Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 85
August 22, 2024
August 21, 2024
In 1974, music writer Jon Landau saw a relatively unknown musician in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote for an alternative paper: "Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time." The review helped to catapult Springsteen to stardom.
After three days at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, I feel like I have seen the political future and its name is the Democratic Party. But rather than feeling like I’m hearing politics for the first time, I am hearing the echo of political themes embraced in the best moments of America’s past.
The theme of the third day of the Democratic National Convention, held in the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, was “A Fight for Our Freedoms.” But the speeches were less about fighting than they were about recovering the roots of American democracy.
The Democrats have not lost their conviction that the reelection of Donald Trump and the enactment of Project 2025 are an existential threat both to democracy and to Americans themselves. Speakers throughout the convention have condemned Trump and highlighted Project 2025, a blueprint written by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations for a second Trump term. Although Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was a high school football coach, notes that no one bothers to write a playbook if they’re not going to use it.
Tonight, comedian and actor Kenan Thompson illustrated the dangers of Project 2025 with humor, bringing home the horror of it as only humor can do. With a giant copy of the plan as a prop, he gave a woman married for eight years to her wife the bad news that Project 2025 would end protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, informed a woman who pays $35 a month for her insulin that the plan would overturn the law that makes drugs more affordable, notified an OBGYN that the plan would ban abortion nationwide and throw abortion providers into jail, and put a woman who called herself a proud civil servant on notice that Project 2025 would guarantee she would be fired unless she is a MAGA loyalist.
But the dark dangers of the assault of Trump and the MAGA Republicans on the country have finally pushed the party to move away from its customary caution and focus on policy to embrace the possibilities of a new future. The convention is electric, packed with young people who push jokey memes and poke fun at themselves, much as Walz and presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris are doing to deflect criticism, and who are sharing homemade politically-themed friendship bracelets that echo the homemade paraphernalia of singer Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.
And, after decades in which Republicans claimed the mantle of patriotism, now that the fate of democracy itself is on the line, Democrats are joyfully claiming the symbols and the principles of American democracy for their own.
During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, many Democrats shied away from symbols of patriotism because they seemed to support imperialism. Then, in the 1980s, Reagan and his supporters wrapped themselves in the flag and claimed it for their own. That impulse to define “Americans” as those who vote for Republicans has led us to a place where a small minority claims the right to rule over the rest of us.
The Democratic National Convention has powerfully illustrated that the rest of us are finally reclaiming the country and its symbols. The convention has been full of references to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the American Revolution, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance. Tonight, attendees chanting “USA” waved signs emblazoned with the letters. Speakers, many of whom are military veterans, have testified that they are proud to be Americans. The theme of patriotism was even in one of tonight’s afterparties: Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean played The Star Spangled Banner with an interpretation that recalled Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. “America is the best place to be,” he said. “I’m the best of the American dream. Welcome to America…. You know what makes America great? We’re a bunch of immigrants.”
As Jean indicated, that embrace of our history does not come with the exceptionalism of MAGA Republicans, who maintain that the U.S. has a perfect past that it must reclaim to become great again. Indeed, speakers have emphasized that honoring our history means remembering the nation’s failures as well as its triumphs. The Democrats’ patriotism means recognizing that despite the fact that the U.S. has never fully realized the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, it has never abandoned them either—a statement paraphrased from President Joe Biden, who has said it repeatedly.
Speakers have highlighted that the imperfect version of those principles has enabled their personal success stories. Speaker after speaker, from Harris and Walz, of course, to tonight’s speakers Maryland governor Wes Moore, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and journalist and television personality Oprah Winfrey, have recounted their own process of rising from humble beginnings to their current prominence,
Winfrey is an Independent who generally stays out of politics, but tonight she spoke passionately during prime time about electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Walz. When a reporter asked her why she was willing to make a political statement, she said: "Because I really care about this country. And there couldn't have been a life like mine, a career like mine, a success like mine, without a country like America. Only in America could there be a me."
The many stories in which ordinary Americans rise from adversity through hard work, decency, and service to others implicitly conflates those individual struggles with the struggles of the United States itself. Running through the stories told at the convention is the theme of working hard through a time of darkness to come out into the light. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning,” speakers have quoted the Biblical psalm, and they have referred to the vision of the American flag still flying after a night of bombardment during the War of 1812, captured by Francis Scott Key in the national anthem, promising that after our time of national darkness, there will be light.
The DNC has called not just for reasserting patriotism, but for reclaiming America with joy. It has showcased a deep bench of politicians, some of whom are great orators, repeatedly calling for joy in the work of saving democracy, and it has shown poets like Amanda Gorman and a wide range of musicians, from Stevie Wonder to Lil Jon to D.J. Cassidy to John Legend. The convention is designed to appeal to different generations—tonight actress Mindy Kaling helpfully explained to older attendees who she is—and younger attendees have handed out friendship bracelets saying things like “Madam Prez” to older people in an echo of the exchange of bracelets among Taylor Swift’s fans.
After an era in which politicians have seemed to lie to the American people, the convention has emphasized authenticity. It has featured testimonials about the candidates with speakers ranging from the candidates’ children to extended family and, tonight, to members of the football team Walz coached. There have been stories of Harris’s cooking and how Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff awkwardly called her for a date, and fond memories of Walz pulling a student out of a snowbank, hunting, and caring for his children. The convention has emphasized that the American government is made up of individuals and that the character of the people we put into leadership will determine what that government does.
Further, the Democrats have made their points with the stories of individual Americans who have overcome dark hours in order to move forward. In that storytelling, individuals represent the nation itself.
The message of joy as we protect democracy, backed as that message is with four years of extraordinary accomplishments that have bolstered the middle class and spread opportunity among poorer Americans, has taken off. The convention has heard from three Democratic presidents and a range of other speakers, including a number of Republicans who have turned against Trump and are backing Harris and Walz. In July, Harris raised four times the money Trump did: $204 million to $48 million, much of it from small donors.
The palpable energy and enthusiasm in Chicago, based as it is in a celebration of American values—especially in the idea of American freedom—reminds me of the enthusiasm of 1860 or 1932. It is about ending the darkness, not indulging in it, and it requires the hard work of everyone who believes that we deserve the freedom to determine our own lives.
Tonight, after his acceptance speech, Walz walked off stage to a favorite song of his: Neil Young’s “Rockin‘ in the Free World.” Neil Young personally allowed the campaign to use the song. When the Trump campaign used it, Young sued to make them stop.
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/12/bruce-springsteen-gig-review
https://www.ft.com/content/140f4bf8-0701-421b-9360-47fa86cd5353
X:
CBSNews/status/1826461394876682534
kaitlancollins/status/1826464959787663586
kylegriffin1/status/1826469493771485573
August 21, 2024
August 20, 2024
At Chicago’s United Center today, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top.
When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for her nomination.
He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”
Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan.
It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27, 2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to the presidency.
Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in 2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of Independence.
“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t's not enough for just some of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.”
He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”
Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”
Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.
When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008, Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY) became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote.
In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting their states after the 2010 census. Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to win previously Democratic House seats.
In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and
a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to protect Democratic voters.
As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme challengers. So they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy altogether.
Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s “central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said.
And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and hard work.
They wanted their children to “do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that in our lives:... good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.”
If President Obama emphasized tonight that the nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.
In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”
Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don't go our way, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don't get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something."
And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.”
It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said. She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect. Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”
“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/20/republican-trump-dnc-speakers
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/keynote-address-the-2004-democratic-national-convention
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kylegriffin1/status/1826089941530788338
August 20, 2024
August 19, 2024
The Democratic National Committee today released a platform that lays out the history of the last four years and explains how and why the Biden-Harris administration has oriented the United States government toward ordinary Americans. It is in many ways a snapshot of the United States of America in this moment. At the most basic level, it shows how rapidly the political world is changing. Approved on July 16, five days before President Joe Biden announced he would not accept the nomination, it refers to Biden, and not to Vice President Kamala Harris, as the party’s nominee.
At a grander scale, though, the platform suggests the country is entering a new political alignment. In its length and scope it recalls the 1980 Republican platform that launched the Reagan Revolution and the modern Republican Party. Unlike that platform, which laid out what the Republicans hoped to accomplish if voters put them into power, today’s Democratic platform recounts almost four years of work on which to base the Democrats’ future plans.
As the Republican Party that coalesced under Reagan has crumbled into a Christian nationalist authoritarianism, the Democrats have come together into a pro-democracy coalition. That coalition includes Republicans eager to stop Trump and his allies. They have signed on to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in order to preserve democracy, but are clear they are not embracing the Democratic Party’s policies. The Harris-Walz campaign has welcomed them.
The Republicans’ platform is heavy on slogans—many of which are in all caps—saying things like “We will defeat Inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices,” without any suggestion of how they will bring about such sweeping changes. In contrast, the Democrats laid out their policies today in a detailed 90-page platform that places the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration in a larger framework of protecting American democracy.
The platform lists the landmark legislation the Democrats have passed since 2021 and explains how they designed those measures to address both economic inequality and the historic racial and gender discrimination that has held back women as well as racial and gender minorities. The central theme of the platform is fairness: some version of that word appears in the document 58 times. The nation’s government, and the globe, have been skewed toward a few rich people. The Democratic platform says that they should pay their fair share and that those Americans who have been held back by systemic discrimination should have a fair shot at success.
“Our nation is at an inflection point,” the platform’s preamble reads. “What kind of America will we be? A land of more freedom, or less freedom? More rights or fewer? An economy rigged for the rich and powerful, or where everyone has a fair shot at getting ahead?” Taking office in the midst of a crisis, “Democrats proved once again that democracy can deliver, and made tremendous progress turning the country around,” but Trump will destroy those victories, focusing “not on opportunity and optimism, but on revenge and retribution…. He and his extreme MAGA allies are ripping away our bedrock personal freedoms, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love. They’re rigging our economy for their rich friends and big corporations, pushing more trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful…. They are eroding our democracy with lies and threats, have refused to denounce political violence, and are making it harder to vote. And given the chance, they’ll keep stacking our courts, locking in their extreme agenda for decades.”
“History has shown that nothing about democracy is guaranteed,” the platform reads. “Every generation has to protect it, preserve it, choose it. We must stand together to choose what we want America to be.”
The Democratic platform was the backdrop today for the opening of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. Today’s theme was “For the People,” and today's speakers hit that goal, aiming directly at voters by telling two compelling stories of America. While the evening was designed to honor President Joe Biden, it did that not so much by focusing on his administration’s achievements—although they were there—as by emphasizing how his qualities, his initiatives, and his faith in America have restored the nation’s better qualities, setting it on a positive path.
Speakers told a wide range of stories about the many kindnesses of Biden, Harris, and Walz. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) teared up when she recounted Harris’s kindness to her as a new lawmaker. Golden State Warriors and U.S. national basketball team coach Steve Kerr noted that Harris and Walz have spent their careers “serving other people.” Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan talked of how as Walz does the work for Minnesota, he brings along a "bottomless bag of snacks -- Nutter Butters, cheese curds, and Diet Dew."
Speakers talked about how the Democrats are getting things done: Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said that "J.D. and Trump like to talk about states like Ohio, but Kamala and Joe actually get stuff done for us." United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) emphasized the support of Biden, Harris, and Walz for unions and other working Americans, noting that they come from a middle-class background themselves.
And they talked about what patriotism means. Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) said: "My mom taught me to love this country. She taught me that real American patriotism is not about screaming and yelling, ‘America first.’ Real American patriotism is loving your country so much that you want to help the people in your country. THAT is American patriotism."
Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) brought the crowd to its feet when he offered the Democrats’ underlying moral doctrine: “I need my neighbor's children to be okay so that my children will be okay,” he said. “I need all of my neighbor’s children to be okay, poor inner city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia, I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine, I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay. Because we are all God’s children. And so let’s stand together. Let’s work together. Let’s organize together. Let’s pray together. Let’s stand together. Let’s heal the land.”
In contrast to this forward looking community vision, the speakers made clear—often with memorable humor—that the future Trump offers is as dark as his own vows of retribution and revenge. They spoke of how he cares only about himself and how Trump has vowed to be a dictator. Several people mentioned Project 2025, which South Carolina representative James Clyburn called “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Flanagan told the crowd that her brother was the second person in Tennessee to die of Covid; Garcia said his mother and stepfather both died of it. The DNC showed a video of Trump downplaying the disease. Individuals affected by the abortion bans enacted after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion care told their heart wrenching stories.
And they talked about Trump’s crimes. Representative Crockett asked voters which of the two candidates they would hire. “Kamala Harris has a résumé,” she said. “Donald Trump has a rap sheet.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence is the first vice president in more than 200 years “not to support the president he served with in a general election.” “Someone should’ve told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article 2 of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not that the vice president is executed…. J.D. Vance, do you understand why there was a sudden job opening for running mate on the [Republican] ticket? They tried to kill your predecessor!” Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) told the crowd: “We deserve a president…who shatters the boundaries of what’s possible, not the boundaries of what’s legal.”
The Democrats tonight wove the past into their story of the future, creating a new history in which the present moment is part of a longer trajectory. Civil rights leader Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who worked alongside the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., received a standing ovation tonight. And when former secretary of state Hillary Clinton took the stage, the crowd roared.
“Something is happening in America,” she said. “You can feel it. Something we’ve worked for and dreamed of for a long time.” She recalled the history of women’s suffrage in the United States, noting that her mother was born before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she remembered the pathbreaking leadership of New York representative Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and Representative Geraldine Ferraro, also of New York, who ran for vice president in 1984. Then she spoke of her own nomination for president in 2016: “Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards we refused to give up on America. Millions marched, many ran for office. We kept our eyes on the future.”
“Well, my friends,” she said, “the future is here!” She urged everyone to “keep going…. Kamala has the character, experience, and vision to lead us forward.”
When Biden took the stage at the end of the night, he was greeted with a long standing ovation and chants of “We love Joe!” He reiterated the deep importance of family and thanked his own before recounting the accomplishments of his administration in rebuilding the damaged country that he inherited in January 2021. And then he turned to democracy.
“The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple. It’s that serious,” he said. “And the power is literally in your hands. History is in your hands…. America’s future is in your hands.”
“Nowhere else in the world could a kid with a stutter and modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, grow up to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. That’s because America is and always has been a nation of possibilities. And we must never lose that.”
“Each of us has a part in the American story. For me and my family there’s a song that means a lot to us that captures the best of who we are as a nation. The song is called ‘American Anthem.’ There’s one verse that stands out….
“‘The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day.
What shall our legacy be? What will our children say?
Let me know in my heart when my days are through
America, America, I gave my best to you.’
“For 50 years…I have given my heart and soul to our nation. And I have been blessed a million times in return with the support of the American people…. I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you…. I can honestly say I’m more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator.
“We just need to remember who we are.
“We’re the United States of America.
“And there is NOTHING we cannot do when we do it together.”
—
Notes:
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1825721198166069446
X:
atrupar/status/1825696732300075086 (Aaron Rupar is a must-follow if you want to see clips of big speeches. He also writes the newsletter Public Notice.)
August 19, 2024
August 18, 2024
August 18, 2024
On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 50 to 49. The deciding vote came from Harry T. Burn, who supported suffrage but was under pressure to vote no. His mother had urged him to vote yes despite the pressure. “I believe in full suffrage as a right,” he said. “I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
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.
The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected 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 era 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 general 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.” It listed the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisted 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 hoped that women would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment and, when they were not, 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. In a unanimous decision in 1875, the justices decided 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. 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.
In 1980, women began to shift their votes to the Democrats, and in 1984 the Democrats nominated Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run for vice president alongside presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Republicans followed suit in 2008 when they nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin to run with Arizona senator John McCain. Still, it was not until 2016 that a major political party nominated a woman, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, for president. In 2020 the Democrats nominated California senator Kamala Harris for vice president, and when voters elected her and President Joe Biden, they made her the first female vice president of the United States.
Tonight, on the 104th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, delegates are gathered in Chicago, Illinois, for the Democratic National Convention, where they will celebrate Harris’s nomination for the presidency.
It’s been a long time coming.
—
https://www.nps.gov/articles/declaration-of-sentiments-the-first-women-s-rights-convention.htm
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.
August 17, 2024
August 17, 2024
I am in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, and don’t think it’s possible for anyone who has written as much as I have about political conventions not to want to dive into some past history of them even as modern history is being made. So I hope you’ll indulge me in a little historical spelunking as I write in the next few days.
But as eager as I am to see a convention in 3D for once after seeing so many on paper, I always hate to leave a Maine summer.
This picture is a friend's view of the harbor at sunrise:
August 16, 2024
August 16, 2024
The complaint of Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) last weekend on CNN that Democrats are bullying him by calling him weird has stuck with me. As I wrote at the time, Republicans have made punching down their stock in trade for decades, and Vance’s complaint suggests that the Democrats are finally pushing back. It strikes me that behind this shifting power dynamic is a huge story about American politics.
Since the 1950s, those determined to get rid of business regulation, social welfare programs, government infrastructure spending, and federal protection of civil rights have relied on a rhetorical structure that centers “real” Americans who allegedly want nothing from government and warns that un-American forces who want government handouts are undermining the country by bringing socialism or racial, gender, or religious equality.
In 2024, that rhetoric is all the MAGA Republicans have left to attract voters, as their actual policies are unpopular. Yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told reporters at his Bedminster availability that to win the 2024 election: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that's gonna destroy our country."
But it is not just Trump. A MAGA pundit has called Vice President Harris “Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,” and on Wednesday, Republicans in Minnesota nominated Royce White as their candidate for the U.S. Senate. “We face an enemy that intends to bastardize our citizenship through an idea called globalism,” White has said. “We must begin to understand how the global affects the local and take a stand for God, Family, and Country.” White has also said that “women have become too mouthy,” and that “Donald Trump could get up on stage, pull his pants down, take a sh*t up at the podium, and I still would never vote for you f*cking Democrats again.”
The rhetorical strategy setting up Republicans against a dangerous “other” was behind Trump’s demand that Republicans in Congress kill a bipartisan border bill so that Trump could continue to demonize immigrants. You could see that demonization of immigrants today in Vance’s straight-up lie that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.” In fact, Harris today called for Congress to expand plans already in place in the Biden administration, and none of those plans call for giving money to undocumented migrants.
Also in that vein today was the announcement of Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, that he is opening an investigation into Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s work in China. Walz is the Democratic vice presidential nominee. He went to China in 1989 as part of a teach-abroad program and went on to coordinate trips for students in China, becoming a vocal advocate for human rights in that country as leaders cracked down on opposition. But by suggesting this cultural exchange is nefarious, Comer can seed the idea that Walz is somehow operating against the interests of the United States.
This longstanding rhetoric that positions Republicans as true Americans defending the country against those who would destroy it has metastasized into the determination of MAGA Republicans to replace American democracy with a Christian nationalism that cements the power of white patriarchy. Vance has been in hot water for his derogatory remarks about “childless cat ladies”; interviews have resurfaced in the past few days in which he embraced the idea that the role of “the postmenopausal female” is to take care of grandchildren.
The New College of Florida is in the news today for illustrating the logical progression of the idea that Republicans must protect the nation from those who would destroy it. The New College of Florida was at the center of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s program to get rid of traditional academic freedom. He stripped the New College of its independence and replaced officials with Christian loyalists who tried to build a school modeled after those that Viktor Orbán’s loyalists took over in Hungary. New College officials painted over student murals celebrating diversity, suppressed student support for civil rights, and voted to eliminate the diversity, equity, and inclusion office and the gender studies program. Faculty fled the New College, and more than a quarter of the students dropped out. To keep its numbers up, the school dropped its admission standards.
Yesterday, Steven Walker of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that the school cleared out the Gender and Diversity Center, throwing the books it had accumulated into a dumpster. Officials said the books are no longer serving the needs of the college: “gender studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory.”
The image of piles of books in a dumpster in the United States of America is not easily forgettable.
But the dominance rhetoric of the MAGA Republicans was never just about political power. Political power always went hand in hand with corruption. A new book by Joe Conason called The Longest Con notes that the modern right-wing movement has its roots in the promise of grifters after World War II to protect America against the communists they insisted were infiltrating the country. Their promises to defend true Americans against an enemy was always about getting cash out of the deal.
Conason emphasizes how drumming up fears of an “other” was a deliberate grift to put money into the pockets of those who told small donors that their dollars were vital for defending the United States. The biggest prize for the extremists, though, was the control of government purse strings that allowed them to turn federal and state largesse toward their own cronies. Conason notes that under President Ronald Reagan, Republicans’ cuts to government oversight and reliance on the private sector to regulate itself, along with their belief that unfettered capitalism was a form of resistance to communism, led to a boom in corruption.
That corruption has continued in the Republican Party, largely unaddressed as politicians insisted that those calling it out were simply un-American malcontents engaging in political hits against good, patriotic Americans. In contrast, as any corruption on the Democratic side can be expected to be sliced and diced in public, the Democrats have stayed relatively clean.
And this is why Vance’s comment about Democrats bullying him jumped out at me. Republican dominance is cracking as Trump struggles and Vance offends people, and as that dominance falls away, the many things it covered are starting to get attention—among them, stories of Republican corruption. And they’re doozies.
On Sunday, for example, Garrett Shanley of the Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper of the University of Florida, reported that when former senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) took over the presidency of the University of Florida, he “channeled millions” to his Republican allies and to secretive contracts. In 17 months he more than tripled spending from his office, with most of the money going to his former aides and political friends, most of whom continued to live and work outside the state. Sasse was appointed in November 2022 in an opaque hiring process and stepped down unexpectedly in July, citing family issues, although Vivienne Serret of The Independent Alligator reported that DeSantis allies on the Board of Trustees forced him out.
One of the biggest stories in the country these days is the corruption scandal in Ohio, in which dark money groups led by the FirstEnergy utility company worked with former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder to put into office politicians who, thanks to about $61 million in bribes, backed a $1.3 billion bailout for FirstEnergy paid for with tax dollars.
On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost agreed to settle the scandal. FirstEnergy will pay a $20 million fine, an amount that Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal notes is less than one-third the amount FirstEnergy spent to bribe legislators, and a fraction of the money ratepayers have had to pay because of the corrupt legislation the bribes paid for.
Nothing better illustrates the grift at the center of today’s MAGA Republicans than Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him by those dangerous “others,” the Democrats. The Big Lie enabled the Trump team to continue soliciting donations in order to fight for the White House. According to Conason, Trump and his fellow election deniers pocketed $255.4 million between the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president.
On Monday, jurors found former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters guilty on seven counts in relation to her compromising of her county’s election system. Peters was determined to get voter information to My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a key Trump ally, in order to prove the Big Lie. She is facing more than 22 years in prison.
—
Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8xqy0jv24o
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/16/tim-walz-james-comer-china-00174403
https://people.com/j-d-vance-post-menopausal-female-podcast-interview-8696246
https://newrepublic.com/post/184926/florida-new-college-ron-desantis-book-ban
Joe Conason, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martins: 2024).
https://www.comicsands.com/royce-white-resurfaced-women-mouthy-2668973149.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/royce-white-republican-nomination-us-senate/
https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/08/reason-behind-sasse-departure
https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2024/08/12/tina-peters-election-tampering-colorado-jury-verdict
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kamala-harris-maga-jezebel-apocalypse-rcna164922
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