwhile life in contemplation and reflection, and waste it all while working every second of waking life.

All of my work is about attention. Attention is the difference between a life you observe from a distance (sometimes within your own bodymind) and a life you live. My work is also always about change. How do we pivot from being victims of change to being shapers of it? I am one of many who picked up this lifelong question from the Buddha and Octavia E. Butler, among others.

On each solstice and equinox I will offer a spell, because its a way I know to be in reverence of the cycles of life on this planet: through patterns and spells and evolution.

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Murmurations: Stewarding the Future - YES! Magazine

In many ways, Glenn Youngkin is off to a great start as Virginias new Republican governor. After his swearing-in ceremony last weekend, he immediately took action to let parents decide for themselves whether their children have to wear masks in school, rescinded the coercive vaccine mandate for state employees, and signed an executive order to cut regulations and declare Virginia open for business. Yet on one key issue, Youngkins early governance is way off base.

Over the last few weeks, Youngkin has repeatedly defended the liability shield for police officers known as qualified immunity.

Its understandable that Youngkin wants to back law enforcement in a time of rising crime and mounting anti-police sentiment. Yet defending qualified immunity takes this instinct too far.

In many cases, the judicially invented doctrine lets abusive officers get away with violating the constitutional rights of citizens without civil accountability. It blocks lawsuits from proceeding unless there already exists an exactly similar precedent that clearly establishes the alleged conduct as a violation of citizens rights. But no two tragedies are exactly alike, so this prohibits legal accountability in most cases.

As reported by USA Today, qualified immunity has protected officers from liability suits in the following cases:

These are just a few examples of the countless injustices qualified immunity has protected.

Police officers do important work, but ultimately, they are government officials and work for the people. They ought to be accountable to us when they make mistakes. Theres nothing in line with traditional conservative principles of limited government about giving government agents the ability to violate our rights and escape civil accountability.

Yes, police are essential and have difficult jobs, but the same can be said about doctors and they dont have qualified immunity from malpractice lawsuits.

Ending qualified immunity wouldnt mean police officers would have to start paying out massive damages all the time. It would simply mean that more people would get their day in court, and then, only if their cases were proven by a preponderance of the evidence would they get compensated for abuses.

What, exactly, is wrong with that?

One typical talking point in favor of qualified immunity is that without it, wed have a hard time staffing police departments because police would be so vulnerable. This simply isnt true. Qualified immunity in its current form did not exist until it was created by the courts in 1982, and for many decades before that, the supposed shortage of police officers never materialized.

We could also pair the abolition of qualified immunity with pay increases for officers if such a problem ever did emerge. However, we have bigger problems to solve if police will only work if they have a shield protecting them financially when they violate civilians rights. Luckily, thats not the case.

In fact, a Morning Consult poll found that 57% of police officers themselves support getting rid of the doctrine. So, theres nothing anti-police about ending qualified immunity. In fact, the status quo only protects the corrupt officers who give all law enforcement a bad name.

While Youngkin may understandably fear the wrath of police unions, the new governor ought to realize that his defense of qualified immunity isnt in line with the conservative principles he espouses. After all, no less a conservative stalwart than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has criticized the doctrine.

Heres hoping Youngkin changes his tune on this important issue soon.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is co-founder of BasedPolitics.com, co-host of the BasedPolitics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.

Continue reading here:

Glenn Youngkin is off to a good start but hes wrong about one big thing - Washington Examiner

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Amos C. Brown and LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson during the announcement of new joint initiatives with the NAACP in Salt Lake City on Monday, June 14, 2021.

| Jan. 20, 2022, 1:00 p.m.

Some 26 years ago, President Gordon B. Hinckley responded to a question from CBSs Mike Wallace about the difficult history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and race.

Part of Hinckleys forward-thinking answer is as useful and wise today as it was then:

Look, thats behind us.

My friends, we cannot control the past. We live only now, in the present. Each day is a gift from God, and an opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder as brothers and sisters in the collective work of creating a future of love and peace.

My association in recent years with Latter-day Saint leaders is full of this kind of work. I count it one of my lifes greatest joys to know these leaders, including President Russell M. Nelson. They are, in my estimation, the embodiment of the best leadership our country has to offer.

Thats why I was troubled by a recent opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune inaccurately characterizing the church on the issue of race. (LDS Church must formally repudiate its former racist views, by Dave Winslow, Jan. 2)

I respect the experience and perspective of the individual who wrote those words. Granted, I dont see what he sees. But he omits important facts.

In April 1830, Joseph Smith began building Zion. Latter-day Saint scripture says this is a real place where people are of one heart and one mind, and [dwell] in righteousness; and there [are] no poor among them.

Joseph Smiths vision was of love for all humankind. Many in America do not know that Smith ran for president of the United States in 1844. A major part of his platform was the abolition of slavery by 1850putting him ahead of many American leaders of his time including the venerable Abraham Lincoln. Smith had the spirit of the great Frederick Douglass, who said all followers of Jesus should do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

Its true that the church has had challenges since then with race. But, as Hinckley said, Thats behind us. In recent years, I have stood arm-in-arm with President Nelson to announce important joint initiatives of the church and the NAACP. For example, the church committed millions in scholarship money to the United Negro College Fund to help young Black students. The LDS Church also provided for a fellowship in my name to send students to Ghana to learn more about their heritage and the evils of slavery. And the church has pledged millions to fund humanitarian efforts in underprivileged areas of the U.S.

Nelson preaches a gospel of working tirelessly to build bridges of understanding rather than creating walls of segregation. The man next in line to be president, Dallin H. Oaks, told Brigham Young University students in 2020 that only the gospel of Jesus Christ can unite and bring peace to people of all races and nationalities. We who believe in that gospel whatever our origins must unite in love of each other and of our Savior Jesus Christ.

These are the actions and words of a faith moving forward and creating a better world.

Some time ago, the church presented me my family history. I learned of my great-great-grandfather, Patrick Brown. He was born enslaved in 1821 in Roxie, Mississippi. He left me the best of legacies: He did not let the evils of slavery define him. He did not allow the cruelties of others to embitter his soul. After gaining his freedom, he took the high road. He later acquired land and built a church and a school.

We can gripe about the way things were. We can refuse to acknowledge all the good going on now. We can decline to embrace the opportunities before us. But these approaches will not heal our national divisions. President Hinckley, President Nelson, President Oaks, Patrick Brown, and others point to a better way. As Jesus taught, we dont eradicate evil with more evil. We love generously and live mercifully, even toward those we think to be our enemies.

So, lets keep the past in the past. Yes, we remember it. Yes, we learn from it. But no, we do not let it define us today.

May we continue to move forward together in the great work of racial harmony and civil rights for all.

Amos C. Brown is a renowned civil rights leader and president of the NAACP in San Francisco. He has served as pastor of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco since 1976.

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Amos C. Brown: Follow the LDS Church's example to heal divisions and move forward - Salt Lake Tribune

Supporters of a U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons gathered Jan. 22 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to mark the first anniversary of the pact going into force, stepping up their calls on Japan to sign it.

Standing in front of the symbolic Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, 10 or so members of a Hiroshima-based groupcalling for the abolition of nuclear weapons hoisted a banner that read the whole world should join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Unless Japan, the only country in the world to have been ravaged by atomic bombing, speaks out in the international community, it will be impossible to eliminate nuclear weapons, said Shuichi Adachi, a lawyer representing the group.

Participation in the rally was kept to a minimum as asafety precaution against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tomoyuki Mimaki, a representative of the association of A- and H-bomb sufferers in Hiroshima Prefecture, expressed disappointment with a joint statement released Jan. 21 by Tokyo and Washington on the issue of nuclear weapons.

They treated the question with kid gloves, he said dismissively, noting that although thestatement encouraged the worlds political leaders and youth to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it made no reference to the treaty.

Mimaki, 72, said he sent a letter to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is from a constituency in Hiroshima, urging Japanese representatives to attend the first meeting of signatory countries of the treaty in Austria in March as observers.

Attendance on the part of Japan, he said, is indispensable as Kishida has pledged that Tokyo will work as an intermediary between the nuclear and nonnuclear powers.

In Nagasaki, about 150 nuclear-bomb survivors and their supporters gathered in the Peace Park to press the Japanese government to join and ratify the treaty.

The government continues to ignore the treaty even though many countries have signed it, said Shigemitsu Tanaka, president of the Nagasaki Atomic-bomb Survivors Council. We want to get the public become familiar with the treaty so we can join forces in applying pressure on the government.

Fifty-nine countries and territories have ratified the treaty.

But the nuclear powers as well as Japan, which is protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its defense purposes, have refrained from doing so.

According to the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs,627 assemblies, or 35 percent, of the 1,788 local governments, including those at the prefectural level, had adopted a resolution as of Jan. 12 calling on the Japanese government to sign and ratify the treaty.

The figure included 90 or so local governments that adopted the resolution after the treaty went into force in 2021.

The resolution adopted by local governments reflects public opinion and thus is more visible, saidShiro Maekawa, an official of the council who tracks the trend among local governments on the issue. The Japanese government should hear what the public says.

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Call for Japan to join nuclear ban treaty on 1st anniversary | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis - Asahi Shimbun

On January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, shot through the heart, at Utah State Prison. He was the first person to be executed after the death penalty had been reinstated in the United States in 1976. This year, to mark the 45th anniversary of this execution, which coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Death Penalty Action and a coalition of death penalty abolitionists gathered in Washington, D.C. calling for an end to the federal death penalty and all executions in the United States.

After a 17-year hiatus, the U.S. resumed federal executions a year and a half ago. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump administration executed 13 people who were on federal death row, a number surpassing the total number of federal executions that had taken place over the preceding 70 years (1949-2019) spanning 11 presidential administrations.

Those who were executed under the Trump administration included: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin John Higgs. Among this group, considered irredeemable by the U.S. government, was a man living with Alzheimers and schizophrenia; another who was a member of the Navajo Nation and was the only Native American on federal death row; and another who was a former soldier. One of the executed men practiced Messianic Judaism, while another was a practicing Muslim. The only woman who was on federal death row under Trump executed in January 2021 was sexually trafficked by her mother. These sparse details tell us that their existence was not solely defined by the crimes for which they were convicted and ultimately executed, but that each of these individuals has a much fuller story that comprises who they were as human beings. Discounting and ignoring the humanity of those on death row is intrinsic to a system that kills human beings as part of its judicial practice.

As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden had pledged to end the federal death penalty, but the administration seems to have backtracked on that promise. Last July, the Biden administration placed a moratorium on federal executions in order to review the policies the Trump administration enacted to carry out this unprecedented execution spree. Yet Biden has not taken steps to actually end the practice. And while federal executions have been halted for the time being, the Department of Justice has defended and sought the death penalty in the high-profile cases of Dzhokar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof.

Cases like Roofs and Tsarnaevs are cited by proponents of the death penalty to justify its use. The idea that the death penalty is necessary to punish the worst of the worst those like Roof and Tsarnaev, who commit the most heinous of crimes is one that has been proliferated in the U.S. in defense of a practice that most countries in the world have outlawed.

In my home state of Illinois, where the death penalty was abolished by the state legislature in 2011 because of the sustained efforts of death penalty abolitionists, the case of infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy was often cited to justify the ongoing use of the death penalty.

Darby Tillis, who along with his codefendant, Perry Cobb, was the first to be exonerated from Illinoiss death row in 1987, was a fiery and outspoken activist against the death penalty until his death in 2014. We had many conversations about his experience on death row, and once, I asked him about John Wayne Gacy, with whom he was incarcerated. His words were telling. He was a quiet man who kept to himself, Tillis told me. When they executed him, we all knew that we would be next.

When the death penalty is sought for people like Gacy or Roof and Tsarnaev, these executions do not take place in a vacuum. By making a monster out of Gacy, it gives the impression that the system works. But what it really does is let the system off the hook for taking the lives of those it deems expendable, said Renaldo Hudson, who survived 37 years of incarceration in Illinois, including 13 on death row.

Girvies Davis was one of those men considered expendable by the state of Illinois. One year after Gacys execution, the state executed Davis, a Black man who was convicted by an all-white jury of killing Charles Biebel, an 89-year-old white man. Scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez argues that the very logics of the overlapping criminal justice and policing regimes systematically perpetuate racial, sexual, gender, colonial, and class violence through carceral power. Along these lines, it is not surprising that the evidence used to convict Davis was problematic and filled with holes. Prison guards claimed that Davis had passed them a note confessing to Biebels murder while he was incarcerated on another charge. But Davis was functionally illiterate at the time and could not read or write. And, on the night he supposedly passed guards this note, prison logs show that he was signed out of the prison.

Racial bias against defendants of color has always affected who is prosecuted, convicted, sentenced to death and executed. Illinois, now known for its high number of death row exonerations, executed men like Girvies Davis before it abolished the death penalty.

Like Davis, Orlando Hall, who was executed by the federal government during Trumps spree, also faced an all-white jury. In a written testimony of his journey of redemption, he describes his experience:

How did I feel as a black man when I saw my all-white jury? I felt like the thousands before me doomed! I was never under the false illusion that I would receive a fair trial or a jury of my peers. The system is set up to punish people of color, especially poor people of color. I was an uneducated man, functioning illiterate at best, but I also wasnt a fool.

The federal death penalty is not immune from the issues that plagued Illinois. Citing the systemic racism of the death penalty, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Sen. Dick Durbin, and more than 70 of their colleagues reintroduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act in 2021. State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty, which kills Black and [B]rown people disproportionately, has absolutely no place in our society, Pressley said. Before 2021 came to a close, on December 15, Representatives Pressley and Jamie Raskin wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a briefing on the status of the Department of Justices review of the Trump administrations federal death penalty policies and practices, asking whether the Biden administration plans to resume executions and procure the controversial drug pentobarbital sodium for use in those executions.

It remains to be seen what the Biden administration will do in 2022. To hold Biden to his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty, the coalition of activists who gathered in D.C. to mark the 45th anniversary since the first execution in the modern death penalty era voiced their support for the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act and held a rally and march at the Capitol calling for a new wave of activism to end the death penalty.

At an indoor rally, activist Art Laffin shared that he sought mercy and compassion toward the mentally ill homeless man who had stabbed his brother multiple times and killed him. He called for our society to provide a continuum of care for all people like him so future tragedies like what happened to my brother wont be repeated again.

A growing number of murder victims loved ones have joined the call to abolish the death penalty, including for people like Timothy McVeigh, who was the first to be executed by the federal government after the death penalty was reinstated in 1988. McVeigh is often cited as an example of someone who deserved the death penalty, with the logic that not punishing him by death would be an affront to all the lives lost in the Oklahoma City bombing.

But Bud Welch, the father of Oklahoma City bombing victim Julie Welch, fought tirelessly to stop McVeighs execution. Welch even met with McVeighs father, Bill, in his Oklahoma City home. In a powerful account of this unique meeting in Grace from the Rubble: Two Fathers Road to Reconciliation After the Oklahoma City Bombing, Jeanne Bishop writes that Bud Welch extended the hand of grace to one who should have been his enemy. That hand was taken in return.

Bishop, who is a public defender, knows the power of this kind of grace because she extended the same to her sisters killer. These death penalty abolitionists hold that state-sanctioned murder cannot be justified even in the least sympathetic cases. What their examples show is that vengeance and punishment do not have to be our societys response to even the most heinous acts of violence.

Meanwhile, in Illinois where the death penalty was abolished, over 5,000 people are facing life sentences or de-facto life sentences of 40 years or more, according to Parole Illinois. Not unlike their predecessors on death row, they face an in-house death sentence. Increasingly, those advocating for the abolition of the death penalty are calling for an end to harsh sentencing and an end to death by incarceration (life without parole).

Perhaps Renaldo Hudson, now the education director for the Illinois Prison Project and a visual artist whose work will be shown at an upcoming exhibition at the University of Chicago, sums it up best with his words: Society loses its moral grounds when we stoop to the actions of the most broken people to punish those who hurt people. The state of Illinois decided that there was nothing redeemable about me. But Im living proof that hurt people not only hurt people we can heal.

Read more:

Its Time for Biden to Fulfill His Pledge to End the Federal Death Penalty - Truthout

BALLSTON SPA A review of the struggles and successes of African-Americans in Saratoga Countyas of the mid-20th century is the subject of a Black History Month exhibit at the Brookside Museum, 6 Charlton St.

The free exhibit will run Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. beginning Feb. 6.The exhibit will be on display through February. Donations are encouraged, with proceeds used for museum upkeep and public programming.

The exhibit by the Saratoga County History Center is in partnership with the Saratoga County History Roundtable. Its titled Black Experiences in Saratoga County, 1750-1950.

The exhibit is a product of research by a team of local historians brought together by the history center, including: Jim Richmond, head of the Saratoga County History Roundtable; Saratoga County Historian Lauren Roberts; Anne Clothier of the Saratoga County History Center; Maryann Fitzgerald, Saratoga Springs historian; Kendall Hicks, Exalted Ruler of the Frederick Allen Elks Lodge of Saratoga Springs; and Lorie Wies of the Saratoga Springs Public Library.

Their collective research and wealth of knowledge will be shared on several panels and display cases with artifacts relative to Black life in Saratoga County during those 200 years.

We go back to the pre-Revolutionary War era when there were enslaved Blacks in Saratoga County, Richmond said in an interview Wednesday. We have information on some of the early experiences that they had, including being bought and sold, and the fact that they would often run away from their owners.

By 1790, there were more than 300 enslaved Blacks living in the county, Richmond said.

And then, we move on and talk about the Antebellum period from 1800 to the Civil War, and we focus on some of the more uplifting experiences that Blacks had in the county during this time, when it was still prejudiced and everything else, the historian said.

The exhibit includes sections about free Black entrepreneurs in the pre-Civil War era, as well as the Underground Railroad.

One of the interesting aspects that I didnt know until I got involved in this, Richmond said, was the support for abolition in the county was very diverse between the countryside and the city of Saratoga Springs.

Rural areas were much more in favor of abolition and supported noteworthy visitors such as Frederick Douglass for talks, Richmond said.

Saratoga Springs was a bit different because it had a resort area they were encouraging people from the South to patronize, Richmond said.

They were a little more reticent to support abolition, he said.

The exhibit will also give examples of free Blacks and their work in the hotel industry in Saratoga Springs.

We highlight a couple of people that were very successful businessmen in the Black community and the mixed race community, Richmond said. They were supported by the community and there was a transition in the late 1800s to more support for Blacks.

The team of historians is finalizing research into the 20th century, with a focus on the community life of Blacks in the area, specifically focused on Saratoga Springs nightclubs and social societies such as the Elks lodge.

The Saratoga County History Center has previously offered content on different Black experiences in Saratoga County spanning 200 years, but it was never before pulled together for a cohesive story, Richmond said.

Richmond co-wrote a book about the history of the town of Milton, which includes the village of Ballston Spa, and it contains a chapter on the experience of Black people in the Ballston Spa area.

The author had also conducted talks for the Saratoga Springs Public Library, prior to the COVID pandemic.

In parallel, Wies and Julie OConnor, an Albany-based historian, are planning a Feb. 19 museum presentation about the Lattimore family, one of the first Black families of Moreau.

Considering the wealth of knowledge, Richmond said, We thought that we should develop our material a little further, into small exhibits.

Michael Landis, the history centers communications director, said the Black History Month exhibit tries to provide material people havent already seen before.

After the exhibit runs its course at Brookside Museum, the panels will be distributed to smaller historical societies throughout the county, Landis said.

Its going to go mobile, and that way the work gets more attention in the long run, rather than just for people who can make it to Brookside, Landis said.

I really hope that this is going to be the first step in a larger process of including people of color in our work, said Landis, adding the center recently launched a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative.

Contact reporter Brian Lee at[emailprotected]or 518-419-9766.

Categories: News, Saratoga County

Continued here:

Local historians to tell story of the Black experience in Saratoga County, spanning 200 years The Daily Gazette - The Daily Gazette

Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, at Stanford University, is a leading scholar of the American Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. He recently spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about his work, the controversy surrounding the 1619 Project and trends in American history writing.

Tom Mackaman: Could you tell us something about your background, intellectual development, and your work?

Jack Rakove: I was born in Chicago. Im one day older than the Marshall Plan, which means everybody knows my birthday is June 4, 1947. My father was Milton Rakove, [1] who was a well-known professor of political science, who taught mostly at what eventually became the University of Illinois Chicago. He went to college at Roosevelt University thanks to the GI Bill. He went on to the University of Chicago but had to drop out for a few years to make a living. He went back in 1954 when we moved from the west side of Chicago down to Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago. He was a student of Hans Morgenthau, [2] and was very close to Morgenthau, who lived about a block and a half away. From kindergarten to eighth grade, I went to five different public schools. When I finished the last year of Chicago public schools, my dad wanted me to go to Evanston High School, which was then one of the elite public high schools in the country.

I went on to Haverford College, and spent my junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh, which was actually quite an interesting year, intellectually. There were a bunch of faculty at Edinburgh with ties to the journal History and Theory; they taught a course on the Theory and History of History so they got me thinking about philosophy of history questions, and not historiography in the narrow sense, but history as an analytical discipline. Are there covering laws in history for example? I think this is actually significant these days because I think few historians think deeply about issues of causation. As my mentor Bernard Bailyn argued, many of these philosophical and epistemological questions are not particularly interesting for what he called working historians when they set out to solve particular problems, what Bailyn called anomalies. But when one is thinking about a big problem like the origins of revolutions, including our own, causal explanations do become important. In general, the social scientists work much harder on this than historians do, but there are times when trying to think as they do is helpful.

Anyhow, from my undergraduate years at Haverford and Edinburgh I went on to grad school at Harvard in 1969, delayed by four months of active duty at Fort Knox and another half year working for the ACLU in Chicago. My undergraduate mentor, Wallace MacCaffrey, [3] was actually very close friends with Bernard Bailyn, but I was not an early Americanist when I started out. I had a general interest in the relationships between politics and political ideas. I came from a political household. I mentioned my fathers friendship with Hans Morgenthau, but in the early 60s he got politically active. He became a speechwriter for Chuck Percy, [4] who was a liberal Illinois Republican who chaired the partys platform committee in 1960, ran for governor in 1964, and became a senator. But my father was kind of a classic New Deal Democrat. We were just conventional liberal Democrats, and with the Goldwater boom, he wound up working instead for Otto Kerner, [5] who became governor, and then a federal judge.

So at the start I was interested in 20th century politics. But I was advised to take Bud Bailyns seminar, and that was transformative, just because Bailyn was far and away the most interesting person to work with.

TM: Tell us about Bailyns seminar.

JR: It wasnt about American history per se. For example, he had us read a book by E. H. Carr [6]you probably know the book, called The Romantic Exiles, which is about Alexander Herzen and his friends who were Russian migrs.

TM: Its interesting that Bailyn would assign that.

JR: Well, thats because the Early American History seminar had nothing to do with early American history. We read all sorts of things. We read Lord Dennings report on the Profumo scandal, which in Bailyns seminar had to do with the use of adjectives. We read David Cecils Melbourne, because of his use of transitional sentences. It all came down to the question of how it is you frame a narrative where you have lots of people doing lots of different things.

I became interested in Sam Adams, [7] whom I like to call Americas Trotsky. At lunch one day, Bailyn said to me that if one could figure out what Samuel Adams is up to, you could explain 30 percent of the revolution. So, I started thinking about his career. Of course, Sam Adams spent a lot of time in the Continental Congress, and I started thinking of the Massachusetts delegation to the Continental Congress, and that it might be interesting to look at that group to try to think about how politics changed over time after the revolution. There really wasnt a good history on this subject. The historian who edited the original version of whats called Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, eight volumes published between 1921-36, Edmund Cody Burnett, had written the narrative history but it had no analytical or interpretive aspect.

One of the things we learned from Bailyn was to ask the question, how do you define a good analytical problem? There had been this presupposition among the neo-Progressives [8] that, in viewing the Continental Congress you would see radicals and conservativesor radicals, moderates and conservativeskind of battling for power. One historian, James Henderson, came out with a roll call analysis based on party politics in the Continental Congress. But I had a very different understanding of how the Congress worked. You are dealing with a revolutionary body whose members came and went. I mean, they came and went with such frequency that they barely knew one another. The idea that you had some embedded struggle for power just struck me as being wrong-headed.

One of the first things Bailyn did with me in his seminar was to give me as a topic the early uses of the Federalist Papers. I have been working on that text ever since. It is an old-fashioned topic in some ways, but, as I like to say, my epitaph should read, He tried to make the old history respectable again. I am not a great innovator methodologically. I just happen to think I have learned how to ask better questions. I see questions that other people have strangely neglected, for example, the history of the concept of Constitutional original meanings.

TM: If you had to recommend one of your books, that best sums up what you have done in your career

JR: I have three big books and a variety of lesser books. My eighth book, on the free exercise of religion, was just published, [9] and Im working on a ninth. Original Meanings is obviously my best-known book, and my most important book. For Original Meanings it helps to be invested in some of the big debates about Constitutional interpretation, and especially to know something about originalism. The original idea for that book emerged out of a long article I wrote on the Treaty Clause back in the early 1980s, but I had first started thinking about the subject a decade earlier, mostly in conjunction with the Nixon impeachment and the adoption of the War Powers Resolution. Because people were asking, How did the Framers think about the question? I started thinking that is an interesting question. Those were historical questions. So I set out to figure out a serious historical method to address them, which is what Original Meanings does.

For general readers, Revolutionaries, [10] which came out in 2010, may be a better book. The idea there was to write a narrative history of the American Revolution, with biographically themed chapters, which is also an idea that came out of Bailyns seminars. The first chapter is on Adams and the moderates, which actually ties in with the 1619 Project controversy, there is one on Washington, one on George Mason and Constitution making, one on Henry and John Laurens, the South Carolinians, and then there is a chapter on the diplomats, John Jay, Franklin, and Adams overseas. The final third of the book deals with Jefferson, Madisonwho is my main manand Hamilton.

TM: In an email you pointed out that we are coming up on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and that called to mind that some of these anniversaries have come in explosive times. The 100th anniversary came in 1876, a decade after the Civil War and in the middle of a huge depression, and on the cusp of the great strike of 1877; and then at the 200th anniversary, that comes right after Vietnam and Watergate and within the crisis of the 1970s. But now as we approach the 250th, there is the question as to whether democracy will survive, coming after the January 6, 2021 sacking of the Capitol by Trumps fascist supporters, and the mass death caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is difficult to overstate the dimensions of the crisis.

JR: I am trying to write a political history of the Constitution to the present. Recent events have actually made this a problematic exercise. I keep telling friends that as an author, you never know exactly how a book is going to end until you finally end it, but usually you know what the conclusion is going to be. But I no longer know what the conclusion will be since who now knows what the fate of our constitutional system will be?

But I have a more general theory on the way we remember the Revolution, which has two aspects. The lesser aspect asks, why are all the great historical movies about the Civil War, and none of them about the Revolution? The problem with the Revolution is that, unless you take the politics, political ideas, seriously, it is hard to dramatize. It is very difficult to do; in fact, probably impossible.

We have this pretentious term for the Revolution, the Founding. But the Revolution has indeed served as a vehicle for national unity in a way that the Civil War, rightly or wrongly, cannot or has not. Even today, over 150 years after its conclusion, the Civil War remains the source of division. We do have the removal of the Confederate memorials and the renaming of army bases. That is probably two steps forward. But then we have a resurgent white nationalism which is rooted in deeply racist attitudes. I think of January 6 and that guy carrying the Confederate flag inside the Capitol as a symbolically horrifying moment.

It is not a profound observation on my part but it does seem to me that the Revolution has long remained a point of unification. The Declaration, the Constitutionwhere would we be without them? We speak sometimes of Reconstruction after the Civil War as a second founding, but nobody thinks it ended well, much less that it set the right course in Southern culture.

TM: I agree with you that it has been hard for Hollywood to imagine the American Revolution as a revolution, or in fact to imagine it at all. But this gets me to another question. I suppose you could say that the difficulty in appreciating the American Revolution has, so to speak, been there from the beginning. I think of the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, where Jefferson asks Adams what was this revolution to which they staked our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, and Adams writes back that the war was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of a change in the minds of the people during the imperial crisis. Im sympathetic to that interpretation. But let me ask you: what was the American Revolution, and why is it so hard to fathom it as a revolution?

JR: I have written about this in different places. Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein, two of my colleagues, edited a book called Scripting Revolutions. Revolutions have their own scripts, you know. So, they asked me to participate and I did. Mine is called Constitutionalism: The Happiest Revolutionary Script.

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It is an open question. Does the American Revolution fit the revolutionary story or not? You have the problem of declaring independence in 1776, and then forming a truly national polity in 1787. How do you get from the one to the other? Those are two interesting questions in themselves. If you are a political historian, you have to explain why certain political actions were taken at particular moments in time.

Of course, a lot depends on how you define revolution. In one sense the explanatory problems you are going to solve do not really depend on whether or not you have a general theory of revolution. Having one may help you, it may inspire you, but in the end, as a historian you focus on specific problems, those things Bailyn called anomalies. We had a 50th anniversary conference, actually at Yale of all places, on the Ideological Origins. [11] There is an issue of the New England Quarterly dedicated to it. The first essay is Bailyns, with his reflections on how the book was written, and the next essay is mine, called Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causation.

TM: You mentioned it before, and we will need to turn to the 1619 Project, whose central claim was that the American Revolution was launched to defend slavery. That assertion has drawn support from a few historians, most notably Woody Holton, who has placed overriding emphasis on the Dunmore Proclamation.

JR: My response to Woody Holton is that the basic story that gets you to 1776 is British provocation and American reaction. Americans never, even on their more radical daysthey are not out there fomenting incidents trying to force the British to drive the Americans into revolt. There is a letter from Samuel Adams I love quoting, from April 30, 1776, in which he says, We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.

The Americans do mobilize, and as Pauline Maiers first book [12] points out, they do have a whole ideology of resistance. And not just ideology, but this whole kind of strategy about what acts they are justified in doing. I think it has been a weakness in American scholarship, including Woody Holtons, but not only Woodys, to not appreciate the fact that the British provide the engine driving all this. Americans see themselves as reacting. I think when you get to 1770, most American leaders hope, think, may even have expected, that the British, having gone through these two big crises over the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties, will say, okay this policy is not working. I think Franklin or Cushing [13] says, lets just let all these issues lie asleep or fall asleep.

That is why Bailyns book on Hutchinson is so important, [14] because events then take place in Massachusetts where things spin out of control. When the Patriots dumped the tea into the harbor, the British government decided it had to make an example of Massachusetts to discourage the others. The government makes that decision in 1774, and it produces a political disaster. Punishing Massachusetts is what creates what Americans called the common cause. But then the British doubled down on this strategy in April 1775. And they immediately wind up with two military defeats. [15] So at that point the British should have recognized that the underlying assumptions of their strategy were mistaken. But they dont, and then we get the Dunmore Proclamation in November, 1775. Even if the Dunmore Proclamation matters, the basic logic of the decision emerged out of the same failed strategy that had already produced the war. I wrote on this in one of my first articles. [16]

My basic argument is that once you get to the summer of 1775, once the Second Continental Congress convenes on May 10, they actually did have a big debate on their objectives: What is our policy now? Do we need to rethink our objectives? And people like Dickinson [17] and the other moderates say, maybe we should do more to encourage conciliation. But in the end, they dont alter anything. They said maybe we should send a delegation to London, but they didnt. They said maybe we should alter our terms, but they didnt. They do send another petition, the Olive Branch Petition. It doesnt change anything. The British are in the same position. So once you get to the mid-to-late summer of 1775, both sides are committed to ultimatums presented to the other side. The American moderates, people like John Jaywho is very active though still a very young manJames Duane, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson and a couple other names I am probably leaving outthese moderates are desperately hoping that the British will send a peace commission over and it will have actual authority to negotiate.

That doesnt happen. What does happen is the British pass the Prohibitory Act, which makes all American commerce subject to confiscation. They declare the Americans to be traitors. The king starts negotiating treaties with the various German states, the Hanoverians and others, to start bringing Hessiansthat is, hiring mercenary armies.

The question became, are we going to have negotiations, or are we going to continue to escalate this confrontation? Dunmores Proclamation just fits inside that story. Its not that it is a fresh grievance, in itself, that ratchets up what is at stakemuch less that Americans have to go to war to defend slavery against a non-existent threat. Its one thing to encourage slave uprising as part of war, to encourage runaway slaves. Its another to say you are actually going to have emancipation under the British Empire. I mean its complete and utter nonsense.

TM: Which raises the question of British slavery in the Caribbean

JR: You might read a book by a historian named Michael Taylor called The Interest. [18] It is about abolition in the West Indies. One of the interesting things about this book is that it shows that what makes the passage of British abolition possible when it was ratified in 1832, and enacted in 1833, is really the first Reform Act. I have been discussing with a couple of my English historian colleagues about the attack on the old representational system of Parliamentwith rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs [19] and so onhow this pivots, or depends upon, the American Revolution and the whole debate over representation that it entailed. But what makes the passage of emancipation possible in the West Indies is actually the political reforms that start significantly affecting English politics with the first Reform Act, because they really break up the sugar interest. Thats why Taylor calls the book The Interest. The sugar riches remained a formidable force in British politics until the Reform Act began shifting the whole calculus of parliamentary governance.

In a lot of ways the 1619 ProjectI think their position on the Dunmore Proclamation and independence being over defending slaveryI think its completely nuts. Its easily falsifiable, including owing to the fact that British emancipation in the West Indies takes another 50 years. Dunmore is trying to govern Virginia from a ship cruising up and down the Chesapeake.

TM: Perhaps this takes us to some of the work you have done on ideology and interest in history. We could consider that from the vantage point of the Constitutional Convention, as it pertains to the question of slavery. There has been a lot of literature on that that has been coming out. What do you make of it?

JR: Chapter four of Original Meanings addresses this. There are two big, quote-unquote, compromises over representation: the misnamed Connecticut compromise, which I think did not have that much to do with Connecticut to begin with, and then the one over the three-fifths clause. [20] The Connecticut compromise over the Senate was not a compromise in the proper sense of the term. In the crucial vote of July 16, 1787, one side won and the other lost. The final vote was five states to four, with Massachusetts dividedand had the Bay State actually voted, it still would have been a tie. The Federalists started calling this a compromise only later, not because they supported it in principle, but simply because they wanted the Constitution ratified.

The real compromise is the one over slavery, in that it was a compromise and was understood as such in its time. There was some serious discussion of it. The theoretical definition of representation that the framers used is that it is a substitute for whats become physically impossible. The people, collectively, cannot deliberate. So, representation is a substitute for popular deliberation. But slaves would never deliberate under any circumstances. They have no legal, much less civic, identity. So, the idea that that form of property should be represented as property, theoretically, makes no sense. And it is easily attacked. This is a great question to ask students of American history. If you are anti-slavery, which fraction do you prefer: five-fifths, three-fifths, or zero? The genuine anti-slavery position is 0/5, because that will reduce the political influence of the slave states in national governance. So that is the compromise. But the real question is, do you want to have a union with the South or without it?

I think the equal state vote was a disaster then and remains one today. The political theory of the Constitution tacitly or effectively presumes that the size of the populace of a statewhether you live in a large state like California or Texas or an itty-bitty one like North Dakota or Wyomingdefines the interests of voters and legislators. But if you are a thoroughgoing Madisonian, as I am, you know that this factor has no effectnone!on the real interests that define our actual political preferences. That is what the framers were arguing about in Philadelphia, and the Madisonians lost.

Slavery, unfortunately, was an interest demanding explicit recognition and protection. And unlike other kinds of interests, which Madison imagined being scattered across the land, it was geographically concentrated in one region of the country, the South. The Missouri Crisis [21] of 1819-21 became the great disproof of Madisons theory. Jefferson understands this as well, and I am sure they talked about it privately when they visited. And the disproof is this: if you have an interest that is concentrated in one particular region, and not just concentrated, but dominant, you have a problem. Madisons notion of multiplicity of factions presupposes, or assumes, some scattering of interest across the landscape. That is why religion is such a good model for him. Turn Protestants loose to read the Bible, prevent the state from interfering with their opinions or enforcing orthodoxy, and denominations and sects would continue to be fruitful and multiply, to the net advantage of all. But the presence or absence of slavery worked politically in very different ways.

TM: Was it predictable in 1789 that slavery would ultimately ruin the union? Did anyone foresee civil war at the time of the framing of the Constitution?

JR: I am working on this question in my new book. I have spent a lot of time with the 1790 debates over slavery, the ones generated by the two sets of petitions, from Quakers and from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which Franklin led. The 1790 debate on slavery in the House goes on much longer than anyone might have expected, given that the Senate never took the petitions seriously in the first place. But the House keeps pushing the issue. Southerners try to shut the debate down, but they cannot. They managed to minimize the resolutions, which the Senate was never going to approve anyway. You do see this escalatory rhetoric on the part of the South Carolinians.

You certainly see it by 1819. I have actually just been reading Rufus Kings [22] letters this morning. King was a major player in the second round of the Missouri controversy. He plays a major role in mobilizing public opinion between the original debate over the Tallmadge amendment, which takes place in late February and very early March 1819. Then the 15th Congress adjourned and the 16th Congress met for the first time in early December, 1819. Remember, a whole year would elapse between the election of a new Congress and their actual assembly, because members had to take time to plan their trip to Washington. You could not just pop into a national airport or whatever. King says very explicitly that the Northwest Ordinance was an ancient settlement in 1787; it had been a compromise then, but not one that the Union had to enforce endlessly.

And then there is the issue of free blacks. And the slaves also pick up information, intelligence, as they are bound to do, about what is going on politically, whether it is in Washington or London, through the rumor mill. Some of this is raised in the work of the recently deceased historian Julius Scott. [23] So southerners were always freely imagining possibilities of slave revolt, and any political discussion of slavery would contribute to that fear. Even during the 1790 debates, one South Carolinian says we should not talk about this because there are a couple of free African Americans up in the gallery right now. If they hear we are discussing this, word will spread and that is going to create trouble.

My late colleague, Don Fehrenbacher, who also came as I do from the Land of Lincoln, has this great line in his Dred Scott book, [24] where he says slavery is a kind of concentrated, testy, aggressive interest, while anti-slavery was a sentiment. Slavery is defensive, it is aggressive, it wants recognition, it bridles at any threat or insult. There are ambiguities in the nature and the depth of what anti-slavery sentiment means right through the antebellum. So, to answer your question, they did not see the threat of civil war, but it was there in some vague sense.

TM: Could you say something about trends in historical writing on the American Revolution and the Constitution?

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JR: You asked about Bailyn and ideas. The neo-progressive historians, and I think Woody Holton is one, or if you read Michael Klarmans book The Framers CoupI have a long review of it in Reviews in American Historythey do not take political ideas very seriously. And sometimes I think they want to conflate ideas with ideals, which are very different. Ideals are to some extent part of civic society. They will call ideas so much philosophical music. They have no capacity to discuss ideas. Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, and I have taken ideas seriously. To think about how they are generated, and how they are disputed, and which parts matter, and so on. The intellectual and the political sources of modern democratic-republican regimes is itself a significant problem, and you have to take the ideas seriously. People care about them. In my view there are significant developments in the history of constitutional thinking, and constitutional development that emerge from the American Revolution. We do not have to be happy with all the results. The equal state vote is terrible in the Senate, as is its replication in the Electoral College. I think Madison understood this at the time. But their thoughts about everything from equality to constitutional government have significant implications for world history.

Notes:

[1] Milton L. Rakove (19181983), noted political scientist and commentator on Chicago politics.

[2] Hans J. Morgenthau (19041980), German-born legal theorist and founder of the field of international relations, Morgenthau was author of the book Politics Among Nations.

[3] Wallace T. MacCaffrey (19202013), historian of Elizabethan England.

[4] Charles H. Percy (September 27, 1919September 17, 2011), Republican US Senator from Illinois, 19671985.

[5] Otto Kerner Jr. (19081976), Democratic governor of Illinois, 19611968.

[6] E.H. Carr (18921982), British scholar and historian of the Russian Revolution.

[7] Samuel Adams (17221803), leading American Revolutionary War figure from Boston, and a distant cousin of John Adams.

[8] A school of contemporary historical writing, the neo-Progressive historians have carried over from the Progressive historians such as Charles Beard (18741948) an overriding emphasis on immediate material causes in history.

[9] Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, Oxford, 2020.

[10] Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

[11] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Belknap Press, 1967.

[12] Pauline S. Maier (19382013), a leading historian of the American Revolution and student of Bailyn. Her first book was From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 17651776. Knopf, 1974.

[13] Thomas Cushing (17251788), statesman and merchant from Boston.

[14] The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Belknap Press, 1974.

[15] Rakove is referring to the battles fought in Massachusetts in the spring and early summer of 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, on April 19; and Bunker Hill, on June 17.

[16] Jack Rakove, The Decision for American Independence: A Reconstruction, Perspectives in American History, Volume X, 1976, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

[17] John Dickinson (17321808), leading moderate figure of the American Revolution, author of the influential pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in 1767.

[18] Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, Bodley Head, 2020.

[19] Rakove is referring to British constituencies that were depopulated or dominated by large landholders but were still represented in Parliament.

[20] The three-fifths clause, part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, held that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation.

[21] Popularly known as the Missouri Compromise, the crisis emerged over Missouris entrance into the union as a slave state.

[22] Rufus King (17551827), Federalist from Massachusetts whose political career lasted from the American Revolution to the 1820s.

[23] Julius Scott (19552021), was author of the The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, published in 2018.

[24] Don Fehrenbacher (19201997), his book, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, 1978, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in History.

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Historian Jack Rakove on American history writing and the falsifications of the 1619 Project and its defenders - WSWS