The Final Friday Read of 2023: A Plea for American History and Democracy

Dressing for the Carnival, Winslow Homer, 1877  “In this Reconstruction-era painting, Homer evokes the dislocation and endurance of African American culture that was a legacy of slavery. The central figure represents a character from a Christmas celebration known as Jonkonnu, once observed by enslaved people in North Carolina and, possibly, eastern Virginia. Rooted in the culture of the British West Indies, the festival blended African and European traditions. ”  (The Met)

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I fully admit to having a most unappreciated undergraduate liberal arts degree in what everyone calls Social Studies in primary and secondary education. I have a B.A. in History and economics with a secondary teaching certificate in Social Studies. I also have enough credits for minors in Philosophy, literature, and Political Science because quite a bit of my high school credits applied to remove me from the obligations of freshman classes while still making me meet the prerequisite 125 hours to graduate. So, I went full throttle into studying what I loved. It kills me to see the utter illiteracy and rewriting of nearly every one of those subjects.  Needless to say, I silently screamed when I heard Nikki Haley’s attempts to rewrite history for the MAGA crowd at an appearance in Iowa.

My painting choices today come from various American art sources, including The American Wing of The Met and its Gallery portraying American Scenes of Everyday Life, 1840–1910.  Many choices also come from The Art Story’s American Art.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley made a disqualifying series of statements that were basically straight from the mouths of Neo-Confederates and other right-wing racists, and miscreants.  It was the old post-Reconstruction Southern rewrite of the Confederacy. It always makes me wonder if we genuinely reunified after the Civil War.

Haley isn’t the only one trying to rewrite our history. For years, we’ve known that the term ‘state’s rights’ was used to keep slavery in the South.  It was then used to support segregation. Now, it’s used to control women’s reproductive health, ban books, and deny equality under the law to the LGBTQ+ community while still trying to keep Black Americans on the sidelines. It currently has the additional label “woke” attached to it. The Civil War was, first and foremost, about Slavery.  PERIOD.  As you can see, it is a central theme running through Black lives and needs to be fully recognized by the rest of us.

Central Park, Winter, William James Glackens, ca. 1905.  (The Met)

Capitalism didn’t even exist as a theory or philosophy when our country was founded. There are so many lies circulating these days in Republican speeches and circles it makes my head spin.

This is from The Hill. “Democrats go after GOP’s ‘anti-history record’ with billboard ads.”

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has launched four billboards in Iowa attacking Republican presidential candidates for their “anti-history record” as they spend the weekend campaigning in the Hawkeye state.

The billboards, which will be in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, come as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley faces criticism over her remarks at a town hall event in New Hampshire in which she failed to mention slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

The former South Carolina governor suggested the cause of the war was “basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” She later claimed the voter who asked her the question was a “Democrat plant.”

The ads the DNC is launching target Haley for her comments, as well as the records of her fellow GOP candidates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Trump. The three currently top the GOP primary field in the state, according to Decision Desk HQ and The Hill’s aggregation of polls.

“We are at a pivotal and dangerous moment for American democracy: Voters are looking on at a GOP primary with three frontrunners who are so subsumed by the MAGA takeover of their party that they are campaigning on an agenda to whitewash slavery, ban books, and tell bold-faced lies about our history,” DNC National Press Secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.

The billboards feature a photo of Haley, DeSantis and Trump and say “MAGA’s America” includes whitewashing slavery, erasing history, banning books and parroting Hitler.

In the first presidential debate in the 2020 election cycle, Trump declined to condemn white supremacists and far-right groups. He later went back on his comments and said he has condemned all white supremacists “many times.”

In separate campaign events this month, Trump claimed migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Critics have said the remark echoes the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in “Mein Kampf” that German blood was being poisoned by Jews. The former president later denied that he intended any racist sentiment with his comments and said he is “not a student of Hitler.”

Under DeSantis’s leadership, Florida became the first in a wave of red states to enact laws that make it easier for parents to challenge what books school libraries carry, a push that has been particularly centered around books that depict race and LGBTQ history and issues.

DeSantis has also faced criticism in response to Florida’s revised educational guidelines on teaching slavery, which tell teachers to instruct students on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The governor has defended the guidelines, saying the backlash against him is “in bad faith.”

“This dramatic landscape exemplifies the work of the Hudson River School.” A Wild Scene, Artist: Thomas Cole,1831-32, (Baltimore Museum of Art}

More evidence supports the many cases against Trump and his cronies, showing the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.  The thought that our tradition of peaceful transitions of power after elections will never be the same after the illegal antics of 2020. This is from CNN. “Exclusive: Recordings, emails show how Trump team flew fake elector ballots to DC in final push to overturn 2020 election.”

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

The new details provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office. The fake electors scheme features prominently in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal indictment against the former president, and some of the officials who were involved have spoken to Smith’s investigators.

The emails and recordings also indicate that a top Trump campaign lawyer was part of 11th-hour discussions about delivering the fake elector certificates to Pence, potentially undercutting his testimony to the House select committee that investigated January 6 that he had passed off responsibility and didn’t want to put the former vice president in a difficult spot.

These details largely come from pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who was an architect of the fake electors plot and is now a key cooperator in several state probes into the scheme. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to a felony conspiracy charge in Georgia in connection with the electors’ plan, and has met with prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, who are investigating the sham GOP electors in their own states.

The Steerage, Artist: Alfred Stieglitz, 1907. “This photograph has become famous both as a cultural document of immigration to America and as a pioneering work of American modernism and Straight Photography.” (The Met)

Just so you know,  Nikki Haley has also pledged–to a nine-year-old–that she will pardon Donald Trump if elected President.   This is yet another thing she’s said that should be disqualifying. No more presidential crooks should get pardons.

If you’re not an indigenous American, you’re from a family of migrants.  African slaves did not “migrate,” but everyone else’s families did at one time or another.  Many of us still have the tales from our families. This is especially true of those who arrived at Ellis Island.  I wonder what the families coming to our border in Texas have to say about the latest stunts pulled by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott.  Will it be something like, we came for refuge and asylum and were thrown into barbed wire and shot at by Texas Rangers. I still am appalled at how the US refused Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler’s Germany.

This is from The Independent. “DOJ threatens to sue Texas governor over law allowing police to arrest migrants. Under the new law, law enforcement officials will be granted powers to arrest and deport migrants who illegally enter Texas.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is threatening to sue Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott over new legislation allowing local law enforcement to arrest migrants crossing the southern border into the US.

In a letter from the Biden administration to Mr Abbott’s office, the federal government announced its intention to sue “to enjoin the enforcement of SB 4 unless Texas agrees to refrain from enforcing the law,” CNN reported.

The DOJ claims the new law – Senate Bill 4 – violates the US constitution.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton, who authored the letter, said the government is “committed to…securing the border” but that the Texas statute is “contrary to these goals”.

“The Biden Admin not only refuses to enforce current US immigration laws, they now want to stop Texas from enforcing laws against illegal immigration,” he said in a post.

“I’ve never seen such hostility to the rule of law in America. Biden is destroying America. Texas is trying to save it.”

Under the new law, law enforcement officials will be granted powers to arrest and deport migrants who illegally enter Texas.

Repeat offenders are punishable by up to 20 years in prison – something that critics have deried as the most draconian anti-immigrant measure passed in more than a decade.

A Railroad Station Waiting Room, Raphael Soyer c. 1940 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Another State has disqualified Trump from its ballot. Since I already inkled the name of Crooked Former President Nixon, I might as well go with John Dean’s analysis at The Hill on Crooked Former President Donald Trump.  “John Dean: ‘Trump’s in trouble’ after Maine ruling,”  All of these things are headed toward the Supreme Court as we’ve not really had a history of having to disqualify Presidents from Public office.

Former President Nixon’s White House attorney John Dean said Thursday he believes the Maine decision to remove former President Trump from the ballot will be difficult to overturn, calling it “very solid.”

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) determined late Thursday that Trump should be kept off the state’s primary ballot because his conduct surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots violated the 14th Amendment.

Dean denounced criticism by the Trump campaign, which called the decision “election interference.”

“There was ample due process in this proceeding, and they just lost by a straight, honest reading of the 14th Amendment,” Dean said in a CNN interview. “Trump’s in trouble.”

The 14th Amendment bars those who previously took oaths to support the Constitution and “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office. Bellows and a similar Colorado Supreme Court decision last week each found that Trump’s conduct falls under that definition.

Bellows said Trump “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters” on Jan. 6 and “was aware of the likelihood for violence and at least initially supported its use given he both encouraged it with incendiary rhetoric and took no timely action to stop it.”

The Trump campaign pledged to appeal the Maine ruling, and the Supreme Court is expected to take up the Colorado case.

Dean said he doesn’t think the Supreme Court would go against either decision, citing a plain reading of the amendment’s text.

A panel from The Great Migration Series, 1941, Jacob Lawrence (MOMA)

CNN has this ominous headline concerning the issues over Trump on various states’ Primary Ballots. “Risks of US electoral chaos deepen after Trump is barred from another state ballot.”  The words Trump and chaos are frequently seen together.

The Republican Party in Colorado has already challenged the state Supreme Court’s decision to bar him from the ballot over the 14th Amendment.

In Maine, the Trump campaign said it would quickly file a case in state court to stop the “atrocious” decision from taking effect.

But Bellows argued that she had the authority to disqualify Trump over his conduct.

“The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all, and my duty under Maine’s election laws … is to ensure that candidates who appear on the primary ballot are qualified for the office they seek,” she said. Bellows wrote that the challengers presented compelling evidence that the January 6 insurrection “occurred at the behest of” Trump – and that the US Constitution “does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government.”

Before Colorado, several other states, like Michigan and Minnesota, rejected similar efforts. And California’s secretary of state released a certified list of candidates Thursday night that included the former president. The fact that different states now have a divergent view of the Constitution and Trump’s eligibility to run again means that it is almost incumbent on the US Supreme Court to step in, even if wading into this political tsunami could further expose an institution that has been battered politically in recent years to further strain.

Two key questions will be before the justices. First, whether the constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office also applies to the president. Second, the top bench will be under pressure to rule on whether a single state can simply decide that a candidate engaged in an insurrection without offering them due process.

“Reclaimed by Snakeweeds,” Shonto Begay, Navajo Tribe, 2008.

I was always in awe of my Nana and Grandad, who lived through the dustbowl, saw siblings die during World War 1, and had sons sent off to fight in World War 2.  As I studied history, it seemed that these kinds of huge events hung over past generations.  I was young when JFK and MLK were assassinated and when I was duck and covering during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon’s resignation was the only really shocking historical event I recall in detail before becoming an adult. However, I watched many things on a black and white TV before that, including the Vietnam War. Since then, we’ve seen 9/11 and several, long reckless wars. We’ve had a Financial Crisis that bordered on a Depression. We’ve had all these historical events that pale in comparison to the challenges of the present and seem more on the level of years with World Wars and great upheavals.

As we lurch through the 21st century, old lessons appear unlearned.  The comparison to 1930s America is disturbing.  I listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra to understand the parallels between our dance with fascism then and now.  The War in Gaza, the lawless Trump, and his army of gun-toting White Christian Nationalists seem present in every state. Is this really a Cold Civil War? American history has an uneven road to forming a more perfect union that we are still on today. These are days that try the people’s souls.  I’m beginning to think we need to reignite enthusiasm for the Bachelor of Arts degree so no one forgets history or falls for a fake rewrite.

I get to do the New Year’s Day Reads. I imagine we will see a lot more of this next year. Hopefully, I can land in a more hopeful place during the Election Season.

Take care, my friends!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?