Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 102

Don’t Know Much About the Lovings

The Loving Story Photo by Gray Villet (Source: HBO)

 

Virginia is for lovers is the state’s slogan. Not always. In 1958, Virginia was not for lovers if they were from different races.

Loving v. Virginia changed that. And America.

On June 12, 1967, the Court issued its ruling in this case, striking down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage (“miscegenation”) in America.

Richard Loving, a white man, married Mildred, a 18-year-old woman of African-American and Native American descent, in Washington, D.C. When they returned to their native Virginia, they were arrested in the middle of the night and the Lovings were forced to leave Virginia. A few years later, young Mildred asked Robert F. Kennedy, the new Attorney General, for help. He suggested the Americana Civil Liberties Union and she wrote to them. Two young lawyers decided to take the case. They brought suit which eventually found its way to the Supreme Court

The Court ruled that that anti-miscegenation laws, such as those in Virginia, violated the “Due Process Clause” (“No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….” )  and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law …”). In the unanimous majority opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

The Loving case deserves discussion in light of the recent decisions to allow same sex marriage in Iowa (a court ruling) and Vermont (a legislative act) and now New York. I have no doubt that this unresolved question is the greatest civil rights question facing America today. I am not a Constitutional lawyer, but I am certain that this landmark case will be invoked as the battle over same sex marriage continues.

I also have no doubt that the country will –perhaps ever so slowly—catch up with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont, along with New Hampshire, the District of Columbia and New York in permitting same sex marriage. Recent decisions in Massachusetts and California make it probable that this issue will and before the Supreme Court. And the Loving case may be an important part of the arguments.

Change in American history is often slow. And it usually comes from the bottom up –not the top down. Whether it was abolition, civil rights, or even independence itself, when it comes to most of the great social upheavals of our past, the politicians and “leaders” have generally had to be dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of change. It may be glacially slow, but it will happen, in part because there is a generational change that will someday make the existing same sex marriage prohibitions on the books seem as antiquated –and despicable—as the now-unconstitutional bans on interracial marriage.

Before her death in 2008, Mildred Loving, the woman of African-American and Native American descent who brought the suit against Virginia, issued a statement on the 40th anniversary of the decision. She wrote:

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

I can’t say it any better than that.

The January/February 2012 issue of Humanities  magazine featured the Lovings as did a recent HBO documentary, The Loving Story.

There is a more complete discussion of the history of the Lovings, their case and its connection to the same sex marriage debate in the new, revised edition of Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don’t Know Much About® Homer Plessy

What did “separate but equal” mean?

On this date 120 years ago — June 7, 1892– Homer Plessy was arrested when he refused to leave an all-whites railroad car in New Orleans. It was no accident. A 30-year-old shoemaker born to parents who were classed as “free people of color,” Plessy had been chosen to deliberately violate the law so that it could be challenged in court.

Don't Know Much About History (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition)

Homer Plessy was seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth black,  an “octaroon” in the parlance of the day, and in facial features, he appeared to be Caucasian. But when he tried to sit in a railroad coach reserved for whites, that one-eighth was all that counted. Plessy was arrested, in accordance with an 1890 Louisiana law separating railroad coaches by race. Assisted by the Comité des Citoyens (“Citizens’ Committee”), a pioneering civil rights group, Plessy fought his arrest all the way to the Supreme Court in 1896.

Unfortunately, this was the same Supreme Court that had protected corporations as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment, ruled that companies controlling 98 percent of the sugar business weren’t monopolies, and jailed striking workers who were “restraining trade.”

In Plessy’s case, the arch-conservative, business-minded Court showed it was also racist in a decision that was every bit as indecent and unfair as the Dred Scott decision before the Civil War. The majority decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson established a new judicial idea in America—the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning states could legally segregate races in public accommodations, such as railroad cars and public schools. In his majority opinion, delivered on May 18, 1896, Justice Henry Brown wrote,

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

The problem with this fine notion, of course, was that every facet of life in the South was increasingly separate —schools, dining areas, trains and later buses, drinking fountains, and lunch counters— but they were never equal.

The lone dissenter in this case was John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) of Kentucky. In his eloquent dissent, Harlan wrote,

“The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds. . . . We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law.”

In practical terms,  Plessy v. Ferguson had given the Court’s institutional stamp of approval to segregation and generations of “Jim Crow” laws. It would be another sixty years before another Supreme Court decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v Board of Education.

A transcript of the Plessy ruling can be found in the “100 Milestone Documents” site of the National Archives.

This entry is adapted from the newly revised and updated Don’t Know Much About® History.

The Birth of the “Marshall Plan”

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave Harvard’s commencement address, introducing and justifying the European Recovery Program, which became better known as the Marshall Plan.

Marshall (born December 31, 1880) had been the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during World War II and Winston Churchill hailed him as the “true organizer of victory.” The plan, part of the Cold War program of “Containment” championed by George F. Kennan, is credited with restoring the economies of post World War II western Europe. At Harvard, Marshall said:

The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character. …Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.

Conceived by Undersecretary of State Will Clayton and first proposed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the Marshall Plan pumped more than $12 billion into selected war torn European countries during the next four years. (The countries participating were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.)

It provided the economic side of President Truman’s policy of “Containment” by removing the economic dislocation that might have fostered Communism in Western Europe. It also set up a Displaced Persons Plan under which some 300,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were granted American citizenship. By most accounts, the Marshall Plan was the most successful undertaking of the United States in the post-war era and is often cited as the most compelling argument in favor of foreign aid.

By most measures, the Marshall Plan must be considered an enormously successful undertaking that helped return a devastated Europe to health. allowing free market democracies to flourish while Eastern Europe, hunkered down under repressive Soviet controlled regimes, stagnated socially and economically.

Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 before his death on October 16, 1959. For more about Marshall, here is a link to the nonprofit Marshall Foundation.

You can read more about the Marshall Plan and the Cold War era in the newly revised and updated edition of Don’t Know Much About History.

Don't Know Much About History (Anniversary Edition, paperback)

Don’t Know Much About® Walt Whitman

 I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

 

Walt Whitman Photo Courtesy of Walt Whitman House, Camden, NJ (Photographer Unknown, Matthew Brady?)

Born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York, Walt Whitman changed the way we thought about poetry.

He “heard America singing.” And his work has inspired some, bedeviled others (mostly students) and stood as the work of a unique American voice for more than 150 years. In July 1855, a former schoolteacher turned newspaper publisher, Walt Whitman self-published 795 copies of the first edition of twelve of his poems in a book called Leaves of Grass.  Over the years, Whitman (1819-1892) would add many more poems to later editions of the work that may be the most famous American book of poems ever published. Sample a bit of  Whitman in this quick quiz. (Answers below)

1. Where did Whitman attend college?

2.  How did Whitman serve during the Civil War?

3. What event inspired the poems “O Captain! My Captain!” and  “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”?

4.  Why did he lose his government job in 1865?

During the Civil War, Whitman recorded wartime life in Washington, D.C. and wrote of seeing Lincoln many mornings as he rode through the city surrounded by a cavalry guard, sabers drawn.

I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep. latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange  bows, and very cordial ones….None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of the man’s face. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.

The Walt Whitman Birthplace is a state historic site in West Hills.

The National Endowment for the Humanities Edsitement offers some very good resources of Whitman and the literature of the Civil War.

Another excellent resource is the Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Answers

1.  He didn’t. Born on Long Island, New York, he went to school for about six years before becoming a printer’s apprentice and was largely self-educated after that.

2.  After his brother was wounded in battle, he became a volunteer nurse, aiding the sick in Washington, D.C. hospitals while working for the Army’s Paymaster’s office.

3.   The death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired.

4. He was fired for his poems which the Secretary of the Interior found offensive, presumably for some of their homosexual themes.

Don't Know Much About History (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition)

The paperback edition had been released with a new cover to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil war.

“Brief, Shining Moment”-Don’t Know Much About® JFK

President John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Alfred Eisenstadt-White House Press Office)

 

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans— born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage— and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you— ask what you can do for your country.

—John F. Kennedy

Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

Born on May 29, 1917, John F. Kennedy would have been 95 years old today.

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, the public remains fascinated with the man, his family, and his times. In 2011, two best- selling books— one based on a collection of audiotapes made by his widow, Jacqueline, in 1964, the other a mostly laudatory evaluation by political commentator Chris Matthews— attested to the ongoing near-obsession with the assassinated president. A 2012 book by a woman claiming an affair with JFK began when she was a nineteen-year-old White House intern underscored the dark side of the Kennedy legend. His life and loves, his controversial death, and the legacy of his brief presidency and extended family continue to exert a hold on the American imagination as nothing about any other politician in American memory has.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the modern myth-making machine was set in motion. It transformed a president who had committed serious mistakes while also conjuring brilliant successes into a sun-dappled, all-American legend— a modern young King Arthur from Camelot, the popular musical of the day, which became the enduring image of his abbreviated life and presidency.

Elected at forty-two —the first and still only Roman Catholic American president and still the youngest elected president— and dead at forty- six, John F. Kennedy had, in the lyrics of Camelot, a “brief, shining moment” that remains one of the most extraordinary passages in American history, shaping the course of modern presidential politics and history.

His administration would be marked by the civil rights struggles and the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union that focused on Cuba–first with the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and then with the 13-day long missile crisis in October 1962. He promised to land a man on the moon, setting America’s space program in motion, and launched the idealistic Peace Corps, even as the nation’s involvement in Vietnam was deepening.

This is his obituary from the New York Times.

JFK’s life is documented at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

This material is adapted from the forthcoming book Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents(Scheduled for publication by Hyperion Books, September 18, 2012)

Don't Know Much About® the American Presidents

Don’t Know Much About® Memorial Day

(Images Courtesy of the Library of Congress and Flanders Cemetery image Courtesy of the American Battle Monuments Commission)

Every year at this time, I spend a lot of time talking about the roots and traditions of Memorial Day.

It’s not about the barbecue or the Mattress Sales. Obscured by the holiday atmosphere around Memorial Day is the fact that it is the most solemn day on the national calendar. This video tells a bit about the history behind the holiday.

One way to mark Memorial Day is by simply reading the Gettysburg Address. Here is a link to the Library of Congress and its page on the Address:

I also discussed Memorial Day in a previous post.

Have a memorable Memorial Day

Don’t Know Much About® Harry S. Truman

Born on May 8, 1884, Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president.

He was, as a New York Times obituary would put it: “a hitherto minor national figure with a pedestrian background as a Senator from Missouri.” But few presidents have changed history as Truman did.

He ordered the use of the atomic bomb. He desegregated America’s military forces. (Photo Source: White House Historical Association)

He oversaw a policy of “containment” of Communism. He recognized Israeli independence in spite of objections by advisers. He won one of the most extraordinary elections in modern presidential history. He led America into the Korean War and paid a steep political price.

And he had done it after taking on one of the most difficult tasks in history –replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt while the Second World War was still being fought on two fronts and the specter of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was rising. He became president 82 days after becoming vice president.

Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

—Harry. S Truman

Remarks to reporters, April 13, 1945

Born in Missouri on May 8, 1884, Truman grew up near Independence, outside Kansas City, the son of a mule trader. A lover of history as a boy, he dreamed of going to West Point, but his poor eyesight kept him out. He served in World War I as the commander of an artillery unit and returned to Missouri to eventually wind his way through state politics into the Senate where he was serving when he was tapped as FDR’s vice president in 1944.

Truman died on December 26, 1972. You can learn more about Truman’s life and presidency at the Truman Library and Museum

Truman’s controversial decision to use the atomic bomb to prevent massive casualties an invasion of the Japanese mainland would produce, and the anti-Communist Cold War era and McCarthyism are discussed in the newly revised and updated Don’t Know Much About History.

Don't Know Much About History (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition)

An in-depth portrait of Truman’s personal life and presidency will be presented in greater depth in my forthcoming book, Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents: Everything You Need to Know About the Most Powerful Office on Earth and the Men Who Have Occupied It to be published on September 18, 2012 by Hyperion Books.

“By the Rude Bridge…”

“Listen my children, and you shall hear/of the midnight ride of . . . Joseph Warren?”

Okay, that doesn’t scan quite like Longfellow’s original “Paul Revere’s Ride.” But that’s the problem. In making sure we “hear” about “Revere,” Longfellow –an abolitionist who wrote that poem in 1861 as a call to rally the Union as the Civil War began– ignored the man whose name should be as familiar as those of John Adams or John Hancock. A man who deserves to be honored as we mark the first battles in America’s Revolution at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775

A successful physician and progressive thinker, Joseph Warren was born a farmer’s son in 1741 in Roxbury, outside Boston. Warren chose his profession when he saw his father die after a fall from a tree. Later, he became an outspoken advocate of inoculations to battle the plague of smallpox sweeping colonial America and vaccinated his most famous patient, John Adams.

But medicine was not his only passion. As the colonies began to clash with Mother England, Warren was drawn to the red-hot center of Boston’s patriot inner circle. He became a propagandist, spymaster and orator who modeled himself on Cicero, martyr of the Roman Republic, occasionally appearing in a toga to deliver incendiary speeches.

Most likely, it was Warren who led those men disguised as Indians to the “party” where they tossed a shipload of British tea into Boston Harbor. And he was the crucial go-between, linking Boston’s upper crust patriots –who got most of the glory– and the workingmen and artisans – like Paul Revere – who did most of the dirty work. But Warren was left out of our poems. And our schoolbooks. And that’s too bad, because his story is compelling.

It was Warren who issued Revere’s “riding orders” on that night in 1775, setting the stage for the fateful April 19th morning at Lexington and Concord. A few weeks later, Warren took to the front lines at the battle called “Bunker Hill.” An enemy ball caught him in the head and he fell.

For the British, Warren’s death was a coup, celebrated by tossing the rebel doctor’s body into a mass grave. But for the patriot cause, the loss of Warren cut deep. Abigail Adams mournfully wrote to husband John:

“Not all the havoc and devastation they have made has wounded me like the death of Warren. We want him in the Senate; we want him in his profession; we want him in the field. We mourn for the citizen, the senator, the physician, and the warrior. When he fell, liberty wept.”

Paul Revere later returned to the battleground to locate the rebel leader’s body. He was able to identify his compatriot’s remains because Revere had fitted the false teeth that Warren wore, one of the first known cases of forensic dentistry.

Yet, Joseph Warren’s story remained buried, overshadowed by the more illustrious Founders with better biographers –and admiring poets. He became the most important Founding Father most of us never heard of.

His story is told more fully in my book America’s Hidden History.

America's Hidden History (Harper)

And while thinking of grade school poetry, here are the opening lines of another poem you should have read and learned about: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Franklin’s Farewell

Surely America’s most fascinating Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at the age of 84. Shortly before his death, he wrote a letter to Rev. Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale, summarizing his religious beliefs.

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe.

That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render him is doing good to his other children . . . That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth. I think the system of morals and his religion . . . the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have . . . some doubts as to his divinity though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon. having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. ” He added, “I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments.

He was, as biographer Walter Isaacson wrote, “an apostle of tolerance.” (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, page 468)

By most estimates, some 20,000 people attended his funeral in Philadelphia on April 21 –about half of the city’s population at the time, and the largest public gathering in America to that date.

The Library of Congress offers an extensive selection of resources on Franklin’s life and impact.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Jefferson

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate: …. (Kings) are the servants, not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the third be a blot in the page of history.

–Thomas Jefferson

A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

Born on April 13, 1743 at Shadwell, his father’s estate in Albermarle County, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was the son of a planter and surveyor, Peter Jefferson and his wife, Jane Randolph Jefferson, who came from the Randolphs, one of Virginia’s wealthiest families. Thomas Jefferson’s father had moved the family to the Tuckahoe plantation owned by William Randolph, which Peter Jefferson managed as executor. The third child in a family of ten, Thomas was a bookish boy who studied with a local clergyman and later at a school in Fredericksburg with Reverend James Maury who taught Jefferson the classics in their original languages. The oldest son, Thomas was fourteen when his father died, leaving the boy head of an estate with about 2,500 acres and thirty slaves.

The Declaration’s author distinguished himself early as a scholar at The College of William and Mary, and gained admission to the Virginia bar in 1767. His literary prowess, demonstrated in A Summary View of the Rights of British America, prompted John Adams to put Jefferson forward as the man to write the Declaration, a task he accepted with reluctance.

Most of the war years were spent in Virginia as a legislator and later as governor, a period of some controversy as he was criticized for failing to aggressively defend Virginia against British attacks.

After his wife’s death, in 1783, he joined the Continental Congress and served as ambassador to France, where he could observe firsthand the French Revolution. Returning to America in 1789, Jefferson became Washington’s secretary of state and began to oppose what he saw as a too-powerful central government under the new Constitution, bringing him into a direct confrontation with his old colleague John Adams and, more dramatically, with the chief Federalist, Alexander Hamilton.

Running second to Adams in 1796, he became vice president, chafing at the largely ceremonial role. In 1800, Jefferson and fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College vote, and Jefferson took the presidency in a tense and controversial House vote that required more than 30 ballots.

While President, Jefferson engineered the Louisiana Purchase and wrote what may be his second most famous lines in a letter addressing religious freedom under the new American government.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

–Thomas Jefferson

Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, (January 1, 1802)

After two terms, he returned to his Monticello home to complete his final endeavor, building the University of Virginia. As he lay dying, Jefferson would ask what the date was, holding out, like John Adams, until July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration.

With the advantage of hindsight, cynicism about Thomas Jefferson is easy. But the baffling question remains: How could a man who embodied the Enlightenment keep black slaves –and it is widely assumed, father children by one of them?

There is no truly satisfying answer. Earlier in his life, as a lawyer and member of the Burgesses, he had unsuccessfully argued against aspects of slavery. At worst, Jefferson may not have thought of slaves as men, not an unusual notion in his time. And he was a man of his times. He was completely dependent upon slavery for his financial life and the political power of his southern slave-holding class. Like other men, great and small, he was not perfect.

Jefferson’s life, writings and politics are discussed in Don’t Know Much About History from which this material is adapted.

Jefferson's Gravesite Photo credit: Kenneth C. Davis ©2012