Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 144
September 4, 2023
September 3, 2023
September 3, 2023
Almost one hundred and forty-one years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.
By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”
In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical” —event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
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Notes:
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-daze
New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.
New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.
New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdf
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/
September 2, 2023
September 2, 2023
On March 4, 1858, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond rose to his feet to explain to the Senate how society worked. “In all social systems,” he said, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” That class, he said, needed little intellect and little skill, but it should be strong, docile, and loyal.
“Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement,” Hammond said. His workers were the “mud-sill” on which society rested, the same way that a stately house rested on wooden sills driven into the mud.
He told his northern colleagues that the South had perfected this system by enslavement based on race, while northerners pretended that they had abolished slavery. “Aye, the name, but not the thing,” he said. “[Y]our whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”
While southern leaders had made sure to keep their enslaved people from political power, Hammond said, he warned that northerners had made the terrible mistake of giving their “slaves” the vote. As the majority, they could, if they only realized it, control society. Then “where would you be?” he asked. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not…with arms…but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
He warned that it was only a matter of time before workers took over northern cities and began slaughtering men of property.
Hammond’s vision was of a world divided between the haves and the have-nots, where men of means commandeered the production of workers and justified that theft with the argument that such a concentration of wealth would allow superior men to move society forward. It was a vision that spoke for the South’s wealthy planter class—enslavers who held more than 50 of their Black neighbors in bondage and made up about 1% of the population—but such a vision didn’t even speak for the majority of white southerners, most of whom were much poorer than such a vision suggested.
And it certainly didn’t speak for northerners, to whom Hammond’s vision of a society divided between dim drudges and the rich and powerful was both troubling and deeply insulting.
On September 30, 1859, at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair, rising politician Abraham Lincoln answered Hammond’s vision of a society dominated by a few wealthy men. While the South Carolina enslaver argued that labor depended on capital to spur men to work, either by hiring them or enslaving them, Lincoln said there was an entirely different way to see the world.
Representing an economy in which most people worked directly on the land or water to pull wheat into wagons and fish into barrels, Lincoln believed that “[l]abor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior of capital.”
A man who had, himself, worked his way up from poverty to prominence (while Hammond had married into money), Lincoln went on: “[T]he opponents of the ‘mud-sill’ theory insist that there is not…any such things as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”
And then Lincoln articulated what would become the ideology of the fledgling Republican Party:
“The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account for another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
In such a worldview, everyone shared a harmony of interest. What was good for the individual worker was, ultimately, good for everyone. There was no conflict between labor and capital; capital was simply “pre-exerted labor.” Except for a few unproductive financiers and those who wasted their wealth on luxuries, everyone was part of the same harmonious system.
The protection of property was crucial to this system, but so was opposition to great accumulations of wealth. Levelers who wanted to confiscate property would upset this harmony, as Hammond warned, but so would rich men who sought to monopolize land, money, or the means of production. If a few people took over most of a country’s money or resources, rising laborers would be forced to work for them forever or, at best, would have to pay exorbitant prices for the land or equipment they needed to become independent.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Lincoln’s day, but on this Labor Day weekend, it strikes me that the worldviews of men like Hammond and Lincoln are still fundamental to our society: Should our government protect people of property as they exploit the majority so they can accumulate wealth and move society forward as they wish? Or should we protect the right of ordinary Americans to build their own lives, making sure that no one can monopolize the country’s money and resources, with the expectation that their efforts will build society from the ground up?
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Notes:
Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Selections_from_the_Letters_and_Speeches/FvMeZzrWW3AC?hl=en&gbpv=1
Abraham Lincoln, September 30, 1859, “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair.”
September 1, 2023
September 1, 2023
New figures out today from the Labor Department show that employers added 187,000 jobs in August, up but at a slower rate than the red-hot job market has been adding since the pandemic. Unemployment ticked up to 3.8%, in part because of the 37,000 jobs lost when the trucking company Yellow declared bankruptcy. The economy appears to be steadying, with only 1.5 jobs for every person looking, down from the 2 openings in early 2022.
As the hiring frenzies of the past two years calm down, economists expect job growth to continue in health care and education, which have made up 85% of the job growth in the past three months. After that, government investments in infrastructure under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, renewable energy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, and semiconductor manufacturing thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act are likely to keep demand growing.
The economic numbers for the Biden administration are remarkable and demonstrate the strength of the system under which the government operated from 1933 to 1981: the idea that investing in ordinary Americans builds the economy far more efficiently than so-called “supply-side economics.” That economic ideology, advanced by the Reagan Republicans, claimed that cutting regulations and concentrating wealth at the top of the economy would enable business leaders to invest in the economy efficiently, cutting costs and driving economic growth.
But that vision has never produced as promised, while it has dramatically concentrated wealth and power since it went into effect in 1981. “Bidenomics” is a rejection of that theory and a return to the economic vision that built the country in the fifty years before it. Investing in infrastructure and programs that help ordinary Americans puts money and the power of innovation into their hands, driving the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, as Biden puts it.
In a reflection of the plan to use the government to help those at the bottom of the economy, the administration yesterday canceled $72 million in student loans for 2,300 borrowers who were cheated by the for-profit Ashford College, which was purchased in 2020 by the University of Arizona. It says it will try to recoup the money from the University of Arizona, which denies any responsibility for the actions of Ashford or its parent company, the education technology services company Zovio.
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to focus on ending abortion, and their determination is leading them to assert power over citizens of Republican-dominated states in a way that is commonly associated with authoritarian governments.
Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall claimed in a court filing on Monday that Alabama, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, can prosecute people who help women travel out of the state to obtain an abortion as part of a “criminal conspiracy.”
Today, Caroline Kitchener reported in the Washington Post that at least 51 jurisdictions in Texas have passed ordinances to make it illegal to transport anyone on roads within city or county limits to get an abortion. Their hope is to target interstates and the roads around airports to block off routes out of Texas and keep pregnant women trapped in the antiabortion state.
The laws also allow any private citizen to sue any person or organization they think is violating the ordinance, leading to expensive lawsuits against the friends and family members of the most economically vulnerable people in society. Antiabortion activists call aid to women seeking abortions “abortion trafficking,” which makes it sound like women are being forced to get an abortion, when in fact, the ordinances ensnare women who want to get an abortion and their friends, preventing them from leaving an antiabortion state. Even if such an ordinance is impossible to enforce, it legally endangers the people who would help someone trying to get an abortion, moving such reproductive care beyond the financial reach of many women, and makes people hesitant to help each other.
Such barriers are precisely the same as those for people trying to leave authoritarian countries. Someone who is prohibited from leaving a jurisdiction is not a citizen but a subject. Free and full citizens of a democracy have the right to travel, both inside the country and out of it. That right is guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the Constitution. But authoritarian countries often restrict travel for their subjects outside their borders out of concern that exposure to freer countries will weaken the authority of the government at home.
Crucially, authoritarian countries also urge people to turn on each other, reporting them to the state for punishment, often in exchange for a reward. Such a system breaks the ability of opponents to organize to resist the government because of the risk that their neighbors will sell them out.
While such circumstances affect most authoritarian governments, it is impossible to miss the parallels between these ordinances and the various laws that circumscribed the lives of Black Americans before the Civil War here in the United States. In that era, free Black Americans had to carry identification papers, known as “free papers,” to prove they should be allowed to travel. White Americans had no such requirement.
Enslaved Americans could not travel at all, of course, unless they accompanied their enslavers; they were confined to the states in which they were enslaved. When some escaped north to freedom, that restriction was enforced with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was a series of laws cobbled together in an attempt to reduce the tensions between the North and the South over human enslavement, the Fugitive Slave Act required federal officials—including those in free states—to return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black Americans could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a “runaway” could be imprisoned for six months and fined $1,000, about three years’ income. Those turning in Black refugees were paid a fee and the costs of their effort.
When citizens of free states spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act for making them enforce laws they opposed, southern enslavers insisted they were “radicals” because they refused to enforce a law, and insisted that American democracy supported enslavement. Ten years later, extremists in the South put that argument into their political platform, saying that “the enactments of State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect.”
No longer willing to say they would accept free states in the West if voters there wanted freedom, enslavers demanded that Congress pass a new federal law to protect enslavement in the western territories. No longer defending states’ rights except when it protected them from federal intervention into the institution of slavery, they demanded the right to use the power of the federal government to control the majority of Americans who opposed enslavement.
Although the Supreme Court justified last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision by saying abortion should be a state decision, antiabortion activists are echoing enslavers in their attempt to get federal legislation to enforce their will. More than half of all abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, and a Trump-appointed antiabortion judge in Texas, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, is currently trying to get rid of such abortions by suspending the approval of mifepristone, given by the Food and Drug Administration more than 20 years ago. Republican presidential candidates former vice president Mike Pence and South Carolina senator Tim Scott both say they support a federal ban on abortion.
Today’s attempted restriction of those who are supposed to be equal citizens from leaving extremist states raises a whole factory of red flags.
Last year, after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision ending the recognition of the constitutional right to an abortion, I suggested to a group of people that it was only a question of time until we saw laws designed to make it impossible for women to travel across state lines. They told me there was no way such a thing could happen in the United States.
And yet, here we are.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/business/economy/jobs-report-august.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/alabama-attorney-general-abortion-prosecute/index.html
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/fugitive-slave-act
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/democratic-party-platform-breckinridge-faction-1860
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/07/texas-abortion-drugs-fda-ruling/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/23/gop-debate-national-abortion-ban-00112666
August 31, 2023
August 31, 2023
The Biden administration emphasized today its whole-of-government response to addressing the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia—which hit Florida yesterday before moving north into Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina—and by the wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, which broke out on August 8. Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, brought 125-mile-an-hour winds and intense flooding that have left at least three people dead. The Maui wildfires, at least one of which was apparently started by a downed electric line, have killed at least 115 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings.
Biden and Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington, D.C., today, and Biden later spoke at the White House, explaining that he had spoken with the governors of all the states affected by the hurricane before the storm hit. He had approved Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s request for an early emergency declaration to free up federal funds to address the expected impacts of the storm, and federal officers surged personnel to Florida and other southeastern states to help people get to safety.
Biden emphasized that the government was also focused on recovering and rebuilding efforts in Maui, promising to respect and honor Hawaiian traditions and the needs of the local community—a deep concern among those affected by the fires. “We’re not going to turn this into a new land grab,” he said.
In addition to the $27 million dedicated to the removal of hazardous material and the $400 million dedicated to debris removal in Hawaii, Biden announced that the administration has dedicated $95 million of the funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to harden the electrical grid against climate change by burying cables or installing smart meters to pinpoint where lines are down.
“I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” Biden said. “Just look around: historic floods—I mean historic floods; more intense droughts; extreme heat; significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before. It’s not only throughout the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, but in Canada and other parts of the world.”
“When I took office,” he said, “I directed my team to raise our game in how we lead and coordinate our responses to natural disasters…to ensure we [meet] the people where they are when they need our help the most.”
At FEMA headquarters, Biden profusely thanked the FEMA employees for their “incredible contribution” to the recovery efforts. He noted that the past few years have kept FEMA going from one emergency to the next, and he thanked them for their sacrifices and the risks emergency personnel take to help our communities when they need it.
With extremist House Republicans threatening to defund the government unless their demands are met, Biden called on Congress to make sure it provides “the funds to be able to continue to show up and meet the needs of the American people to deal with immediate crises that we’re facing right now, as well as the long-term commitments that we have to make to finish the job in Maui and elsewhere.”
When a reporter asked if he could “assure Americans that the federal government is going to have the emergency funding that they need to get through this hurricane season,” Biden answered, “If I can’t do that, I’m going to point out why…. And so, I’m confident, even though there’s a lot of talk from some of our friends up on the Hill about the cost, we got to do it. This is the United States of America.”
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee, chaired by Republican James Comer of Kentucky, announced this week it will investigate the federal response to the Maui wildfires. Biden said yesterday he welcomes such an investigation, suggesting that House Republicans “should go out and talk to every elected official, from the mayors to the governors to the United States senators” who have praised the government’s response.
Biden’s use of the government contrasts sharply with former president Trump’s promise to turn the government into an agent of retribution for those he perceives as his enemies. On Tuesday, right-wing radio host Glenn Beck asked him if he would use the presidency to imprison his political opponents if he were reelected. “You said in 2016, you know, ‘lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”
Trump replied: “[T]he answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”
Trump’s legal troubles have sparked an outpouring of violent talk from him, but it is simply an escalation of the theme he staked out at his first campaign rally in March 2023, held in Waco, Texas, a spot that is a rallying cry for those of his base who believe the government is oppressing them. There, Trump told his supporters: "I am your warrior, I am your justice…. For those who have been wronged and betrayed…I am your retribution."
Trump promises retribution and power for those MAGA Republicans determined to impose their will on the majority of Americans, like those cheering on Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall, who claimed in a court filing on Monday that Alabama, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, can prosecute people who help women travel out of the state to obtain an abortion as part of a “criminal conspiracy.”
Today’s Republicans have abandoned the Reagan-era Republican plan to gut the federal government and are instead determined to capture it, replacing nonpartisan civil servants with Republican extremists who will carry out the ideals of Trump or any candidate like him who can defeat Biden in 2024. Their nearly-1,000-page plan, called “Project 2025,” calls for politicizing the Department of Justice and law enforcement officers and giving far more power to the president.
Today, Trump waived his right to appear at his arraignment in Fulton County on racketeering charges for his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and entered a plea of not guilty.
Also today, Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas filed their annual financial disclosure report after receiving an extension from the May deadline. Thomas’s report included three gifts of transportation from megadonor Harlan Crow and two of meals and lodging from Crow when Thomas was his guest. Thomas defended his previous omission of such gifts by saying the omission was inadvertent, as he had used old guidelines that were changed only in March 2023 (in fact, ethics experts say he should have disclosed the previous gifts at the time).
Thomas also suggested he needed to travel on private planes because “the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak” meant that his “security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”
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Notes:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23932793-clarence-thomas-2022-financial-disclosure
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23932794-justice-alitos-2022-financial-disclosure
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/thomas-alito-supreme-court-disclosures/index.html
https://www.kcra.com/article/hurricane-categories-meanings/44940726#
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hurricane-idalia-damage-see-videos-photos-florida/
https://apnews.com/article/florida-hurricane-idalia-2136985ceea53f5deb600c43aeea1138
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/weather/florida-hurricane-idalia-wednesday/index.html
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/25/donald-trump-waco-rally-retribution-justice/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/alabama-attorney-general-abortion-prosecute/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/30/trump-interview-jail-political-opponents-glenn-beck
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kyledcheney/status/1697266936516637069
August 30, 2023
August 30, 2023
Four days ago, on Saturday, August 26, in the early afternoon, a heavily armed, 21-year-old white supremacist in a tactical vest and mask, who had written a number of racist manifestos and had swastikas painted on his rifle, murdered three Black Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. He had apparently intended to attack Edward Waters University, a historically Black institution, but students who saw him put on tactical gear warned a security guard, who chased him off and alerted a sheriff’s deputy.
As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo put it two days later, “America is living through a reign of white supremacist terror,” and in a speech to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law on Monday, President Joe Biden reminded listeners that “the U.S. intelligence community has determined that domestic terrorism, rooted in white supremacy, is the greatest terrorist threat we face in the homeland—the greatest threat.”
Biden said he has made it a point to make “clear that America is the most multiracial, most dynamic nation in the history of the world.” He noted that he had nominated the first Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for the Supreme Court and has put more Black women on the federal circuit courts than every other U.S. president combined. Under him, Congress has protected interracial and same-sex marriages, and his administration has more women than men. He warned that “hate never dies. It just hides.”
But in his Editorial Board newsletter, John Stoehr pointed out that the increasing violence of white supremacists isn’t just about an “ideology of hate” rising, but it is “about a minority faction of the country going to war, literal war, with a majority faction.” He pointed to former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin’s recent prediction of civil war because “We’re not going to keep putting up with this…. We do need to rise up and take our country back.” Stoehr calls these white supremacists “Realamericans” who believe they should rule and, if they can’t do so lawfully, believe they are justified in taking the law into their own hands.
Indeed, today’s white supremacist violence has everything to do with the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870 after white supremacists refused to recognize the right of Black Americans to vote and hold office. Minority voting means a government—and a country—that white men don’t dominate.
In the 1870s, once the federal government began to prosecute those white men attacking their Black neighbors for exercising their right to vote, white supremacists immediately began to say that they had no issues with Black voting on grounds of race. Their issue, they said, was that Black men were poor, and they were voting for lawmakers—some Black but primarily white—who supported the construction of roads, schools, hospitals, and so on. While these investments were crucial in the devastated South and would help white Americans as well as Black ones, white supremacists insisted that such government action redistributed wealth from white people to Black people and thus was a form of socialism.
It was a short step from this argument to insisting that Black men shouldn’t vote because they were “corrupting” the American system. By 1876, former Confederates had regained control of southern state legislatures, where they rewrote voting laws to exclude Black men and people of color on grounds other than that of race, which the Fifteenth Amendment had made unconstitutional.
By the end of the nineteenth century, white southerners greeted any attempt to protect Black voting as an attempt to destroy true America. Finally, in North Carolina in 1898, Democrats recognized they were losing ground to a biracial fusion ticket of Republicans and Populists who promised economic and political reforms. Before that year’s election, white Democratic leaders ran a viciously racist campaign to fire up their white base. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, ”in the elections.”
Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. Vigilantes said they would never again be ruled by Black men and their unscrupulous white allies who intended to “dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” They destroyed Black businesses and property and killed as many as 300 Black Americans, then portrayed themselves as reluctant victims who had been obliged to remove inefficient and stupid officials before they reduced the city to further chaos.
In 2005, white supremacists in North Carolina echoed this version of the Wilmington coup, claiming it was a natural reaction to “oppressive radical social policies” and a “carnival of corruption and criminality” by their opponents, who used the votes of ignorant Black men to stay in power.
That echo is no accident. The 1965 Voting Rights Act ended the power of white supremacists in the Democratic Party once and for all, and they switched to the Republicans. Then-Democratic South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond had launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop the 1957 Civil Rights Act; Republican candidate Richard Nixon deliberately courted him and those who thought like him in 1968.
Republicans adopted the same pattern Democrats had used in the late nineteenth century, claiming their concerns were about taxes and government corruption, pushing voter suppression legislation by insisting they cared about “voter fraud,” insisting their opponents were un-American socialists attempting to overthrow a fairly-elected government.
This political side of white supremacy is all around us. As Democracy Docket put it last month, “Republicans have a math problem, and they know it. Regardless of their candidate, it is nearly certain that more people will vote to reelect Joe Biden than his [Republican] opponent.” After all, Democrats have won the popular vote since 2008. Under these circumstances and unwilling to moderate their platform, “Republicans need to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat.”
Republican-dominated state legislatures are working to make it as hard as possible for minorities and younger Americans to vote, while also pushing the election denier movement to undermine the counting and certification of election results. At the same time, eight Republican-dominated states have left the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a compact between the states that makes it easier to share voter information to avoid duplicate registration and voting, and three more are considering leaving.
In a special session of the Tennessee legislature this week, Republican lawmakers blocked the public from holding signs (a judge blocked the rule), kicked the public out of a hearing, and passed new rules that could prohibit Democrats from speaking. House speaker Cameron Sexton silenced young Black Democratic representative Justin Jones for a day and today suggested the Republicans might make the rule silencing minority members permanent.
In Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s most extreme gerrymanders gives Republicans dominance in the legislature, Republicans in 2018 stripped Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers of power before they left office, and now right-wing Chief Justice Annette Ziegler has told the liberal majority on the state supreme court that it is staging a “coup” by exercising their new power after voters elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz to the court by a large majority in April. Now the legislature is talking about keeping the majority from getting rid of the gerrymandered maps by impeaching Protasiewicz.
The courts are trying to hold the line against this movement. In Washington, D.C., today, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell decided in favor of Black election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who claimed that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani defamed them when he claimed they had committed voter fraud. Not only did Howell award the two women court costs and damages, she called out Giuliani and his associates for trying to keep their records hidden.
But as the courts are trying to hold the line, its supporters are targeting the courts themselves, with MAGA Republicans threatening to defund state and federal prosecutors they claim are targeting Republicans, and announcing their intention to gather the power of the Department of Justice into their own hands should they win office in 2024.
After pushing a social studies curriculum that erases Black agency and resistance to white supremacy, Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Monday suggested the Jacksonville shooting was an isolated incident.
The Black audience booed.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/jacksonville-shooting-victims-racist-5e66c7e4baf504de08d73a3857b78490
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/shooting-multiple-fatalities-dollar-general-store-jacksonville/
https://www.editorialboard.com/the-jacksonville-shooter-was-one-of-the-chosen-people/
https://guides.lib.unc.edu/wilmington-1898/central-figures-resources
https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/00ddd/id/173131
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/connor/connor.html
League of the South, “1898 Wilmington: Debunking the Myths,” on the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081024220048/http://www.newsobserver.com/1370/story/508595.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.238720/gov.uscourts.dcd.238720.94.0.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46573458
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/reforms/WI
https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-republicans-special-session-e2f2ae7248a2a48a277dfb6f6af98734
https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-special-session-gun-control-f0af470eb6f377633735c5a1dcefa66f
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/30/giulianis-first-big-legal-loss-is-blistering-one/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/upshot/reagan-trump-gop-stool.html
https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1696899773456933175
August 29, 2023
August 29, 2023
“For far too long, Americans have paid more for prescription drugs than any major economy. And while the pharmaceutical industry makes record profits, millions of Americans are forced to choose between paying for medications they need to live or paying for food, rent, and other basic necessities. Those days are ending,” President Joe Biden declared today.
The government announced the first ten drugs whose prices it will negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for about 65 million Medicare recipients. Until now, the United States has been virtually alone as the only country in which the government did not negotiate or regulate medicine prices, instead allowing companies to set whatever prices they believe the market will bear. Since their products often are the difference between life and death, it turns out the market will bear quite high prices, but—as Biden observed—those prices often force consumers to sacrifice in other ways to afford them.
A 2021 study by the RAND corporation found that drug prices average 2.56 times higher in the U.S. than in 32 other countries. For name brand drugs, U.S. prices were 3.44 times those in comparable nations.
As Amy Goldstein and Daniel Gilbert explained today in the Washington Post, when Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, it covered drugs administered in a health care setting but excluded those a patient took at home. In 2003, after almost 40 years of medical innovation had significantly changed our management of chronic illnesses, Congress included those drugs under a separate Medicare plan—Part D—or as part of managed-care plans, but to get Republicans behind the bill, Congress explicitly prohibited the government from negotiating the prices of medications.
In 2021 a nearly three-year investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, then overseen by Democrats as they held the majority in the House of Representatives, concluded that “[d]rug companies have raised prices relentlessly for decades while manipulating the patent system and other laws to delay competition from lower-priced generics. These companies have specifically targeted the U.S. market for higher prices, even while cutting prices in other countries, because weaknesses in our health care system have allowed them to get away with outrageous prices and anticompetitive conduct.”
Republicans sided with the drug company executives who insisted that high prices were necessary to create an incentive for drug companies to innovate, as their investment in research and development depends on the revenue they expect from new drugs. But the committee’s report said their investigation concluded that “sky-high drug prices are not justified by the need to innovate. The largest drug companies spend more on payouts for investors and executives than on research and development. And many blockbuster drugs rely on scientific discoveries from research funded by taxpayers, while drug companies’ R&D spending often focuses on minor changes to extend patent protection and block lower-priced competitors.”
In 2022, Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act without a single Republican vote. That law permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices the government will pay.
The ten drugs listed in today’s announcement are among those with the highest total spending in Medicare Part D, and today the Department of Health and Human Services released a report that 9 million seniors paid a total of $3.4 billion for these drugs in 2022. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress, estimates that government negotiation over these drugs will save taxpayers about $98.5 billion over ten years. If a drug maker refuses to negotiate, it either will face a significant tax or must withdraw from Medicare and Medicaid.
This measure is extraordinarily popular. More than eighty percent of Americans want the government to be able to negotiate drug costs.
The new negotiated prices are scheduled to go into effect in 2026. Pharmaceutical companies are suing to stop the law, claiming it is unconstitutional, although when asked by reporters today about the lawsuits, domestic policy advisor Neera Tanden pointed out that the government “negotiates prices for every other element” Medicare covers of the health care system,, including rates for doctors, other providers, and hospitals. “The only reason why Medicare has not been negotiating drug prices is because Pharma got a sweetheart deal decades ago to basically prohibit negotiations,” she said. “Negotiations are part of [a] market system. It's very normal for that to happen.”
“This plan is a key part of Bidenomics, my economic vision for growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up—not the top down,” Biden said. “And it’s working.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-finding/public-weighs-in-on-medicare-drug-negotiations/
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2021/01/28.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/08/29/medicare-drug-price-negotiations/
https://www.pharmexec.com/view/astrazeneca-joins-legal-battle-against-ira
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/29/biden-drug-prices-gop-00113404
August 28, 2023
August 28, 2023
After making it clear that she would run her courtroom in the interests of justice without reference to the 2024 presidential election, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has set March 4, 2024, as the start date for former president Trump’s trial on four criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Those charges are not about anything Trump said. The 45-page indictment acknowledges Trump’s right to speak about the election and even to lie that he had won, and the Department of Justice did not charge him with incitement. The indictment charges Trump with being part of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to stop the lawful government function of determining the results of a presidential election, a second conspiracy to obstruct the lawful January 6 congressional proceeding to count and certify the results of the presidential election, and a third conspiracy to take away from other Americans “a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”
Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith’s office had asked the judge for a January 2 start date, saying the date “serves the public’s interest and the interests of justice, while also protecting the defendant’s rights and ability to prepare for trial.” (A Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll from August 18–21 bears out this position: it shows that 61% of the American people believe that Trump should go to trial for election subversion before the Republican primaries.)
Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposal to start the trial in April 2026, an extraordinary request that they attributed to the need to sift through enormous amounts of evidence—12.8 million pages worth—but which might well have been an attempt to get the judge to split the difference and give Trump a court date in 2025, after the 2024 election.
Trump has told his aides he intends to solve his legal problems by winning the next election.
Today, Department of Justice prosecutor Molly Gaston responded to Trump’s request by noting that 7.8 million pages of that material either came from Trump himself—tweets, for example—or from those associated with him, or had been public for months already. She noted that Trump’s lawyers themselves have publicly called the case a “regurgitation” of the report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and noted that the Department of Justice had been careful to make sure the new material it provided is easy to review.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba didn’t help the Trump camp yesterday when she told Fox News Sunday that Trump wouldn’t need to prepare for his many legal cases because he’s “incredibly intelligent.” Nonetheless, Trump lawyer John Lauro used the March 4 trial date to begin laying the groundwork to argue he could not provide adequate representation.
Before she set the date, Chutkan said, she conferred with New York state judge Juan Merchan, who is set to preside over Trump’s trial for campaign violations when he paid hush money to an adult film actress to cover up an affair. That case is scheduled to start on March 25. Trump’s federal trial for his theft of national security documents and hiding them at Mar-a-Lago is currently scheduled to begin in May 2024.
The trial date on racketeering charges in Georgia for a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has not been set yet, but today the arraignment for all 19 defendants was set for September 6, 2023.
In the midst of all these court dates, Judge Chutkan’s establishment of March 4 for the federal trial over Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election means that Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the Mar-a-Lago documents trial and who seems eager to protect the former president, will have far less power to shape public perceptions of the cases against Trump. Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman noted: “This is the centerpiece now of accountability for Trump, which is as it should be.”
Meanwhile, in an Atlanta courtroom, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows took the stand to try to get charges against him as part of the Georgia indictments transferred to federal court with the ultimate goal of getting them dismissed. Meadows took the unusual step of testifying himself in the case, and he argued for a sweeping interpretation of a chief of staff’s official duties.
He claimed that it was his job as chief of staff to address anything that might distract Trump or divert his attention, and therefore his work to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election fell within his job description. If so, his case belongs in federal court because federal officials are protected from state prosecution over things they did as part of their official duties. But working for a political campaign is explicitly not part of an officer’s duties: the Hatch Act prohibits federal officials from engaging in partisan activities while on duty.
U.S. District Court Judge Steve C. Jones said he would rule as quickly as he can after considering the arguments.
Three Republican false electors from Georgia have also asked to move their cases to federal court, arguing that they were acting at the direction of Trump and his people, who were agents of the federal government. So has lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who tried to take over the office of attorney general to push Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, and who was employed at the time by the Department of Justice.
Nicole Narea of Vox noted that dividing up the defendants in the Georgia indictments serves Trump’s case by slowing everything down as Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has to prosecute each defendant separately. Cornell University law professor Randy Zelin told Narea that such a scenario will permit Trump’s lawyers to prepare their defense based on the previous cases. It is, he said, “a defense lawyer’s dream.”
Republicans are planning to stand behind Trump, echoing his lawyer’s argument that Trump is being prosecuted selectively because he is Biden’s political opponent. John Lauro called the case a “show trial,” suggesting Lauro does not see any reasonable likelihood that he can produce evidence to convince a jury Trump is not guilty.
Republicans in Congress appear to be in a similar place, apparently planning to defend Trump not by arguing he is not guilty, but by launching more investigations to tarnish Democrats, as they did with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and as Trump did in his attempt to get Ukraine president Voldymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter in 2019.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the Judiciary Committee, has demanded that Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis turn over internal documents related to the grand jury’s indictment of Trump on racketeering charges, implying that they will show illegitimate coordination between her and the Department of Justice, when in fact federal and state prosecutors often confer on cases that involve both of their jurisdictions.
House Republicans also are moving forward on impeaching President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence that there are any grounds for such a proceeding. One Republican lawmaker told CNN’s Melanie Zanona: “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden got money, or…agreed to do something so that Hunter could get money…. And they can’t impeach without that evidence. And I don’t…think the evidence exists.”
But polls last spring indicated that the American people think the Republicans’ investigations are a waste of time. Now the lack of evidence for an impeachment inquiry makes some Republican lawmakers unwilling to vote for one, just as they were unwilling to vote to “expunge” the former president’s impeachments, recognizing that such votes might turn off some of their more moderate voters. So the extremists eager to run the playbook of using an investigation are talking about skipping a formal vote and just launching an inquiry without one.
Trump yesterday wrote on his social media network: “You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven…. Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!”
But Republicans who jump on board this effort will be working against the American people. According to that Politico/Ipsos poll, 59% of Americans think the Justice Department decided to indict Trump after a fair evaluation of evidence and the law.
And the March 4 trial date means backing Trump for the Republican presidential nomination has a new pitfall. March 4 is the day before Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states will hold Republican presidential primaries. Philip Bump of the Washington Post noted today that by mid-March, more than half the delegates allotted for the Republican nomination will have been assigned and, since the Republicans have designed their nomination process to consolidate quickly with winner-take-all primaries, Trump could win the Republican nomination in the midst of his trial for trying to overturn the foundational principle of our democracy.
March 4 is also a historically significant date. Until 1936 it was the date on which presidential inaugurations were held (unless it fell on Sunday, in which case the inauguration was moved to the following day, Monday, March 5). Lawmakers chose that date because it was the one on which, in 1789, the Constitution went into effect.
—
Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.39.0_2.pdf
https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.23.0_5.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/us/politics/trump-jan-6-trial-date.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/judge-chutkan-expected-to-set-trial-date-in-trump-jan-6-case
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/28/trump-trial-date-election-subversion-2020-00113186
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/28/politics/mccarthy-biden-impeachment-strategy/index.html
https://www.vox.com/politics/23659090/house-republicans-hunter-biden-oversight-china-comer-jordan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/13/trump-desantis-republicans-delegates/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/28/trump-campaign-2024-trials/
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/politico-indictment-august-2023
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/28/meadows-testimony-georgia-hearing-00113215
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/24/co-defendant-georgia-trump-indictment-00112932
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/8/28/23849528/trump-georgia-mark-meadows-court-hearing
Twitter (X):
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August 27, 2023
August 27, 2023
Buddy and I spent today visiting family on a nearby island. There is news, but I am quite happy to have left it behind for a day.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow, but until then, here was the view coming in from the island in Buddys boat this evening.
It has been a good day.
August 26, 2023
August 26, 2023
On this date in 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State received the official notification from the governor of Tennessee that his state had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it. He did that as soon as he received the notification, making this date the anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, and it read:
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.
But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.
Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.
“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.
The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.
The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.
That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.
The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.
Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.
In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.
This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.
For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.
Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”
In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.
Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.
Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.
Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. For all that the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Equality were men, in fact women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.
And now women are the crucial demographic going into the 2024 elections. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg noted in June that there was a huge spike of women registering to vote after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and that Democratic turnout has exceeded expectations ever since.
—
Notes:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/declaration-of-sentiments-the-first-women-s-rights-convention.htm
The Big PictureThe Big Q&A With Simon RosenbergIn the weeks and months leading up to the midterms of 2022, there was much talk of a massive “Red Wave”—one that would sweep the Democrats from power in Congress and put Mitch McConnell and Kevin McC…Read more3 months ago · 129 likes · 7 comments · George Takei and Simon Rosenberghttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/22/women-democracy-human-rights/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-senate-the-nineteenth-amendment
Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899), p. 373, on Google Books.
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