Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 103

Don’t Know Much About® the Declaration

We hold these truths to be self evident

In the run-up to the nation’s birthday, here are some things you “need to know” about the Declaration of Independence.

-It’s not a “piece of paper.” The original version of the Declaration  was “engrossed” (a word for preparing an official document in a large, clear hand) on parchment (which is an animal skin, stretched and treated to preserve it). The Declaration was probably “engrossed” by Timothy Matlack, an assistant to Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress.

–”Inalienable” or “unalienable“?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Jefferson’s drafts shows he wrote “inalienable.”

The parchment and printed versions use “unalienable.”

According to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style from Houghton Mifflin:

The unalienable rights that are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence could just as well have been inalienable, which means the same thing. Inalienable or unalienable refers to that which cannot be given away or taken away.

–Why didn’t George Washington sign? Washington was otherwise engaged. At the moment that the Congress voted on the Declaration, Washington was commanding his ragtag Continental Army in New York City, about 90 miles from Philadelphia. Washington had been appointed Commander of the Army in June 1775 and taken command in Boston.  On July 9, 1776, he had the Declaration of Independence read aloud to his men. After hearing the Declaration read, a mob of enthusiastic New Yorkers tore down a statue of King George III in the Bowling Green and melted the lead for musket balls.

For Washington, the date of July 4 was bittersweet. In 1754, as the young and untested commander of a Virginia militia unit, he had been surrounded and forced to surrender by a French army in the Pennsylvania wilderness. Washington’s surrender came after his men and some Native American allies attacked and massacred a group of French soldiers on a diplomatic mission.  Washington’s surrender included what was a “confession” of murdering a French diplomat and the incident helped sparked the Seven Years War (known in North America as the French and Indian War). This was the first and only time he surrendered in his military career. But the sting of that defeat must have made July 4th an unhappy anniversary for Washington for years to come.

--How many Declarations are there?

Jefferson’s draaft document, which was later lost, went to printer John Dunlap who prepared 26 (known) copies of the Declaration of Independence on the night of July 4th. Their present location –including two in England– and more information on the history of the Declaration and its travels over the centuries can be found at the National Archives.

Three years ago, I wrote about seeing a handwritten copy of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration made a few days after the Declaration was adopted. You can read that post here.

 

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

Don’t Know Much About® Helen Keller

 

Helen Keller, circa 1920
Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (UCLA Library)

Born on June 27, 1880. Helen Keller.

You probably know the story of her childhood from The Miracle Worker. But her life was much more than that. And they certainly didn’t tell you that she was a Socialist. And a feminist. And a pacifist.

This is from a letter she wrote to Eugene V. Debs, labor leader and presidential candidate, while he was in jail for advocating draft resistance during World War I, and whom she addressed as “Dear Comrade”  (March 11, 1919). {Excerpted in Don’t Know Much About History.}

I write because I want you to now that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. When I think of the millions who have suffered in all the wicked wars of the past, I am shaken with the anguish of a great impatience. I want to fling myself against all brute powers that destroy the life, and break the spirit of man.

. . .  We were driven onto war for liberty, democracy and humanity. Behold what is happening all over the world today! Oh where is the swift vengeance of Jehovah that it does not fall upon the hosts of those who are marshalling machine-guns against hungry-stricken peoples? It is the complacency of madness to call such acts “preserving law and order.” What oceans of blood and tears are shed in their name! I have come to loathe traditions and institutions that take away the rights of the poor and protect the wicked against judgment.

What most people know of Helen Keller (1880-1968) comes from the play and film The Miracle Worker which tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Helen Keller, who became blind and deaf at the age of two, and her teacher Anne Sullivan. That story stops with Keller’s triumph in learning to sign. With Sullivan as her companion, Keller went on to Radcliffe, then Harvard’s female counterpart, from which she graduated in 1904 with honors. Born into a conservative Alabama family, Keller eventually became both an outspoken feminist and pacifist. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party and became friends with party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had been imprisoned for expressing his antiwar views at the time Keller’s letter was written.

Helen Keller died on June 1 1968 In Connecticut.

And here’s a quick quiz about Keller from Don’t Know Much About Anything:

She was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880. After an illness destroyed Helen Keller’s sight and hearing as an infant, she lived for the next five years as a kicking, screaming wild child. In 1887,  Anne Sullivan (1866-1936), child of poor Irish immigrants and nearly blind herself, was hired to tutor the uncontrollable Helen. Through touch, Sullivan was able to reach Keller. Using a manual alphabet in which words were spelled out in her hand, Keller gradually learned to read and write Braille, eventually learned to speak and went on to college. As a writer and speaker, she crusaded to improve conditions for the blind and deaf-blind until her death in 1968. What do you know about this heroic conqueror of physical disabilities? Take this quick quiz.

1.  What famous American inventor advised Helen’s father to seek help at Boston’s Perkins Institution for the Blind?

2. What college did Helen Keller attend ?

3.  How did Helen Keller “listen” to people?

4.   In the 1962 film of Helen’s story, The Miracle Worker, Helen was played by Patty Duke, who won an Oscar, and Anne Bancroft portrayed Anne Sullivan. Who played the Sullivan role in a 1979 television remake?

Answers

1.  Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, whose wife was also hearing impaired.

2. She went to Radcliffe in Cambridge, Mass., and graduated in 1904 with honors. Sullivan assisted her through her college years, interpreting lectures.

3. She “read” lips by touching the lips and throat of people as they spoke.

4. Patty Duke. The role of Helen was taken by Melissa Gilbert.

The Don’t Know Much About® Online Video Series With ABC News

In partnership with ABC News, I have begun a new series of videos that will explain presidential history and explore the presidents as well as have some fiun with other aspects of America’s Hidden History.

The first in this series explains the Electoral College.

“The Electoral College Explained”

 

The second video looks at the curious first presidential election… Who did elect George Washington?

“America’s Funky First Election”

 

The third installment asks: Why do we have political parties if the founders didn’t like them?

“Party Poopers: The Founders Didn’t Like Political Parties”

 

Don’t Know Much About® Juneteenth

A Senator from Texas wants to create a new national holiday out of an old tradition: celebrating Emancipation on a day  called Juneteenth.

It is a holiday still unfamiliar to many Americans. I explain its roots here:

“America’s birthday is fast approaching. But let’s not wait for July 4th to light the fireworks. There is another Independence Day on the horizon.

Juneteenth falls on June 19 each year. It is a holiday whose history was hidden for much of the last century. But as the nation now observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s onset, it is a holiday worth recognizing.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine

Flag Day and Mr. Madison’s War

 

America  is preparing to mark the 200th anniversary of one of the most unnecessary and avoidable wars in its history– the War of 1812, or “Mr. Madison’s War, declared by Congress  on June 18, 1812.

It is also appropriate to note that today  – June 14– is Flag Day, the day that the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the nation’s flag in 1777. These two landmarks come together because it was during the War of 1812 that American got the words that eventually became its national anthem –with music borrowed from an old English drinking song. Almost from the outset, the song has been butchered at baseball games and Super Bowls.

It was September 13, 1814. America was at war with England for the second time since 1776. Francis Scott Key was an attorney attempting to negotiate the return of a civilian prisoner held by the British who had just burned Washington DC and had set their sights on Baltimore. As the British attacked the city, Key watched the naval bombardment from a ship in Baltimore’s harbor. In the morning, he could see that the Stars and Stripes still flew over Fort McHenry. Inspired, he wrote the lyrics that we all know –well, at least some of you probably know some of them.

But here’s what they didn’t tell you:

Yes, Washington, D.C. was burned by the British  in 1814, including the President’s Mansion which would later get a fresh coat of paint and come to be called the “White House.” But Washington was torched in retaliation for the burning of York –now Toronto—in Canada earlier in the war.

Yes, Key wrote words. But the music comes from an old English drinking song. Good thing it wasn’t 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Here’s a link to the original lyrics of the drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven  (via Poem of the Week).

The Star Spangled Banner did not become the national anthem until 1916 when President Wilson declared it by Executive Order. But that didn’t really count. In 1931, it became the National Anthem by Congressional resolution signed by President Herbert Hoover.,

Now here are two other key –no pun intended– events related to Flag Day, June 14:

•In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that  schoolchildren could not be compelled to salute the flag if it conflicted with their religious beliefs

•In 1954 on Flag Day, President Eisenhower signed the law that added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

 Learn more about Fort McHenry, Key and the Flag that inspired the National Anthem from the National Park Service.



The images and music in this video are courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History which has excellent resources on the flag that inspired Key.



This version of the anthem is on 19th century instruments:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/mp3/song.ssb.dsl.mp3

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