Teaching American History: Recent Episodes
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Mark your calendars! Our summer sale starts June 2nd!
Educators—this is your chance to stock up on volumes for your classroom! We’re offering three ways to save:
- 50% off select individual volumes
- $25 library sets
- Bulk pricing classroom sets
As always, shipping is free!
Individual Volumes$6/copy and free shipping! Edited and excerpted to make the complexities of the content more accessible to the high school and post-secondary audience, each volume contains a background essay, thematic table of contents, topical appendices, and documents with a student-oriented introduction and discussion questions.
Interested in ordering more than 25 copies of an individual volume? Unit price is $4/copy and free shipping. Email us at info@teachingamericanhistory.org for more information.
American Foreign PolicyAmerican Foreign Policy covers the story of America’s foreign relations through the rise of the United States to great power status. Documents include:
- Alexander Hamilton, “Views on the French Revolution,” 1794
- President James Monroe, Monroe Doctrine, December 2, 1823
- President William McKinley, Message to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Spain, April 11, 1898
- Carl Schurz, “Against American Imperialism,” January 4, 1899
American RevolutionThis treasury of firsthand accounts and other primary sources gives voice to the story of the American Revolution. Documents include:
- Deacon John Tudor, An Account of the Boston Massacre (1770)
- Prince Hall, et. al., Massachusetts Antislavery Petition (1777)
- Private Hugh McDonald, The Continentals Encounter Civilians (1777)
- Eliza Wilkinson Encounters Redcoats in South Carolina (1779)
- “Plain Truth,” “To the Traitor General Arnold” (1781)
Cold WarThe Cold War covers American aid to Europe in the early years of the Cold War and American intervention in subsequent years in conflicts around the world to contain the spread of Soviet power. Documents include:
- Irving Kaufman, Sentencing of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, 1951
- U.S. State Department, The Negro in American Life, 1952
- Rusk and McNamara, Report to President Kennedy on South Vietnam, 1961
- Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 1962
- National Security Council, National Security Directive 23, 1989
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787Madison wanted to leave his notes on the Constitutional Convention to posterity, and left the final decision of what should appear in print to his wife, Dolley Madison. The several editions published since his death, however, have moved further away from what the Madisons wanted published. This volume is a faithful attempt to recreate Madison’s vision for his “Report on the Debate.”
Great Depression/New DealThis collection of documents on the Depression and New Deal makes clear the reasons why and the degree to which Franklin Roosevelt intended the New Deal to be a re-founding of the American republic. The collection also presents the arguments of those who opposed the New Deal — Democrats as well as Republicans — and those who thought it did not go far enough. Documents include:
- Representative Jacob Milligan, Speech on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930)
- E.E. Lewis, “Black Cotton Farmers and the AAA” (1935)
- Senator Huey P. Long, Statement on the Share Our Wealth Society (1935)
- Al Smith, “Betrayal of the Democratic Party” (1936)
- Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” on “Purging” the Democratic Party (1938)
Populists and ProgressivesPopulists and Progressives highlights thinkers who translated the late 19th century American experience with industrialization and urbanization into political ideas and reforms that influenced 20th century American politics. Documents include:
- Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
- William A. Peffer, “The Mission of the Populist Party,” December 1893
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement’s “Address to the Country,” 1906
- Theodore Roosevelt, “The Right of the People to Rule,” 1912
- John Dewey, “The Crisis in Liberalism,” 1935
Religion in American History and PoliticsThis volume draws together twenty-five primary documents through which readers may trace central themes in the long, complex story of religion and politics in American history. Documents include:
- Laws, Rights, and Liberties Related to Religion in Early America (1610-1682)
- Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island (1790)
- Abraham Lincoln, The Temperance Address (1842)
- Martin Luther King, “Can a Christian Be a Communist?” (1962)
- Barack Obama, Address at Cairo University (2009)
Slavery & Its ConsequencesSlavery & Its Consequences addresses the codification of race-based chattel slavery and the related grievous problem of racial prejudice, as well as the development of a principled resistance to both slavery and its social, cultural, and political effects over the course of four centuries. Documents include:
- John Laurens, Envisioning an African American Regiment, February 2, 1778
- Alexander Crummell, The Race Problem in America, 1889
- W. E. B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” May 1919
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family, March, 1965
- Ta-Nehisi Coates and Stephan Thernstrom, Reparations for Slavery, 2007, 2019
The Supreme CourtThis collection highlights the landmark cases in American jurisprudence. Documents include:
- Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
- Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
- Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963
- Roe v. Wade, 1973
- District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008
Westward ExpansionThe documents in this collection present the reasons Americans gave for and against westward expansion and their thoughts on the political, moral, and economic issues it raised. Documents include:
- Narcissa Whitman, Letters and Journals from the Oregon Trail, 1836
- John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” July 1845
- The Farmers’ Movement, 1873–1874
- The Ghost Dance Religion among the Sioux, 1889–90
- Senator Albert J. Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” 1898
Library Sets – $25 per library setHistory Library* American Revolution * Slavery & Its Consequences * Westward Expansion * Great Depression and the New Deal * Cold War
Government Library* Religion in American History and Politics * The Supreme Court * Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 * American Foreign Policy * Populists and Progressives
Mark your calendars! Sale runs from June 2nd–July 18th or until supplies last!
The post Bookstore Summer Sale! appeared first on Teaching American History.
Memorial Day. A three-day weekend that marks the ending of the school year, the beginning of BBQ and pool season, and the unofficial beginning of American summer. However, this federal holiday was created with a different purpose in mind. Intended to be less a celebratory day off and more of a day of remembrance, Memorial Day is a chance for us to honor the sacrifices of our nation’s soldiers and their families.
While it is hard to generalize the experiences of American soldiers, we’ve chosen the following excerpts to give voice to the humanity of their authors, through sacrifice and glory, perseverance in the face of overwhelming hardship, and across conflicts and centuries. We hope you take the time to read, reflect and share.
Please be aware that the following excerpts contain historical language that is currently considered offensive.
Valley Forge | 1777The army… marched for the Valley Forge in order to take up our winter quarters. We were now in a truly forlorn condition—no clothing, no provisions, and as disheartened as need be. We arrived, however, at our destination a few days before Christmas. Our prospect was indeed dreary. In our miserable condition, to go into the wild woods and build us habitations to stay (not to live) in, in such a weak, starved, and naked condition, was appalling in the highest degree, especially to New Englanders, unaccustomed to such kind of hardships at home. However, there was no remedy—no alternative but this or dispersion. But dispersion, I believe, was not thought of—at least, I did not think of it. We had engaged in the defense of our injured country and were willing, nay, we were determined to persevere as long as such hardships were not altogether intolerable….
-Joseph Plumb Martin, excerpted in The American Revolution
Washington, D.C. | 1863Dear Madam,—
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement . . . that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.
-Abraham Lincoln
Ambrieres, France |1919On or about December 26, 1918, General Order No. 40 was issued from the headquarters of the 92nd Division. . . . “Military Police will see that soldiers do not address, carry on conversation with or accompany the female inhabitants of this area.” At the time this order was issued we were billeted in the village of Ambrieres, Mayenne. There were white soldiers also billeted in the same village but they did not belong to the 92nd Division and the order did not affect them, hence it was an order for Colored soldiers only. It was not an A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Force) order. It was a divisional order for Colored soldiers. We were living in the same houses with the French people and under the terms of this order we were forbidden to even speak to the people with whom we lived, while the white soldiers of the 325th Baking Co. and the Sub-supply Depot #10 were allowed to address, visit or accompany these same people where and whenever they desired.
-Charles Isum, excerpted in World War I and the 1920s
Somewhere in the South Pacific | 1943Last night they said we were about 2½ hours from the Jap fleet, but let them come. I came out here to see action and I hope this is the biggest battle of all time and it is also an honor to be on the flagship so I think this baby will give a good account of itself. Most of the crew would rather keep on going and see action than go back to the States. As for me, I would not trade my place with anyone back in the states. I do not know how I will feel when we run into action, but right now I feel in the pink of condition and don’t care how many Japs I run into.
-James J. Fahey, excerpted in World War II
We at Teaching American History thank all veterans and current members of the armed forces for your service.
The post In Honor of Memorial Day: A Soldier’s Experience appeared first on Teaching American History.
This blog was originally posted on May 12, 2021. We rerun it today on the 179th anniversary.
175 Years Ago Today: Congress Declares War on Mexico, Invoking Manifest Destiny and Destabilizing the House DividedDuring the first half of the nineteenth century, the young American republic expanded across the continent at a rapid pace. Purchasing the vast Louisiana territory from France, acquiring Florida from Spain, displacing Native sovereignties in the Southeast, annexing the republic of Texas, and eyeing the far reaches of the Pacific, expansionist-minded Americans considered it their “manifest destiny” to “civilize” North America with democracy, Christianity, and capitalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson voiced this nearly unconquerable attitude when he described the United States in 1844 as “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations. It has no past: all has an onward and prospective look.”
Manifest Destiny, however, also brought great instability to the federal Union. The acquisition of Texas in 1845 sparked a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Mexico. Both nations contested the location of Texas’s southern border. Americans asserted a border along the Rio Grande, while the Mexicans placed the boundary north of that, along the Nueces River. To defend American claims, President James K. Polk deployed the military to the Nueces and ultimately directed General Zachary Taylor to advance south of the river. In response, on April 25, 1846, Mexican troops traversed the Rio Grande, engaged United States forces, and killed several American soldiers in the disputed territory. President James K. Polk demanded that Congress declare war against Mexico to avenge the “shed[ding] of American blood on American soil.” On May 13, 1846, Congress gave Polk what he had always desired: a justification to invade Mexico, secure the Rio Grande as the United States’s southern border, and seize the Mexican province of California. Sensing that Polk intentionally—and immorally—initiated the conflict, an obscure Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln garnered attention when he challenged the president’s presumption that American blood had indeed been spilled on American, and not Mexican, soil. Steadfast in his criticism of “Polk’s War,” Lincoln lost his reelection bid in 1848, concluding his only term in Congress.
The newspaper editor and poet Walt Whitman captured the war fever that gripped an American public eager to “chasten” Mexico. “Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!” Nearly 90,000 United States soldiers served during the war, two-thirds of whom were amateur citizen-soldiers. The New York Herald depicted Americans’ romantic view of volunteer military service in the republican tradition: “One of the highest tests of a good citizen, is the readiness or reluctance with which he yields his personal liberty . . . when at his country’s call, he leaves his private pursuit and enters the field to fulfill the highest obligation a citizen owes his country.”
A chauvinistic racism underwrote Americans’ confidence in their Manifest Destiny. One ardent supporter of the war called Mexicans “reptiles in the path of progressive democracy” who could never advance beyond their allegedly primitive Indian and Spanish heritages. Only the strong arm of American military power, so went the argument, could wean Mexico away from what was seen as Catholic religious idolatry and veneration of dictators, replacing these with a stable republicanism. Mississippi volunteer William P. Rogers believed that the United States carried a heavy burden to “greatly improve the condition of the poor Mexico.” For Rogers, the war was a paternalistic crusade “promotive of humanity and the cause of freedom and religion.”
The war nevertheless garnered significant opposition. As a Democrat, President Polk embodied the bellicose assumptions of Manifest Destiny. He sneered at other national sovereignties, considering the United States fully entitled to swift territorial acquisitions across North America. The Whig Party lambasted Polk for instigating what it deemed an unprovoked and reckless war against Mexico. Georgia congressman Alexander H. Stephens condemned the war as “downward progress. It is a progress of party—of excitement—of lust for power—a spirit of war—aggression—violence and licentiousness. It is a progress which, if indulged in, would soon sweep over all law, all order, and the Constitution itself.” Statesman Henry Clay likewise denounced Polk’s militarism as a dangerous harbinger of national destabilization: “War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality.”
Like many Whigs, Clay assumed that Polk purposely instigated the war to conquer land through which slavery might expand. Though a slaveholder himself, Clay considered the aggressive expansion of slavery a danger to national equilibrium, destabilizing sectional balance, radicalizing political extremes, and, he believed, planting the seeds of race war. Abolitionists expressed an even more earnest opposition to what Frederick Douglass called Polk’s “slaveholding crusade.” Douglass excoriated the Democrats for parading as “the accustomed panderers to slaveholders: nothing is either too mean, too dirty, or infamous for them, when commanded by the merciless man stealers of our country.”
Nervous that “Polk’s War” would yield abundant territorial bounties for slaveholders, Democratic Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed in 1846 that, “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” Wilmot aimed to keep western lands free for white antislavery settlement but also free from African American residents.
Although Wilmot’s Proviso failed to pass Congress, its implications held great resonance for the future. When Mexico surrendered in 1848, the United States acquired as a prize of war the vast Mexican Cession, stretching from current-day New Mexico to California. The great twentieth-century American historian David M. Potter called this moment “an ominous fulfillment” of Manifest Destiny. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted the trouble that would follow. He anticipated that the United States would “conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” By 1848, the triumph of national expansion had established the conditions of an irrepressible conflict over the question of slavery’s expansion into the western territories.
As Potter wrote in his magisterial account of the 1850s, “the slavery question became the sectional question, the sectional question became the slavery question, and both became the territorial question.” By 1848, the antislavery movement crystallized into an organized political coalition that insisted that slavery could never spread beyond its current place in the American South. Antislavery adherents maintained that the territories must be preserved for free labor, uncorrupted by the exclusionary oligarchic and aristocratic influence of slaveholders. The incompatible social architectures of the North and South had made the Union a “house divided” against itself.
The post The Mexican-American War: 175 Years Later appeared first on Teaching American History.
This blog was originally posted on May 5, 2022. We rerun it today to spotlight teacher Ginny Boles!
Ginny Boles needed to build her content knowledge in American history. Paradoxically, her love of this history had led her to major in classics as an undergraduate at UCLA, so as to read the Latin and Greek texts the Founding Fathers read as they formulated their plans for self-government. Now, having taught social studies for two years at Oakcrest School in Vienna, Virginia—an independent girls’ school in the Catholic tradition—she knew what she didn’t know. She needed more knowledge to answer students’ questions. She hoped to study part-time while continuing to teach.
Living in Northern Virginia, she thought she had options. George Washington University, Georgetown, American University, and even the University of Virginia offer Masters programs on campuses in the District of Columbia. Investigating them, she discovered what is true of most MA programs in history: the courses were scheduled during her teaching day, and the curriculum emphasized methodology, to prepare students for PhD research.
Boles had hoped for in-depth seminar discussions on the eras of history she’d never studied. Discouraged, she almost enrolled in Gilder Lehrman’s program, which is built primarily around recorded online lectures by prominent scholars. “But they paused the program, right when I was ready to start, so I was left without any good option.”
A Program Designed for Working TeachersThen, in the same week, two different people told her about the Master of Arts in American History and Government program (MAHG). A teacher friend in Pittsburgh came back from a week in the summer residential MAHG program, having audited a course on Lincoln. “This seminar I just took was amazing,” the friend said. “It’s at Ashland University, and they offer a Masters.” Next, her father called. After a busy career in law, he had reduced his practice and taken up teaching history at the high school Boles graduated from in Pasadena, California. He’d just returned from a multi-day Teaching American History seminar at the Reagan Library, led by Professor John Moser. “This organization offers amazing professional development!” he said. “They also offer a Masters, at Ashland University.”
“Then I got on Ashland’s website,” Boles said. “As soon as I read about MAHG, I realized, ‘This is designed for me! And it’s been the best experience ever. I recommend it to any history teacher I know who’s looking for a Masters.”
She has enjoyed both the online and on-campus experience. “MAHG’s WebEx seminars pretty well simulate in-person seminar classes. But I loved going to Ashland and seeing people I had ‘met’ on the screen. You could bond over having been with someone for those WebEx sessions.”
She has also enjoyed the hours of private study. “I love being able to say: ‘Oh, sorry. I have to go do my reading right now.’” The readings fascinate her, and they have changed her teaching.
How MAHG Builds Content Knowledge and Confidence“My first two years teaching American history were fun, but a little bit rough. I was like every new teacher tackling a new course, barely learning enough at night to teach it the next day. Then one of my high school juniors would raise a hand and ask a good question. I had to say: “I don’t know. I’ll check and get back to you.” But there was never time to research extra things!”
After several MAHG courses, she found she had answers. “Last year, my students were asking questions about the daily experience of enslaved people and the attitudes of slaveholders. I could say, ‘I’ve read these letters and memoirs. I think I can answer that.’ I became a lot more knowledgeable and more confident.”
Beginning the program, she lacked the content knowledge of many of her classmates, who had taught for years in public schools. These veteran teachers “are inspiring me to learn more and teach better.”
Learning through Text-Based DiscussionsAt the time, Boles used primary source documents to a limited extent. This was not for lack of a model in teaching students how to read and discuss texts carefully. She began her teaching career at the Geneva School in Manhattan, where she taught the “great books” of Latin using a simple but effective approach called “Shared Inquiry” (The method was pioneered at St. John’s University and elaborated by the University of Chicago). She found that most MAHG professors applied a similar approach to primary documents. “MAHG classes are discussions grounded in texts.” The professor poses a question based on a document all have read. Teachers respond, using the text as evidence. Anyone offering an opinion based on their own experience or prior beliefs is reminded, “where in the text do you find support for that?”
Seminars conducted in this way teach “how to disagree with others civilly.” Since everyone shares the same piece of evidence, there are no arguments about unverifiable claims. Reading speeches, essays and letters on contrasting sides of a political issue of the past, MAHG students think through the logic of each perspective together. Students learn to “listen closely, responding in their comments to what the person before them said.” MAHG professors clarify confusing points—but “their own politics doesn’t enter the discussion.”
Two years into the MAHG program, Boles began to add more primary source documents to her courses. She now understood which documents illuminated the themes in history she most wanted to teach.
MAHG Helps Teachers Define Their PrioritiesBy then, the MAHG program had helped Boles define her teaching priorities. MAHG faculty, drawn from universities across the country, are about equally divided between historians and political theorists. The dual perspectives benefit both history and government teachers. “I didn’t really know the difference between the two when I began MAHG,” Boles said. I asked my professors, and they explained it to me.” While she took some “super helpful” courses from historians who emphasized social history, she discovered that she was most drawn to political theory.
In Boles’ judgement, all Americans need to ponder two questions: “‘What is the role of government? And, ‘What is required to create—and then sustain—a free republican government?’ This has become my ‘essential question’ for all the courses I teach, whether it’s sixth grade Ancient History, 11th grade American History or 12th grade Government and Modern World History.”
Boles does not teach AP courses at Oakcrest; she teaches students more inclined to take AP courses in math and science. Without the pressure to cover everything that might appear on the AP exam, she can choose events and topics centered on her theme. The first part of her American history course covers the development of self-governing traditions in the colonial period; the Revolution; the first framework for national government, the Articles of Confederation; and the lasting framework developed at the Constitutional Convention.
Little-Known Documents that Illuminate Big IssuesThe Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Nullification….despotism.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Image ID: ps_prn_cd24_345Then she moves to the controversy over “nullification.” Americans rebelled against the tyranny of George III, and after winning independence worked to create a government that would not fall back into tyranny. But by 1830, some complained that a tyrannous northern majority were imposing tariffs on a southern minority. Boles assigns excerpts of the debates between Senator Daniel Webster (MA) and Senator Robert Hayne (SC); Andrew Jackson’s 1832 proclamation repudiating South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification; and an exchange of letters between Hayne and the elderly James Madison, who’d written the 1798 Virginia Resolutions in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison had claimed the right of a state to “interpose” when Congress overstepped its Constitutional authority.
“Hayne sent his speeches to Madison,” asking him to confirm his arguments in favor of states’ rights. “Madison’s letter back says, ‘You’re completely wrong.’” Students discuss whether Madison’s thinking on state sovereignty and federal authority changed, or Haynes’ and John C. Calhoun’s opinions diverged from the founder’s position. “I love this exchange—and I learned of it through MAHG,” Boles says.
Having considered “the nature of the union” apart from “the obvious moral element of slavery,” Boles’ students see the states’ rights claims made by slave-holding secessionists at the outset of the Civil War with greater clarity. “Lincoln’s First Inaugural takes on”—and demolishes, Boles says, “every single argument the secessionists make.” Later, she presents the Progressive challenge to constitutional provisions “that the founders saw as protections against tyranny. The Progressives had a completely different view of government’s role.”
Thesis Work that Answers Important QuestionsTo complete her degree requirements for MAHG, Boles is writing a thesis. (Many MAHG students opt instead to take four more course credits, for a total of thirty-two, and a cumulative exam.) The MAHG program invites teachers to write on the questions they most need to answer. Boles will write on the Progressive critique of the founding. “Did the founders establish a government that protects only individualism? Or did they see their limited government taking care of the common good?”
“Everything we’re asked to do in MAHG can be transferred to my teaching,” Boles says. “It’s demanding but doable for someone teaching full time. It is also really fun!”
The post Teacher Spotlight: Ginny Boles and why MAHG is important appeared first on Teaching American History.
This blog was first posted on April 15, 2014. We rerun it today in honor of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15th, 1865.
“The latest photograph of President Lincoln – taken on the balcony at the White House, March 6, 1865,” Henry F. Warren. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19192.Today, April 15th, is the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Four days before, the president had delivered his last public address. It was his official acknowledgement of the Confederate surrender. But instead of dwelling on the hard-fought victory, Lincoln spent the bulk of his speech outlining his approach to the next difficult task: returning the lately rebellious states to their pre-war status as participants in the democratic governance of the nation. Already the state of Louisiana had applied for recognition of its rewritten state constitution. The occasion was unprecedented and posed numerous practical difficulties. Lincoln had always insisted that the seceding states had done so illegally. He could not treat those applying for Louisiana’s readmission to the union as the representatives of a once independent nation, now a defeated people making peace terms under duress. Yet it was obvious that those making up the new post-war legislature did not represent the sentiments of most of those in Louisiana who had sided with the Confederacy:
Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction. . . .
Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1865
Some in Congress, who feared that the Southern states would not recognize the national decision to emancipate the slaves, wanted to delay the admission of Southern representatives to Congress while awaiting proofs that the 13th Amendment would be respected. These voices wanted to impose tests before “readmitting” seceded states. Lincoln, however, did not want to delay restoring the Confederate states to what he felt was their “proper” place within the Union. He details his plans for reconstruction only after asserting that talk of “readmitting” states to the Union would not be constructive:
We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.
Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1865
It is perhaps not inaccurate to say that Lincoln recommends that the loyal states reintegrate the seceded states in the same way that a loving parent might welcome home prodigal sons. The Biblical analogy fails, however, when one considers that the Southern prodigals did not acknowledge having betrayed the Union when they seceded.
The post Honoring the Life of Lincoln with His Last Speech appeared first on Teaching American History.
Invited to attend a TAH multiday seminar on the Cold War at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, social studies teacher Cade Lohrding was thrilled. Lohrding—born in the late nineties—has no memory of Reagan’s presidency. Yet he feels nostalgia for the decade which culminated in the end of the Cold War, and for the president whose actions helped end it. Although those politically active during the 1980s recall many partisan disputes, Lohrding sees these fights as less acrimonious than those in the years since. He’s concluded that Reagan’s optimistic, good-humored leadership style blunted partisan fights. Reagan was a leader about whom both parties “could say something positive.”
Cade Lohrding teaches social studies for all three grades at Kiowa County Junior High School in Greensburg, Kansas.Kiowa County Junior High School in Greensburg, Kansas, provided a substitute teacher so that Lohrding could fly on a Friday into Burbank Airport in time for the seminar’s opening reception and dinner that night. Lohrding enjoyed this time of socializing – a chance “to talk with teachers from all over the country who teach different groups of kids. Yet we’re all experiencing the same problems.” Lohrding, who is the only junior high social studies teacher at his rural, K – 12 school, has few opportunities to share ideas with colleagues. The next day, he thoroughly enjoyed discussing primary documents with these new friends. “Then we went to the Reagan Library and learned more about the era. In the next sessions we got to relate what we saw to what we read in the documents. I’d never done anything like that before.”
Contrasting Today’s Partisan Fights with Cold War Unity
At the end of the seminar, an older teacher affirmed Lohrding’s sense that after the Cold War, partisan fights in America grew increasingly bitter. Professor John Moser, the seminar facilitator, asked the participants if there were aspects of the Cold War era they missed. One teacher responded, “I miss how united we were.” This prompted Lohrding to tell his colleagues,
I’m the youngest person here . . . . All of my life, it has been constant: one side hates the other. . . . It takes a natural disaster or some other horrible event for us to realize we’re not that different from each other, and that it’s really important for us to work together to get positive things done. We might agree or disagree about what that positive change is, but . . . . what matters is that we all recognize something has got to change. . . . Today, the public discussion . . . is negative, negative, negative. That really bothers me.
Lohrding has seen citizens pull together in the wake of natural disasters. Greensburg was devastated by a tornado in 2007, destroying the homes of Lohrding’s grandparents and aunt and uncle. Ranchers in the area immediately drove pickups into town to rescue those trapped under debris. Once the roads were safer to travel, Lohrding—then an eight-year-old, living forty miles away in Protection, Kansas—and his brothers and sister joined their parents in the clean-up effort. “People who live in southwestern Kansas help each other out automatically, expecting nothing in return,” he said. Lohrding did reap one treasure from that time, a photo showing him standing beside President George W. Bush, who visited the disaster site.
Lohrding’s Decision to Teach
As a child, Lohrding met President George W. Bush in Greensburg, KS after a tornado devastated it. Standing with President Bush are (back row, left to right): Lohrding’s father Mark, sister Hadley, mother Sindi, and grandparents Sonia and Niles Hadley. Front row: Lording’s brother Cody; Cade Lohrding himself; his neighbor Bayler Kelly; and older brother Cole.With ambitions to run for elective office, Lohrding entered Wichita State University as an undergraduate political science major. He switched to 6th through 12th grade social studies education after concluding that politics had grown “too ugly.” Today he works to promote vigorous but civil discussion in his classroom. “There are 60 kids in the junior high, and I teach every one of them, watching them mature,” he says. To sixth graders, he teaches ancient world history; to seventh graders, geography and Kansas history; to eighth graders, US history from early settlement through World War I. Some semesters he also teaches an elective introductory business class.
Following the advice of his mentor at Wichita State, D. J. Spaeth, Lohrding builds students’ interest in social studies by relating lessons to current news and encouraging them to explain their own opinions. Teaching them that healthy politics entails debate, he often responds to students’ arguments with counter arguments. He pushes students to back up their opinions with facts.
Responding to Students’ Interest in the Election
Yet this fall, as the presidential contest grew rancorous, Lohrding avoided referring to it. His eighth graders protested. “This is US history happening right now!” they said. “Why are we not talking about it?” Changing tack, Lohrding asked students to evaluate the candidates’ campaign effectiveness. He showed videotapes of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, asking students to monitor the candidates’ responses to questions about their policy proposals. After a moderator’s question was answered by both candidates, “I paused the video, and asked the students to write notes on what the candidates said. Then I asked them to discuss which candidate spoke most convincingly about their policy.” Before beginning the exercise, he’d told students not to expect either candidate to “win on every single issue.”
Watching the presidential debate, students saw the candidates deflecting difficult questions and speaking instead about issues they could more confidently discuss. “Students got so annoyed,” Lohrding recalled. “They were like, ‘Just answer the question!’” Later, when they watched the vice-presidential debate, students found the candidates’ responses refreshingly on point. “‘Mr. L, is this what debates are supposed to be like?’ they asked. I said, ‘Yes! The candidates are supposed to be civil, and to base their responses on facts. It’s our job as viewers to check those facts, of course.’”
Although Lohrding never divulges to students his own political views or voting choices, he shares their excitement at the suspense of a close race. “So we talked about the polls every day,” Lohrding said. “We even checked the betting market,” tracking changing predictions on Polymarket.com’s electoral map. Lohrding also showed students maps of votes in the Electoral College since 2000, asking them to analyze political trends. Just before election day, Lohrding asked students at every grade level to predict the electoral outcome. He showed them polls that made district-by-district predictions, then handed out blank maps, telling them to color each state either red or blue. At first, “students protested, ‘All the polls are close!’ So I said, ‘Use your best judgment. Tell me how the election is gonna go.’
“I had one kid get it 100% right. And a lot of them came close,” Lohrding said. After noting on earlier maps the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, many guessed correctly that, despite predictions, Michigan would vote as the other two states did.
Opening Dialogue Between Students and Parents
Later, at a parent-teacher conference, a father jokingly chided Lohrding for encouraging students’ interest in partisan politics. “Come on, man, you couldn’t put off that discussion? That’s all my kid wants to talk about now!” Lohrding said he understood the wish to forestall adolescents’ entry into partisan fights. “But your kid asked about the election. If they ask, and it’s in my curriculum, I’m teaching it.”
Another lesson plan evoked a positive parent response. To help students understand their own political convictions, Lohrding handed out a chart listing elements of the dominant parties’ ideologies. “Then I said, ‘Go through and highlight five of your main beliefs.’ There were kids who highlighted three on one side and two on the other. When one student pointed out that there was a donkey above the left column, and an elephant above the right column, the other students said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and asked to mark a fresh sheet. I said, ‘No, you are taking that home to show your parents. Your parents will still love you, whatever you marked. Ask them to mark three of their own beliefs. Then talk with them about it.
“One parent emailed me to say this lesson led to ‘a genuine conversation with my kid.’”
Lohrding hopes to foster “engaged citizens who will register to vote, research the candidates, and find candidates they can support. I hope they develop political convictions they are willing to defend, even to those with different views. I hope they feel, ‘we can disagree, yet still be best friends.’ Our political opinions shouldn’t define our identities.”
Participants in the TAH seminar on the Cold War standing in front of the Reagan Presidential Library. Professor John Moser, in khaki shorts and dark shirt, stands in the middle of the front row. Lohrding stands in back, second from right.The post TAH Multiday Prompts Discussion of Partisanship, Then and Now appeared first on Teaching American History.
For today’s blog, we are highlighting a document that helps students intersect two of the most historically important elements of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. A part of our Cold War CDC volume, this statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) clearly and succinctly describes the Johnson administration’s perceived hypocrisy in fighting injustice abroad while tolerating it at home, and demands that Americans reprioritize the expansion and enforcement of democratic norms and institutions within the American south as opposed to southeast Asia.
Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Structure and Leadership Brochure. December 6, 1963. National Archives. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has a right and a responsibility to dissent with United States foreign policy on any issue when it sees fit. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee now states its opposition to the United States’ involvement in Vietnam on these grounds:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.
We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black peoples’ struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.
We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by United States governmental officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights, and whose murderers have been allowed to escape penalty for their crimes. . . .
We question, then, the ability and even the desire of the United States government to guarantee free elections abroad. We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask, behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.
We are in sympathy with, and support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the “freedom” we find so false in this country. . . .
Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here. And visit our bookstore to get your copy of The Cold War today.
The post Conflicted Policies? Civil Rights and the War in Vietnam appeared first on Teaching American History.
One-Day seminars are the easiest way to engage with Teaching American History in person. These are free to attend for all social studies teachers and can be in historical locations, school districts, and educational service centers. For a few hours, teachers can dive into the content of primary source documents through a discussion with colleagues facilitated by a scholar. Lunch is provided, and at the end of the day you head home with an attendance letter.
Although One-Days are designed to fit around a teacher’s busy schedule, it is important to spend some time preparing for the day. Here is some advice from teachers who frequent One-Day seminars.
- Complete as much of the readings as possible. Course packs (you can find a sample here) are sent 3–4 weeks ahead to give teachers a chance to carve out some time to read. This allows participants to prepare their thoughts and questions and join in the conversation to really get the meaning behind the documents. You have the opportunity to participate in some deep and meaningful conversations and the more reading completed, the more you can jump right to those conversations at the seminar! That can be daunting, however, for a first timer. “[What I do] is read through the readings that are provided rather slowly,” says Brandon Floro, a teacher in Tontogany, Ohio. “While I read, I highlight or underline answers to the questions provided for each section. I also highlight or underline remarks that I found interesting in the documents that I think would add to the discussions. I also look up words/terms that I know are unfamiliar to me as they help bring context to the documents at hand. Lastly, I will look up maps or visuals that may be of assistance to gain a visual understanding. For example, when reading the Missouri Compromise, it helped to look up a visual of the map where the lines were drawn so I could physically see where it was.” Ron, a teacher in southern Ohio, echoes Brandon’s advice: “I read the packet and highlight things that strike me as important. I then annotate in the margin things about which I may have a question or jot down something that is connected to another reading or to another historical event or concept.”
- Plan your drive and possibly stay the night. Some of our One-Days are in incredible locations! Whether you’re going to be driving to see the beautiful Smoky Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina or the vast fields in Corning, Iowa you want to make sure to plan your trip to include traffic and sudden weather events. Perhaps staying in a hotel the night before or planning an early morning might be your best bet. Either way, One-Days start at 8:55 am and end at 2:15 pm to allow busy teachers time to travel. We have One-Days on weekdays and Saturdays. Book that substitute, and then make sure you come!
- TAH staff will typically reach out several weeks prior to the seminar to confirm attendance. Since materials are printed and sent and lunch is offered at the seminars, we want to make sure our numbers are correct. TAH wants to ensure that the seminar is as meaningful as possible!
- Our hope is you leave a One-Day with a better understanding of content and are ready to take it back with you to your students. Steve Kohler, a social studies teacher in Sandusky, Ohio, remarks “[One-Days] have reinvigorated me as a teacher and given me so much to take back to my students…. [They] have made me a better teacher and given me more to share with my students ” We look forward to seeing you at one!
Interested in scheduling a One-Day at your district? Email us at info@teachingamericanhistory.org!
Courtney Reiner holds a Bachelor of Arts in Integrated Social Studies degree from Kent State University and a Master’s of American History and Government degree from Ashland University. She taught 14 and a half years in northwest Ohio and is currently TAH’s Teacher Program Manager for Ohio.
The post Preparing for a One-Day Seminar appeared first on Teaching American History.
In honor of women’s history month, we bring you a reading selection that highlights the upheaval American society experienced in the 1920s as regards gender roles. The media popularized the term “flapper” to describe rebellious young women who rejected conventional notions of proper female behavior, and it became a common descriptor for young women who shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair, danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol illegally, embraced their sexuality, or disobeyed their elders. As journalist William O. Saunders illustrates, flappers didn’t just challenge gender norms, but also the dynamics of white middle-class family life.
I am the father of two flappers: trim-legged, scantily dressed, bobbed-haired, hipless, corsetless, amazing young female things, full of pep, full of joy, full of jazz. They have been the despair of me for two or three summers; but if they don’t fly off and marry and quit me before I’m a century old, I’m going to know those girls.
I used to think I knew my girls. A lot of foolish parents make that same mistake; but it remained for Elizabeth, the elder of the two amazing young persons, to open my eyes and show me up in my ignorance.
For instance, I thought my girls were different from the average run of wild young things. My own childhood was spent in a righteous, church-going, psalm-singing little country town, where young folk were taught “to be seen and not heard,” and where a game of croquet on Sunday afternoons was an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
I assume that I am just an average adult and parent. I was fetched up by a modest mother who wore three petticoats and a floor-sweeping skirt, and by a father who kept on his trousers to bathe his torso, and put on his shirt before bathing the rest of him. I never learned from either parent whether I was male or female, or that there was such a division in the human species.
I came up with some old-fashioned ideas about women and woman’s place in the world. There was nothing frank about the age in which I was brought up. It was not even decent to concede that women were bipeds. . . . Read more
Want more women’s history materials? Check out these materials from our digital atlas entry on World War I and the 1920s!
The Changing Role and Status of WomenCourting vs. DatingThe post Parents, Flappers and Women’s History Month appeared first on Teaching American History.
Early in his first term, President Donald Trump signed the Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017, establishing March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day. The law honored the women and men who served in the military during the Vietnam War, and, as Trump put it, “were spit on and treated like dirt for serving.” It was clear that Trump envisioned himself that day righting an age-old wrong. After decades of neglect and disdain, Vietnam Veterans Day would offer these Americans the heroes’ welcome home they never received.
That is one way of telling this story. But it unfortunately obscures a great deal more than it reveals.
U.S. involvement in Vietnam officially began on November 1, 1955, with the establishment of the American Military Assistance Advisory Group for South Vietnam, and ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon and the departure of the last remaining American personnel. Between these mileposts, 8.75 million American men and women served in uniform around the world, 40 percent of them stationed in Vietnam and adjacent Southeast Asian countries. More than 58,000 of those would die in the war.
President Lyndon Johnson visits with U.S. troops in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.The so-called “police action” in Vietnam evolved over time to become the most challenging war in American history. Although World War II resulted in nearly seven times as many American deaths, Vietnam has come to occupy a place of unique anguish in the national psyche. Its vague and conflicting goals, its protracted nature, its ballooning unpopularity at home, and its eventual end in ignominious defeat conspired to make honoring, celebrating, and remembering service in the war difficult and messy.
Efforts at honoring Vietnam veterans cannot be understood apart from the experiences and memory of their parents’ (“Greatest”) generation who served in World War 2. The war their father’s fought was clear in its aims, short in its duration, virtuous in its achievements, and victorious in every sense. Surviving veterans returned home, en masse, to the open arms of a jubilant and grateful nation. American military service in all future wars would be compared to these images and experiences. Anything short of ticker-tape parades would raise questions of honor and gratitude.
This helps us understand how the image of the scorned Vietnam veteran became a mainstay of American oral tradition in the years following the war’s end. This image portrayed him returning home from Southeast Asia not to adoring crowds or fanfare but to derision, anger, and contempt. The notion gained traction through various anecdotal accounts in circulation and was all but “confirmed” thanks to widely read memoirs like Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July(1976) and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk(1983), along with comparable depictions in film including William Devane’s in Rolling Thunder(1977) and Jon Voight’s in Coming Home(1978).
The reality on the ground was more complicated. A Harris Poll commissioned by the Veterans Administration in 1971 found that only 1% of returning veterans described their reception upon their arrival home as “unfriendly.” The best scholarship on the home front amid the Vietnam War has challenged popular depictions of the derided returning veteran. Historians like Jerry Lembcke and Eric T. Dean could find no evidence of spitting on veterans, and very few incidents of ridicule or hostility. They conclude that the trope of the reviled Vietnam veteran is a historically dubious, yet politically useful myth.
By contrast, examples abound of communities throughout the war welcoming veterans home with euphoric celebrations—even parades! Despite the war’s strange complications—and a vocal anti-war movement—Americans, by and large, remained patriotic backers of American military operations in Vietnam, showing particular support for military personnel risking their lives. Richard Nixon understood this dimension of the American public when he appealed aptly to the “great silent majority” in a November 1969 televised speech.
None of these observations are meant to imply that returning veterans didn’t experience challenging, even painful homecomings seasoned with feelings of alienation, loneliness, dissonance, or post-traumatic stress. Many obviously did. But so too did veterans of previous wars—even the “good” ones. Even so, the feeling that Americans lacked gratitude for Vietnam veterans lingered and became its own cause célèbre.
Because Vietnam veterans never received massive or triumphant homecomings like those fondly remembered from 1945, groups began lobbying public officials to give this younger generation the honor they deserved. No one wrote more letters, lobbied more members of Congress, or traveled more miles on behalf of this cause than Alfonso Sellet, a building superintendent from tiny Pine Bush, New York. Sellet deserves title as the true father of Vietnam Veterans Day.
April 17 was proclaimed Vietnam Veterans Day in NY State under the signature of Gov. Rockefeller. Al Sellet (2nd from right)Born in 1920, Sellet immigrated to the United States from Italy as a small child with his parents just before the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 went into effect. He spent his formative years in Brooklyn. While living an otherwise ordinary American life, Sellet had the rare distinction of serving and seeing action in World War II (earning a Bronze Star), Korea, and Vietnam. He thus experienced personally both the exhilaration of a celebrative welcome home in 1945, and the humiliation of arriving returning (injured) from Vietnam in 1966 to a quiet, abandoned Air Force base. No one there to greet or thank him or his fellow returnees. Something had to be done.
In 1968, he founded the Committee to Honor Vietnam Veterans, and began lobbying state and federal officials to, among other things, observe a special “Honor the Vietnam Veteran Day.” He quickly won over his congressman, Hamilton Fish (R-NY) who would sponsor a bill in 1971 to this end. Despite receiving what Fish reported as “letters and newspaper articles by the hundreds acknowledging the need for recognition of these brave men—AND NOT ONE DISSENT,” it would take until 1973 for the bill to be considered, passed, and signed. Just before Christmas, President Nixon signed a resolution declaring March 29, 1974, “Vietnam Veterans Day,” marking the one-year anniversary of the last American serviceman to withdraw from South Vietnam.
Statue of the Three Servicemen, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC. Photographed by Bernt Rostad, Nay 10, 2009.In the meantime, cities and states issued dozens of their own “official” Vietnam Veterans Day, held often on March 29 and sometimes, confusedly, on March 30. While the March 29 was not (and still isn’t) recognized as a federal holiday, various congresses and presidents through the years have episodically recognized the day with their own proclamations of gratitude and honor of the millions who served in uniform during the Vietnam era. In some cases, such as the congressional resolution passed in 2009 and the bill signed by President Trump in 2017, these proclamations were set forth as though the day was being recognized for the very first time.
It is good that Americans honor our military personnel who have served our nation in seasons of both peace and war. And it is especially important that we recognize the sacrifice of those who risked and gave their lives amid a conflict that was complicated and unpopular. But the story of Vietnam Veterans Day is a telling reminder that American memory—especially when it comes to military service—is always tinged with politics. It is also short and prone to amnesia.
Jay D. Green is Professor of History at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has been on the faculty since 1998.
The post Vietnam Veterans in American Historical Memory appeared first on Teaching American History.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries American labor fought a sustained battle against American capitalists over who should determine the wages, hours, and working conditions in America’s booming factories—ownership or the workers. Battle tactics included dueling messaging in friendly publications, lobbying for favorable laws, and confrontations between strikes and strikebreakers. As is well-known, the struggle grew intense and violent during labor protests like the 1886 rally at Haymarket Square and the 1892 Homestead Strike. Less well known is labor activists’ occasional resort to sabotage of anti-union business establishments. In 1910, the Los Angeles Times, a strident anti-union voice in a staunch anti-union state, was a target of domestic violence that took the lives of 21 of its employees.
Why the LA Times Was Targeted
Los Angeles Times building, after the bombing disaster on October 1, 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. During a highly successful career, the newspaper’s owner, Harrison Gray Otis, had become the political enemy of all unions and a symbol of capitalistic intransigence to worker rights. A delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention, Otis served with distinction in the Civil War, rising to the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel. Following the conflict, he moved to Los Angeles, seeking his fortune in the newspaper business. He landed a job, making $15 a month with the LA Times, but soon saved enough money to purchase the struggling paper with a partner’s help. Otis was not a man willing to share power. He bought out his partner and instituted dictatorial control of the Times. Otis and LA’s other printers were virulently anti-union. Along with other merchants, they organized the Merchants and Manufacturers Association to ensure they remained “masters of our own business.” Members promised not to hire union members, to use lockouts and blacklists to break the unions, and to provide financial support for their fellow members if their workers struck.
When the typographical worker’s union struck LA’s printers in 1890 in protest of wage cuts, Otis joined the other LA papers to break the back of the union. His fellow printers caved, but not Otis. When the union abandoned the fight in 1895, the LA Times became the only non-union shop in the LA newspaper business. Otis became a symbol of anti-union capitalists unwilling to negotiate wages or working conditions.
The Times Owner’s Swift Response
Detective William J. Burns. Head and shoulders portrait. Between 1900 and 1920. Library of Congress. In the early morning hours of October 1, 1910, a bomb destroyed the LA Times building, killing 21 workers and injuring many others. While the destroyed plant still smoldered and authorities searched for survivors and clues to what happened, Otis persuaded another printer to run an abbreviated edition of the Times with headlines proclaiming Union Bombs Wreck the Times. Police discovered an unexploded bomb at his residence the same day, which cemented Otis’s view that unions were attacking him and his business in retaliation for his firm stance against their cause. To Otis, being a union member was synonymous with being an anarchist or socialist; all were radicals bent on destroying property rights and the American system of government. One month before the attack on the Times, an unexploded bomb was found at the Alexandra Hotel Annex in downtown LA, and on Christmas Day, a local non-union iron works plant suffered a bombing. Otis was convinced these bombs signaled a dangerous new phase in a radical campaign to destroy capitalism. He pledged to fight back hard.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not exist in 1910, so Otis and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association turned to the most famous private investigator in the United States, William Burns, to find the culprits. Burns believed the case was the most important of his career. If he could identify the bombers and prove the case against them in a court of law, he would not only cement his reputation as the nation’s best investigator but also make himself rich. Burns spared no expense traveling the country in search of clues. His break came when he linked a bombing in Illinois to the attacks in LA.
The Arrest and Trial of the Suspects
Newspapers closely covered the hunt for suspects in the LA Times bombing and the subsequent trial. “Wreck of the Los Angeles Times building, photographed on the morning after it was dynamited… and a portrait of Detective William J. Burns.” April 24, 1911. The San Francisco Call. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.Bombers often use consistent methods and materials in creating their devices. Having learned to build a bomb successfully, they repeat the process, sticking with what worked before. Burns and his agents were already investigating a bomb attack on a railroad yard in Peoria, Illinois, when the MMA hired them to investigate the LA attacks. Burns and his agents identified the materials and bomb-making methods used in the Peoria bomb closely resembled those used in the deadly bomb that destroyed the LA Times building. They traced the purchase of materials used in the bomb, and that trail led them to the brother and known associates of John McNamara, the Secretary-Treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. One of McNamara’s hired men, a man named Ortie McManigal, was arrested and confessed to planting several bombs.
The arrest of union members in connection with the LA bombing enraged union leaders and their supporters. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and “Big Bill” of the Industrial Workers of the World was convinced that Otis hired Bill Burns to plant evidence implicating union leaders. He fought back by hiring the nation’s best-known defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. Darrow quickly learned that the evidence Burns had developed proved that McManigal and the McNamara brothers were guilty. A plea bargain agreement was reached, and all three men switched their pleas to guilty and received lengthy prison sentences, shocking Gompers, Haywood, and union members across the country.
Teaching the Complexities of the Labor Struggle
Samuel Gompers. (c.1920). Underwood & Underwood. Library of Congress.
The LA Times bombing is not emphasized in many history classrooms today. Teachers are more likely to teach the Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead Strike of 1892. Why? A domestic terror attack by a labor union is just as disturbing as the Pinkertons’ assault on steel workers in Homestead, PA. One possible answer invokes the old adage, history is written by the winners. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 banned yellow-dog contracts in which workers promised not to join a union and restricted the use of injunctions blocking strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The law boosted the strength of unions and helped lead to high union membership in the 50s and 60s. In the 1960s, most Americans would not have associated union membership with incidents of domestic terrorism.
Another possibility is historical awareness of the imbalance of power between unions and industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Industrial owners held the stronger hand. When they were unable to impose their will on workers, they turned to courts and state officials to block activities that they believed threatened violence. Employers had a powerful argument. Domestic peace and prosperity depend on a stable workforce. And violence threatened entire communities. Perhaps American history students should learn about the LA Times bombing so they understand the complexities of the labor struggle in this era.
Ray TylerRay Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.
The post Violence and the Labor Struggle in Industrializing America: the 1910 LA Times Bombing appeared first on Teaching American History.
Keene at MAHG 2021Teaching American History has recently published World War I and the 1920s: Core Documents, a collection curated by Professor Jennifer D. Keene, Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Keene, a specialist in American military experience during World War I, has published three studies of this subject, along with numerous essays, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Keene also edited our collection of core documents on World War II (2018; 2nd ed. 2022) and teaches courses on the World Wars and Modern America for the Master of Arts in American History and Government program at Ashland University.
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- For Europeans, World War I was devastating. Technological advances in weaponry made combat terrible and costly to life and well-being. Many grew pessimistic about modern “progress.” To Americans, the war brought risk, loss and sacrifice, but did not diminish expectations for economic growth and social and political reforms. What accounts for the difference between the European and American experience?
Although it’s true that Americans were less devastated by the experience of World War I, the war brought profound changes to American life. We entered the war late and suffered fewer battlefield deaths than the Europeans over the course of our year and a half involvement. However, Americans of that era saw the war as the major historical event of their lifetimes, one that changed everything. It changed the role of the United States in global politics and gave it a stronger position in the global economy. It accelerated the fight for women’s suffrage. It changed African Americans’ understanding of their own prospects in our society, laying the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights movement. We also make a big mistake if we ignore the long-term effect of Wilsonian rhetoric on the way Americans understand their civic responsibilities and role in the world.
The momentum of the Progressive movement propelled America into the war and shaped Americans’ expectations. When the European war began in 1914, Woodrow Wilson based his argument for neutrality (Document 1) on the claim that neutrality would allow the United States to arbitrate between the warring sides. In April, 1917, after concluding that Germany represented a national security risk and could be defeated only if America joined the fight, Wilson delivered a war address (Document 6) that distinguished America’s war aims from those the other combatants. While others waged a territorial contest, Americans would fight to remake the international order in the image of liberal democracy. This would help the world powers negotiate their differences, preventing future wars. Fast forward to Wilson’s Fourteen Points (Document 14), and you see him approaching a negotiated settlement in a progressive manner. He first convened a group of academic experts on the contested regions of the world, “The Inquiry,” to draft his proposals. He thought he could sit down with these experts to redraw the map of Europe, rationally solving old historic conflicts that nobody else had been able to solve.
Food Administration Home Card, 1917, U.S. Food Administration, National Archives and Record Administration (National Archives identifier: 20762195). Available at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/20762195.Others acted from the same progressive impulse. As Director of the US Food Administration, Herbert Hoover could have confiscated food sources and rationed them. Instead, he asked for voluntary efforts from across American society (Document 13), as he had when he headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium. To support the war effort, he asked people to voluntarily conserve food. This progressive approach left a legacy, influencing the conduct of agency heads during the mobilization for World War II.
Of course, Wilson’s reformist impulses were inconsistent. After arguing that America needed to make the world safe for democracy, he asked Congress to pass an Espionage Act that criminalized public dissent and obstruction of conscription under the new Selective Service Act. For the most part, Americans went along with this. Immediately after the war, the Supreme Court affirmed the suppression of dissent in Schenck v. United States (Document 19), ruling that freedom of speech is not an unconditional right.
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- Given Wilson’s intolerance of dissent, why did he change his position on women’s suffrage?
The suffrage activists forced Wilson’s hand. By 1917, the suffrage movement had divided into two main groups, each pursuing different strategies, yet it took both groups to force the change. Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA; see Document 12) pressed for a federal woman suffrage amendment while seeking simultaneously to secure women’s suffrage one state at a time, by persuading states to change their own constitutions . She wanted Wilson to endorse the national movement, and use his position as head of the Democratic Party to move a proposed amendment through Congress. Catt realized she could exert pressure on Wilson by encouraging women to support the war through public volunteer efforts. “How can you ask women to assume the responsibilities of citizenship,” she asked in effect, “without according them the rights of citizens?” Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP; see Document 10) pushed more aggressively for an amendment to the federal constitution. They began picketing the White House in January 1917. No one had ever done that before. They continued after America entered the war in April, calling Wilson a hypocrite for pushing a war to safeguard democracy abroad while denying women democratic rights at home. As upper and upper middle-class women, they could use their social connections to publicize their brutal treatment in prison when they were arrested for blocking the sidewalk in front of the White House.
Lucy Branham protests the political imprisonment of Alice Paul with “Russia” banner (United States: Harris & Ewing, 1917) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000224/.This negative publicity put Wilson in an embarrassing position. Meanwhile, Chapman’s state-by-state strategy made a significant gain when the state of New York voted for women’s suffrage in November 1917. Women’s exercise of voting rights in key states like New York might derail Wilson’s legislative agenda or Democrats’ chances in upcoming elections. Wilson had only squeaked by in the 1916 presidential election. Still, when Wilson endorsed giving women the vote on September 30, 1918, those in the movement remained dissatisfied; they wanted him to push the amendment through Congress. In the end, the 19th amendment was approved by Congress after the war ended and ratified by a sufficient number of states when a single Tennessee state legislator changed his mind.
African Americans also protested the hypocrisy of a war for democracy abroad while democratic rights and protections were denied to Blacks at home (see document 20, “Returning Soldiers” by W. E. B. Dubois), but they didn’t have the same success. Wilson did nothing to combat the epidemic of racial violence that erupted in 1919 after the soldiers returned home.
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- During the war, government leaders used the media to rally public support. One sees this in Hoover’s use of propaganda to save food and in the posters encouraging enlistment and purchase of war bonds. Even private groups hoped to shape behavior through advertising. African Americans published advice to Southern Blacks on how to behave after migrating North (Document 22). The Sears Roebuck catalogue advertised modular home kits (Document 34). Was this a new feature of American life?
Wartime leaders always aim for unity on the home front, but Wilson faced a particular challenge. He couldn’t point to a direct attack on the US such as that at Pearl Harbor. His war address began with circumstantial evidence of the security threat, but this fell flat in the rural South, West and Midwest where populist feelings remained strong. Many said, “This is a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight”—that America entered the war to ensure that loans to the allied nations would be repaid and that American manufacturers would make nice war profits.
To solve this problem, Wilson created the first federally controlled propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information, that used Progressive propaganda techniques, previously employed to popularize social reforms, for government purposes.
The Wilson Administration also used legal and social pressure. While the Espionage and Sedition Acts threatened arrest for those who voiced opposition, community mobilization offered incentives to support the war effort. Women signed the food pledge because a local committee woman knocked on their door; people were asked at work to buy Liberty Bonds; and then they were issued cards testifying they had done these things to hang in their windows. Displaying these cards won you social approval. Not displaying them aroused suspicion—especially if you had a German surname. Once men were conscripted, many families had a personal stake in the success of the war effort and wanted their community to support the war.
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- So, Wilson’s effort to mobilize the country for war succeeded.
Remarkably well, I would say. The US entered the war with just 300,000 men in the military but grew that number to over 4 million, with 1.2 million men in overseas combat, in a year and a half. We also produced the food needed for those troops. That’s an amazing success.
Did the war, as Wilson promised, spread democracy? No, but as often in US history, the aspirations of the period continued to animate activism and policy after the war. Of course, Americans wondered in hindsight whether entering the war was a mistake, especially when war clouds gathered once again in Europe. They then looked to the steps that led to entering WWI in an effort to learn from the past. Just as it took two and a half years for us to get involved in World War I, it took two and a half years for us to enter World War II – reflecting Americans’ mixed feelings about intervening in European conflicts. Even today, Americans debate whether and how to use our power overseas so as to balance our self-interest with our idealistic goals for the world at large.
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A Lesson from the Founders for Constitution DayAmericans in our day think “transparency” in government essential to its efficient and wholesome operation. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not entirely agree. They understood that secrecy encourages careful deliberation and compromise in the political arena.
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention understood how precariously their new nation stood together, and how important it was to deliberate and compromise during that fateful summer. Thankfully, the delegates established ground rules for communicating with each other that helped to ensure the success of their meeting. We could learn an important lesson from the founders when thinking about our Congress today.
Secrecy Rules at the Convention
One of the Convention’s first decisions was to adopt secrecy rules. The delegates agreed “that no copy be taken of any entry on the journal…and that nothing spoken in the [Convention] be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”
As John Kaminski has written, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought this was appropriate because it would promote deliberation and careful consideration of issues. As James Madison explained to Thomas Jefferson, the Convention thought secrecy would be “expedient in order to secure unbiased discussion within doors, and to prevent misconceptions and misconstructions without.” He wrote to James Monroe that the rule would “effectually secure the requisite freedom of discussion” and “save both the Convention and the Community from a thousand erroneous and perhaps mischievous reports.”
Congressional row, in the U.S. House of Representatives, midnight of Friday, February 5th, 1858. Illustration in: Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, v. 5, 1858 Feb. 20, p. 177. Library of Congress. These remarks suggest that the delegates saw several critical benefits from a rule of secrecy during legislative debate. First, such a rule enables members to speak freely to each other while on the floor of the chamber. If members fear that their statements will be made public in order to turn public opinion against them, they will no longer discuss their ideas openly or seek to persuade each other. This would turn the whole meeting into a debating club, not a deliberative assembly.
Second, a public record can be manipulated by “mischievous” people to produce “misconceptions and misconstructions” in the public mind. The public may not read the journals and the debates, but they will read reports about them from people who can selectively quote those materials to distort what’s actually happening. To put it in today’s vernacular, reporters can take remarks “out of context” to turn the public against individual members and their proposals.
Later in his life, when reflecting on the secrecy rule, Madison described a third benefit. As he recollected, while the Convention was in debate, “the minds of the members were changing,” and if members had “committed themselves publicly at first, they would have afterwards supposed consistency required them to maintain their ground.” Keeping the deliberations secret, Madison maintained, ensured every member was “open to the force of argument” and able to change their minds freely. A secrecy rule allows representatives to listen to the arguments of others without being accused of “flip-flopping.”
We do not know whether the Convention would have been successful without a secrecy rule, but it is clear that the delegates thought the rule essential. Madison believed that “no Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.”
The Moderate Approach of the Early Congress
The U.S. Congress took a moderate approach to secrecy in its early years, balancing the benefits of transparency and secrecy. While the Constitution mandates that “Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy,” these journals merely record actions taken rather than the entirety of floor debates. Since 1794, both the House and the Senate have been open to visitors who wish to watch debates from the galleries, and debates have been published in various outlets such as the Congressional Record (since 1873). However, much of the discussions in committee rooms, cloakrooms, and elsewhere were still private, preserving the benefits of secrecy.
Transparency “Reforms” in the 1970s
Reforms in the middle of the 1970s abandoned this balanced approach. The 1970s brought in a wave of new members who, in the words of one member, “destroyed the institution by turning the lights on.” In 1973 the House prohibited closed committee hearings (the Senate did so in 1975). In closed session, committees can hear expert testimony from and ask questions of expert witnesses, and consider their recommendations. When the doors are thrown open, members feel pressured to perform for the audience, seeking to embarrass the witnesses and other members of the committee.
President Nixon addressing a joint session of Congress; WHPO-9299-07; 6/1/1972. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Reformers also took advantage of a provision of the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act that allowed for public roll call voting. Prior to 1970, most of the votes cast in the House of Representatives were unrecorded, and thus essentially secret. Once these votes became public, members began to force “messaging” votes that were intended not to make law, but to put their political opponents “on record” for the next election. This practice has increased animosity, polarization, and vitriol in Congress.
The introduction of C-SPAN completed the transparency reforms of the 1970s. The network first began broadcasting House proceedings in 1979, and the Senate in 1986. It also covers most committee hearings. As Yuval Levin has recently written, the introduction of cameras has “turned all of Congress’ deliberative spaces into performative spaces, leaving less and less time for members to speak and work in private. The most obvious consequence of this transformation has been the explosion of grandstanding in both chambers.” Today’s committee hearings and floor debates in Congress are opportunities for members to score political points, or go viral on social media, but not to deliberate, persuade, or compromise with each other.
Recovering the Lesson from the Founders
Members are aware of the problems these transparency reforms have produced. One of them, a first-term member from North Carolina, has recently spoken out. In his experience, he writes, “The same people who act like maniacs during the open [committee] meetings are suddenly calm and rational during the closed ones. Why? Because there aren’t any cameras in the closed meetings.”
Thankfully, there are still places where members can work together on lower-profile issues, where there isn’t enough controversy to attract media. (Some playfully refer to these places as “Secret Congress.”) These places provide useful illustrations of the fact that, when they are given a little bit of space and secrecy to work together, people of different political views can still find common ground in this country on many issues. Many Americans are frustrated with Congress’s inability to compromise or agree on anything. But they typically overlook the role that these transparency reforms have played in producing this outcome. The members of the Constitutional Convention would not have been surprised, and they would counsel us to let our elected officials talk more to each other and perform less for us.
Joseph Postell is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College and a faculty member in the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program at Ashland University. In MAHG, Postell often teaches courses on Political Parties and on the US Congress. During the 2024 summer residential program, he delivered the Sunday evening lecture, “After Party: The Roots of Congress’s Dysfunction.” He also edited TAH’s core document collection, Congress (2020). Postell studies American political institutions and their relationship to the modern administrative state. He is the author of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government (University of Missouri Press, 2017) and coeditor of, among other volumes, American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice (with Steven F. Pittz). Professor Postell is an alumnus of Ashland University, where he was an Ashbrook Scholar.
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Katherine Thrailkill considered careers in drama, law, and hi-tech sales before realizing all her interests and experiences pointed her toward teaching social studies. She would help students gain political efficacy—the knowledge and confidence they need to make their voices count in our political system. Once she found her calling, colleagues helped her make her way. A key mentor was Nancie Lindblom, who showed Thrailkill how to model civil discussion. Lindblom is the 2013 Arizona Teacher of the Year and a 2014 Graduate of the MAHG program.
Katherine Thrailkill at Summer 2024 MAHG. Thrailkill was a third-year teacher happily settled at Skyline High School in Mesa, AZ, when Lindblom phoned to ask her to apply for an opening at nearby Mountain View High. The request surprised and flattered Thrailkill. Not only was Mountain View the high school from which she’d graduated; Lindblom was a teacher she admired. While earning her Masters in secondary school education at Arizona State University, she’d observed Lindblom’s class. “That’s the teacher I want to be,” she’d thought.
Lindblom’s “Defining America” CourseThrailkill watched Lindblom teach a sophomore course she herself designed: “Defining America: The Fulfillment of the Promise of the Declaration of Independence.” Lindblom based it on a summer seminar she attended in the early 2000s: the Presidential Academy, a forerunner of Teaching American History’s current programs. The three-week program took teachers from across the country on a study tour of Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and Washington, DC, discussing with leading scholars three eras in history—the Founding, the Civil War, and the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights movement—all of which tested Americans’ commitment to their principles of liberty and equality. This inspired Lindblom to design an elective sophomore course on the same three periods, using many of the primary documents she’d studied in the TAH seminar. The course would prepare students for her fast-paced junior-level AP American History class. It would give them time to think about American principles while learning to read primary documents.
Nancie Lindblom, 2011 James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow and MAHG graduate. As Lindblom posed questions that pushed students to think through the readings, Thrailkill was reminded of her favorite undergraduate courses. A political science and philosophy double major at Arizona State University, Thrailkill learned about the American political system in large lecture halls. But small seminars on ethics and political philosophy stimulated her imagination and taught her to think critically. Lindblom’s teaching approach “was everything I wanted to do.”
How Lindblom Modeled Civil DiscussionShe took the job at Mountain View. The next year she taught across the hall from Lindblom. Thrailkill watched Lindblom model civil discussion, disarming students’ fears of disagreeing with others. Increasingly reliant on cell-phone communication, today’s students often feel “anxious” when asked to debate historical or political questions, Thrailkill said. Teachers must model civil discussion. “Before challenging another person’s argument, you have to understand it. You must listen to what they say, then tell them what you heard, to verify that you understood.” This not only shows respect for the other person; it pushes you to carefully think through your own position. She found students learned this process best in small groups; afterwards, they more comfortably discussed issues with the whole class.
Lindblom, a 2011 James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow, recommended that Thrailkill apply for the same grant, to fund a Masters emphasizing constitutional studies. She also recommended the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) at Ashland University as the ideal MA program for a working teacher interested in encouraging civil discussion of the perennial issues in American civic life. Thrailkill applied twice, and when she learned in May that she’d been awarded the grant for 2024, she felt Lindblom’s recommendation had made the difference. Looking through the Masters study options the Madison Foundation recommended, Thrailkill quickly concluded that Lindblom’s choice was the best.
Thrailkill’s First Impressions of MAHGShe registered for two courses in this year’s summer residential MAHG program. A study of Cherokee Indian removal during the 1830s would inform her on a part of history she knew little about. A second-week course on the American Founding would help her review what she’d learned as an undergraduate about the framing of the Constitution.
Teachers in the course on Cherokee history participated in a “Reacting to the Past” game, testing whether the discovery of gold on Cherokee lands make their forced displacement into the Arkansas territory inevitable. Each player acted the part of an actual historical figure or a composite of several, basing their actions on primary documents they’d read and discussed. Some played Cherokee nationalists, vowing to hold the land guaranteed them by federal treaties; some, white political leaders determined to force them off their land. Others played Cherokee leaders who thought the tribe’s survival depended on accepting removal. A fourth group represented Cherokee who were undecided.
Most players made one or more speeches in character. Professor Jace Weaver assigned roles only after asking the teachers how comfortable they were with public speaking. Having begun college as a drama major, Thrailkill told Weaver, “I’m fine with any role you give me.” She got the role of Andrew Jackson, the historical character she most loves to hate. Presiding over a fictional meeting between representatives of the Cherokee and the white officials advocating their removal, she delivered a gracious speech of welcome that conceded none of the Cherokee claims.
The game illuminated the primary documents Thrailkill read to prepare for it. It helped her understand why Cherokee removal occurred, despite its evident injustice and the Supreme Court ruling in Worchester v. Georgia. Thrailkill now plans to use more role-playing exercises in her teaching. They make classroom debate “less risky. No one will judge you for taking Andrew Jackson’s side against the rights of Native Americans. You’re acting! Yet the exercise requires you to think about Jackson’s perspective.”
The course on the founding, taught by Professors David Alvis and Beth L’Arrivee, revealed the tense conversations that led to our constitutional framework. Delegates compromised without necessarily resolving their underlying differences. Thrailkill confided she’d “been feeling a little low lately about political efficacy.” Citizens seemed doubtful that they could make their voices heard in our polarized political climate. Given all that the founders achieved in the summer of 1787, Thrailkill “expected to come out of this course feeling a little more cynical” about current politics. “But now, I see that today’s debates reflect older ones.” The Antifederalists foresaw the elastic potential of the commerce and the “necessary and proper” clauses; our current debates over taxation and federal regulation reflect their worries. Yet the founders thought through their reasons for incorporating these and other more controversial provisions into the Constitution.
Building Students’ Political EfficacyHenry Adeoye, MAHG student and US History Teacher in Texas. “I absolutely love MAHG,” Thrailkill said, impressed with the quality of the seminar conversations. The program will equip her for her life’s work of building students’ political efficacy. With the help of veteran teachers like Lindblom, Thrailkill is well positioned for the task. She advises Mountain View’s Model UN team; students on the team take her AP Comparative Government class. They study the governing systems in six nations: Mexico, whose system is modeled on that of the US; the United Kingdom, with a parliamentary system, and Nigeria, which is considering returning to such a system; the authoritarian systems in Russia and China; and the theocratic system in Iran. The team debates other teams in district, state, and sometimes national conventions. Thrailkill is constantly building the knowledge she needs for the course. She shared a shuttle ride from the airport to the Ashland campus with Henry Adeoye, a Houston-based, Nigerian-American teacher and Madison Fellow. Born to the Yoruba tribe, Adeoye engaged the Nigerian driver—an Igbo—in conversation about the differences between the Nigerian and American political systems. Thrailkill planned to tell her students about their conversation.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Lindblom designed a new sophomore course — “Changemakers” — to teach civil discussion and build students’ political efficacy. Then she was offered the position of social studies curriculum advisor for the large Mesa Public School district. Lindblom asked Thrailkill to take on the class. Working with a veteran English Language Arts specialist (who also has become a mentor), Thrailkill implemented the double-unit course last year. It challenges students to think about how political and social reforms occur; teaches critical reading and media literacy skills; informs them on Constitutional protections for free speech; and teaches civil discussion through “structured academic controversies”—debates that require participants to restate their opponents’ arguments, conceding the strongest points, before responding. Students also select problems to research, investigating policy solutions and presenting their findings in a forum at year’s end. “Nancie attended the forum and said we did well. A few days later I learned about the Madison fellowship,” Thrailkill said. “I’ve been blessed with brilliant and generous mentors. I feel like I won the teacher lottery!”
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Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on September 4, 1957. Johnny Jenkins, United Press. Library of Congress.Two well-known black and white photographs depict the struggle to end racial segregation in Southern schools that continued after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Less well known is the woman who organized and supported the brave actions of the Little Rock Nine: Daisy Bates.
The two black and white photographs are iconic images in modern U.S. history. The first photo shows a young black woman walking with school books cradled in her left arm. Sunglasses shield her eyes but can’t hide an expression that is grim, calm, determined. Behind her, a crowd of angry whites presses forward. At the forefront is a woman whose face contorts with hate as she hurls slurs at Elizabeth Eckford, who is trying to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 4, 1957. It was supposed to be the first day of school for her, and for eight other black students, all of whom had been promised admission to the school.
Escorted by federal troops, the Little Rock Nine enter the front door of Central High School in Little Rock. Published in Ebony Magazine, January 1958. Library of Congress.The second photograph was taken three weeks later. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, ascend the main staircase of Central High. They are guarded by helmeted troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Many of the soldiers carry rifles fixed with bayonets. The armed escort finally made possible the students’ attendance, literally opening the doors for them.
Together, the photographs tell us much about an important historical moment. More than three years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case that racial segregation in education and “separate but equal” were unconstitutional, Elizabeth Eckford and her peers enrolled in the all-white Central High School. Fierce opposition to integration brought not just mobs of whites to the school grounds, but also state troops, who, under orders from Arkansas governor Orville Faubus, blocked the entry of the young African Americans. This flagrant defiance of constitutional order perturbed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who dispatched troops to Little Rock to ensure compliance with the court’s decision. The images appear to neatly capture the dynamics and drama of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Children determined to receive a good education meet with anger and the menace of violence. Yet efforts to preserve white supremacy and segregation are no match for the law of the land, enforced by federal troops.
This statue of Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, sculpted by Benjamin Victor, was unveiled in National Statuary Hall on May 8, 2024. Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.But the pictures don’t tell the whole story. Who were these brave young men and women? Who supported and inspired them? What happened to them after they started attending school? To answer these questions, we must look beyond the photographs and focus on a singular figure in the story of the Little Rock Nine, an African American woman named Daisy Bates. Her vision, leadership, and bravery made possible the integration of Central High School in 1957. Not only is Bates important to the history of Central High’s integration, she is also a significant figure in the national Civil Rights Movement. In recognition of her historical contributions, Arkansas selected Bates to be memorialized in a statue recently unveiled at the U.S. Capitol.
Bates was born in November 1914 in a small town in southern Arkansas. White men murdered her mother when she was an infant and adoptive parents raised her. Learning what had happened to her birth mother engendered lifelong anger “about what has happened to my people,” as Bates shared in an interview. Yet on his deathbed her adoptive father counseled, “Hate can destroy you, Daisy. Don’t hate white people just because they’re white. If you hate, make it count for something.”
She made it count. After marrying, she moved with her husband L.C. Bates to Little Rock, where they put their life savings into starting a newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. Coverage of racially biased justice made them frequent targets of spurious arrests. In one instance, the Bateses were charged with contempt of court for an article they published. Daisy Bates also headed the state’s conference of NAACP branches, bringing further harassment. Undeterred, she emerged as a leader in the fight to integrate Little Rock’s schools after the Brown decision. When the white superintendent announced he would only admit one student (whose complexion was so light she could pass as white), Bates helped organize the Little Rock Nine. The students and their parents quickly came to rely on Bates, who had no children of her own, as a protector, spokeswoman, and problem-solver. Governor Faubus’s mobilization of state troops to block the students’ entry was just the first of many crises for her and the Little Rock Nine. The city’s White Citizens Council, formed to oppose integration, distributed handbills portraying her as a criminal because of the prior unjust detentions. The city council ordered her arrest for failing to provide detailed information about the NAACP branch’s membership and finances. She and her husband had to hire armed guards to protect their home. After President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne, Bates had to personally travel to the Little Rock Nine’s homes in the middle of the night to let the families know they could come to school.
Yet entry into Central High was far from the end of the integration struggle. The students faced unrelenting verbal abuse, and, in some cases, physical violence. School officials were eager to use any pretext to discipline the black students, which placed an extraordinary burden on them—even a modicum of self-defense or instinctive retaliation would be grounds for expulsion. Bates knew that if the students could not finish the academic year, not only would their bid to get an equal education be quashed, but also the national campaign to make the Brown decision a reality. As she wrote in her memoir, “Each day after school I sat with the embattled nine in the quiet basement of my home . . . these meetings were not unlike group therapy. In relating the day’s experiences, all the suppressed emotions within these children came tumbling out.” On one especially dangerous day, two of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown and Melba Pattillo, feared for their lives. Could they seek help from school officials? They didn’t dare try. “Let’s call Mrs. Bates,” Melba remembered saying. “Maybe she can talk to the army or reporters or the President.” Although Bates didn’t have a direct line to the president, the girl’s faith wasn’t misplaced. Every day, Bates was there for the Little Rock Nine. As the harassment intensified, she went to the school and demanded that stronger measures be taken against white offenders. When the school year ended in May 1955, eight of the nine had successfully completed their grade.
In his recent history of the modern Civil Rights Movement, historian Thomas E. Ricks astutely observes that, like an effective military force, the Movement depended on self-discipline, “of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one’s own emotions and fears in order to serve a greater good.” Of course, strong leaders nurture self-discipline among their “troops” by modeling restraint as well as courage. For the Little Rock Nine, and the nation, Daisy Bates set that example. As the Chicago Defender reported, “If there had been no Daisy Bates there would have been no 101st Airborne Division patrolling the halls at Central H.S. And no nine negro children in the once all-white high school.”
David Krugler during a MAHG class. Professor David Krugler (University of Wisconsin, Platteville) is the author of 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2015) as well as of two books on US policy during the Cold War. He edited TAH’s core document collection, The Cold War (2018), and has also written two World War II spy thrillers, The Dead Don’t Bleed (2016) and Rip the Angels from Heaven (2018), both published by Pegasus Crime.
Bibliography
Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. New York: D. McKay, 1962; reprint, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.
Interview with Daisy Bates. Southern Oral History Program Collection, October 11, 1976. Interview G-0009. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0009/menu.html
Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976.
Poston, Ted. “A Woman Who Dared . . . Mrs. Daisy Bates.” Chicago Defender, December 4, 1957.
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Discussion of primary documents. A supportive and engaged group of educators. Historic locations. Free professional development. What more could you ask for?
Applications open soon for our Spring 2025 Multi Day Seminars! We are hosting seminars on a variety of topics in American history and politics. The application will be open September 9-29, 2024. Some of our topics include:
- Security, Self Determination, and Empire: The Grand Alliance, 1941-1945 at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA.
- Controversy, Consensus, and Compromise in the American Founding, at Pima Air & Space Museum in Tuscon, AZ.
- The End of the Cold War and the Challenge of the Nineties at George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum in College Station, TX.
- Born Into Conflict: The United States and American Indians at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, FL.
- How Congress Began at National Constitution Center & Independence Hall National Historic Park in Philadelphia, PA.
- Salem Witch Trials at Salem Witch Museum in Salem, MA.
- Andrew Jackson at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage in Nashville, TN.
- Ellis Island: 19th & Early 20th Century Immigration at Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in Newark, NJ.
TAH Teachers at a Multi Day Seminar in Kansas City, MO at the WWI MuseumEach Multi-Day seminar runs for three days and brings together a small group of teachers from around the country. During the seminar, the teachers discuss primary documents on the seminar topic with the guidance of a scholar, who acts as the seminar leader. The seminar also includes a visit to a local historical site. See a sample itinerary here.
TAH Teachers at a Multi Day Seminar in Angel Island, CA in August 2024. Teaching American History hosts Multi-Day seminars at no cost to American history and government teachers. Meals, materials, double-occupancy rooms, and historical site visits are covered 100%. At the end of each course, teacher participants receive a letter of participation for 15 contact hours and a $600 stipend to help defray travel costs or other expenses.
For more information about our Multi-Day seminars and to see the schedule of events please click here. Have more questions? Click here.
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This summer marks the sixtieth anniversary of a watershed season of civil rights organizing across the state of Mississippi. Referenced internally as the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and advertised as the Mississippi Freedom Project, this period has since been memorialized as Freedom Summer. The effort sought to democratize the state that Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, called “the most savage uncivilized state in the entire fifty states.” A turning point in civil rights strategy, Freedom Summer operated at a greater scale of magnitude and complexity than previous efforts. In a summer of activism bookended by tragedy at its beginning and a political showdown 1000 miles away from Mississippi at its close, Freedom Summer cemented the fight for civil rights and the power of student movements in stoking institutional change.
While the work of civil rights activism was urgent throughout the Jim Crow South, Freedom Summer organizers recognized the Mississippi of 1964 as a distinctlyheatedplace and time. Mississippi was the site of the most notorious lynching in the early civil rights movement, the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and had the highest rates of lynching in the country — violence meant to impose social, economic, and political intimidation. Add to this violence the pervasive harassment of black residents, along with numerous formal acts of repression, and it is clear why activists deemed Mississippi a crucial, yet perilous, site for resistance. As organizer Curtis Hayes put it, “If we were going to fight for freedom, Mississippi was the test. You had to break Mississippi.”
The potential and peril of activism in Mississippi had been evident in the years leading up to 1964. Young Mississippians, organized and recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participated in the Sit-in Movement. Concurrently, civil rights activists in Mississippi participated in a series of “Wade-Ins” to integrate public beaches, “Read-Ins” to desegregate public libraries, and “Pray-Ins” at all-white churches. This ascendant energy, largely driven by students at historically black colleges like Tougaloo in Jackson, increased regional coverage of the movement and boosted momentum. And yet for many activists, the attention and momentum had not yet built to a level they felt suited the scale and urgency of the Mississippi challenge.
Then came the assassination of Medgar Evers, Field Secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, in June 1963 — the most high-profile murder of a civil rights activist to that date. This act, combined with murders of organizers who sought to register black Mississipians to vote, fortified activists’ resolve to democratize the state during the following summer.
Teachers at the Freedom Schools Convention in Meridian, Mississippi during Freedom Summer, 1964. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical society.Mississippi organizers knew that a project worthy of their ambitions would require a novel approach and greater scale of organizing than they had yet employed. In 1961, the Mississippi chapters of the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE (in conjunction with other local groups) had begun coordinating voter outreach and registration efforts through an umbrella coalition, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). This alliance would be crucial to coordinating the 1964 Summer Project, resourcinginstitutional memory and best practices while also tapping into an established and committed grassroots network that operated out of churches, storefronts, community centers, and private homes throughout Mississippi’s black communities.
COFO organized intricate transportation and communication networks and recruited dedicated activists. Organizations beyond Mississippi, such as the Northern Student Movement, responded, leading the national recruitment of college students for the Summer Project. They also collaborated with the National Council of Churches (NCC) to coordinate training for these volunteers. The young volunteers were joined in Mississippi by over 250 NCC-sponsored clergy, along with hundreds of legal and healthcare professionals. Myriad organizations were aligned, focused, and mobilized to support COFO’s goals.
The most controversial strategy of the Summer Project was COFO’s decision to invite white students to participate. Critics both worried about the blowback from endangering white students and feared the repercussions ofpotentially reckless and ignorant white volunteers visiting Mississippi on what might amount to a glorified “service project” for them. Ultimately, the perspective of Bob Moses — a Harvard-educated math teacher and organizer from Harlem (and the man most identified with Freedom Summer’s field operation) won out. As Moses maintained, “These students bring the rest of the country with them. They’re from good schools and their parents are influential. The interest of the country is awakened and … the government responds.” Moses knew that activist efforts and the subsequent assaults that followed often struggled for recognition beyond the black press, and would gain a greater spotlight through interracial allyship. However, both critics and supporters of the invitation insisted that the Summer Project weed out applicants with any hint of ulterior or cynical agendas, and that field secretaries communicate to white volunteers, in no uncertain terms, the stakes of the Summer Project’s work.
Close experience of Mississippi’s struggles made the stakes of the Summer Project tragically, vividly, and starkly clear.Just one day after the first wave of white volunteers arrived to assist in voter mobilization, three volunteers already working on the ground — black Mississippian James Chaney and white New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — went missing. COFO immediately contacted federal law enforcement and the national media to demand and publicize a manhunt. Movement pressure forced the FBI to open an office in Jackson that summer, and compelled Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson to cooperate in the search as well. In the course of the investigation, and before discovering the bodies of the three civil rights workers six weeks later, law enforcement discovered eight more murdered young black men, whose disappearances had not been investigated. (Many of these victims still have not been identified decades later.) Now no one could denythe peril of their summer mission. But the revelations strengthened the overwhelming majority of volunteers in their sense of purpose. Intentions matured into resolve.
While the Summer Project contained numerous facets, they were all united by the motif of freedom. In the Fall of 1963, black Mississippians had begun to refer to their political participation as “Freedom Votes” and by early 1964 were drawing local media attention to “Freedom Days” of voter registration. Summer Project workers lived and worked in rented or donated spaces that became known as “Freedom Houses.” Volunteers who came to Mississippi after the initial June wave often assisted the ongoing civic and practical education taking place in “Freedom Schools.” Permeating all of this work, in all of these spaces and beyond, were the “Freedom Songs” of joy, solidarity, and determination — expressions of collective purpose that acted as their own form of resistance.
Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Courtesy of Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/. The best known of these “freedom facets” is also the most immediately politically consequential one: the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Just as other parts of the Summer Project fought to democratize the citizenry, the MFDP fought to democratize the state’s dominant political institutions. While black voters in Great Migration cities had gravitated toward the Democratic Party during the New Deal, in the South the party had long been a bastion of unreconstructed Southerners and Jim Crow enforcers, with no black representation whatsoever in Mississippi. The Freedom Democrats mirrored the procedures of the state’s official Democratic Party as closely as possible — from paperwork, to precinct meetings, to delegation selection — with the crucial modificationof making each of these processes open and inclusive, the goal being to seat a more representative delegation as the official Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that August.
Continuing to adhere scrupulously to party procedures, the MFDP arrived in Atlantic City intending to persuade the convention’s credentials committee that, as the only Mississippi delegates selected through an open and transparent process, they were the rightful representatives of the state’s best interests. They entered the convention with public sympathy on their side; the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman (murdered at the beginning of the Summer Project) were discovered two days before the convention’s start, refocusing national attention on the cause. And with the MFDP’s chosen lead petitioner to the credentials committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, they found a forceful appeal to hearts and minds.The most famous figure to rise to national attention during Freedom Summer, Hamer had been repeatedly terrorized and arrested for her activity in voter mobilization efforts. In her speech at the DNC on August 22, she detailed abuses she and other activists had suffered before closing with a pointed challenge tothe committee:
… if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Hamer’s speech further swayed public sympathy for the MFDP. While President Lyndon Johnson had been making significant steps in recognizing civil rights, including signing the CIvil Rights Act earlier in the summer, he feared the electoral consequences of supporting the MFDP. At his insistence, the DNC delayed a recognition vote (to cool the emotions Hamer aroused), then offered a compromise: the DNC would recognize two MFDP delegates (one black member, one white member) in a ceremonial capacity and promise larger structural change and greater inclusion at future conventions. The compromise satisfied neither the MFDP (who rejected it and continued to protest) nor the all-white official state party (all but a handful leaving in outrage). Johnson’s political maneuvering on this front proved for naught: while he defeated Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in a landslide in the November general election, he ultimately lost Mississippi and four other Deep South states.
Many of the most impactful feats of activism demonstrate powerful combinations of protest and partnership, resistance and coordination. Freedom Summer shows how such cooperation bears fruit. The project drew on a vast network of interpersonal and organizational partnerships, involving a cast of thousands. The creativity, discipline, and courage of the participants galvanized future efforts in the civil rights and student movements. While Freedom Summer’s voter registration efforts ultimately fell short of organizational ambitions, it inspired future mobilization efforts in Mississippi and beyond. It fed the momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Finally, its institutional challenge at the DNC precipitated changes in both the delegation practices and in the very composition of the Democratic Party.
ADDITIONAL WORKS CONSULTED
Biewen, John, host/producer. “Freedom Summer.” Scene On Radio. Season 4, Episode 7. Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. April 2020. Podcast.
Dittmer, John. Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Illinois Press, 1995
“Freedom Summer, 1964.” History this Week. The History Channel. June 2020. Podcast.
“I Question America: 1963-1964.” Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Jackson, MS. Visited on-site June 2024.
SNCC & Grassroots Organizing: Interpretive Booklet. SNCC Legacy Project. 2024.
Malik Ali teaching.Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.
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We were sad to learn last week that Mike Bisenius, a 2022 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program, has passed away after a brief, intense illness. Mike was a highly dedicated teacher. Last fall we ran a story about Mike, who’d been named 2023 North Dakota History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Foundation. In memory of Mike Bisenius, we present an excerpt from the story. Written in his own words, it shows his thoughtful, resourceful approach to teaching. Our deepest sympathy to Mike’s family, friends, students, and colleagues.
Because of a refugee resettlement program in our community, our students are aware of the world outside of North Dakota. A number of my students immigrated here with their families from places like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Somalia. I ask them about their experiences; it helps to put American history and government into perspective for everyone in the class. At one time, I taught a class for English Language Learners (ELL) only. I tried to get their parents involved—I would tell students, on the first day of class: “Ask your parents to describe what government was like in the country you came from. How did the laws work there?” Many came back to class reporting that their parents fled their countries for religious reasons. For example, students from Nepal or Bhutan explained that their families had been promised religious tolerance by the government, then a new government took over and withdrew that tolerance. Other students’ families had gotten caught in the crossfire of tribal wars, because they belonged to neither side of the conflict.
Mike Bisenius, 2023 North Dakota History Teacher of the YearOccasionally, if I stepped out of my classroom between periods, a fight would break out. Once I entered the room to find a tiny girl lifting her desk, preparing to hurl it at a boy. She had already thrown her shoes and books at him. I don’t know what he’d said to her, but I knew some of my students had grown up in refugee camps where boys had learned not to respect women. This girl probably had been abused. All the students were yelling, in their own languages, and I had no idea what anyone was saying. So, I began yelling at them in the bit of Norwegian I’d learned from my immigrant grandmother. Suddenly they stopped and looked at me, like, “What are you doing, Mr. Bisenius?” I said, “Well, I got your attention.” I sent the boy to the principal’s office and the girl to an ELL room where there were teachers who knew her well and could help her calm down, and then class began. . . .
. . . I hope students leave my classroom unafraid to ask questions—especially to ask “Why?”—the question I so often ask when they state their opinions. . . . Kids may get frustrated when I ask them “Why?”— but later, they appreciate it. A few years back, my family and I were out eating supper. Although I didn’t see him, a former student saw me in the restaurant and paid for our dinner. I wish I knew who that student was; I would love to thank him.
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Staff and faculty members at Teaching American History have heard from our teacher partners that they want nonpartisan election resources that elevate classroom discourse beyond political bickering and horse race coverage.
2024 marks the 60th time that Americans have gone to the polls to elect a new president. To support our teacher audience through the election, we created our Fall 2024 Saturday webinar series: American Political Rhetoric. Created to help American government and history teachers find connections between current and past presidential elections, this webinar series will cover topics like communication technology’s impact on political speech; the role of the president as both a political leader and the government’s chief executive; and the constant but evolving presence of America’s founding ideals in political rhetoric.
Our webinars meet monthly on select Saturday mornings from 10.45am – 12pm ET. Background readings, a pre-webinar discussion board, and links to webinar recordings and relevant primary sources will be made available to registrants. Those who remain digitally present for the duration of the conversation will receive an attendance letter from Teaching American History for 1.25 hours of professional development.
Register now for this free professional development by clicking on the links below!
· Saturday, August 24th – American Political Rhetoric and the Declaration of Independence· Saturday, September 14th – Pins, Likes and Swipes: How Social Media has Affected Political Rhetoric· Saturday, October 26th – The Language of Campaigning vs. Governing· Saturday, November 16th – Rhetoric in Times of Crisis· Saturday, December 14th – The Language of America’s Civil ReligionLooking for Nonpartisan Primary Sources for your Classroom?Check out Teaching American History’s core document volumes on Political Parties and the American Presidency
American Presidency covers not only the role of the executive branch in our constitutional order, but also the specific questions of presidential selection, term limits, and impeachment. Its documents also explore the president’s responsibility to oversee the executive branch and his authority as commander in chief and in regard to foreign policy.
Political Parties begins with James Madison’s commentary on the unavoidable but dangerous nature of parties and ends with the Supreme Court’s opinion expanding access to legitimate sources of funding for political party activities in Citizens United.
Want More Background on Controversial Elections?From Bullets to Ballots: The Election of 1800 and the First Peaceful Transfer of Political Powerrecounts the contentious political history of the late 1790s and America’s first political realignment. This concise history is perhaps the best account we have of the election of 1800.
Want to Broaden your Students’ Understanding of Election History?Teaching American History’s exhibit, The Election of 1912, recounts the history of this three-way election with data, maps, images, historical essays and primary sources.
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Good teachers respond to the needs of the students they seek to educate. Yet in their approach to this task, they are also responsible to administrators, parents, school boards—and, increasingly, to state and federal courts. Since the middle of the twentieth century, “seemingly no aspect of education policy has been too insignificant to escape judicial oversight,” writes Professor Joshua Dunn, in a 2008 essay he coauthored with Martin R. West, “The Supreme Court as School Board Revisited.” Little wonder that Dunn’s course in this year’s summer residential Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program, “From Courthouse to Schoolhouse,” drew teachers from urban and rural areas across the country. All wanted to better understand the court’s jurisprudence on education issues, including school financing; students,’ parents’ and teachers’ rights; and local citizens’ oversight of the education offered in their communities. “The course covers the history of the judiciary’s involvement in education, helping us better understand policies followed today,” said a teacher in the course. “But it also covers issues that are still being litigated.”
The Impact and Limits of Judicial Power
The earliest case teachers discussed in the course—Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—established the precedent of racially “separate but equal” public accommodations that was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education(1954), probably the most consequential Supreme Court ruling on education to date. After discussing Brown, teachers went on to discuss later, related cases. These ruled on the constitutionality of a number of complicated desegregation plans devised for large urban areas with segregated housing patterns. Professor Dunn’s first book, Complex Justice(2008), examines the 1995 case of Missouri v. Jenkins, in which the court found that a desegregation plan devised for Kansas City by a federal district court did little to improve the quality of education in the district and the racial isolation of the students despite spending over $2 billion. In the end, a coalition of black parents led an effort to take over the school board and end judicial supervision.
As Dan Hogan of Illinois comments on a Supreme Court decision, Heather Merckens (OH), Cathy Alderman (CA), and Professor Dunn listen.As the above examples suggest, to study the court’s jurisprudence on education issues is to trace several threads in the country’s ongoing conversation over how best to achieve our national ideals of liberty and equality. But it is also to explore the limits of judicial power to achieve these ideals. To some extent, courts are equipped to rule on the intent behind educational policy—whether that intent accords with Constitutional guarantees of citizens’ rights. But they are not well equipped to judge which policies will best achieve the educational outcomes that one hopes would result from good intentions. As a result, court rulings on educational policy and practice may seem, to the public eye, to swing from one extreme to another, sometimes, for example, upholding school busing to achieve racial integration and sometimes forbidding it. This happens because the public tends to focus on the hated expedient—busing—to achieve an end such as equal education for all, instead of focusing on the desired outcome, which is hard even for educational experts to guarantee or measure.
First Amendment Freedoms in Schools
Another set of recent cases the course examined involved the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and religion. This was the theme of the most recent cases the teachers read. Mahanoy v. B.L., decided in 2021, upheld a student’s right to free speech outside of school hours and off of the school campus. Two cases, both decided in June 2022, concerned religious establishment and free religious expression in the educational context. In Carson v. Makin, the majority ruled that a state-funded tuition voucher program in Maine could be used to finance children’s education in religious schools without violating the Establishment Clause and that refusing to do so while funding vouchers for nonreligious schools violated the Free Exercise Clause. In Kennedy v. Bremerton the majority ruled that the firing of a football coach who led players in voluntary prayer on the football field following games violated the coach’s right to free religious expression.
Several earlier cases covered in the course involving First Amendment freedoms might seem, to the casual observer, to have upheld opposite perspectives. Earlier cases involving religious establishment took positions unfavorable to educational policies influenced by the religious motives of the policymakers. These included Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), which overturned an Arkansas state law prohibiting the teaching of human evolutionary theory, and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), which invalidated a later Louisiana state law requiring that the teaching of human evolutionary theory be accompanied by instruction in the theory of “creation science.” In these cases, the court reasoned that the laws were made to propagate the lawmakers’ religious agendas. A case bearing on students’ free speech rights, Bethel v. Fraser(1986), upheld the suspension of a student who used vulgar and offensive language in a speech he made at a school assembly. But in this case, the critical fact was that the student used offensive language on school property and during a school-sponsored event. The court reasoned that it is proper for schools to uphold standards of civil speech during school activities. Teaching students to use civil speech is part of the public schools’ overall mission to teach responsible citizenship.
Lively But Respectful Discussions
Dunn asked each teacher enrolled in the course to “brief” two of the cases covered in the course. For each briefing, teachers prepared a two-page summary explaining the historical background of the case; lower court rulings on it; the arguments presented when the case reached the Supreme Court; the legal question central to the case; and the court’s decision, along with the reasoning in the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions. Teachers proved themselves adept at locating justices’ most incisive and telling commentary. Then they opened the class discussion of the case, asking questions that related the case to others they had discussed.
Lively but respectful discussions occurred when teachers from different parts of the country with differing cultural expectations disagreed on the soundness of the majority opinions. For example, a teacher from New Jersey briefed a case involving books removed from school libraries, Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982). In its opinion, the court ruled that a school board could not ban books it deemed offensive from school libraries.
Heather Merckens of Ohio, Cathy Alderman of California, Professor Joshua Dunn, and Casey Enright of Arizona. Mercken and Alderman, graduates of MAHG, returned to campus to audit Dunn’s course.One teacher from Utah wondered whether, instead of speaking of “banned” books, one should speak of “curated collections” of books. Was it not the school’s responsibility to decide which books were of greatest educational value? If students wanted to read books outside this collection, they might find them in the local public library. The teacher from New Jersey objected to this view, arguing that in the case of students with limited transportation options, school libraries provided their only access to books that fell outside of the school culture’s norms. The remaining teachers in the course fell on both sides of the question.
Conflicting Opinions, Yet Far-reaching Consequences
Despite the limits of judicial power to achieve desired results, the teachers in the course concluded that the judiciary’s involvement in education has far-reaching consequences. This occurs even when the Court’s decisions in a given era appear inconsistent. Confusion over the court’s actual position can lead to “defensive teaching,” or the avoidance of topics and reading selections that could provoke parental disapproval and possibly lead to legal challenges. Teachers afraid of this may steer an unnecessarily wide path around painful history that needs to be discussed. Examining cases involving teacher dismissals helped clarify the issues that teachers taking the course really needed to worry about.
Several government teachers looked forward to sharing with their students what they were learning about landmark court cases involving education. The course would expand their curricular options, they said; they would ask their students to analyze and discuss the justices’ often conflicting opinions. He felt he could encourage lively but respectful discussions like those in the MAHG class, “if we stick to the constitutional issues,” he said.
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On Independence Day, we watched a “bipartisan reading of the Declaration of Independence” organized by legislator and educator Sean Brennan, representative to Ohio’s House of Representatives for District 14. Ohio House members from both sides of the aisle took turns reading the Declaration from its opening, “When in the course of human events,” through its closing pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” along with the names of its signatories. The reading typifies Brennan’s creative approach to public service. It also suggests his effectiveness; Brennan’s colleagues read the Declaration clearly, expressively, and without a stumble.
Sean BrennanBrennan, a frequent participant in Teaching American History seminars, has long promoted civic education and civil cooperation at the local and state level. For nearly two decades, he served on the city council of Parma, Ohio’s 7th-largest city. His service included a decade as the at-large elected Parma Council President, a role in which he chaired council deliberations. He carried on this work while teaching government and an elective course in constitutional, civil and criminal law at Brecksville-Broadview High School. “Being on the Council furnished endless lessons for my classes,” he said. At the same time, Brennan’s teaching work allowed him to share the views of a younger generation with the older citizens of Parma.
In 2020, Brennan began bringing local naturalization ceremonies into the high school. He wanted students to understand the careful process through which immigrants become citizens. He involved students in planning school assemblies during which new citizens publicly pledged, as is customary, to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” and to perform military or other service when the law so requires. Prior to the pledge, the school choir sang, a film celebrating the arrival of immigrants at Ellis Island was shown, and prominent local citizens from immigrant families gave speeches about their own experience of becoming American. Before these assemblies, “some students didn’t even know what naturalization was! Now they will never forget,” Brennan said.
These events typify Brennan’s creative approach to public service. As a legislator and educator, he’s spent his career reaching across generational, ethnic, religious, and partisan lines to carry out projects that serve the whole community. He’s often worked with private charities on such projects. A runner, he led in the creation of the annual Parma Run-Walk for Pierogies, which raises money for local scholarships and an all-faith food pantry. As a teacher, he appreciated Teaching American History’s free seminars featuring scholar-led discussion of primary documents. In his teaching he used only primary documents, knowing from his city council experience that they “are the materials you deal with when you are trying to solve political and social problems.” Now, as a full-time legislator, he is “working hard to build trust with my colleagues and to honorably serve the people to the best of my ability.”
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Teaching American History emphasizes the use of primary documents. Why, then, is Teaching American History publishing a series of narrative histories?
In case you didn’t know about the narrative histories, let me describe them, before I explain them. There will be six:
- Discovery and Settlement
- The Founding, 1789–1800
- Civil War, 1850–1876
- The Emergence of Modern America, 1880–1920
- The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929–1939
- America in the Age of the Vietnam War, 1960–1980
Each volume covers a critical period in American history (are there any periods that weren’t?). The subtitle of each is “A Concise History,” because that is what each will be. John Moser’s history of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the only one published so far, is 145 pages. In that brief space, John narrates what happened in the ten years he covers. He tells the story of the economic crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929, the efforts of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt to address it, and the economic and political changes wrought in the United States by Roosevelt’s New Deal. In doing so, he reviews the various interpretations offered by the participants in the events he narrates and those who subsequently studied them. In all of this, his narrative is tied to and helps readers understand the 43 primary documents in The New Deal and the Great Depression: Core Documents that John also edited.
But why does TAH offer John’s narrative (and the others), if primary documents are so important?
The idea for the narrative histories came from the experience of teaching the MAHG course on the American Revolution. Several teachers who took the course mentioned that Gordon Wood’s short volume The American Revolution, which was part of the assigned reading, was helpful to them because they did not have an overview of the period and Wood’s book provided it. Talking to them it, we realized that by an “overview” they meant at least three things.
First, they meant a chronology of events, a clear statement of what happened before and after a specific primary document. The chronology helps in understanding the significance of the document, why it was written and what effects it may have helped produce. For example, John’s documentary history contains two documents on the relationship of African Americans to the New Deal. Both provide insight into specific aspects of black life during the depression. John’s narrative places what those documents tell us in the longer-term movement of black voters from the Republican party to the Democratic party. This movement has had a significant effect on American political life ever since. John’s narrative helps us understand why those two primary documents were written. It helps us look forward to the post World War II civil rights movement, even though Roosevelt himself was for political reasons guarded in his dealings with the issue of black civil rights.
Second, the author of a primary document is always aware of more about his current circumstances than a reader many years later will be. As the New Deal continued, for example, Roosevelt was quite aware of his critics, but he did not necessarily even mention them, let alone describe their criticisms accurately or fairly in detail in his speeches. John’s documentary history of the Depression and New Deal includes some of the critics, of course, but his narrative account gives all of them, including extremists of the left and right, due consideration. In doing so, he allows us to better judge FDR’s political maneuvering to deal with them. Ultimately, the context John provides allows us to weigh the argument that the New Deal saved democratic capitalism rather than undermined it.
Finally, as the second reason for the narrative histories suggests, the narrative and the documents work together and allow us to question each more thoroughly. Readers who work through the primary documents will be able to question John’s narrative, just as reading the narrative will allow them to return to the documents with the knowledge they need to better question and evaluate what each author says.
This process of reciprocal questioning is like what happens or should happen in the discussions we have in our MAHG classes and in our one day and multiday seminars.
As these reasons suggest, the narrative and the documentary histories are meant to work together to deepen our understanding of the period they treat. To that end, each narrative history includes a chronology and an appendix that lists by chapter the primary documents from the corresponding documentary history discussed in that chapter. Each of the narrative histories, with the exception of the Founding, will be written by the editor of the corresponding core document collection. The next two to appear (both in the 2024-25 academic year) are The Emergence of Modern America and America in the Age of the Vietnam War.
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On this date (June 25th) in 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928, authorizing construction by the federal government of a gigantic dam on the Colorado River, just west of the Grand Canyon. The dam, which would eventually be named after Hoover, took five years to complete, at a then unprecedented cost of $49 million (about $900 million today). When finished, it rose higher than any dam ever before built and enabled the construction of what was then the world’s largest power plant, as well as of the “All-American Canal,” which would carry water from the reservoir the dam created to California’s Central Valley. This allowed California to become a major producer of the fresh produce that now feeds the nation. Most interesting, the building of the Hoover Dam illustrates the unusual and problematic way water rights in the west are determined.
Why the Dam Was BuiltSuch a project had been recommended by the US Bureau of Reclamation as early as 1919. In the beginning, it was conceived primarily as a flood control measure, since periodic spring flooding on the Colorado had been known to inundate California farmlands as far as eighty miles distant from the river’s normal banks. By the time the Act was passed, the dam was also seen as a way of storing water for use in dry years and as a source of hydroelectric power for a rapidly growing population in the southwestern region of the country.
The act followed lengthy and difficult negotiations among the seven states that shared portions of the Colorado River Basin: the “upper basin” states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico; and the “lower basin” states of California, Nevada, and Arizona. (The division between upper and lower basins resulted from the topography of the Colorado River canyon, which was unusually steep, except at Lee’s Ferry, a point just upstream of the Grand Canyon, very near the border between Utah and Arizona. Only at Lee’s Ferry had those journeying southwest from Colorado been able to cross the Colorado River, so as to stake claims and settle in Arizona and New Mexico.)
A Compact Among Seven StatesHerbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce under Warren G. Harding, was appointed chair of the Colorado River Commission, which was charged with finding an equitable way of allocating the water resources among the seven states. Compacts between states were authorized by Article I, Section 10, clause 3 of the Constitution, which also specified that such compacts had to be approved by Congress. Never before had a compact been formed among so many states. Hoover would need to convince the delegates of each state to reach an agreement that would then be ratified by their state legislatures; then the agreement would have to be made official through an act of Congress.
Hoover had experience managing projects combining technical and political difficulties. After making a fortune as a mining engineer, he had organized an effort to provide food to occupied Belgium during the first world war. Later, he’d headed the American Relief Organization, which provided food to post-war Central and Eastern Europe. As chair of the new commission, Hoover spent six months in fruitless meetings, failing to persuade the state delegates to accept an equitable division of the water that would be stored behind the proposed dam. What finally persuaded the upper basin states to work out a compact with the lower basin states was a 1922 Supreme Court decision on a case involving a dispute between Colorado and Wyoming over use of the water in the Laramie River. To understand that decision, and to understand why seven western states needed to negotiate a compact to be sure to have the water they needed, one needs to understand how water rights in the west are granted.
First in Time, First in RightSince the beginning of gold and silver mining operations in the western states, water rights had been claimed and held in a way that differed from the practice elsewhere in the country. In the east, those who owned land owned the right to draw enough water to irrigate their crops from rivers that crossed their land; frequent rains meant that there would usually be adequate water for those downriver. In the west, water was claimed as property independently of land. This happened because mining operations often used sluices to separate ore from the dirt or mud in which it was found, and the water needed to operate the sluices was often drawn from sources distant to the vein being mined. In time, a legal doctrine developed that gave the right to use any source of water to the first who claimed it, as long as that owner used the entire amount he claimed. If he used less in a given year, he could thereafter claim only the reduced amount.
Within western states, this practice of giving first rights to the first claimants helped to clarify who had a right to water in a region where dry conditions meant there was rarely enough for everyone who wanted it. It remained to be resolved what would happen if two states disputed the right to draw water from a river that ran through both. The Supreme Court declared in 1922 that in interstate disputes, also, the right to first draw water from a river was held by the first claimants. Since California had been settled prior to the southwestern states, this meant that California had a stronger claim on Colorado River water than the other states through which the Colorado flowed. The Court’s decision persuaded those states to cooperate with the Colorado River Commission, since they were more likely to get the water they needed through a negotiated process than through a judicial one.
Hoover summoned the delegates to the Colorado River Commission to a meeting at Bishop’s Lodge, a ranch in New Mexico accessible from Santa Fe only via several hours of driving on bad roads. He wanted to shield the delegates from the denunciations they’d receive at home if the concessions they made were reported. This strategy worked. The US Geological survey had estimated the annual flow of water through the Colorado River at 16.5 million acre-feet (MAF). The commissioners agreed to allocate 7.5 MAF to the upper basin states and 7.5 MAF to the lower basin states, leaving 1.5 MAF to be left to flow into Mexico. The agreement depended on California’s pledge to claim only the amount of water it was already drawing, 4.4 MAF. The compact was later ratified by six of the seven states concerned, Arizona being the lone hold-out. After the commission agreed to overlook Arizona’s refusal of the compact, Congress drafted the law that authorized building of the dam.
Constructing the DamThe Bureau of Reclamation supervised the construction, which occurred between 1931 and 1936. More than 100 of the thousands who worked on the project died on the job. The finished structure was named the Boulder Dam by the Roosevelt administration, although in 1947 an act of Congress renamed it the Hoover Dam.
Those building the dam endured extremely high summer temperatures and often worked at high elevations, without protective gear. “Boulder Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, Sept. 1934–Workman attaching cables to an eight cubic yard capacity concrete bucket at a transfer station on the Nevada rim of Black Canyon,” Library of Congress, 1934. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96522429/A concrete gravity-arch structure that is 726.4 feet tall and 1244 feet long, the dam was built to hold over 28 MAF in the reservoir, Lake Mead, that it created. Today it holds less than 16 MAF. It turns out that the US Geological Survey greatly overestimated the annual water flow of the Colorado, having based its estimate on several years in the early twentieth century when rain and snowfall were heavier than at any time since the 1400s (tree ring analyses have helped to establish precipitation in centuries before records were kept). In recent years, water drawn from the reservoir has included water stored in prior years, and the level of Lake Mead is dropping.
Although the Hoover Dam remains the largest dam in the US, there are now fourteen other large dams on the Colorado River, including the Glen Canyon dam, located at Lee’s Ferry. Each captures water and generates hydroelectric power for the growing demands of towns and cities along the river’s route. The river is drawn from so heavily that it peters out in the Sonoran Desert several miles short of what was once its mouth in the Sea of Cortez.
For Further Reading:Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers. Blackstone Publishing, 2021.
David Owen, Where the Water Goes : Life and Death Along the Colorado River. Riverhead Books, Reprint edition, 2018.
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin: Revised Edition, 1993.
The post Water Rights in the West: The Hoover Dam appeared first on Teaching American History.
Summer has arrived! And that means the pinnacle of TAH’s professional development for teachers has arrived as well: our Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program at Ashland University in Ashland, OH.
Every summer, hundreds of teachers from around the country join us for week-long classes on topics ranging from early American history to modern political institutions. The one day seminars we hold around the country provide in-depth learning from document-based discussions, but the experience is amplified during the summer residence program.
There’s the obvious benefit of more time than in our one day seminars, with several days to develop your expertise in the topics you’re interested in. But that’s just the start. Teachers and professors live together on campus, sharing meals and continuing the discussions outside of class. Add to this the serenity and seclusion of our campus, and it’s no wonder so many incredible teachers keep coming back every summer.
But all good things eventually end, and some of our students will be finishing their final classes this summer. Teachers at the end of the program can choose to complete either a traditional master’s thesis, a capstone project, or our qualifying exam. With the qualifying exam being the option most of our students choose, we’d like to take a look at the structure of this exam and how to perform well on it.
The exam will be released to students on a Friday, and they will have a little over two weeks to submit their final answers. The exam has two parts. The first part asks students to analyze a short text. The second part consists of four questions. Students answer two of these. The four questions cover a variety of topics, eras, or themes in American history and government. Each question has a corresponding document to analyze in your response.
Tips for Succeeding on the ExamThe first part of the exam comes with detailed instructions that describe what the analysis should consist of. The key is to focus on the argument in the document; don’t get lost in the weeds of irrelevant historical context for this part of the exam.
It’s common for teachers to overlook the arguments in the document. Frequently, teachers will try to do too much and forget to provide this basic analysis. They dive right into the historical context or how the document fits into a larger debate and neglect to take a close look at the document itself.
While the historical context is relevant to the question being asked, it’s important to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the document itself. For what purpose was it written? Who was its intended audience? What effect did it have? One of the benefits to learning through primary sources is developing an ability to understand others as they would understand themselves, so set aside time to make sure you reveal this ability in your responses.
Another common danger teachers run into is running out of time to complete the essays. We encourage you to take full advantage of all three weekends between the release of the exam and its submission deadline. Start right away to give yourself time to proofread, revise, and edit later.
Save your notes from class! If you’re not a pack rat and can’t save them all, you should at least consider saving notes from the core or required courses in our program (501, 502, 503, 505, 506, and 507). These courses lay an excellent foundation for a deep understanding of the history and government of America. From the American Revolution through the Rise of Modern America, you’ll have plenty of material to draw from to help you answer the questions in your essay.
Take breaks in your writing to revisit later. It may feel like you won’t have time, but you’ll benefit from looking back over your work with a fresh set of eyes. This is also why it’s important to start writing that first weekend you get the questions. You need to have words on the page to work with later after you’ve had time to reflect more on the document and what you’d like to include about it.
Get feedback from the friends you’ve made in the program. We always encourage our students to form study groups for their classes on campus, so continue to make use of the connections you’ve made when working on this exam. Someone familiar with our classes will help you see if you’ve strayed into irrelevance in your answer.
It can also be helpful to try asking people with no knowledge of the topic to proofread your essay for you. English teachers you work with can offer valuable feedback on the coherence of your answers without getting lost in the technicalities of the content. Additional sets of eyes reading back through what you wrote will help you know whether you’ve fully addressed the prompt and thoroughly analyzed the document.
ConclusionThe Qualifying Exam may be intimidating, but as with all of the challenges in the MAHG program it’s also a rewarding way to finish your studies. It will remind you how much you learned over the years in our program, and you’ll leave with that familiar sense of pride when you push your brain to its limits thinking through topics worthy of serious study.
The post MAHG Qualifying Exam Tips appeared first on Teaching American History.
Summer’s here! Time to do that reading you put off during the school year. We asked teacher friends what they plan to read during the summer vacation. Most will delve into the complex and fascinating American story, reading books that will enrich their teaching for next year. If you are still looking for good reads, here are some ideas.
Some MAHG students and graduates of the program now have time to read books recommended by fellow students and professors. Tina Boudell will read American Colossus by HW Brands, which chronicles the rapid industrialization of America in the latter half of the 19th century and Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas Leonard. David Widenhofer will read The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party by Michael Holt. Professor Jeremy Bailey called it “the definitive work on the Whigs,” Widenhofer recalls, “and of course it will be loaded with lots of Henry Clay. Who needs another reason?” he asks.
Jody Glass is reading Gilbert Kings’s Devil in the Grove, a riveting account of Thurgood Marshall’s experience defending four young black men in Groveland, Florida, falsely charged with rape. “A friend from the MAHG program referred the book to me after many discussions on civil rights activism from Reconstruction to the modern Black Lives Matter movement we see today,” she said.
Several teachers are reading in preparation for summer teacher institutes. Both Kymberli Wregglesworth and Kelly Steffen will attend an NEH workshop at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, site of a World War II Japanese detention center. They are reading Shirley Higuchi’s Setsuko’s Secret and Sam Mihara’s Blindsided, among other books. In preparation for the 2024 Alexander Lebenstein Teacher Education Institute in Richmond, VA, Amy Livingston is reading Doris Bergen’s War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust.
Amber McMunn will attend an NEH institute on the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the effort that brought northern college students to Mississippi to help register African Americans to vote. She is reading Bruce Watson’s Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy and John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Tyler Nice, who will be attending an institute on the Civil War and Reconstruction at the University of Virginia, is reading The American War, by Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh, and Remembering the Civil War, by Caroline Janney.
Many teachers will pursue answers to Civil War-related questions. Both Adena Barnette-Miller and Jason Berling are reading The Demon of Unrestby Erik Larson, an account of the early days of the Civil War. Barnette-Miller, who now teaches a college course on West Virginia history, will also read Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War by Brent Tarter, which tells the story of George Berlin, delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 (which triggered the events leading to West Virginia statehood). Berlin began as an outspoken opponent of secession yet ultimately voted in favor of it. George Hawkins will read Thaddeus Stevens, Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine, along with Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s collection of The Classic Slave Narratives.
Greg Balan has been working toward a PhD at Liberty University. For a course on “The Development of Western Freedoms,” he’s reading Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom and Eicholz’s Harmonizing Sentiments, two books that he says attempt to define “the West” as a locus of political thought. Looking ahead to a dissertation on the origins of Southern pro-slavery arguments, he’ll be reading Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum Southby Keri Merritt and reading through the work of John C. Calhoun and James Henley Thornwell.
Great biographies, especially of presidents, always fascinate. Lucas George plans to read Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant “to enrich my classes with his Civil War experience” and consider “how his legacy has changed over time.” Brian Milliron will read An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life & Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford byRichard Norton Smith.
Brett Van Gaasbeek plans to read Tip and the Gipper, by Chris Matthews, which recounts the amical relationship between House Speaker Tip O’Neil and President Reagan “during the 1980s, when it seemed that politics didn’t need to be so combative.” Van Gaasbeek will also check out Stephen Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, to see what this MAHG professor he admires really “knows about the presidency.”
Speaking of books by beloved MAHG professors, Professor Marc Landy has co-authored with Dennis Hale a book that carefully considers criticisms of the US Constitution throughout our history yet finds good reasons to defend it: Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism.
“Border policies are a hot topic in the election year coming up,” Robin Deck Davis notes, so she will be reading Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzales. Spanning five centuries of Latino experience in the US, the book will enrich her knowledge of American history as a whole.
With this year marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Milliron and Berling look forward to reading about the challenges faced by those who fought in World War II. Milliron will dig into Forgotten Fifteenth: The Daring Airmen Who Crippled Hitler’s War Machine, by Barrett Tillman. Berling plans to read C. S. Forrester’s The Good Shepherd, an historical novel about a battleship captain trying to protect a convoy of ships from German U-boats during an Atlantic crossing. Meanwhile, Miles Matthews plans a trip into some of America’s most enduring and revealing narrative myths: The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s and 50s, published by the Library of America.
Both Nancie Lindblom and Anne Walker will read books exploring the influence of the Greek and Roman classics on the founders. Lindblom will read Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers by Carl J. Richard; Walker will read The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen. Vince Bradburn intends to immerse himself in one of those classic texts the founders read, Plato’s Republic. He also plans to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “I’ve chosen these two classics to revisit some essential questions on how best to organize society as well as order my individual life,” Bradburn wrote.
Carrie Huber recommends that everyone read Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes. The book delves into the earlier “history of resistance for the Oceti Sakowin of the Upper Midwest. The discussion of dams on the Missouri River and dislocation of Native peoples was both heartbreaking and fascinating.” Sonja Czarnecky will be slowly and carefully rereading a book she read quickly during her winter break: The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. “During my graduate study I kept wondering how encounters between white colonials and native Americans shaped the founding era and the later development of the United States . . . .This book attempts to tell that story,” she writes.
Even during summer, teachers continue thinking about their classrooms. Some look for insights into what is happening inside students’ heads. Berling will read The Anxious Generationby Jonathan Haidt, which discusses the effects of cell phones, social media, and internet access on young people. Lindblom will read Making Thinking Visibleby Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church. The book elaborates a set of “thinking routines” that can be used across disciplines and age levels to reveal how students think, guide their learning, and deepen their understanding.
Happy reading to all!
The post What’s Your Summer Reading? appeared first on Teaching American History.
Assault landing, one of the first waves at Omaha. The Coast Guard caption identifies the unit as Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. Photo courtesy of Center of Military HistoryThursday June 6, 2024 is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the day Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy to begin the “great and noble undertaking” of liberating Europe. We commemorate the anniversary with the words of General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces. The introduction that follows, and the words of Eisenhower, are from World War II: Core Documents, selected and introduced by Jennifer D. Keene.
June 6, 1944 (known as D-Day) the Allied Forces launched a series of attacks on German-occupied northern France. A massive naval armada crossed the English Channel and troops stormed the beaches at Normandy from amphibious landing vehicles. Bad weather compounded the logistical difficulties of attacking the well-defended shoreline. Uncertain whether the attack would succeed, Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) prepared two messages on June 5, 1944. One was distributed to troops right after Eisenhower made the decision to attack at dawn. The second he scribbled in private to be released if the attack failed. The attacks secured a beachhead, so this second message was never issued.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hand-written, unissued messageOur landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
The post The 80th Anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944 appeared first on Teaching American History.
On May 28, 1892, a group of university professors and interested citizens met in the San Francisco law office of Warren Olney to found what arguably became the nation’s most influential wilderness protection organization, the Sierra Club. Naturalist John Muir, whose popular magazine articles had done much to bring about the 1890 Congressional act creating Yosemite National Park, was unanimously named president of the new organization.
Muir in fact had been pressed into service by Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the influential New York magazine The Century. Johnson, intent on recruiting Muir to the preservationist movement, had traveled to California to meet Muir in 1889. By then, Muir had been writing articles advocating conservation—and, to the extent possible, preservation of virgin wilderness—for fifteen years, but he had never attempted to form a political advocacy group. Possessing an unusual mixture of idealism and pragmatism, along with a natural charm and affinity for storytelling, Muir seemed the ideal spokesman for the burgeoning wilderness preservation movement. Muir, however, did not at first see himself as such a leader.
A largely self-taught botanist and geologist, Muir would happily have spent his life engaged in wilderness rambling, feeding his intellectual curiosity and nurturing his spiritual affinity with wild places. When he was ten years old, his family immigrated to America and settled on wooded tract in Wisconsin. As a boy Muir delighted in woodland rambling; but as a young adolescent he was expected to cut trees, clearing the land for farming. He worked hard but rebelled inwardly at the destruction of a habitat unlike any he’d seen in Scotland, where most of the land had long been tamed to grazing and farming. Breaking free of the parental yoke, he pursued a science degree at the university in Madison, WI but never finished, setting out instead to tour American wilderness on foot. Eventually making his way to California, he found work in the Sierra Nevada as a sheepherder, operating a sawmill (in, of all places, Yosemite Valley, where he was hired to make board lumber of pines downed in a fierce winter storm), and manufacturing wooden farm implements.
These varied activities made him keenly aware of the rapid exploitation of the nation’s remaining western wilderness areas. Sheep devoured the native wildflowers and shrubs in the publicly owned lands the herders used; mining polluted the mountain streams salmon needed for spawning. Lumbermen were eagerly cutting the massive redwoods and sequoias, while other entrepreneurs squatted in these remarkable forests, building flimsy hotels in hopes of cornering a new tourist trade that had been encouraged by the work of artists like Albert Bierstadt and photographers like Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Muir began writing descriptions of western wilderness for the popular magazines. His articles as a roving correspondent for San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin and other papers earned him a national reputation, but he did not become financially secure until his late thirties, when he married the daughter of a fruit farmer in Martinez, California, and began managing the family’s extensive orchards and vineyards. The marriage brought him domestic happiness but did not prevent him from leaving home in between harvests to explore new wilderness, especially the coast of Alaska, where he pursued his interest in glaciers as agents of continuous geological change, a view that was controversial at the time.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and nature preservationist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. In the background: Upper and lower Yosemite Falls. Underwood and Underwood. Fast forward to June 1889, when Muir went to a San Francisco hotel for the meeting Robert Johnson had requested. Muir immediately persuaded Johnson to decamp via train to Yosemite Valley, where the men marveled at the majestic mountains peaks and deplored the squalid valley community they encircled. At the time, Yosemite was under the control of a California state commission. Johnson began urging Muir to write a series of articles for the Century that would persuade Congress to designate the area as a national park. Hesitantly, Muir began the work, finally producing a series that captured Yosemite’s beauty and proposed the projected park’s borders. In the meantime, others had been lobbying to protect the area, home to trees that predated the Christian era, a marvel that, once cut, could not soon be regrown. Those interested in promoting railway tourism supported the effort, as did lowland farmers who depended for irrigation on the Merced and Twolumne Rivers that flowed down from the area around Yosemite. Shortly after Muir’s articles appeared, Congress passed the bill, adopting the boundaries Muir proposed. Although nearly two million acres of forested land were thus protected, the valley at the center remained under control of the California state commission.
Albert Bierstadt, “Merced River, Yosemite Valley,” 1866. Metropolitan Museum of Art.The citizens meeting in Olney’s law office in 1892 felt the newly created park (along with a park in the southern Sierra later renamed Sequoia National Park, created by Congress just days before it protected Yosemite) needed a nongovernmental watchdog. Politicians would be subject to lobbying by commercial interests. Indeed, the Sierra Club was soon lobbying Congress to defeat a proposal to reduce the acreage of Yosemite National Park. The proposal, sprung from local business interests who were angry about the use of military patrols to protect the park from sheepherders and timber cutters, was defeated. Congress had voted to give the President authority to create national forest reserves in 1891, and Republican President Benjamin Harrison had soon thereafter used his power to set aside thirteen million acres. Muir himself felt that public forests (other than the ancient redwoods and sequoias) should be treated as “perennial fountains” and selectively harvested, with new planting to replace what was taken so that their usefulness could “be maintained unimpaired.” Throughout his life he balanced this pragmatic approach to conservation against an instinctual reverence for all living things that made him abhor sport hunting and reluctant even to crush a tarantula invading his campsite.
Muir remained President of the Sierra /Club until his death on December 24, 1914. Under his leadership, the Sierra Club did become an influential wilderness protection organization. It helped to persuade Congress to pass the 1905 American Antiquities Act, which allowed presidents to designate national “monuments” that preserved natural areas as landmarks of scientific, historic, and archaeological interest. This allowed Theodore Roosevelt to protect Mesa Verde, Devil’s Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Petrified National Forest. A year later, the club’s effort to get the valley at the center of Yosemite National Park under federal control passed Congress. Between 1908 and 1913, the club battled a proposal to build a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was within the boundaries of the Yosemite Park. Those urging the need to create a reliable water supply for San Francisco prevailed, leaving Muir disheartened. In a 1909 article, “Let Everyone Help to Save the Famous Hetch Hetchy Valley and Stop the Commercial Destruction Which Threatens Our National Parks,” Muir had written that the proposal to dam the Twolumne River and flood the valley it watered was equivalent to making “water tanks” of “the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” Although Muir tried to negotiate pragmatically and respectfully with business interests, he remained convinced that humanity’s need to recreate and expand the spirit in contemplation of wildness surpassed its need to build urban centers. These only distanced humanity from nature’s soul-healing influences.
The post John Muir Founds the Sierra Club appeared first on Teaching American History.
Join us this summer for the best professional development TAH offers! We still have room in some graduate classes—both online and on campus.
Our summer experience on campus can’t be beat. With each class lasting one week and with teachers coming from all over the country, it’s a bit like a summer camp for social studies teachers!
Fans of game-based learning or historical simulations will have two options during the first week of on-campus classes, as Progressive Era and Indian Assimilation, Resistance, and Removal are both using a Reacting to the Past game alongside our more standard method of seminar discussions.
Our online classes meet more frequently in the summer than during the school year, and we have some great options for teachers looking to build their expertise and teach dual enrollment classes.
If you’re interested in giving us a try, email Charles Martindell at cmartindell@tah.org or click here to learn more!
On Campus Classes505: The Progressive Era (June 23 – 28)
The transition to an industrial economy posed many problems for the United States. This course examines those problems and the responses to them that came to be known as progressivism. The course includes the study of World War I as a manifestation of progressive principles. The course emphasizes the political thought of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and their political expression of progressive principles.
Instructor: John Moser (Ashland University)
Course Materials: Syllabus, Course Packet, Game Book
610: American Foreign Policy (June 23 – 28)
Students examine events and issues in the foreign policy of the American republic. Topics include the major schools of thought and approaches, the connection between domestic and foreign politics, and the connection between the principles of the American regime and its foreign policy.
Instructor: Christopher Burkett (Ashland University)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
660: Indian Assimilation, Resistance, and Removal (June 23 – 28)*
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the tribes of what is today the southeastern United States took steps toward assimilation and accommodation of American culture, becoming known as the Five Civilized Tribes. During the same period, pressure mounted on them to remove to the trans-Mississippi West. Events culminated in the 1830s with open conflict and the forced removal often called “The Trail of Tears.” Often these events are portrayed as inevitable and depicted in simplistic terms. This class will help students understand the complexities and nuances of a pivotal time in American history.
*Instructor: Jace Weaver (University of Georgia)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
602: European Discovery and Settlement (June 30 – July 5)An examination of the motives behind and the consequences of the expansion of European power beginning in the sixteenth century. The course focuses on the European settlement of North America and the interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples.
Instructor: David Tucker (Ashbrook Center at Ashland University) and Paul Otto (George Fox University)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
621: Race and Equality in America (June 30 – July 5)This course explores the history of black Americans as they strove to secure their dignity as human beings, and rights as American citizens, in the face of racial prejudice. Students will examine the writings of leading black intellectuals and activists about human equality, slavery, self-government, the rule of law, emancipation, colonization, and citizenship. The course will also review laws, constitutional amendments, court cases, and social criticism addressing civil and political rights in America.
Instructor: Charissa Threat (Chapman University)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
503: Sectionalism and Civil War (July 7 – July 12)
A study of the sectional conflict beginning with the nullification crisis. The course will not only examine the political, social and economic developments in the period leading to the civil war, but will emphasize the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and John C. Calhoun.
Instructors: Eric C. Sands (Berry College) and Robert Colby (University of Mississippi)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
501: The American Revolution (July 14 – July 19)
This course focuses on three topics: political developments in North America and the British empire and the arguments for and against independence, culminating in the Declaration of Independence; the Revolutionary War as a military, social and cultural event in the development of the American nation and state; and the United States under the Articles of Confederation.
Instructor: Adam Seagrave (Arizona State University)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
507: Lincoln (July 14 – July 19)
This course provides an in-depth study of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and action. Students will study Lincoln’s most important speeches, as well as study various aspects of his political leadership, including his role as the leader of the Republican party and as commander in chief. The course will also provide opportunities for students to analyze Lincoln’s rhetoric and political argumentation.
Instructor: Joseph R. Fornieri (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
603: Colonial America (July 14 – July 19)
This course focuses on the development of an indigenous political culture in the British colonies. It pays special attention to the development of representative political institutions and how these emerged through the confrontation between colonists and King and proprietors. The course also considers imperial politics through a study of the Albany Plan of Union.
Instructor: Robert M.S. McDonald (United States Military Academy)
Course Materials: Syllabus and Course Pack
*Online Classes507: Lincoln (June 3 – 27)*
This course provides an in-depth study of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and action. Students will study Lincoln’s most important speeches, as well as study various aspects of his political leadership, including his role as the leader of the Republican party and as commander in chief. The course will also provide opportunities for students to analyze Lincoln’s rhetoric and political argumentation.
Instructor: Peter C. Myers (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire)
Schedule: Mondays & Wednesdays, 6:15 pm to 9:30 pm ET
Course Materials:** Syllabus and Course Packet
633: The American Presidency II – Johnson to the Present (June 3 – 27)
This course is an examination of the political and constitutional development of the office of president from Reconstruction to the present. It focuses on how changing conceptions of the presidency have shaped American political life in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially as America has become a global power.
Instructor: Adam Carrington (Hillsdale College)
Schedule: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:15 pm to 11:30 pm ET
Course Materials:Syllabus and Course Packet
506: The Rise of Modern America, 1914-1945 (June 17 – 27)
With the exception of the Civil War era, it is difficult to find another thirty-year period in U.S. history during which the nation underwent such dramatic change. In 1914 the United States was no more than a regional power, with a primarily rural demography and a relatively unobtrusive federal government. Thanks to the experience of two world wars, a major cultural conflict (the 1920s), and a disastrous economic crisis the country was transformed into the global economic and military power that it remains to this day. This course will examine the cultural, economic, military, and diplomatic events and trends of the period 1914-1945.
Instructor: David F. Krugler (University of Wisconsin-Platteville)
Schedule: Monday through Thursday, 6:15 pm to 9:30 pm ET
Course Materials: Syllabus & Course Packet
502: The American Founding (July 29 – August 8)
This course is an intensive study of the constitutional convention, the struggle over ratification of the Constitution, and the creation of the Bill of Rights. It will include a close examination of Federalist and Antifederalist writings.
Instructor: Jason W. Stevens (Ashland University)
Schedule: Monday through Thursday, 6:15 pm to 9:30 pm ET
Learn more about what makes us the best graduate program for social studies teachers.
The post Professional Development or Summer Camp for Teachers? MAHG is both! appeared first on Teaching American History.
Today’s blog is an edited excerpt from the introduction to TAH’s CDC volume, Congress, edited by Joseph Postell, available in our bookstore for free download or purchase.
Joseph PostellWhat’s wrong with our Congress? Judging by its approval ratings over the past decade, Congress has lost the support of the American people. Once considered to be the great American contribution to constitutional government—being governed by our own consent through elected, representative lawmakers—Congress is now the most disliked part of our political system. Over the past decade, Congress has not once reached a 30 percent approval rating or above. . . .
The causes of Congress’s decline are numerous, but understanding these causes requires careful attention to intricate rules and procedures that are little-known, and rarely the subject of careful reporting. The public, as a result, typically doesn’t understand how Congress actually works. It knows that something is wrong with our legislative branch, but it doesn’t know what happened. . . .
The Nature of Representation: Delegates or Trustees?The documents in this book address the three broad questions that are the most critical to understanding and evaluating Congress. The first question is the nature of representation in the American political system. This debate was largely the focus of, and was largely resolved by, the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. . . .
This debate was not simply a historical debate about representation. It addressed a fundamental question about what kind of representation works best. Should representatives act as delegates who mirror their constituents, or should they act as trustees, voting for what they think is right regardless of their constituents’ views? In other words, is liberty endangered by a government of elites, who ignore their constituents, or by a government that is too democratic, with majority tyranny? This debate continues today, as Americans debate whether they are ruled by an out-of-touch “Washington Establishment,” of which (some argue) Congress is a central part.
Once the Constitution was ratified, this debate over the nature of representation receded into the background. (However, Progressives in the early twentieth century returned to the idea of a more direct democracy, and were successful in making Congress more democratic).
Parties and the Structure of Power in CongressBecause the Constitution was vague about the rules and procedures that should govern the House and the Senate, two additional issues have influenced the development of Congress to the present day. Thus a second question these readings seek to address is Congress’s internal organization. The Constitution does not specify how the rules of Congress are to be set up; it merely says that each House shall make its own rules. But the manner in which the rules are set up determines who wields the power in Congress.
Thus, many of the primary sources after the ratification of the Constitution concern various rules governing debate, which bills can be sent to the floor, what powers the committees will have, and so forth. These rules allocate power among various people in Congress—such as the leadership, the majority party as a whole, the committee chairs, etc. In terms of the distribution of power in Congress, there have essentially been four distinct periods with four distinct approaches. . . .
In examining these periods of Congress’s history, we are challenged to consider the merits and demerits of each model of Congress. . . . While seemingly arcane, the rules are critical to American constitutionalism because they affect the responsiveness, the efficiency, and ultimately the willingness of the Congress to use its legislative powers and therefore to preserve our republican form of government.
The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the PresidentThe third and final theme in these documents, also debated consistently from the First Congress to today, has to do with Congress’s external relationship to the president. . . .
Scene in the House of Representatives as the second session of the 70th Congress convened, December 3, 1928. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-35195.. . . Should Congress, the elected legislature, be the primary maker of policy through the writing of specific laws? Or should the president, the national representative, be the most important domestic policymaker, with Congress granting discretion to the executive branch controlled by the president?
In the early years of the American republic, Congress acted as James Madison predicted when he said it would be an “impetuous vortex.” It wrote laws very carefully, addressing all of the details, so that the executive was merely carrying out its will. The president had total control over administrative officials, but those officials had little authority to make their own decisions. Their hands were tied by the law.
More recently, the president has emerged as a national policymaker because Congress has delegated more power and discretion to the executive branch. It has tried to keep control over these delegations, through things like legislative vetoes, but these have proven relatively ineffective.
The same trend has occurred in foreign policy. Although presidents routinely involved the nation in military conflicts, without declarations of war by Congress, the nature of these conflicts changed in the twentieth century. Now, presidents involve the nation in major military actions without declarations of war. Congress has attempted to reclaim the power to declare war, but this too has proven ineffective.
Congress and the American ExperimentThe American Founders famously committed themselves to an experiment to see if a nation could govern itself through the consent of the governed. This was a relatively new phenomenon at the time the nation was founded. We often take it for granted today. But the decline of public esteem for Congress should be cause for serious concern. If we do not understand how consent of the governed works, and how it should work, we risk losing it.
Teachers and their students have a critical role to play, therefore, in sustaining self-government by studying how it works in our Congress. Through careful examination of the principles and ideas in these documents, we become better informed, and gain greater understanding, of how to make consent of the governed effective in the twenty-first century. Congress was once the great achievement of the American Constitution. A knowledgeable and engaged citizenry can make it so again.
The post Joseph Postell on How Congress Actually Works appeared first on Teaching American History.
Recently I emailed a question to teacher friends who are graduates of the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program. “How do you teach students about the challenge of preserving self-government?” Brett Van Gaasbeek replied that he relied on Abraham Lincoln’s analysis of the challenge.
Brett Van Gaasbeek, MAHG graduate and teacher at Cincinnati Northwest High School in Ohio.Van Gaasbeek teaches a “College Credit Plus” US History course to sophomores enrolled simultaneously at Northwest High School in Cincinnati and at Sinclair College, where they earn college credits for course. The fast-paced survey covers American history from Columbus to the present day. Early in the fall, Van Gaasbeek’s students had read Lincoln’s 1838 speech to the Springfield Lyceum on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” They “nailed the section on mob rule,” he said. Since that time, they had recalled the speech during discussions of “the Civil War, the formation of unions leading to violent strikes, the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, and unrest associated with the Great Depression.”
Impressed, I asked Van Gaasbeek to tell me more. He replied, “Why don’t you chat with the students themselves?”
We arranged a Zoom meeting, where I met Van Gaasbeek’s honors-level students, a diverse mix of African-, European-, and Asian-Americans. I asked them, “What have you learned about the challenge of preserving self-government? What problems have Americans repeatedly faced in our history?”
A tall young woman with intricate, shoulder-length braids stepped forward to the video monitor. “I’m Madisyn,” she said. “One thing that seems to come up a lot in our history is corrupt government leaders, people who go into politics just for power, not because they want to make needed changes.”
Jyair introduced himself, then spoke of unequal economic outcomes. Not all Americans are financially successful. “Each new president tries to find ways to help people earn enough to avoid going bankrupt.” But none have yet solved the problem.
Amora, thin and blonde, pointed to the many disputes over taxation. Government needs money to operate, but citizens object to taxes, whether these are the tariffs of the 19th century or the income and capital gain taxes of today. Meanwhile, those with fewer earnings to tax worry about workers’ rights, wages, and benefits.
Janessa spoke of tensions among people with different experiences. People get divided by race, while those with generations of family history in America are suspicious of more recent immigrants.
Maliya added that citizens who “don’t believe their government is doing the right thing” have staged protests.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“I think most of the time it is a good thing,” Maliya replied.
True, said a student named Cory; but protest movements reveal the country’s problems. People protest when they feel their concerns are unheard. He mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement.
I asked, “Does preserving self-government require giving representation and a voice to all citizens?” Van Gaasbeek thought Lincoln could help on this point. He turned the conversation to Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union. “Do you remember?” he asks the class. “About the apple?”
Casey remembered Lincoln’s analysis, based on an allusion to a verse from Proverbs—“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Lincoln related the “word fitly spoken” to the central promise of the Declaration: that all men are created equal. To Lincoln, the Constitution was a structure of laws created to safeguard this promise. Casey, Van Gaasbeek later told me, was the student who first realized what Lincoln meant.
Now Casey offered a colorful synthesis of Lincoln’s comments on the sectional crisis over slavery: “The apple was like the Declaration, and it was held in place by the framers of the Constitution. But there was a court case about a slave named Dred Scott. And in his ruling, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said that the enslaved man was not even worth three-fifths of a person. That ruling really threatened the golden apple.”
“Does the Constitution make any sense if we don’t believe in human equality?” I asked. “For example, Casey, why doesn’t Jyair’s vote count for twice as much as your vote?”
“Well, that wouldn’t make sense if all of us are created equal,” Casey responded.
“So, majority rule means everyone’s vote is worth the same as everyone else’s.”
I’d delayed getting to what I really wanted to discuss with the class: Lincoln’s analysis of the most dangerous threats to American democracy. “You’ve read a lot of Lincoln’s writing,” I said. “Your teacher says you read the Lyceum speech that he gave as a young man. Tell me about that.”
Amora said, “He’s criticizing mob rule. He’s saying that if we disagree with a law, we still have to follow it. We can fight to change it, but until it’s changed, we have to follow it. We have to follow the Constitution in order to maintain our independence.”
“When Lincoln speaks of mob rule, what sorts of things does he mean?”
“They were tarring and feathering and hanging people,” Amora recalled.
Madisyn added, “There was a newspaper editor saying things they didn’t like, and they threw his printing press in the river.”
Van Gaasbeek recounted the story. “Elijah Lovejoy was an abolitionist newspaper editor. He was printing his anti-slavery message in 1837 in southern Illinois and sending it to Missouri, a slave state. People said, ‘You can’t publish that here!’ So now the rights of Southerners to hold slaves are pitted against freedom of the press. Lincoln argues that no matter what he’s printing, you have no right to break his press—or to shoot him, as they did! And remember, Lincoln also mentions the riverboat gamblers. They were assumed to be swindling people, so a mob took them off a riverboat and hung them. Lincoln says, you can’t do that—we have a court system for a reason. And if there is no law against cheating while gambling, change the laws.”
“Do you all feel that mob rule is a threat today?” I asked.
“Yes!” several students answered.
The anti-abolition mob attacking the Warehouse of Godfrey Gilman & Co. Alton, Ill. on the night of the 7th Nov. 1837. Elijah P. Lovejoy, whose presses were destroyed, was killed that night. Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division.“January 6, 2021,” DiWash said. “That insurrection was a perfect example of what Lincoln was criticizing 200 years earlier. It was trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power provided for by our Constitution.”
“Can you think of any other instances of mob rule occurring today?”
Madisyn said, “Cory mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement. I know we have a right to peaceful assembly, but when protesters start to fight, break into stores, or hurt other people, it goes from being a peaceful protest to rioting—to mob rule.”
“How does that make other citizens feel—say, those who are watching events on TV?”
“They can get scared. If I were to see a protest turn into a riot, it would discourage me from wanting to help the protesters’ cause. I would feel unprotected, and I’d look for someone to protect me.”
“It could lead to the breakdown of democratic institutions,” DiWash added. “Lincoln says a strong man, a tyrant, could take advantage of the situation.”
“Do you guys remember what else Lincoln said?” Van Gaasbeek prompted. “That Americans would not be conquered by a foreign nation . . .”
“—that we could only be conquered by ourselves,” Cory said.
As the period drew to a close, students discussed the reasons for Lincoln’s success as a leader.
“He was moderate,” Cory said. “He could see both sides’ goals, and he wanted to prevent the coming war—” so he tried to persuade the South that war was not in their interest. “I think he was elected because people thought he might be able to lead everyone.”
“But the South didn’t listen. They fired on Fort Sumter anyway,” Van Gaasbeek said.
The bell rang, and students began to gather their books. But DiWash wasn’t finished. “Guys, before we go, I want to say something else. Lincoln got elected because his rhetoric was so good. It was a cut above everyone else’s.”
“I would love to talk with you about that sometime,” I said, as DiWash grabbed his books and hurried to his next class.
The post Talking with Students about Preserving Self-Government with Brett Van Gaasbeek appeared first on Teaching American History.
This blog post, written by faculty member Sarah Morgan Smith, was first posted on January 19, 2021.
An online resource guide at Library of Congress, U.S. Presidential Inaugurations: “I Do Solemnly Swear…,” showcases the development of the inauguration day ceremonies. For each president, library staff have collected primary materials illustrating what made his inauguration unique. There are drafts of inaugural addresses, descriptions of the ceremonies written by attendees (sometimes by the president himself), and a wide variety of memorabilia, including ceremony tickets and programs, prints, photographs and even sheet music. Each entry also includes a list of historical ‘firsts,’ along with factoids like which Bible the president was sworn in on, the number of inaugural balls held, and so on. A particularly interesting set of documents illustrates the very first presidential inauguration ceremonies, those for George Washington.
The first Presidential inauguration in American history entailed careful planning, with much behind-the-scenes negotiation. As the first grand public event of the nation under its new Constitution, the inauguration had to strike just the right note. Ceremony was needed, but the event could not be overly solemn, lest it be seen as a royal coronation. Nor could it be merely celebratory, lest it appear too common.
William Maclay, the first United States Senator from Pennsylvania and an inveterate diarist, believed the Senate spent altogether too much time worrying about the niceties of the occasion: “Ceremonies, endless ceremonies, the whole business of the day” (Journal of William McClay, April 25th [1789]). Although a member of the “upper” house, Maclay had very republican tastes and habits. He abhorred those whom he saw applying too aristocratic a veneer over the inauguration ceremonies and, by extension, the new government. Virginians and New Englanders were particularly prone to this vice, Maclay thought, although the “gentlemen of New England” were the worst:
No people in the Union dwell more on trivial distinctions and matters of mere form. They really seem to show a readiness to stand on punctilio and ceremony. A little learning is a dangerous thing (’tis said). May not the same be said of breeding? … Being early used to a ceremonious and reserved behavior, and believing that good manners consists entirely in punctilios, they only add a few more stiffened airs to their deportment, excluding good humor, affability of conversation, and accommodation of temper and sentiment as qualities too vulgar for a gentleman (Journal of William McClay, 28 April 1789).
Vice President John Adams, in particular, irritated Maclay. Adams worried over the formalities, particularly as they related to his (relatively non-existent) role in the forthcoming event. The plan was for Washington to come to the Senate chambers after taking the oath of office. Adams, ever the dramatist, informed the Senate that he was unsure of how to handle himself under such circumstances:
Gentlemen, I feel great difficulty how to act. I am possessed of two separate powers; the one in esse [nature] and the other in posse [power]. I am Vice-President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But I am president also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate, what shall I be? I cannot be [president] then. No, gentlemen, I cannot, I cannot. I wish gentlemen to think what I shall be. (Journal of William McClay, April 25)
The Senate, wisely, refrained from attempting to resolve Adams’ identity crisis and moved on to discuss more substantive aspects of the inauguration ceremonies.
Other tense moments marked the planning process. Each highlighted the difficulty of creating in a moment the customs of a new nation. A joint committee, made up of members from the House and Senate, worked out a proposed order of ceremonies. The two houses of Congress then discussed the plan, suggesting amendments. Maclay, a stickler for parliamentary procedure, objected to a motion that the Senators join Washington at a church service following his inauguration. The idea had already been rejected by the joint committee in the course of their sessions. Maclay wrote, “I opposed it as an improper business after it had been in the hands of the Joint Committee and rejected, as I thought this a certain method of creating a dissension between the Houses.” (Journal of William McClay, 27 April) The following day a proposal was made to require state officials to swear allegiance to the new government. Now Maclay worried that the relationship between the federal government and the states would be damaged by the inauguration ceremonies.
Inauguration day dawned at last: “a great, important day,” Maclay wrote, and then implored, “Goddess of etiquette, assist me while I describe it.”
The Vice-President rose in the most solemn manner. … “Gentlemen, I wish for the direction of the Senate. The President will, I suppose, address the Congress. How shall I behave? How shall we receive it? Shall it be standing or sitting?” (Journal of William McClay, 30 April 1789).
In response to Adams’ question, a number of senators began to discuss the behavior of the houses of Parliament when being addressed by the king, and whether, indeed, the new Senate ought to model itself on Britain at all.
Before this question could be resolved, the Clerk from the House of Representatives appeared at the door of the Senate chamber with “a communication.” His appearance vexed the Senate greatly, according to Maclay, for they knew not how to receive him:
A silly kind of resolution of the committee on that business had been laid on the table some days ago. The amount of it was that each House should communicate to the other what and how they chose; it concluded, however, something in this way: That everything should be done with all the propriety that was proper. The question [now] was, Shall this be adopted, that we may know how to receive the Clerk? It was objected [that] this will throw no light on the subject; it will leave you where you are.
Mr. Lee brought the House of Commons before us again. He reprobated the rule; declared that the Clerk should not come within … that the proper mode was for the Sergeant-at-Arms, with the mace on his shoulder, to meet the Clerk at the door and receive his communication; we are not, however, provided for this ceremonious way of doing business, having neither mace nor sergeant …. (Journal of William McClay, 30 April 1789).
Things went on in this vein for some time, with the poor Clerk kept out of the Senate chamber until finally “repeated accounts came [that] the Speaker and Representatives were at the door. Confusion ensued….” Eventually, the members of the House were admitted and sat down with the Senators to await the arrival of the President. After a delay of over an hour, Washington appeared.
The President advanced between the Senate and Representatives, bowing to each. He was placed in the chair by the Vice-President; the Senate with their president on the right, the Speaker and the Representatives on his left. The Vice-President rose and addressed a short sentence to him. The import of it was that he should now take the oath of office as President. … The President was conducted out of the middle window into the gallery, and the oath was administered by the Chancellor. Notice that the business done was communicated to the crowd by proclamation, etc., who gave three cheers, and repeated it on the President’s bowing to them. (Journal of William McClay, 30 April 1789).
Interestingly, administration of the oath of office seems to have been the extent of the public’s involvement in the inauguration ceremonies, for Washington then returned to the Senate chamber where (despite the formally unresolved status of Adams’ earlier question of protocol) all parties took their seats. Washington then stood and addressed the room. To Maclay’s eye, “this great man was agitated and embarrassed more than ever he was by the leveled cannon or pointed musket. He trembled, and several times could scarce make out to read, though it must be supposed he had often read it before.” As he read, Washington fidgeted, holding the speech first in one hand and then the other, moving his free hand into and out of the pocket of his breeches.
When he came to the words “all the world,” he made a flourish with his right hand, which left rather an ungainly impression. I sincerely, for my part, wished all set ceremony in the hands of the dancing-masters, and that this first of men had read off his address in the plainest manner, without ever taking his eyes from the paper, for I felt hurt that he was not first in everything. … (Journal of William McClay, 30 April 1789).
Following Washington’s speech (in accordance with the Senate resolution noted above regarding the inclusion of a church service in the day’s festivities), “there was a grand procession to Saint Paul’s Church, where prayers were said by the Bishop.” Maclay notes that members of the militia stood along one of the streets through which the group traveled, but that appears to have been the extent of the pageantry. That evening, however, “grand fireworks” and illuminations were offered to the public.
The wrangle over ceremonial details was not yet finished, however, for the Senate had to take up the President’s address and consider the proper means of entering it in their journals. Introducing it to the record, Adams referred to the inaugural address as the president’s “most gracious speech.” Maclay spoke up, objecting “I cannot approve of this.” Then,
I looked all around the Senate. Every countenance seemed to wear a blank. The Secretary was going on: I must speak or nobody would. “Mr. President, we have lately had a hard struggle for our liberty against kingly authority. The minds of men are still heated: everything related to that species of government is odious to the people. The words prefixed to the President’s speech are the same that are usually placed before the speech of his Britannic Majesty. I know they will give offense. I consider them as improper. I therefore move that they be struck out, and that it stand simply “address” or “speech,” as may be judged most suitable.” (Journal of William McClay, 1 May 1789).
Adams, predictably, defended his use of the phrase, saying “he was for a dignified and respectable government, and as far as he knew the sentiments of the people they thought as he did.” Maclay—ever the republican—countered “that there had been a revolution in the sentiments of people respecting government equally great as that which had happened in the Government itself.” Americans, he argued, were leery of even the “modes” of monarchy, and already suspicious of the new Constitution with its concentration of power at the federal level. “The enemies of the Constitution had objected to it the facility there would be of transition from it to kingly government and all the trappings and splendor of royalty,” he observed. “If such a thing as this appeared on our minutes, they would not fail to represent it as the first step of the ladder in the ascent to royalty.” (Journal of William McClay, 1 May 1789).
Although Adams remained unconvinced, Maclay won the day: Washington’s address was entered into the minutes with republican simplicity. Pageantry to celebrate the successful launch of the new government was one thing; pomp and circumstance in the day-to-day business of politics, quite another.
The post A Pageantry of Power: Planning Washington’s First Inauguration appeared first on Teaching American History.
On May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, the first federal law in American history designed to establish permanent, comprehensive restrictions on immigration. It came at the end of a long, contentious process that debated the nature of American citizenship and identity along with the perceived merits and hazards of mass immigration. The law is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of American nativism and a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. immigration policy.
Aside from a brief allusion in Article 1, Section 9, to “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” (i.e., enslaved Africans), the U.S. Constitution—including all amendments to date—is silent on the question of immigration. The only constitutional guidance even on the crucial question of defining American citizenship was to empower Congress in Article 1, Section 8 “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Two years after the Constitution was ratified, Congress set about fulfilling this mandate by limiting eligibility for naturalization to “free white persons” of “good character” who had been in the United States as little as two years, adding that their children under the age of 21 would likewise be counted as naturalized citizens. (The 14th and 15th Amendments gave greater clarity to these matters.)
Anxieties about the perils of unfettered immigration and dangerous “aliens” were apparent from the beginning. Worries over French radicalism led to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, empowering the President to deport those deemed a threat to the “safety and security” of the nation. These laws revealed deeper anxieties about national loyalty and the importance of preserving cultural uniformity, concerns that form a consistent throughline in the evolution of American debates over immigration to this day.
Early in the 19th century, Americans began to sound the alarm over new arrivals—especially Irish Catholics. These anxieties generated what historians call “nativism,” an impulse that would become a stable feature of American life and an impetus for immigration policy. Erika Lee defines nativism as “the naming of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers and their descendants as ‘natives’ to the United States and the granting of special privileges and protections to them.” As the U.S. grew in territory, population, and diversity, so would nativist ambitions to circumscribe the nation’s citizenship qualifications and terms of entry.
The most important early turning point in this evolution came in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting free immigration to the United States (it remained in effect until 1943). The law’s passage established the need for a federal administrative apparatus for managing the flow of people into the country most notably at key points of entry in San Francisco and New York City. Little attention was given at this time to the nation’s northern or southern borders.
The 1880s also marked the beginning of the so-called “Great Wave” of immigration from Europe, a massive upsurge in foreign-born people pouring into the United States. Between 1880 and 1924 roughly 25 million predominantly southern and eastern Europeans arrived in the U.S.; large populations of Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and other Slavs, among them 3 to 4 million Jews. These “huddled masses” would dramatically change the complexion and character of America’s cities. They were outsiders by language, custom, and religion, prompting a rising chorus of critics who questioned whether they could ever assimilate to the America way of life. Some wondered, moreover, if these new arrivals might be bringing strange diseases and radical ideas that could destabilize the country in permanent ways.
The foundations of the 1924 Immigration Act were laid during these decades. In 1894, a group of Harvard educated Boston “Brahmins” formed the Immigration Restriction League, aiming to preserve the Anglo-Saxon “stock” of the American people. They lent intellectual credence to something called the “Nordic theory” of racial supremacy, which assumed that Anglo-Protestantism was the source of American greatness. One of the League’s founders, Prescott F. Hall (1868-1921), created an enduring distinction on this basis between “old immigrants” (British, German, and Scandinavian presumed to be intelligent, dynamic, and free) and “new immigrants” (Latin, Asian, Jewish, and Slav presumed to be backwards, stagnant, lazy, and servile). The League also immediately began pushing legislation that would curtail the flow of “new immigrants.”
League efforts in Congress were championed by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), who worked tirelessly pushing their most prized policy goal: the literacy test. By this time, both Democrats and Republicans were eager to limit the flow of immigration, and bills advocating the literacy-based restrictions passed multiple times during the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, but were consistently vetoed by presidents who argued that such tests ran contrary to American ideals. Meanwhile, Congress authorized the United States Immigration Commission led by Senator William P. Dillingham (R-VT), its first major effort to study the issue. The resulting massive 41-volume report reinforced Nordic theory assumptions and, among many other recommendations, endorsed the establishment of national immigration quotas.
World War I both interrupted the flow of immigration and witnessed a mass exodus of foreign-born men re-crossing the Atlantic to fight for their homelands. Wartime also supplied “emergency conditions” that increased the national appetite for long desired restrictions. On the front end, Congress passed and Wilson signed the Immigration Act of 1917, which finally satisfied the dream of a literacy test along with other restrictions. At the war’s end, with a rising tide of social unrest and xenophobia, Congress passed an even more restrictive law, the landmark Emergency Quota Act of 1921, temporarily capping immigration at 350,000 and for the first time implementing a quota system on the basis of national origins. The quotas were based on the 1910 census and limited the number of immigrants from any country to 3% of the number of residents from that country in the United States, giving much greater weight to people from northern and western Europe.
Because the 1921 law was intended as a temporary fix, the debate over immigration restriction continued. The national mood heading into the 1920s was decidedly conservative, leading Senators Albert Johnson (R-IL), a staunch eugenics advocate, and David Reed (R-PA) to pen what would become the most restrictive immigration law in American history. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 overwhelmingly passed in both houses of Congress. It built on the 1921 legislation, this time capping total immigration at 165,000 and reducing the nationality quota from 3% to 2%, but importantly established the basis for these calculations on the population distribution within the 1890 census. It also barred all immigration from Asia. These moves vastly diminished the flow of people from outside of northern and western Europe, thus guaranteeing white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance in the U.S. through the heart of the twentieth century.
Immigration to the United States shrank to historic lows over the coming decades thanks to the new law, with a strong assist from the economic collapse of the Great Depression. While Congress adjusted and amend features of the 1924 provisions in the coming decades, Johnson-Reed largely defined immigration policy until 1965 when Lyndon Johnson dismantled and reshaped its priorities as part of his vision for a Great Society. It is impossible to understand today’s debates about immigration without a deeper understanding of the one-hundred year old Johnson-Reed Act and its long shadow.
The post Passage of the 1924 Immigration Act appeared first on Teaching American History.
Primary documents prompt reflection on history. Landen Schmeichel sees this often when using documents in his Advanced Placement US History course at Legacy High School in Bismarck, North Dakota. During a unit on the Progressive movement, he asked students to read an excerpt of Justice David Brewer’s 1908 ruling in Muller v. Oregon. It upheld an Oregon State law prohibiting women from working more than 10 hours in a day. After they read the excerpt, Schmeichel showed students a textbook summary of the ruling that called it a win for women. But in the opinion, Brandeis referred to women as a class of persons needing protection because they were physically weaker than men. He also argued that their energies needed to be conserved for service in the home. “Wait a minute,” a female student said. “What if I want to work more than 10 hours? Wouldn’t this ruling do the opposite of what the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment intends?”
Landen SchmeichelDiscussion then shifted to the meaning of equality in the Fourteenth Amendment. Does equal protection under the laws really entail treating some people—but not others—as members of a protected class? “This is sexist!” the female student protested. “If I apply for a job at Home Depot, and they tell me they’re hiring a man because he can work more hours in a day than I can, I’ll be mad. I’ll never shop there again!”
Liberty and Equality: Ideas That Shaped AmericaPrimary documents prompt reflection on powerful ideas. Many of the documents Schmeichel uses reflect American political theory, probing the interrelated ideas of liberty and equality. “Those ideas birthed what I would say is the greatest nation in human history. Our job as educators is to engage students in conversation about what those ideas mean. When we engage with those ideas, we’re not diminishing what history is as a discipline; we’re elevating it. We’re reflecting on what matters to us most—what we aspire to be not only as individuals, but collectively as a nation. We need such discussion if, as Federalist 1 puts it, we want a government based on reflection and choice rather than accident and force.”
Schmeichel finds the well-curated primary documents he needs for his teaching in Teaching American History’s Core Document volumes, which excerpt key documents of American history, preface them with a scholar’s summary of their historical context, and suggest questions for discussion. “This collection, I would argue, is the preeminent source for primary documents that are accessible to students. And the online versions are free.”
An Easier and Completely Rewarding Way to TeachWhen Schmeichel began teaching APUSH, he relied on the textbook. “I had students read a chapter a week. In class I lectured over the chapter’s major arguments and major terms, often using PowerPoint slides. My AP pass rates were decent—above the national average. But if a student said, ‘There’s a term on page 242 I don’t understand,’ I’d have to reply, ‘I have no idea myself. Let’s read that passage and try to figure it out.’ That type of engagement wasn’t too beneficial for students.”
He began looking for primary sources to flesh out the story of history, which led him to TAH.org and to its Master’s program centered around reading and discussing documents. Awarded the James Madison Foundation Fellowship in constitutional studies for North Dakota in 2021, he immediately enrolled in MAHG. Soon he was reading about history through the words of those who lived and shaped it, gaining insight into their decision-making.
“Three years down the line, I understand those documents and can ask the questions that help students wrestle with really hard topics. We can discuss history from multiple perspectives. Now my job is not only easier; it is completely rewarding.
A Safer, More Effective Way“It’s also a safer way to teach,” Schmeichel says. “When you say, ‘This is the textbook that I use,” you’re saying, ‘This is the narrative that students are being sold.’ That’s a dangerous way to put yourself out there as an educator.” To prevent misunderstandings—and help students better understand the contest of ideas that shaped history—Schmeichel gives students firsthand access to those ideas.
“For example, when I’m teaching the antebellum South, I let students discover for themselves the arguments made by Southern slaveholders. I give them documents by John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh, who claim the state must preserve chattel slavery because that’s what’s best for African Americans. Students react in shocked disapproval, saying the arguments are racist. Yet they see how the arguments might have persuaded Northerners unfamiliar with slavery’s reality. This makes them uneasy. Then I ask them to consider whether those arguments are consistent with the founding ideals of liberty and equality, principles that Abraham Lincoln often discussed in his great speeches. Students who compare the proslavery arguments to Lincoln’s arguments easily see that slavery violates the principles on which self-government depends. It moves the conversation from our personal feelings to the facilitation of critical thought.”
Schmeichel connects each document he assigns to a learning standard and objective, ensuring he covers the wide-ranging requirements for the APUSH course. Then he uses the documents to shape a narrative about Americans’ ongoing attempt to realize the ideals of liberty and equality. “If you tell students, here are the 540 things you need to memorize before you take the AP test on May 10, they’ll say, ‘There’s no way I’ll pass!’ But if you teach thematically, you’ll help students draw connections between events and ideas. They remember much more.”
Primary documents prompt students to reason through the implications of powerful ideas, like liberty and equality. Schmeichel encourages this by guiding students in rhetorical analyses of key texts. “My last graduate class in the MAHG summer residential program was on American political rhetoric,” he says. “Many of the readings were from Lincoln.” Much of today’s political rhetoric relies on pathos—an appeal to the emotions. Lincoln’s makes masterly use of the other two rhetorical elements Schmeichel teaches students to identify: logos and ethos. Logos appears in Lincoln’s stunningly clear arguments against slavery. Ethos appears when he quotes authorities his audience recognize as credible. “He quotes Jefferson constantly. He refers to his letters, to the original draft of the Declaration, and to Jefferson’s 1784 draft of a law that was the model for the 1787 Northwest ordinance. All of those sources show Jefferson viewing slavery as immoral and destructive to both races.” Reading Lincoln reinforces the critical importance of primary source work to the study of history, Schmeichel says.
Encouraging Students to Join the American StorySchmeichel with his daughter Bryony. It is never too soon to prompt reflection on primary documents!Most important, primary documents make the people of the past relatable and understandable. This can encourage students to join the American story and help to shape it. Schmeichel sees this as critically important. Americans suffer from “an epidemic of non-involvement. We believe we are separate from our institutions.” People who are disgruntled with civic life see it as controlled by those they didn’t vote for and can’t trust, so they don’t engage in “the gritty but civil dialogue” self-government requires. “That means that concern to perpetuate our institutions is dwindling.”
One way of countering non-involvement is to explain the social contract—our consent to government—as a daily recommitment. “Every day when I leave my house, I stop at a stop sign. I turn on my blinker. Those are all micro components of the social contract we’ve agreed to. These are the ways we preserve each other’s liberty and equality.” Another way is to invite students into a document writer’s story. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, for example, appeals to students because it shows a young person coming of age in a society that obstructs his agency. His story of secretly learning to read shows students that reading confers power, because it gives us access to powerful ideas.
One of Schmeichel’s students commented on the motivational power of primary documents in a thank-you note she sent him:
In my previous history classes, I was taught through memorization and secondary source[s] . . . . This year, I’ve had the opportunity, thanks to you, to explore history through primary sources, living breathing sources, and have gained a far greater . . . understanding . . . . Primary sources that will stay with me are: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass, . . . Abraham Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union, and George Washington’s Farewell Address. I’ll remember the impactful discussions we had on Vietnam [after] reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I’ll keep my pocket Constitution with me, along with the primary sources, to reminisce on the year and continue to learn.”
The student who sent the note recently participated in the United States Senate Youth Program, travelling to Washington and meeting President Biden, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and 78 current senators. She is an “incredible” student who might herself enter politics. But reading primary documents can profoundly affect students who have other goals. Another student thanked Schmeichel for showing through his teaching a way out of apathy and toward moral self-development:
“. . . Instead of fleeing from the problems of today, you believe that you combat them . . . by educating. You create your own change by recruiting others to your cause. Frederick Douglass captures my sentiments about this . . . when he says, ‘I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’”
“What is meaningful for me as I look to the next 27 years of teaching is what my students say they learned in my classroom,” Schmeichel says. “If they can point to ideas we discussed and say, ‘This is how I want to live, because there’s inherent virtue in this way of life,’ then I can deem my career as an educator a success. . . . That’s what teaching through primary sources makes possible.”
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Discussion of primary documents. A supportive and engaged group of educators. Historic locations. Free professional development. What more could you ask for?
Applications open soon for our Fall 2024 Multi Day seminars! We are hosting seminars on a variety of topics in American history and politics. The application will be open April 8-April 30. Some of our topics include:
- The Underground Railroad at The Underground Railroad Heritage Center in Niagara Falls, NY
- West Coast Immigration at the Angel Island Immigration Station on Angel Island, CA
- Contested Elections: 1800, 1824, 1874, 1960 & 2000 at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, MA
- The World Wars and the American State at the Indiana War Memorial Museum in Indianapolis, IN
- The American Founding at Valley Forge National Historical Park in Valley Forge, PA
- Reconstruction at Natchez National Historical Park in Natchez, MS
- From Brown v. Board to Little Rock and Beyond: School Desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement at Little Rock Central High School Historic Site in Little Rock, AR
- Abraham Lincoln and the New Birth of Freedom at the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, IL
- Westward Expansion: Conflict, Conservation, and the Environment at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, CA
Each Multi-Day seminar runs for three days and brings together a small group of teachers from around the country. During the seminar, the teachers discuss primary documents on the seminar topic with the guidance of a scholar, who acts as the seminar leader. The seminar also includes a visit to a local historical site. See a sample itinerary here.
Teaching American History hosts Multi-Day seminars at no cost to American history and government teachers. Meals, materials, double-occupancy rooms, and historical site visits are covered 100%. At the end of each course, teacher participants receive a letter of participation for 15 contact hours and a $600 stipend to help defray travel costs or other expenses.
For more information about our Multi-Day seminars and to see the schedule of events please click here. Have more questions? Click here.
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Thomas Jefferson is most famous for eloquently articulating three natural rights that belong to “all men”—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Jefferson held that humans had more than just those three rights; in 1803, he was particularly worried about “the natural right we have always insisted on with Spain; to wit that of a nation holding the upper part of streams, having a right of innocent passage thro’ them to the ocean” (Jefferson to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803). The Mississippi River was the stream to which Jefferson referred: stretching more than 2,300 miles, the Mississippi in 1803 formed the western border of American lands, flowing through Spanish territory to end in the Gulf of Mexico. In a 1795 treaty, Spain had recognized the right of Americans to float their goods down the Mississippi to land at the port city of New Orleans, before transferring those goods onto seagoing vessels for further trade.
In an 1802 letter, Jefferson commented that “Spain might have retained [New Orleans] quietly for years. Her pacific [peaceful] dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us.” Spain’s “feeble state” was a great comfort to America, since, as Jefferson put it, “there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural & habitual enemy. it is New Orleans.” The territory of New Orleans, by which Jefferson also meant the Louisiana region stretching from the Gulf of Mexico up into the heartland of North America, was of vital importance to the United States, for through it “the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from it’s [sic] fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants” (Jefferson to Livingston, 18 April 1802).
Jefferson hoped that Spain might soon be induced to transfer control of its North American territories to the United States. But feeble Spain instead signed over the Louisiana Territory to ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte in October 1802, and even before their official handover to the French, the Spanish government in New Orleans revoked American access to the port. Jefferson had long been a Francophile, but if Napoleon were in control of the Louisiana Territory, enmity would inevitably follow: it was “impossible that France and the US. can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position” (Jefferson to Livingston, 18 April 1802). Jefferson therefore sent emissaries, including young James Monroe, to France. Their instructions: attempt to purchase the city of New Orleans and all or part of the Floridas for $10 million.
In an incredible moment of providence, Monroe arrived in Paris just as Napoleon was changing his mind about Louisiana: the armies Napoleon had sent to re-conquer the formerly enslaved sugar laborers of Haiti were dying in droves, victims of tropical diseases spread by mosquitos. If French troops could not reestablish control over the sugar plantations of Haiti, it made little sense for France to keep hold of Louisiana—land which had been meant to produce food for the Haitian slaves, and which could be vulnerable to an invasion from British Canada. Thanks to the mosquito, Napoleon therefore decided to sell not only New Orleans, but the entire region of Louisiana—some 827,000 square miles—for the bargain price of $15 million. The Americans could not refuse.
The only complication caused by Napoleon’s impulsive offer was the chance that he might change his mind; Jefferson was pressed to overcome any constitutional scruples he may have had and complete the purchase as quickly as possible. As a strict constructionist, President Jefferson hated to make any move unless it was specifically authorized in the Constitution. However, knowing that negotiations regarding borders could drag on with Spain and England for years, Jefferson’s Cabinet persuaded him to abandon his plan for a constitutional amendment that would have given him the authorization to add Louisiana to the United States. Ultimately, Jefferson reasoned that “it is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; & saying to him when of age, I did this for your good” (Jefferson to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803). If the American people believed Jefferson had overstepped his bounds, they could let him know in the next election.
The people did not object, however; and the Senate ratified the purchase of the Louisiana Territory by a vote of 24 to 7. Although Jefferson’s amendment proved unnecessary, it is still a noteworthy document because of the insight it gives us into Jefferson’s hopes and concerns for the future of Native Americans. The draft amendment is almost entirely devoted to the rights of Natives; for example, the second sentence reads “The rights of occupancy in the soil, and of self-government, are confirmed to the Indian inhabitants, as they now exist.” Jefferson wished to ensure that Native people would maintain full legal title to the lands that they were currently settled on, and any lands not inhabited by Natives would be the property of the United States—settlers would need to purchase land directly from the American government, rather than being able to seize from or make treaties with Natives. Jefferson wished the government to form a protective barrier between the weakening Native tribes and the land-greedy American settlers.
Moreover, Jefferson saw the Louisiana lands as a sort of safety valve for the Native people living east of the Mississippi, who were also being increasingly squeezed by white settlers. From early in his political career, Jefferson had admired Native peoples and defended them against detractors, arguing that “the proofs of genius given by the Indians of North America, place them on a level with whites in the same uncultivated state” (Jefferson to Chastellux, 7 June 1785). Jefferson at first foresaw a future in which Native people would become more “civilized,” abandoning hunting as impractical and choosing instead to farm, most eventually becoming—through intermarriage and neighborly affection—one people with the European-descended Americans.
In a February 1803 letter to Indiana Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison, President Jefferson remarked that Natives “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the US. or remove beyond the Missisipi [sic]”—or, if Natives attacked white Americans, the Natives should be forcibly driven “across the Missisipi, as the only condition of peace.” Jefferson was here attempting to balance his commitment to Natives’ natural right to self-government on their traditional lands with his commitment to the safety of American citizens. Ultimately, this balancing act would prove unsustainable.
On March 26, 1804, Congress passed a law regarding government of the newly acquired territory, with a section giving the president power to exchange Native lands in the east for U.S.-owned territory on the western side of the Mississippi. Some Native peoples did indeed sell their lands in the eastern United States for land in the Louisiana Territory. But not all Native people wanted to sell, and the small federal government proved unable to protect all American citizens from Native attacks, or to stop white settlers from encroaching on Native lands. Within a few years, Jefferson’s idealistic vision was replaced by more aggressive policies, such as the forced relocation of the Cherokee by President Andrew Jackson. What began as an issue of access to New Orleans became a matter of tremendous import to Native peoples, both east and west of the Mississippi, with consequences far beyond what Jefferson could possibly have foreseen.
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Teaching American History’s Documents and Debates volumes presents American history as a series of topics. For each topic, a selection of documents recreates a debate over a particular issue that highlights one of the enduring themes of American life: balancing freedom, equality, liberty and order; the struggle of groups for full inclusion in American life; the role of the government in overseeing the economic life of American citizens; and the ongoing argument over the role America should play in world affairs. Below is a sampling of topics from Documents & Debates, v.2. Each topic contains an introductory essay, a curated and excerpted set of documents, and a series of discussion questions to guide understanding of the topic.
Reconstructing the South As the Civil War progressed and Union forces gained control of territory in states that had seceded, the question arose as to how that territory and its people – slave and free – should be dealt with. President Lincoln encouraged reconciliation. Other Republicans believed that the South had to be reconstructed in a fundamental way and that the seceding states had to be treated as conquered territories. Meanwhile, the freed men and women sought to construct new lives in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The long-term effects of Reconstruction – or its failure – are evident in later defenses of the system of segregation developed in the South after Reconstruction.
Documents include Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Douglass’ “Reconstruction,” and Tillman’s Speech in the Senate.Urban Growth: The Pullman Strike A recession in 1893 led the Pullman Sleeping Car Company to reduce the wages of its workers, which led to a contentious strike, a boycott of any train containing a Pullman car, and the eventual disruption of the US mail service. A federal court issued an injunction barring the union from hindering railroad traffic. It was upheld by the Supreme Court.
Documents include the US Strike Commission’s “Report on the Chicago Strike,” Harper’s Weekly cartoon, “King Debs,” and Brewer’s opinion in In re Debs.The Progressive Era: EugenicsFor almost thirty years, from around 1900 to the late 1920s, America had an active and popular eugenics movement. Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, states passed laws requiring medical exams before issuing marriage licenses to make sure the unfit did not reproduce. Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907, although other states had tried and failed before. Prominent Americans – among them Theodore Roosevelt, Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Margaret Sanger – supported the eugenics movement. State Fairs included Better Baby contests. Eugenics was considered a progressive reform, related to the larger Progressive movement by its emphasis on the good of society and the use of science and rationality to achieve it. Sterilization was the most contentious part of the eugenics program, but it remained alive in part because of the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, which found constitutional the sterilization of Carrie Buck by the State of Virginia.
Documents include Pennypacker’s Veto of Eugenics Law, Hall’s “Eugenics as a New Creed,” and Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell.What Caused the Great Depression?(Seated, left to right) Migrant worker Will Neal plays the fiddle while Robert Sonkin record him and migrant children listen. Arvin, California Migrant Camp, 1940. By 1928, the United States had enjoyed eight years of unprecedented prosperity under Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge. As the 1928 presidential race drew to a close, the Republican candidate, former Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover outlined the Republicans’ governing philosophy, which he credited with producing the prosperity. Seven months after Hoover took office, in October 1929, the stock market crashed. After two weeks, it recovered somewhat, but then began a long-term decline, as the American economy fell into what became known as the Great Depression.
Hoover responded to the economic difficulties according to the principles he had articulated in 1928. The American system was sound, he thought, and would recover with only limited assistance from the government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the leading Democratic candidate for President in 1932, argued that the American system as championed by Hoover was not sound and needed to be changed. This was the “New Deal” that Roosevelt offered the American people.
Documents include Hoover’s Principles and Ideals of United States Government, Roosevelt’s “The Forgotten Man,” and Milligan’s Speech on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.Containment and the Truman DoctrineAllies during the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union fell out quickly once it ended. In February 1946, George Kennan, the Chargé at the American Embassy in Moscow, sent a telegram that explained Soviet actions. Quickly dubbed the “Long Telegram,” its analysis and recommendations became the basis for the policy of containment that guided America’s actions toward the Soviet Union until the end of the Cold War. As the Cold War continued, it became a struggle not just between two political and military powers but between two ways of life or which of the two could better meet human needs. Even the quality of American and Soviet kitchens and what that represented could be part of the debate.
Documents include Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Truman’s “Address (The Truman Doctrine).”The Equal Rights AmendmentAs the United States struggled with the issue of civil rights, another issue of rights began to gain attention: equal rights or equal opportunities for women. As with African American civil rights, the movement for women’s rights had been part of American politics since the Revolution. It too gained momentum following the Civil War; one accomplishment was the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which guaranteed women the right to vote. Advocates for women’s rights also proposed an amendment guaranteeing equality of rights for women. First introduced in Congress in 1923, the amendment was introduced every year thereafter and passed and submitted to the states finally in 1972, with a deadline for ratification of March 22, 1979.
Thirty-five of the necessary 38 states ratified the amendment before opposition to it, led largely by Phyllis Schlafly, stalled the process. Under pressure, Congress extended the ratification deadline, but the amendment never passed.
Documents include Chisholm’s Address to the House of Representatives, Ginsburg’s “The Need for the Equal Rights Amendment,” and “Dialogue with Phyllis Schlafly on the ERA.”America and the WorldA U.S. Army Special Forces soldier assigned to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan provides security during an advising mission in Afghanistan, April 10, 2014. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Sara Wakai/ Released)The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era in international relations and raised the question of how the United States should deal with the post-Cold War world. Like his immediate predecessors, President George W. Bush argued that the United States should promote democracy for America’s sake and for the benefit of the world. This included a global struggle against the people and ideas that sponsored the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
Documents Include: Bush’s Inaugural Address, Obama’s “Address at Cairo University,” and Paul’s “Containment and Radical Islam.”Download your free pdf today!
The post Teaching the Themes of US History with Documents & Debates appeared first on Teaching American History.
As Publications Manager at Teaching American History, I frequently hear the following from our teacher partners:
- I love teaching with primary sources! But which one should I use?
- Your website is great! But I feel overwhelmed when I look all the documents.
- My district has dropped our textbook and we are switching to primary sources. Where do I even start?
- I can’t expect a high school student to read an entire Federalist Paper!?
Document collection page featuring document thumbnails and dropdown menu with a thematic table of contents, introduction, related resources and study questions.We get it. There is a dizzying number of websites out there that promote the use of primary sources. Some even supply educator notes, videos, colorful presentations, classroom activities and reading guides. All you need to replace the textbook . . . except that you wind up literally replacing the textbook!
At TAH, we know teachers are the true classroom experts. Unlike textbooks, we won’t tell you what to teach or how to teach it. Instead, we’ll provide you with the materials and education you need to teach the complex and sensitive topics that always come up in the secondary social studies classroom.
To that end, we’ve made all our Core Document volume series available as standalone digital collections that can be accessed here. Here’s a sampling of the available titles:
- 50 Core American Documents
- American Revolution
- Congress
- Race and Civil Rights
- The Judiciary
Use our study questions as classroom conversation starters, activity guides, or as assessment tools. Question A requires close reading of the document; Question B requires comparison between multiple documents from this collection.Each of these collections includes an introduction, a thematic table of contents, study questions, and a set of introduced and excerpted documents. All pages are optimized for classroom projection as well as individual use. Designed for ease of navigation for both teachers and students, our digital document collections are a classroom-ready resource around which you can base instruction.
Try out our document collections in your classroom today!
The post A 3000+ Document Library: A Blessing or a Curse? appeared first on Teaching American History.
Anna LenardsonIf you ask Anna Lenardson, a 2023 graduate of Ashland University’s Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program, why she enrolled in the challenging program, she replies, “I love to learn. I loved being with other teachers, talking about history and government.” True, she had to complete a lot of reading before arriving at the weeklong residential summer courses. But doing so prepared her for a week of intense, revelatory conversation. Online interactive evening courses during the school year required a different kind of focus—engaging in discussion after a long school day. “But the online courses allowed us to spread out our reading over eight weeks,” she says. “I enjoyed every minute of the program.”
She learned about MAHG in 2018, at a one-day TAH seminar offered in Tulsa on the American Founding. As the facilitator, Professor Jason Stevens, drew all the teachers in the room into discussion, she wondered, “Where can I get more interaction like this?” At the end of the seminar, a TAH representative told participants about Ashland’s Master’s program and the possibility of funding MAHG studies through a James Madison Foundation Fellowship in constitutional studies.
Intrigued, Lenardson attended a residential MAHG seminar in Ashland the next summer on “The Civil War in History and Literature,” taught by Professors Lucas Morel and Kathy Pfeiffer. A week of constant conversation—during seminar sessions, meals, and evening study time—“led to a couple of lasting relationships” with fellow teachers. She applied for the Madison fellowship, was awarded it in the spring of 2020, and enrolled at once in MAHG.
A Learner Called to Teach People who love to learn often find joy in helping others learn, especially if they like “being around kids,” as Lenardson does. Both Lenardson and her husband Robb—whose first career was in business—felt called to teach in mid-life. They moved their family, including children aged sixteen, nine and seven, to Portugal, in order to teach at Cascais International Christian School. Robb taught math, while Anna taught high school English and history, to students from around the world.
After four years overseas, the Lenardsons returned home to work at a boarding school for at-risk students from around the United States, Cookson Hills Christian Ministries in Oklahoma. They enjoyed helping students from difficult family situations find their strengths in a safe and supportive environment. “The hardest part was seeing kids leave and return home, which could happen suddenly, mid-year,” Lenardson said. “You knew you might never see them again.” She taught history and American government at Cookson Hills for ten years, beginning her MAHG studies during that time.
Now she teaches at the Tulsa Honor Academy, a charter school in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood that promotes college readiness. “I’ve found my sweet spot, where I can help kids on the brink of adulthood. I watch them spread their wings.”
How MAHG Enhanced Lenardson’s TeachingMAHG Summer 2022Lenardson teaches semester-long courses in Oklahoma History and US Government, and the year-long elective AP US Government course. Her MAHG studies have helped her better serve her students. “I learned enough to pull out a ready answer when a student asks a question,” she says. MAHG offered a wide range of courses on American government. “My course on the Supreme Court with Professor Sikkenga was probably the best I took,” she recalls. “I expected it to be difficult and dry, but not a minute was boring. Whatever issue came up, Sikkenga had a case at his fingertips to offer as an example.”
She benefited equally from the history component of the MAHG curriculum. “I weave a lot of history into my teaching of government, especially the history of the founding era.” Teaching ideas keep coming, because “each class in MAHG built my history nerd network (of fellow teachers) out deeper and wider. This is especially nice when it comes to a last-minute search for resources or lesson ideas. There’s always someone out there with a great idea at their fingertips.”
An Academy for Ambitious ImmigrantsTulsa Honor Academy is a Title I school; about 95% of its students receive free or reduced-price lunch. The school was founded in 2015 by a woman who grew up in the community, who was dismayed that only three youths in her neighborhood—she and her two brothers—went on to college. Too few of the founder’s fellow students even made it to graduation. The honor academy has changed that pattern. “The school started with a fifth-grade class, building out each subsequent grade year by year,” Lenardson explains. “Last June, when we graduated our first class of seniors, 65% of them were the first in their families to complete high school.” Most of the graduates went on to local and state college programs, while a few were accepted to prestigious out-of-state schools, such as George Washington and Emory universities.
Most of Lenardson’s students are first- or second-generation immigrants. They split their days between school and work. “Most take after-school jobs to help their families pay the bills.” They stock shelves in groceries and convenience stores, serve tables in restaurants, help on construction sites or in mechanical repair shops. “When a student asks for an extension on an assignment, I always say yes. I know their work schedules limit study time.”
Learning American History for the First TimeHer students’ families gave them a strong “work ethic,” but few assumptions about American history and government. Unlike those who started school in America, they don’t begin the required high school government course expecting to rehearse old, boring lessons about the three branches of government. And unlike students whose families have been in America for generations, they don’t find high school’s more candid discussions of the unflattering aspects of American history unsettling to their sense of identity. “It’s all news to them; their parents didn’t know to tell them about it,” Lenardson explains. They are curious about the careful structuring of our constitutional system and about constitutional guarantees of rights. When they learn about American failures to protect these rights, they react with surprise and simple “outrage.”
In Oklahoma history, students learn about slavery and the denial of rights during Jim Crow. Instead of struggling to grasp an understanding of federalism that allowed the court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, they conclude “that the 14th amendment was violated by Jim Crow; that the arguments made by the majority in Plessy were disingenuous. But I don’t think this history discourages them,” Lenardson continues. “It motivates them to guard against violations of their own rights.”
When Lenardson tells students they are responsible for maintaining our democracy, they “get it,” she says. “Last week, one of my students asked, ‘Is this an election year?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and then I asked, ‘How many of you will be 18 by election day?’ It turned out all of them will be. In Oklahoma, if you will be 18 by election day, you can register to vote at age 17 and a half. So, I said, ‘All right, I’ll bring in registration cards for you all.’ When I did, every student registered.”
Learning to Think for ThemselvesEach year, Lenardson reads through the entire Declaration and Constitution with her students. “I like that they can say that they’ve read the Constitution. I give them each a pocket constitution to keep. I tell them to bring it out at Thanksgiving dinner when their uncle gets crazy and to say, ‘I’ve read the Constitution, and I don’t think that’s what it says.’”
Her government students read a long excerpt of Federalist 10 and shorter excerpts of Federalist 51 and 33, along with excerpts from some of the Antifederalists–Brutus II and Patrick Henry. These are ambitious assignments, given that some of Lenardson’s students are learning English as a second language. “Eighteenth century language is difficult even for native English speakers,” Lenardson says. Working as a class or in small groups, students read the excerpts out loud, small segments at a time, parsing out each argument carefully. Then they fill out a chart listing the reasons Americans gave for supporting or opposing ratification of the Constitution. “Students find it difficult at first, but then they get into a groove and begin to understand. My classes tend to be harder than the others they take. But colleagues tell me that my students say they like being challenged. They learn better when they have to figure things out for themselves.”
That is what she hopes for them—that they learn to think for themselves. “It’s not easy to maintain an open mind. To do so, you have to be willing to seek information on all sides of an issue. I recently talked with my AP students about this—how we all want short cuts. It’s easy to attach ourselves to a particular political group and accept a single set of answers to all the problems of government.” But these problems are different, and complicated. Self-governing people “have to put in the work to understand all the options,” Lenardson tells her students. “That’s the active participation that democracy requires.”
The post Anna Lenardson Loves to Learn and Teach appeared first on Teaching American History.
Amanda Bryan excepted today’s blog from our Core Documents volume, Political Parties, edited by Eric Sands. Download the volume in our bookstore today.
Political parties have a long and often convoluted history in American politics. . . . To the Founders, parties were factions that threatened to divide the nation into competing groups that, at the worst, could turn to violence to advance their interests. The Founders also feared that parties would disrupt the separation of powers. This would be especially true in the case of unified government where loyalty to party might come to interfere with the system of checks and balances. Finally, the Founders worried that political parties might stand in the way of effective representation. Elected officials with party affiliations might be tempted to represent only those of their own political party and leave party opponents without a voice. Given these concerns, it is little wonder that the Founders did not want parties participating in American government.
Yet within ten years of ratification of the Constitution, political parties were alive and well in American politics. . . . This leads to an interesting conundrum—how did the political system become partisan within such a short time after the formation of a government designed to avoid reliance on political parties? Probably the leading answer to this question is that parties were understood as being inevitable. More precisely, republican government does not work well without being buttressed by political parties. Parties have proven to be instruments through which voters can make choices about the policy direction of the country. Parties allow minorities to form coalitions to create majority rule, even if that rule is not always harmonious or stable. Parties help build support for officeholders and serve as conduits of communication to the masses and vice versa. Parties serve as schools of democracy where citizens learn to associate and become attached to governing institutions. Finally, parties mobilize voters and encourage voter participation at all levels of democratic politics.
The following documents tell the story of the changes of the party systems throughout American history.
1790s* Parties, James Madison * Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Phillip Mazzei
1800 – 1820s* Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson
1820s – 1854* Autobiography, Martin Van Buren
1854 – Reconstruction* House Divided Speech, Abraham Lincoln
Reconstruction – 1900* Peril in the Machine, Robert La Follette * Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, George Washington Plunkitt
1890s – 1932* Progressive Party Platform of 1912
1932 – 1980* Acceptance Speech at the DNC, Franklin D. Roosevelt * Mandate for Reform on Party Structure and Delegate Selection
1980 – present Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan * Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission*
In reviewing these documents, what becomes clear is that political parties in the twenty-first century bear scant resemblance to their predecessors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries, and the chances of returning to an earlier era of party governance seems remote. Yet contemporary problems like voter alienation, low voter participation rates, government gridlock, and low popular trust in government may all have their roots in the weakening of political parties. Parties have traditionally been laboratories where people develop the habits of associating with others, the techniques of accommodation, and attachment to government institutions. What parties need is a sense of public purpose, but it is unlikely that this purpose is going to come from the parties themselves. Instead, the parties need strong leadership that can infuse public purpose into the parties and lead them to restored prominence and relevance in American politics. American parties are far from perfect, but they may be needed now more than ever to restore American politics from the twin dangers of cynicism and indifference. Given the traditional roles of parties, we must think seriously about whether a rejuvenation of the parties might be an elixir for our contemporary ills.
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On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave one of the most important and effective speeches of his political career. His speech at Cooper Union was a rhetorical masterpiece and helped make him the Republican candidate for president.
Lincoln’s debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 allowed him to reach a national audience. In those debates, Lincoln argued that Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty—that the people of the territories could decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery—meant an indifference to the spread of slavery. Worse, it was a betrayal of America’s principles. Rather than trumpeting the cause of self-government, Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty was its death knell. If whites could decide to enslave blacks, then Lincoln argued, there was nothing to prevent some whites from deciding to enslave other whites. Only adherence to the self-evident truth that all human beings were equal could save popular sovereignty—self-government—for all.
Composite image of Abraham Lincoln (left) and Stephen A. Douglas (right)Douglas continued to press his case, however. In September, 1859, he published an essay in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority,” arguing for his version of popular sovereignty and claiming that this was in line with the thinking of the founding generation. He delivered speeches on the same subject, all in an attempt to secure the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. In October, John Brown carried out his raid on Harper’s Ferry, further inflaming the sectional issue that threatened civil war.
Exterior shot, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art. Historic American Engineering Record, (New York, NY: 1968). https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0359/.In this fateful situation, Republicans in New York City invited Lincoln to give a speech scheduled for February 1860. Lincoln had his own presidential ambitions, but to become the Republican candidate, he needed to win the support of eastern Republicans, who tended to favor Senator William Seward of New York. Lincoln had to show that he, and not the more experienced and better-known Seward, was the man to defeat Douglas.
Lincoln prepared for his speech by doing extensive research in the Illinois State Library. He read primary documents—principally the words of the thirty-nine people who signed the Constitution—and historical records—how those thirty-nine voted on issues of federal control of the territories. He did so to fight Douglas on the ground that Douglas claimed as his own. Douglas claimed that the founding generation understood the question of who controlled the territories, whether the federal government or those who lived in the territories, better than anyone else. Lincoln showed that on Douglas’s own terms, Douglas was wrong. The documents and records showed that a substantial majority affirmed federal control of the territories. Showing this to be true, Lincoln showed that popular sovereignty as Douglas presented it was false.
Lincoln concluded this part of his speech by arguing that on the issue of slavery Americans ought to return to the position of the founding generation. “Let [slavery] be again marked as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.” This was not because Americans had to accept the views of the founding generation. They were free to reject those views, but only, Lincoln argued, “upon evidence so conclusive and argument so clear” that it outweighed their authority. But evidence and argument showed the founders right on the issue of slavery and supported their authority.
The Great Hall at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art. Historic American Engineering Record, (New York, NY: 1968). https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0359/.In the next section of his speech, Lincoln addressed southerners. He considered and countered one by one their objections to the Republican Party, repeatedly appealing to the standard Douglas had raised “of our fathers, who framed the government under which we live.” In this section, he also offered a concise statement of how to evaluate the Dred Scott decision (1857). Notoriously, this decision held that African Americans, free or slave, whose ancestors were brought to the United States and sold as slaves could not be American citizens, and that the Missouri Compromise (1820) was unconstitutional because the federal government did not have the power to exclude slavery from any federal territory. In discussing the decision, one thing Lincoln showed was that the Court based its ruling on a misstatement of fact. The Court’s decision stated that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” Lincoln pointed out that such a right was not “distinctly and expressly affirmed” in the Constitution. On the contrary, Lincoln said,
Wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a ‘person’; and wherever his master’s legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as ‘service or labor which may be due,’ as a debt payable in service or labor. Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man. (Lincoln was alluding to a remark Madison made at the Constitutional Convention.)
Overall, Lincoln’s consideration of the southern view showed, as he said, that southerners would abandon the Constitution, if they could not get their way. This was as willful and arbitrary an assertion of power as slavery itself.
Finally, Lincoln addressed his fellow Republicans. He stressed to them that the fundamental issue was whether slavery was right or wrong. Republicans held it was wrong. They should act on this understanding. They must stand by their duty “fearlessly and effectively.” Lincoln closed with a stirring imperative: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
[Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. president, half-length portrait, looking left, May 20,1860]. Marsh, William. (1860) Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009630662/ Scholars often note that Lincoln’s Address at Cooper Union lacked the flourishes and embellishments of mid-nineteenth century speeches. It reads, most say, as if it were a lawyer’s brief. This is true, but this is also what gave the speech its rhetorical force and its political effect. The country was at the brink of war, passions at fever pitch. Lincoln stood for a calm, factual, reasoned consideration of the case. Southerners, for example, claimed Republicans were revolutionaries, and tried to associate them with fanatical abolitionists. Lincoln’s tone and words undid this criticism, as his presentation of the case revealed southerners to be unreasonable hysterics. Using this rhetorical approach, Lincoln took the advice he offered in a great speech from early in his career, the Lyceum Address (1838). In perpetuating the Republic, Lincoln had then argued, “passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”
As Lincoln stood on the speaker’s platform at Cooper Union, unimpassioned reason stood in opposition to fiery willfulness, a cool presentation of the facts to willful misrepresentation. Amid the political storm, Lincoln presented himself and Republicans as a calm rallying point. Their position was consistent with historical fact, political necessity, and moral principle. His audience understood this, and enough Americans came to understand it to bring Lincoln to the White House.
When we read Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech we are in effect a jury hearing the words of the greatest advocate of the Constitution’s and America’s founding principles as thoroughly anti-slavery. It is remarkable that still today those who claim to be most passionate in their defense of freedom repeat the mistaken facts and arguments of those who then advocated slavery. As we steer a way through our own political storms, we should remember the importance of fact and reason, and above all renew our faith that right makes might.
For more on Abraham Lincoln’s writings, see our CDC volume, Abraham Lincoln, available for free download or hard copy purchase.
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Teaching American History provides various free resources for American history and government teachers, including our popular seminars, multi-day seminars, and extensive database of original source documents. Still, to paraphrase a famous campaign slogan from the 1990s, for TAH, it’s the documents, stupid! Seriously, that’s because we believe the best way to learn about American history and government is by bringing the words of those who lived it into the classroom.
Most teachers discover our database when searching for a specific document. When our site pops up in the search results, and they click on our site, they see that we have thousands of primary source documents, many accompanied by introductions and study questions. Still, here are some tips that help you locate documents you want to use with your students.
Say you want to use Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Holmes expressing his concerns about the Missouri Compromise. There are several ways to search for the letter. You could enter Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes in the search bar on the documents page. This is the best way to find a specific document. The more information you have, the better. However, you may not know who the recipient of a letter was. In that case, you could search for the documents authored by Thomas Jefferson by typing only his name into the search field. We have 93 Jefferson documents in our collection, so you must dig further. You know the Missouri Compromise was in 1820. If you search “Jefferson 1820,” 49 documents are listed. The first is Jefferson’s letter to Holmes. One more pointer. Our author drop-down menu lists authors alphabetically by first name, not last.
Suppose you are looking for something other than a specific document. You may hope to find a new document that will freshen your approach to teaching a particular topic. In that case, we recommend you explore our Core Document volumes. Our Core Document volumes are curated by scholars, with each book focusing on a specific topic. Titles include Reconstruction, Native Americans, Gender and Equality, Slavery and Its Consequences, and The Great Depression and the New Deal. Each book has an introduction, as does each document in the book. Each collection also contains study questions to use with students, and a thamtic table of contents which groups the documents according to the collection’s key themes. Study questions, arranged in pairs, include one question relevant to a single document and a second question that pairs each document in the collection with others in the collection.
Two Core Document Collections cover the entire scope of American history. Documents and Debates volumes 1 and 2 each contain 15 chapters that together cover American history from 1493 to 2009. Each chapter consists documents that present different views on a key issue. Chapter 1 in Volume 1 is titled “Early Contact.” Volume 2 concludes with a chapter called “America and the World.” Each chapter is a case study that can be printed and shared with students or linked to a classroom management program for lessons during several class periods.
All Core Document paperback volumes are available to purchase for $12.99 in the TAH bookstore. You can also choose to download a FREE PDF version of the book.
Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.
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Presidential overreach and congressional abdication of authority? David Alvis and Joe Postell cover it all in their latest CDC volume, Separation of Powers.
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This year marks the 240th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which formerly ended the hostilities of the Revolutionary War and won British recognition of the United States of America as an independent nation. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 is rightly celebrated as the defining document of the time for its universal and timeless truths about humanity and governance, and the poetic beauty of its diction. The Articles of Confederation of 1781, our first federal constitution, is almost universally chided in American classrooms for its weaknesses and inefficiency. But another document that could rightly claim considerable historical importance, but which is often passed over with only cursory mention, is the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Perhaps this is because we fail to heed historian Carl R. Trueman’s important admonition that “…we cannot and should not write history as if it is simply a case of identifying the inevitable phases of a society as it moves toward a predetermined goal.”
With the meteoric rise of the United States on the world stage over the last 240 years, it is easy to assume that victory during the War of Independence was a given and that the peace treaty was merely a perfunctory step on the way toward national greatness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the war saw the United States losing the majority of pitched battles with the British Army and it was only 6 years into the war, with Washington’s decisive victory at Yorktown, that victory became clear. The peace negotiations dragged on for more than a year and saw five different ministries (North, Rockingham, Shelburne, Fox-North coalition, Pitt the Younger) take command of Parliament before ratification of the treaties by all the nations involved in the war were completed. To further complicate matters, the interests and egos of five nations (Great Britain, the U.S., France, Spain, and the Netherlands) and several powerful personalities (Adams, Franklin, Jay, the Comte de Vergennes, Lord Shelburne, and Charles Fox) were forced into a delicate dance of shifting sentiments and this made any successful negotiation downright incredible.
The success of the negotiations is undeniable, however—the nascent United States of America ended the war with international recognition, room for territorial growth, and all immediate potential rivals in considerably weakened states. But with Dr. Trueman’s admonition in mind, it is important that amidst celebrating the anniversary of this truly world-changing treaty, we appreciate the perilous process that got us to the signing of the treaty on 3 September, 1783, and the Continental Congress’s ratification of the treaty on 1 January, 1784.
John Adams. Trumbull, John. (1792) White House Historical Association (White House Collection). Two years before Yorktown, John Adams was appointed as a minister plenipotentiary with the sole power to negotiate a peace treaty with the British Empire and any commercial treaties for the new United States. Adams was a great champion of the new nation, but his cantankerous and vain tendencies quickly irritated the French, our most important ally in the war effort. After ruffling too many feathers, Adams left France in 1780 for the Netherlands and the French lobbied the United States to send other ministers in his stead. The United States did not recall Adams, who at that point was negotiating with the Netherlands for recognition of the United States as an independent nation and for a commercial treaty. However, they did decide to commission Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Laurens, a prominent South Carolina planter, as ministers plenipotentiary.
Thomas JeffersonJefferson, for all his key roles during the Revolution, ended up playing no part in the negotiations. Washington, for one, was pleased with this turn of events, as he expressed serious misgivings about Jefferson’s appointment to Robert Livingstone in early 1783. Henry Laurens was captured at sea by the Royal Navy and spent virtually the entire time as a prisoner in the Tower of London. Interestingly, he was bailed out of prison by the original British negotiator, Richard Oswald, as the two of them had lucrative business connections involving the shipment of commercial goods and slaves. Laurens’ only contribution was the inclusion of a clause that restricted evacuating British forces from taking away property and slaves as they left the United States. This caused tensions with Adams, Jay, and Franklin, all of whom had growing antislavery sentiments. However, they knew that Laurens had the pulse of the Southern elite and would need that clause to prevent a fracturing of the Union, so they allowed its inclusion.
Adams spent considerable energy in the Netherlands to gain recognition for the United States and a favorable commercial treaty with the Dutch Empire. He boasted to Abigail Adams that his name was publicly lauded in the Netherlands and that the treaties he negotiated with the Dutch were truly historic, claiming, “I shall recollect Amsterdam, Leyden, and the Hague with more Emotion than Philadelphia or Paris.” Fresh off his triumph in the Netherlands, Adams was none too pleased to be working with Franklin, whom he felt was of poor character, too Francophilic, and not up to the task of negotiating a proper peace for the United States. Adams also chafed at Franklin’s maneuver to make one of his grandsons a secretary to the proceedings, though he effectively did the same thing with his son, John Quincy. Upon arrival in Paris, Adams refused to see the elderly and ailing Franklin, believing that his dignity and protocol dictated that Franklin come to see him. He was leery of Jay too, having developed a poor opinion of him during their time in the Continental Congress years earlier. Adams was even less a fan of the French and the political intrigues of the Comte de Vergennes, the chief French negotiator.
John Jay. Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) after Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull (1754-1829) New-York Historical Society Library, Despite Adams’ earned reputation of being a curmudgeon and his distaste for the French, John Jay proved to be even more shockingly disdainful of his European counterparts. Jay initially went to Spain and left with nothing but contempt for their claims of poverty while receiving ship after ship loaded with silver from the Americas, and for their designs on the Mississippi River. Originally a more moderate Patriot with warm sentiments towards the Franco-American alliance of 1778, Jay came to hold the French, especially Vergennes, in suspicion believing that the French were looking to merely replace British hegemony in North America with a Gallic one. He was further exasperated with the infighting amongst British MPs like Lord Shelburne and Charles Fox that complicated negotiations. Jay eventually won grudging respect from Adams with his hardline negotiating on behalf of the United States. While the two men had very different demeanors and styles of negotiation, Jay and Franklin worked effectively together.
Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Siffred Duplessis (c.1785) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, NPG.87.43.Benjamin Franklin was an affable and capable diplomat, but despite Adams’ misgivings about his relationship with France, Franklin had a fragile relationship with our closest military ally at the time. Franklin was popular in the salons and with the cosmopolitan, liberal aristocrats, but the French king made chamber pots with Franklin’s face on them. Beneath his easygoing demeanor, Franklin was hawkishly optimistic about the United States’ future and did not want France to play an overbearing role in that. To that end, he shocked Adams by not telling the French that the United States and the British Empire were already negotiating—a clear violation of terms in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778. Franklin was gambling significantly with this tactic—it gave the United States the best shot at independence, but Vergennes had spies in England so the secret negotiations were not so secret in reality, and Franklin was still angling for more French monetary support. Remarkably, the United States avoided a conflict with France over the secret negotiations and managed to secure more money. Perhaps most challenging for Franklin was the fact that his estranged Loyalist son, William, was in London and openly advocating for Loyalists to receive compensation, frustrating the elder Franklin’s opposition to such compensation.
Through this labyrinth of national interests, personal rivalries, and ingrained biases, Adams, Franklin, and Jay successfully bargained for a treaty that could have scarcely been better for the United States. While the future greatness of the United States on the world stage was never guaranteed, the Treaty of Paris of 1783 should be celebrated for creating the possibility of such a future performance, and for its unlikely genesis at the hands of colorful characters who put their differences aside for the benefit of their nation.
Greg Balan is a 2016 James Madison Fellow for Florida, the 2022 State History Teacher of the Year for the Florida State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a proud MAHG graduate.
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The 15th Amendment was the third and final constitutional change of Reconstruction, hailed then and since as a profound leap in American democracy. And though the story of its deliberation, enactment, and enforcement illustrates its great potential impact, many of those possibilities were only realized in the mid-20th century by the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement. Even today, 153 years since its ratification, the scope of the 15th Amendment remains uncertain.
The congressional road to the 15th Amendment actually begins in the 1866 debates of the 14th, which was itself an attempt to reinforce the principles of the 13th. Section 2 of the 14th Amendment sought to penalize states for disenfranchising prospective male voters by reducing their House representation. In this way it encouraged voting rights for black men without imposing them — a strategy aimed at compromise. Nonetheless, congressional Democrats presented black political power, and specifically voting, as a boogieman to unify their resistance to the 14th Amendment in Congress and rally the (unsuccessful) opposition to its ratification. So despite its passage, Democratic opposition to the 14th Amendment showed that future voting rights laws would effectively be an intra-party debate among Republicans.
Between their successes in the 1866 midterms (with Republicans winning clear supermajorities in both chambers) and the 1868 presidential election, Republicans carefully leveraged their political power to expand voting rights. This took the form of combined persuasion and pressure campaigns. In Republican-controlled states, they encouraged local action like referendums to enfranchise black men. In places where the federal government had more direct authority, they passed laws and applied pressure by eliminating racial restrictions to voting in Washington D.C. and the federal territories; requiring former Confederate states to do the same for readmission; and rejecting Nebraska’s petitions for statehood until they followed suit. While these efforts advanced the cause of suffrage, they faced more resistance than anticipated, and the referendum movement in particular was less successful than envisioned. This halting, uneven progressconvinced Congress that a more permanent measure – an Amendment – would be necessary.
Even though they maintained a numerical supermajority after the 1868 presidential election, Republicans worried that their incoming caucus would not be as ideologically unified behind black male suffrage. The lame duck session of early 1869 thus seemed the last chance to push a voting rights amendment through Congress.
The original 15th AmendmentCompromising between different factions of their caucus, on January 30 1869 the House Republicans passed a deliberately narrowly tailoredversion of the 15th Amendment primarily drafted by George Boutwell (R-MA):“the right of any citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of the race, color, or previous condition of slavery of any citizen or class of citizens of the United States.” Ten days later, a broader version of the amendment passed in the Senate (typically considered the more conservative chamber). Seeking a “comprehensive, just, and … strong” statement, Senator Henry Wilson (R-MA) proposed, and the Senate passed, the following: “No discrimination shall be made in any State among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elected franchise, or in the right to hold office on account of race, color, nativity, property, education, or creed.”Defending the broader statement, Wilson highlighted the importance of “secur[ing] the right to vote and the right to hold office,” both keys to a government built on popular sovereignty. By eliminating additional restrictions beyond racial categories (restrictions employed throughout the United States at the time) Wilson hoped to “appeal … alike to the friends of the colored race, and to other citizens,” and indirectly, in a bold effort to expand enfranchisement, to empower states “to try … the experiment of woman suffrage.”
About a month before a new congress commenced in March 1869, the House and Senate convened a joint conference to reconcile the differences in their versions of the amendment. With a moderate-majority committee, and racing against time, expediency won out. With a lowest-common denominator approach, the committee adopted only the ideasshared by both versions; effectively, this meant adopting the relatively narrow House version. Fearing that the Senate additions would be impossible to ratify (or probably even to pass in the House), the conference excluded all of them. As a result, the final 15th Amendment reads like a concise edit of the House version:
Section 1. 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 race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Underscoring its continuity with the two previous Reconstruction amendments, the 15th closes with the same enforcement clause as the 13th and 14th:
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The United States had its first voting rights amendment.
In US history courses, we tend to frame voting rights amendments as affirmative grants of rights: the 15th gave black men the right to vote; the 19th gave women the right to vote; the 26th gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. Yet the difference between this framing and the actual language reveals key nuances of the federal system.
State voting systems predated the 1787 US Constitution, and that document left most voting qualifications up to the states. However, by the late 1860s the continued hopes of Reconstruction lay in the ability of freedmen to protect their rights through political power — which Southern states (and, as Republicans learned through the referendum movement, many Northerners) were committed to suppressing. So lawmakers faced a political problem: What if a state’s exercise of power (in this case, voting regulations) fundamentally violated the principles of the federal constitution?
Republicans had to balance deferring to state authority with advancing the agenda of Reconstruction. So, rather than being framed as an affirmative measure, the 15th Amendment (and each of the constitution’s subsequent suffrage amendments) is phrased as an anti–discrimination measure (“shall not be denied or abridged”). The amendment still defers to states but removes unconstitutional restrictions. In the words of then-Senator (and longtime reformer) Carl Schurz (R-MO),
States [remain] free as … ever to legislate … the free exercise of the suffrage … But … a State shall no longer have the power to swindle … citizens out of their rights. A State [may] do that which is right in its own way; but it is prohibited from doing that which is wrong in any way.
“Voter Registration, Macon, Georgia.” 1867. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3fa4-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99With this phrasing, the 15th Amendment established a template since relied upon to eliminate the aforementioned voting restrictions based on sex (19th) and age (26th), as well as class (the 24th Amendment’s outlawing of poll taxes uses the same construction).
Then and now, many voting rights advocates have pushed for more expansive grants of voting rights. And yet, upon passage in 1869 and ratification in 1870, the 15th Amendment was considered a dramatically transformative measure both by contemporary critics and supporters. On the opposition side, and reminding us that anti-Reconstruction attitudes were not exclusive to the South, a Connecticut broadside attacked the 15th Amendment as a violation of states’ rights, “strik[ing] at the foundation of our system of government … a gross perversion of the authority of Congress … making this a Kingdom instead of a Republic … mutilat[ing] our State Constitution.” On the other hand, Frederick Douglass celebrated the 15th by exclaiming “Never was a revolution more complete. Nothing has been left for time.” Similarly, President Grant hailed the 15th as completing “the most important event … since the nation came into life.”
Remarkably, this transformative amendment became moot shortly after its ratification. All three branches of the federal governmentretreated in the face of Reconstruction’s challenges.
Collection of the Supreme Court. The Waite Court (1874-1877). Seated, from left to right: Joseph P. Bradley, Stephen J. Field, Samuel F. Miller, Nathan Clifford. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, Noah Swayne, David Davis, William Strong, and Ward Hunt. S. M. [Samuel Montague] Fassett (1825-1910)Judicial retreat from the 15th Amendment is best captured by two cases decided on March 27 1876: U.S. v. Reese and U.S. v. Cruikshank. In Reese, the Supreme Court applied a prohibitively narrow interpretation of the 15th Amendment that discouraged enforcement, and in Cruikshank, it invalidated the Enforcement Act designed to prosecute violations of the Reconstruction Amendments, leaving those amendments largely toothless. The next year brought the Compromise of 1877, negotiated by a bipartisan congressional commission of federal lawmakers and judges which settled the disputed presidential election of 1876 in the Republicans’ favor in exchange for ending executive enforcement of Reconstruction. From this point, black voting rights and representation faded and ultimately cratered after a Federal Elections Bill fell to defeat in January 1891. From this point, most of the power and force of the 15th Amendment lay dormant until revived by all three branches of the federal government, in concert with activists and reformers, during the Second Reconstruction, better known as the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century.
In our time voting rights and regulations remain at the forefront of our political conversations. And the questions of our time — How expansive can they be? How do they harmonize with federalism? Whose rights must be protected? How can they be enforced? — not only echo the questions of this much earlier debate of voting rights, they are a continuation of the ongoing national debate about how to politically secure a government built on popular sovereignty.
Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.
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The second and most important reason we study Lincoln is that our own purposes are inspired by his. Above all, Lincoln worked to restore the common ground of American citizenship.
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As pivotal a constitutional event as it was, the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery initially accomplished less than its supporters had hoped — substantially due to President Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson’s opposition to congressional Reconstruction, as well as unyielding resistance from the southern establishment. The congressional response to these obstacles resulted in the Fourteenth Amendment. With three more sections than the Thirteenth Amendment and over NINE times the words, the Fourteenth is the longest, most complex, and most litigated amendment of our Constitution.
“Scene in the House on the Passage of the Proposition to Amend the Constitution, January 31, 1865” (Harper’s Weekly: New York, NY, February 18, 1865). Internet Archive.Many of the Thirteenth Amendment’s original supporters considered its key statement (“neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States“) a sufficient expression of principle to guide Reconstruction. They recognized slavery as the core root of disunion, so the Thirteenth Amendment’s proclamation seemed a fundamental platform to address both philosophical and institutional issues — to transform, in Representative Thaddeus Stevens’s words, the “whole fabric of southern society.” Since slavery permeated that fabric, a denunciation of it could redefine constitutional matters of powers, of rights,and of structure in southern society. But the southern establishment staunchly resisted any significant change, intending to maintain the status quo as closely as possible. Before the amendment was even ratified, southern governments began instituting black codes, which legally subordinated African Americans and frequently denied them protections enshrined in the federal Bill of Rights. Disparate application of the Bill of Rights was constitutional under the Supreme Court’s 1833 case Barron v. Baltimore, which determined that the Bill of Rights applied only to federal law — not state or local action. Furthermore, black codes frequently exploited the criminal exemption in the Thirteenth Amendment (whereby “punishment for crime” allowed governments to impose involuntary servitude) as a loophole to criminalize actions protected in the Bill of Rights when performed by black people (e.g. public assembly above certain numeric thresholds, bearing arms, public speech or preaching without permission, etc.). These practices outraged congressional Republicans, who committed to crafting a legally binding response.
John A. Bingham. T.M. Johnston (Boston : C.H. Brainard, 1860) Library of Congress LC-DIG-pga-07173Enter Representative John Bingham of Ohio, now known as the “father of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Bingham had served eight years in Congress fighting against the expansion of southern “slave power” before losing his seat in a redrawn district after the 1862 elections. During his single-term congressional hiatus, in the midst of the Civil War, Bingham’s friendship with fellow Whig-turned-Republican Abraham Lincoln led to various legal roles in the administration — work that ideally positioned him to regain his seat in the Republican wave accompanying Lincoln’s 1864 reelection. Even before the outrages of the black codes, Bingham was convinced that reconstruction would require “[constitutional] limitations upon the States in favor of the personal liberty of all citizens of the Republic.” This conviction made him a logical champion for a new Reconstruction amendment.
In February of 1866 Bingham proposed his new amendment, stating that “The Congress shall have the power to make all laws necessary and proper to secure to citizens of each state all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states, and to all persons in the several states equal protection of life, liberty and property.” However, Bingham’s Republican colleagues hesitated, wary of the sweeping language and unconvinced that they had sufficient majorities to pass and ratify it. Still, certain of the urgent need to counteract Southern backlash, they turned to an intermediate recourse that could protect freedpeople while asserting their rights and role in post-emancipation society: the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This volley against the black codes approximated Bingham’s vision, legislating a national definition of citizenship and asserting “full and equal” legal protections that superseded “any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to the contrary.” In this act, they hoped to ensure that neither hostile laws nor normswould obstruct the necessary course of civil equality.
Detail from Nast, Thomas, Artist. Andrew Johnson’s reconstruction and how it works / Th. Nast. , 1866. September 1. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-13467.The motivation to return to the more permanent amendment process came quicker than anticipated, and from an unexpected place: President Johnson’s March 1866 veto of Congress’s Civil Rights Act. Calling the bill “fraught with evil,” Johnson rebuked its citizenship expansions and insisted that it interfered with market forces that would more naturally realign the civil order. While congressional Republicans knew that Johnson did not share the boldest parts of their Reconstruction vision (which they’d kept out of the law), they were surprised by his rebuff. Galvanized, they mustered supermajorities to override Johnson’s veto — the first major veto override in federal congressional history — and swiftly returned to amendment deliberations.
By the beginning of May 1866, Congress had the Fourteenth Amendment in near-final form for debate. Congressional records show that, then as now, the greatest energy focused on the first section:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This section would secure the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the Constitution — in then-Representative (and future President) James Garfield’s words, “lifting [the Civil Rights Act] above the reach of political strife, beyond … plots and machinations of any party.” Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan echoed Bingham’s insistence that Section 1 nationalized “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments” of the Bill of Rights — a process we now call incorporation. Further, Section 1’s establishment of birthright citizenship overturned the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 Dred Scottdecision, which had deemed black people ineligible for citizenship, and hence beneath the protection of federal law.
The remainder of the Fourteenth Amendment became a vessel to resolve various Reconstruction complications. Section 2 presented a new representation formula that eliminated the obsolete three-fifths clause of the original Constitution, and penalized states for denying any male citizens the right to vote by proportionally reducing their congressional representation (alas, this clause was ignored in practice once Reconstruction was overthrown and Jim Crow law overtook the South). Section 3 placed restrictions on former Rebels who had held political offices before the war. Section 4 dealt with financial matters, prohibiting Confederate debt payment while guaranteeing Union debt payment, and refusing any future compensation to former slaveholders. Finally, Section 5 reiterated the language that closed the Thirteenth Amendment, asserting congressional enforcement power.
Opposition to the amendment during debate heavily focused on threats to states’ rights as well as to white rule. Representative Andrew Rogers (D-NJ), the most cited congressional opponent, attacked the amendment as a “program of disunion … most dangerous to liberty … [which] destroys the elementary principles of the States” as well as America’s status as a “Government made for white men and white women.” Senator (and future Vice President) Thomas Hendricks (D-IN) found new threats to federalism in the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that he somehow had not seen in the exact same words of the Thirteenth Amendment: “When these words were used in the [Thirteenth] amendment they [seemed] harmless; but [now] there has been claimed for them such force and scope … that Congress might … crown the Federal Government with absolute and despotic power.” But these complaints were a distinct minority. The Republicans had crafted the amendment through compromises between their radical and moderate factions, and the urgency of countering political and social resistance was pressing. The Fourteenth Amendment passed both chambers of Congress with clear supermajorities — the Senate on June 8, 1866 by a 33-11 vote, and the House on June 13, 1866 by a 120-32 vote.
More than any amendment before or since, the US Constitution became a different document after the Fourteenth Amendment. Its various provisions have been reinterpreted over time, its role in American life changing with the power and influence of the interpreters. The amendment’s scope extended beyond empowering freedpeople and restraining Confederates in short order: the Supreme Court’s first major Fourteenth Amendment decision actually involved an association of white butchers in New Orleans, The Slaughter-House Cases (1873). A little over a decade later, after the Court announced its own shift away from Reconstruction, it extended Fourteenth Amendment protections to corporations as legal “persons” — a key source of legal protection, and controversy, to this day. During the Civil Rights Movement, activists and legal strategists demanded that the federal government apply the enforcement power of the Fourteenth Amendment and revisit the equal-citizenship roots of the amendment — both emphases that had been dormant since the end of Reconstruction. These demands helped set legal conditions for the broader rights revolution of the 1960s.
And the Fourteenth Amendment permeates current political events, cropping up in predictable and unpredictable ways, in mainstream and marginal arguments, across the political spectrum, through discussions of the debt limit, vote suppression, affirmative action, birthright citizenship, the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and more. Unsurprisingly, considering the numerous issues it reaches, many Fourteenth Amendment supporters consider it (in legal scholar John Witt’s phrasing) a “mini-constitution” unto itself, embedded within the original. The historical context and modern applications of the Fourteenth Amendment show that tackling the challenges and realizing the possibilities of reconstruction demanded a reimagining of the federal Constitution — an ongoing process to this day.
Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California
The post The 14th Amendment: A “Mini-Constitution” appeared first on Teaching American History.
Today we feature an interview with Professor John Moser, author of The Great Depression and The New Deal, a concise history of this critical juncture in American history. The first of a new Teaching American History series, it is a highly readable account of a period that has been the subject of myths and misinterpretations in textbooks and histories. Few Americans understand the economic conditions that produced the Great Depression, and many do not understand the factors that brought an end to the crisis.
The Great Depression and The New Deal, like the other volumes planned for the series (Discovery and Settlement; the Founding; the Civil War; the Rise of Modern America; and America in the Age of Vietnam) covers, in about 150 pages, a turning point in our nation’s history, including the factors that led to it and the political and cultural changes it wrought. It includes a timeline of events, a list of works for further reading, and an index. The text is linked (and hyperlinked in its downloadable digital version) to TAH’s core document collection on the same period, itself edited by Moser.
Professor John Moser giving a Sunday night lecture during the summer residential MAHG programProfessor John Moser chairs both the Department of History and Political Science at Ashland University and Teaching American History’s graduate program, the Master of Arts in American History and Government, based at Ashland University. Moser’s many books and articles, which include The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II (Routledge 2015), cover a wide range of subjects, from the world wars to Japanese foreign policy to the cultural significance of comic books.
We asked Professor Moser to explain, first of all, what students and teachers can learn by studying the Great Depression and the New Deal.
Why is it important for Americans today to understand the history of the Great Depression? Haven’t many of the economic factors that led to this calamity since been resolved?Well, we like to think that. The fact is, there are many people who still misunderstand why the Great Depression occurred; they do not grasp the central role monetary policy played in causing the crisis. So, they do not grasp the economic lessons this history offers.
Second, we still suffer periodic economic downturns. God willing, we will never have another one as severe as the Great Depression. But there is comfort in looking back to the Great Depression when new economic crises occur, just as, when 9/11 happened, we looked to the historical precedent of Pearl Harbor. In many ways, 9/11 confronted us with a shocking, absolutely new kind of attack. But when we remembered 1941, we could say, “Wait a minute, that surprise attack killed about the same number of people and did a comparable amount of damage. Yet we rebounded and eventually won the war.” I think there is something comforting in understanding what the Great Depression was all about, and putting subsequent crises into that historical context.
You mentioned monetary policy. Your short history gives a brief and cogent explanation of how restrictions in the money supply, largely as a result of adherence to the gold standard, led to the Depression. Why is this not better understood?Portrait of 32nd United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. National Archives.It’s a misunderstanding that has persisted ever since the Great Depression unfolded. Remember that the Depression occurred against the backdrop of the 1920s, when Americans seemed to be more prosperous than they ever had been before. They were buying things that earlier they never could have afforded. At the same time, people worried about the effect of this growing materialism. There was lots of talk about immorality among young people, who were driving about unsupervised in automobiles, drinking in speakeasies, and dancing to jazz music. It became easy to see these things as symptoms of a larger attitude of selfishness and carelessness that brought the crisis about.
I’m now reading a colleague’s manuscript about New Deal crime policy. I wish I had read it a year ago, so I could have brought some of its insights into my short history. During the Roosevelt administration, law enforcement agencies grew in terms of their budgets and the power they wielded—because of public demand. Americans at the time didn’t see the Depression simply as an economic crisis; they saw a crisis of morality.
One thinks of the many hoboes traveling around looking for work. Did people find them unsettling?That was part of it: weren’t the so-called tramps a menace to the American way? But Americans also complained of greedy businessman who acted only in their own self-interest and didn’t think about the public welfare. And during Prohibition—which was not repealed until the end of 1933—they had watched organized crime grow. Overall, there was a crime boom in the early 1930s, and the Roosevelt administration committed itself to ending it. Sure enough, crime rates went down—but of course, that happened in part because of the economic recovery.
If people were worried about crime, it seems they were unsure who committed it—the poor, or those exploiting the poor? I’m thinking of Hoover’s oscillations. Hoover called the Bonus Army a “mob” and empowered Douglas MacArthur to use force to disperse them. Yet Hoover also signed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which banned courts from issuing injunctions to break strikes.The Bonus Army demonstrating in front of the US Capitol, Washington, DC. Harris and Ewing, 1932. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-36872.Hoover saw the Depression as a technical problem and, engineer that he was, set out to solve it. He never tried to personalize the issue the way that Roosevelt did. For FDR the Depression was the work of selfish, greedy businessmen and bankers. Even in 1932 Al Smith, one of Roosevelt’s major rivals for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, accused him of engaging in “class warfare.”
I’m still amazed at how often one sees Hoover depicted in popular histories as a do-nothing president. In fact, he was highly activist. He spent more money in peacetime than any of his predecessors—and some of the things he did, frankly, made things worse.
The popular view of Hoover as the conservative who didn’t care derives from Hoover’s personality. He was always an engineer; he saw himself as an expert solving technical problems. Of course, he cared about the plight of ordinary Americans; he would have been a monster not to care. Yet he couldn’t project warmth and empathy. In that sense, the contrast in personality between him and FDR was real. Still, they were both very active presidents.
Did Roosevelt’s New Deal policies end the Great Depression—or, at least, put the economy on a path to recovery?President Franklin Roosevelt delivers his first “fireside chat,” on the banking crisis, March 12, 1933. National Archives.Roosevelt did some things that helped. Certainly, he restored faith in the banking system—although it’s worth pointing out that most of FDR’s actions to stabilize banking were things that Hoover had planned to do. The idea for the Emergency Banking Act—to close all the banks and then have examiners look at their situations and decide which ones to reopen—that was a Hoover idea, and in fact the policy FDR executed was put together by holdovers from the Hoover administration. It’s true enough that FDR’s radio address did a lot to restore confidence.
If all you do is look at the Depression, you might get the idea that banking crises were a new feature of American life, but in fact, they happened all the time. There just were more of them between 1930 and 1933, and the one that occurred at the beginning of 1933 was the worst ever in American history. The Emergency Banking Act resulted in an immediate boost to the economy.
But what’s often forgotten is that after that, things leveled off. You don’t see an upward trend until 1934. Then there is steady upward progress through early 1937. That helps to explain why FDR wins by a landslide 1936. Yet soon after, in the middle of 1937, the economy takes another nosedive. This history, I think, really undercuts the idea that the New Deal ended the Depression.
Other forces had a greater influence on the US economy. The biggest one was the flow of gold into the United States, which was related almost entirely to the rising threat of war in Europe and Asia. Remember, the Depression was world-wide. When war threatened, if you were a wealthy person abroad, you wanted to send your hard currency to the United States where you thought it would be protected. As a result, Americans’ gold reserves built up tremendously, allowing for significant economic improvement. So much so, though, that in late 1936 and early 1937, FDR and some of his advisers started to worry—amazingly—about inflation. Despite their earlier anxiety to raise prices, now they thought prices were going up too fast.
FDR and his team were not the only ones to worry inordinately about inflation. Hoover had also; that’s why he raised taxes and slashed spending and why, under Hoover, the Federal Reserve Bank raised interest rates. The fear was that if we went off the gold standard, we’d have runaway inflation. Everybody looked to the example of Germany in the early 1920s. That was a nightmare scenario.
Likewise, at the end of 1936 and in early 1937, FDR and some of his advisers, like Henry Morgenthau, began worrying that the economy would overheat and prices would rise too much. So, the Federal Reserve starts increasing the requirement for gold reserves that banks had to keep on hand, and interest rates started to go up. Roosevelt also decided to cut back on spending. Also, in 1937, Social Security taxes were collected for the first time ever. With money being taken out of the economy in all these ways, a serious setback occurred.
By 1940, things were looking better again. But I don’t think the New Deal brought this improvement. The flow of gold brought it. And by 1940, of course, you’ve got increasing spending on the armed forces, not just in the United States, but world-wide.
By the way, early in the Depression commodity prices—on basic goods like wheat, cotton, pork, steel, etc.—dropped to really low levels. So, much of New Deal policy early on was aimed at forcing prices upward. If you make things more expensive, then it’s going to create an upward spiral: wages will go up, prices will go up, wages will rise more, and so on. Hence the fear of inflation and the efforts to restrict the money supply. Fortunately, in 1937, wealthy investors abroad were still seeking safe havens for their money; and around the world countries were building up their military forces, effectively bidding up the price of all these basic commodities. That certainly helped pull the US economy out of a second tailspin.
One policy that was bitterly criticized was the destruction of what was perceived as excessive farm produce, at a time when many people were hungry. Did that policy do any good?Dorothea Lange, photographer. “Four families, three of them related with fifteen children, from the Dust Bowl in Texas in an overnight roadside camp near Calipatria, California.” March 1937. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-016109-E.It’s not clear to me how much of an effect it had on commodity prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) increased farm income, because farmers received subsidies for not farming certain crops. The aim of the policy was to increase farm commodity prices. But I don’t think this happened because of the voluntary curtailment of production. Rather, things were getting more expensive everywhere as a result of the rearmament campaign in most of the world.
Of course, then as now, a disproportionate amount of the benefit of farm subsidies went to the big farmers—to agribusiness. Southern plantation owners really made out well from it—whereas African American sharecroppers got the short end of the stick. When large farmers were paid not to produce as much cotton, sharecroppers were put out of work.
In your conclusion you cite one of FDR’s early advisors, who said that to assume that the New Deal operated according to some unified plan would be like assuming
. . . that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.
— Raymond Moley
This raises the question, what did FDR understand himself to be doing? What was his animating idea?His animating idea was to improve the situation. I’m not sure that he had a clear idea of what that meant, even when he entered the White House, when the most immediate thing was to address the banking crisis. He had a very talented group of advisers, many of whom disagreed with one another vehemently. To those butting heads, he usually said something like, “Okay, you two get together and come up with something satisfactory to you both.” That helps to explain why so many different approaches were stitched together. I don’t want to suggest that FDR wasn’t involved in the process. He absolutely was. His advisors showed him their ideas and FDR would say either, “this looks good” or “no, work out another plan.” But he did not initiate policy, except on very rare occasions, such as when he suggested the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Not all the policies came from members of his brain trust; some came from members of Congress. Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York played an extremely important role, even though he was not a member of the administration. The “New Deal” encompasses all the legislation that FDR came out in favor of.
Take the National Labor Relations Act. For a long time, Roosevelt was ambivalent about it, even though today it’s remembered as a key part of the New Deal. He did not endorse it until it was clear it would pass. In general, members of Roosevelt’s administration felt ambivalent about organized labor. I think this goes back to the go back to the Progressive Era.
Would you explain that?Well, certainly the idea that workers join unions and bargain collectively to wring higher pay and other concessions out of management has a long and distinguished history. However, the progressives of the early 20th century preferred that government guarantee fair wages, safe working conditions, and a limited work day. Progressive administrations hated labor strikes. They were disruptive. They pointed up the internal conflicts that government was supposed to smooth out. By contrast, union leaders—such as Samuel Gompers of the AFL (who was no longer around by the 1930s)—said, in essence, “you can’t trust the government to give us this stuff. Even if they do, they can always take it away again. It’s safer just to forget about the government and focus on unionizing.” In 1934, when a wave of labor unrest affected industry in the United States, the administration wanted to settle the strikes quickly, lest they interfere with recovery. It’s only in 1935, with the National Labor Relations Act, that the administration goes all in on organized labor. And organized labor repays the favor in the 1936 elections. That election established the relationship between the unions and the Democratic Party that to a great extent still exists today.
That’s interesting, especially when you think of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, successfully pressuring FDR during the Second World War to integrate military industries.[Untitled negative showing a portrait of A. Philip Randolph, labor leader, Washington, D.C. ]. Parks, Gordon. (Washington D.C.: Nov. 1942) Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017840536/The African American votes that went for Roosevelt in 1936 came from northern states, where public works programs of the New Deal didn’t discriminate—or at least, didn’t discriminate much. Also, there were people in the administration who genuinely cared about civil rights, which made a big difference. Eleanor Roosevelt was a was a very powerful asset for the administration. She was outspoken, whereas FDR would not even push an anti-lynching bill. He did not want to offend white southern Democrats whose votes he needed.
This leads back to something we talked about briefly with the AAA: the New Deal and civil rights. It’s very interesting to me that African Americans went so heavily for Roosevelt in 1936, considering how little the New Deal did for black people. Not only the AAA subsidies but also Social Security did little for them, since agricultural workers and domestic help were not covered by Social Security. One must remember, of course, that in 1936, the vast majority of African Americans in the South couldn’t vote.
What lessons can we learn from the story you tell in this book?British economist John Maynard Keynes, photographed by Walter Stoneman (1930) National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG x68883As I said at the outset, monetary policy matters. It’s also important to understand that the government under Roosevelt did not spend its way out of the Depression. The extent to which FDR followed the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes has been greatly overstated. Keynes famously wrote two open letters to FDR, advising him that he was focusing on the wrong things. “It’s not rocket science!” he argued, in essence; “just spend a lot of money! That will increase aggregate demand and fix the problems.” Keynes also criticized the NLRA, saying “We don’t need new regulations right now. That will upset business. Worry about reforming industry later.”
Roosevelt himself, to an extent that is often forgotten, tended toward fiscal conservativism. When he criticized Hoover in the 1932 campaign for spending too much, he wasn’t being disingenuous. Although he knew money had to be spent to deal with the crisis, one of his first initiatives was to ask Congress to pass an Economy Act slashing pay for government employees and cutting spending in a range of areas. Even as he supported programs that cost money, he tried to find savings elsewhere, by either reducing spending or raising taxes.
This debate certainly seems relevant to the discussion in Congress today.Keep in mind that during the Great Depression, there was much more room to spend, because debt was such a small percentage of GDP. We have less wiggle room for that now. Today, the amount that the United States government has to spend every year just to service the debt really constrains what government can do to address an economic crisis.
Keynes was right that governments could use deficit spending to stimulate an economy. But he also thought that governments should rein in spending during economic boom times. He didn’t seem to be aware that public spending always benefits some special interest, and those interests will fight hard to make sure that the spending never goes away. So we find ourselves in the position we’re in today; where very little gets cut, and the national debt keeps piling up.
Another lesson we’ve learned is that the gold standard was not nearly as important as it was believed to be in the 1920s and 1930s. Arguably the best monetary system that the United States ever had was the one put into place at the end of World War II, with the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The dollar was tied to gold at a certain rate, but not at the level of the old gold standard. And of course, the FDR himself, after taking us off the gold standard in 1933, returned the country to the gold standard in 1934. But he set the price of the dollar at roughly half of what it had been.
As an historical observation, the notion that a president is in some way responsible for the health of the economy developed during this period. Previously, when economic downturns occurred, the party in power always suffered. But it had not been previously expected that the president would devise a strategy for economic recovery. The model that FDR followed was much like the model for World War I. The United States had not been ready for war in 1917. We had a tiny military establishment and almost no war-related industry, but through the actions of smart people running the economy, we mobilized and were able to win the war. On the campaign trail in 1932, FDR again and again mentions his work in the Wilson administration as Secretary of the Navy. We can use the same kind of know-how and hard work to fight this crisis as we used to fight World War I, he said.
What is the most important idea you hope students and teachers take from your book?Many teachers rely on textbooks, and textbooks have not changed much in their interpretation of the Great Depression and New Deal. They still echo the explanations offered by journalists of the era.
Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history. A reporter named Frederick Lewis Allen published a book in the early 1930s called Only Yesterday. It’s such a fun book, and I am embarrassed to say that I have assigned it. In fact, I would still assign parts of it—but not Allen’s analysis of the economic problem of this period as a combination of overproduction and under-consumption.
Economists have been telling a different story. Although I didn’t set out in this book to blaze any new trails, I do think this book brings some of the insights of economists into the story. I am not an economist, but I have read a fair amount of their commentary. Not just conservative economists, but the economics profession in general looks at the Great Depression and says, this was fundamentally a monetary problem, which required a monetary solution.
The post Understanding the Great Depression: An Interview with Professor John Moser appeared first on Teaching American History.
Did you know? Teaching American History partners with Ashland University to offer weeklong summer graduate courses that combine quality instruction with the opportunity to become part of a community of those who love to both learn and teach about America’s past. “For anyone who has only taken a MAHG course online, I would say the on-campus class takes it to a whole new level. . . . It’s by far the best intensive professional development experience out there,” says John Giltner. Other graduates of the MAHG program agree.
How can one marathon week away from home be more productive than an online course taken from your home office and steadily paced across eight weeks of the academic year?
We designed the marathon week for convenience! Meals and housing are provided. “Instead of all the other chores and things at home,” you just focus on history, says Gina Knowles. Dedicated history and political science buffs work hard, loving it. When you’re on campus, “you literally eat, breathe, and sleep history for a week with fellow history professionals,” says Robin Deck. “The discussion never ends. That bonding experience with fellow lovers of history cannot be replicated.”
Yet certain strategies can help you get the most from the experience. MAHG graduates offer this advice:
Before the course begins:1. Complete the assigned reading ahead of the week—or complete as much of it as you can. If you have a free week or two between the end of your school year and the beginning of the course, that’s an ideal time to prepare, says John Talley, since it’s “not so far in advance that you forget the material.” If not, try to read ahead as you are finishing the school year. Write notes or questions in the margins to help you remember key ideas. You will want to reread portions of the reading each night before the next day’s classes. But you can think through the reading more carefully if you are reading it a second time.
Some grads add that reading ahead allows you time for after-dinner discussion sessions at one of Ashland’s new pubs. We remain noncommittal on that point, but offer this from Rusty Eder: “If you do all the reading ahead of time, it gives you the chance to engage in brilliant conversations with very smart people.”
2. Plan to stay in the on-campus apartments. These are furnished with desks as well as sofas, dining tables for shared study sessions, and semi-private baths. While single rooms are available in Clayton Hall, you’ll benefit from sharing an apartment with other teachers. You’ll enjoy and learn from the conversation that develops during study breaks.
3. Bring a few items for comfort and convenience (especially if you are driving). The pillows provided with the basic linen set are new, inexpensive polyester foam versions from a big box store. If you need a pillow of a particular firmness, bring your own, Stacy Moses advises. Apartment kitchenettes include appliances, but you might bring a coffeemaker, favorite mug, bowl and/or set of flatware. A rolling backpack will prevent sore muscles, says Adena Barnette. “This way you can haul your books, a printed copy of your course packet, your electronic device, and extra drinks and snacks to class each day.” The walk between the apartments and the classrooms takes about ten minutes at a leisurely pace, with another five minutes to swing by the dining hall for breakfast before or lunch afterwards. To take advantage of the excellent recreation center on campus, bring workout clothing or swimwear.
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Once you register for a course, you’ll be given access to Blackboard, where the readings—course packs—are found. Download the course pack and print it out. Get it bound at an office supply store, or hole-punched to fit into a three-ring binder. You’ll be flipping back and forth between pages and documents during seminar discussions and when writing essays on the open-book exams. After you complete the course, an organized and bound set of documents will help you review for the qualifying exam or find sources for a thesis or capstone. You’ll also draw excerpts from many of the documents to use in your own classes. Don’t worry about the highlighting and annotations you add; clean copies of the documents are available for download at TeachingAmericanHistory.org.
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Several students recommended buying one copy of key texts and using it repeatedly whenever it is assigned in coursework. Most professors specify the text they prefer, and this helps everyone in the class to find passages being discussed. Still, if you stick with one text, your notes will aggregate in the margins as you revisit it. Selections from one text in particular, The Federalist, appear repeatedly on course syllabi. Some professors prefer the Signet Classics edition (with an introduction by Charles Kesler); others, and many students, recommend the edition in the Online Library of Liberty (edited by George W. Carey and James McClellan and published by the Liberty Fund) as the most complete and authoritative.
During your time on campus:1. Seminars are designed as collaborative discussions. “Ask your questions and give your feedback,” John Talley says. “When you speak, you help the whole room and advance the learning environment,” adds Wesley Hall. Meanwhile, “being engaged yourself by professors who know how to engage students” will help you learn how to pass that excitement onto your students at home, Kate Pitrone points out.
2. “Take advantage of the opportunity to talk with the amazing faculty and wonderful program staff,” says Stacy Moses. Sitting down with professors at meals in the cafeteria or over coffee during the afternoon socials is “a great way to delve deeper into topics discussed in class,” says Kymberli Wregglesworth. Professors enjoy these interactions, and each of them “wants you to succeed and is there to help you reach your goals.”
3. The same advice applies to interactions with classmates. “Jump in with both feet!” says Moses. Students in the program often organize study sessions; “if you don’t hear of one, create one!” After the professors, “Your classmates are the second best resource for preparing for your final assessment,” says Barnette.
4. As you make friends with fellow teachers, you’ll trade pedagogical ideas and learn about other professional development opportunities. “Make as many friendships and connections as possible with other classmates and professors, because they’ll change your life,” says Nicole Keith. MAHG grads frequently speak of making “lifelong friendships” with colleagues they continue trading ideas with years later.
5. Josh Halpren advises those doing multiple weeks during a summer to “get into a routine that provides time for self-care. Use the awesome athletic facilities at Ashland, occasionally talk about non-history things at meals and get sleep. You need to be on most of the day in discussions and you don’t want to burn out.” Several grads recommend taking walks around “the beautiful Ashland campus” or at the nearby Freer Field trail, part of which takes you through shaded woods.
6. Coffee breaks fuel study. During classes, there will be a coffee station set up near the MAHG classrooms in the Dwight Schar College of Education. Starbucks-style lattes and other snacks are available in the Eagles’ Nest on the ground floor of the Student Center. At a further walk is Downtown Perk (145 Main Street), offering dessert and lunch items or Whit’s Frozen Custard. For those looking to take a mid-week break, downtown Ashland also offers plenty of shopping and restaurants
7. “Weave yourself into the fabric of Ashland. You get more out than you put in, but [first] you have to put in,” Talley says. “If you do multiple weeks, don’t go home. Stay on campus to stay focused,” he adds. If you need a Saturday getaway, there are “plenty of presidents’ houses in Ohio to visit,” Rhonda Watton notes, along with sites on the Underground Railway and other places of historic note.
Tammy Hendershot sums it up: the MAHG program gives you not only a degree; it gives you “a community” with whom you learn to see the many connections between the American past and our present experience. This community will support you as you become a more knowledgeable and effective teacher. It may even, says Nilani Jawahar, give you the best inspiration your work could have: “a newfound love and appreciation for America.”
The post Prepping for Summer MAHG Classes appeared first on Teaching American History.
Professor Brent Aucoin of the College of Southeastern specializes in post-Civil War Southern history, race relations and American religious history.At a recent TAH multiday seminar on “The Failure of Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow,” teachers from around the country gathered in Atlanta to discuss what happened in the South during the critical decades following the defeat of the Confederacy. The war put an end to southern aspirations to create a separate, slaveholding nation. But it thrust the dominant white class and the African Americans they had enslaved into a wary, tense counterpoise. In the judgment of the seminar facilitator, Professor Brent Aucoin of the College at Southeastern, what happened after the war is “the most important part” of the troubled story of race relations in the South—and in the nation as a whole.
Aucoin opened the seminar by asking participants whether the curricular expectations in their own school districts prioritized study of what happened in the South following its defeat. Most said that, until quite recently, there was no such expectation. This confirmed what Professor Aucoin had witnessed among the undergraduates he teaches at the College of Southeastern. “Even the brightest and most knowledgeable usually bring to my classes a superficial understanding of what happened during Reconstruction. It’s probably the weakest area of their knowledge of US history.”
Why Reconstruction is Not Well TaughtAmber McMunn, a 2015 MAHG graduate who teaches at Humble High School in Houston, Texas. In part, this is a consequence of curricular scheduling, explained one seminar participant, 2015 MAHG graduate Amber McMunn. In her own state of Texas, as in many others, students take US History I—covering European discovery and settlement through Reconstruction—in middle school. In the rushed final unit before summer begins, “they learn about the postwar Reconstruction amendments”—but do not learn why the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution did not result in immediate protection for individual African Americans’ rights. Three or four years later, students take up US History II, beginning in 1878, the year Reconstruction ended. Their teachers chart a rapid course through the transformation of America into an industrialized and imperial power, covering the emerging tensions between business owners and labor, native-born Americans and immigrants, isolationists and international activists. “That’s how Reconstruction gets glossed over,” McMunn said. Most students do not revisit the unsettled racial conflict in the South until they study the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Anne Hester, a 2017 graduate of MAHG, who teaches at East Lee County High SchoolOther factors reinforce curricular neglect of the failure of Reconstruction, said 2017 MAHG graduate Anne Hester, who traveled from Florida to attend the seminar. “Teachers today are leery of talking about certain subjects, particularly race. We don’t want to offend. We don’t want to be labeled as either insensitive or oversensitive to racial issues.” Understandable as these worries are, Hester is able to dismiss them. “I tell students on day one of my class: We are going to talk about things in this class that will make you uncomfortable and that will make you angry. . . . If you are easily offended, go see your guidance counselor now, because you are in the wrong class.” McMunn makes a very similar speech: “If you’re not comfortable in this class, then we’re teaching you the right history,” she says.
Both Hester and McMunn teach in Title I schools with diverse student bodies. Students at East Lee County High School, where Hester teaches, are 61% Latino and 21% African American. At Humble High School in Houston, where McMunn teaches, students are about 55% Hispanic and 40% African American. In both schools, students react to difficult history with dismay—but also curiosity. History helps them make sense of their own life experiences. Hester and McMunn attended the seminar to find answers to their students’ questions.
What Teachers Were Surprised to LearnThe reading packet, spanning the years between 1865 and 1896, covered debates at both the state and federal level on the civil rights of freedmen, along with Congressional legislation, constitutional amendments, and Supreme Court interpretations. Aucoin observed that, like most of the undergraduates he teaches, some of the seminar participants were surprised by the extent of the efforts undertaken by the federal government to ensure the civil rights of African Americans in the postwar period. “Reading the Civil Rights Act of 1875, some teachers were surprised to learn that for a time after the Civil War, segregation was illegal. If you’ve read C. Vann Woodward’s Strange Career of Jim Crow, you take this for granted. You understand that in the first post-war decade, Congress made a great, revolutionary effort to establish equality. You understand that in the following decades a counter-revolution led by white Southerners, and aided and abetted by the Supreme Court and the federal government itself, completely undermined the gains made.”
Aucoin wanted teachers to see the complex factors rendering the Reconstruction amendments ineffectual to protect Freedmen’s rights. “The Fourteenth Amendment was written in response to the Black Codes” passed by southern state legislatures soon after their readmission to the union. “It was written to focus on state action—to say that no state shall deprive a person of equal protection and due process under the laws. At the time, the states were the culprits in denying African Americans their civil rights. I don’t think many of those in the seminar had made that connection before.”
Even before passage of the Reconstruction amendments, “long cherished concepts of democracy and federalism” were invoked to obstruct guarantees of freedmen’s equal rights. “Like the students I teach at Southeastern, teachers in the seminar were somewhat surprised by the complexity of the argument that arose. In a sense, it was a conflict between differing American ideals.” In the Declaration, Americans had affirmed the equality of all human beings. Yet the constitution was written to give individual states a large measure of autonomy over such matters as procedures for voting and maintaining civil order. “We read an argument for granting amnesty to ex-Confederate leaders—for restoring to them the rights to vote and hold elective office. We saw that this argument was based on the American respect for democracy, and that opposing it almost made you un-American. The same argument occurred over federalism: that continuing to subject the ex-Confederate states to federal rule and authority amounted to nationalism, to abandoning the federalism of our founding fathers. It seemed as though Congressmen had to choose between dueling ideals which previously had not been seen as conflicting.”
Rhetorical Appeals to Custom; Logical Appeals to JusticeGeorge Washington Cable, from the frontispiece of Little Pilgrimages, published by L C Page and Company, Boston, 1903. Wikimedia Commons.Teachers also discussed the engrained cultural attitudes that, after Reconstruction, supported the institution of the Jim Crow system. McMunn was struck by two essays written by white southerners in 1885. Two years earlier, the Supreme Court had effectively permitted racially segregated public accommodations in its ruling on the Civil Rights Cases. It found that the Fourteenth Amendment did not permit the federal government to outlaw racial discrimination in hotels, theaters, or transportation facilities that were privately owned. Neither essay questioned the constitutional soundness of the Court’s ruling. However, one writer—George Washington Cable, who as the son of a slave owner had himself fought for the Confederates—castigated his own region for using segregation and other practices to keep freedmen in a servile position. Henry Grady, the influential editor of the Atlanta Constitution, defended the practices Cable condemned.
As editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Henry Grady promoted an industrializing “New South” based in white supremacy. “Cable writes as if, ‘I’ve seen the light,’ arguing that white and black people can live and work together in a just relationship. Grady argues that neither race really wants to mix together—that integration would make people uncomfortable,” McMunn summarized. She had been surprised by Grady’s ability to make his argument sound plausible. Aucoin commented, “Grady’s writing style is excellent.” More effectively than Cable, he engages the sentiments of his audience; “but his argument is very much lacking,” as teachers discovered when they examined the two essays side by side.
An essay written two years before Cable’s and Grady’s, Frederick Douglass’s “The United States Cannot Remain Half-Slave and Half-Free,” struck McMunn as the most powerful of the readings. Douglass wrote before the ruling in the Civil Rights Cases, but after the Court’s ruling in Cruikshank effectively shielded those who led the Louisiana Colfax Massacre from prosecution. Invoking Lincoln’s prewar “House Divided Speech” in his speech’s title, Douglass warned that the federal government’s abandonment of Reconstruction was relegating many of the emancipated to a status very much like slavery. McMunn found Douglass’s impassioned protest, combined with his hope for justice, moving and poignant.
Frederick Douglass warned that the rights of African Americans were eroding at a gathering commemorating the 21st anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia. Photographed by C. F. Conly, 1876; published between 1884 and 1890. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-56175.Aucoin agreed. “That speech really hit home with the teachers, because of the beauty of its rhetoric and the power of its logic. It dispels Grady’s insinuations that blacks were incapable of intelligent self-rule. Here you have the eloquence of an ex-slave surpassing that of the preeminent man of letters in the South.”
Frequently during the seminar, teachers called attention to the prophetic import of the documents. Writers like Douglass, Cable, Thaddeus Stevens, and Justice Harlan (writing the dissent in Plessy) pointed out that “as long as African Americans are denied full equality, our race problem is just not going to go away,” Professor Aucoin said. “As long as there’s an aggrieved group, they will continue to press for their equal rights, and others, seeing the injustice, will continue to advocate on their behalf. Conflict and tension will continue until equality and justice are achieved. For the teachers, these arguments foreshadowed that of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said that the moral arc of the universe always bends towards justice.”
What Teachers Carried Back to StudentsAfter the seminar, teachers spoke of what they’d learned. McMunn, who teaches a two-year International Baccalaureate (IB) course on the History of the Americas, plans to add historical background to the 9-week unit she devotes to the Civil Rights movement. “Now I’m going to revamp what I teach at the beginning of that quarter, so students will understand how and why Reconstruction failed and how Supreme Court decisions undermined protections for African Americans.”
Hester teaches a course similar to IB, the US History component of Cambridge Assessment International Curriculum Education (AICE). It is a collegiate level course with a nationally normed final exam. Like IB, it takes a deep dive into a particular window of history. Fortunately, that window—1820 to 1940—places the Reconstruction era in the center. Hester also teaches an Honors US history course that, following the Florida curricular standards, begins in 1850 and concludes in the present day. “We start off with what threatened the deconstruction of the United States,” Hester said. “And then we jump right into the reconstruction of the United States.”
For Hester, the opportunity to talk among fellow teachers about the failure of Reconstruction was as important as the resources the seminar provided. “Reconstruction is such a touchy subject. But we need to understand this history so we can prevent it in the future. Professor Aucoin led a discussion in which we said, ‘This is how I understand it; how do you understand it?’ He would say, ‘I think what you’re saying is this. Can you elaborate on that?’ As in all TAH seminars, we were given a model through which we can host civil discourse in our own classrooms.”
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“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” It’s a simple rhyme, taught to thousands of young children when most history instruction focused on names and dates. This simple lesson ignores the broader story of Christopher Columbus’s four voyages to the New World and the impact those explorations had on Europe and the Americas. Columbus’s last voyage left Europe on May 11, 1502, and continued his quest for a sea route to China, this time by exploring the coastal areas west of the Caribbean islands. Though he failed to achieve his goal, his voyages launched a new age of European exploration, colonization, and a nightmare for the indigenous Caribbean people. His legacy is complicated. “After five centuries, Columbus remains a mysterious and controversial figure who has been variously described as one of the greatest mariners in history, a visionary genius, a mystic, a national hero, a failed administrator, a naïve entrepreneur, and a ruthless and greedy imperialist.”
Given the variety of viewpoints about Columbus, it is no wonder some try to simplify his story.
One benefit of contributing to our We the Teachers blog is the opportunity to research various topics in American history. I always learn things I either did not know or had forgotten. Columbus’s voyages, especially trips two, three, and four, are no exception. For example, I did not know that 11-year-old Christopher Columbus’s first sailing experience was on a merchant ship. Nor did I know that when he was 25, by clinging to his ship’s debris and floating to shore in Portugal, he survived a pirate attack that destroyed and sank his vessel. It also surprised me that before Columbus secured financial support for his first expedition from Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, he embarked on a comprehensive self-study of mathematics, astronomy, navigation, and cartography, subjects he needed to master to implement his plan.
These facts paint a picture of a driven, ambitious man determined to make his mark in a violent and dangerous world. His experiences may have contributed to his assessment of the people he encountered in the New World as people to exploit for his purposes. “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance …,” he recorded in his diary. “They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Though he was denied permission to enslave natives on at least one occasion, Columbus and his men ignored the restriction, enslaving hundreds throughout his career.
Columbus was not the first to seek a sea route from Europe to Asia. The challenge had engaged European thinkers since the days of early Rome. Traveling overland was long, arduous, and dangerous. If a sea route could be discovered, it promised to make trade with Asian nations more profitable and gain access to goods not found or produced in Europe.
Columbus’s insight was to reach the East by sailing west. His mistake was mathematical. He assumed the globe was smaller than it is, so his estimate of how long the trip would take was unrealistic. He also did not know that the Western Hemisphere blocked his path.
Columbus landing on Hispaniola, Dec. 6, ; greeted by Arawak Indians. Engraving by Theodor De Bry, 1594. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-59702.Impressed by the gold, spices, and human captives Columbus brought back from his first expedition, the Spanish crown authorized a quick turnaround for his next voyage with a significantly larger fleet of seventeen ships and 1200 men. Also on the expedition were settlers encouraged by promises of large quantities of gold in the islands. The Spanish crown ordered Columbus to Christianize all the natives he encountered.
Upon his return to Hispaniola, the settlement he founded on his first landing, Columbus discovered it decimated by disease and war with the natives. The new settlers he brought quickly grew discouraged by the exaggerated claims of gold on the island. Columbus decided to return to Spain for supplies, leaving his brother Bartholomew in charge of Hispaniola. His third trip was equally disastrous. The Spaniards on Hispaniola accused Christopher and his brother of maladministration. A new Spanish administrator arrived in September 1499, investigated the allegations, arrested Columbus, and sent him home in chains.
He attempted to salvage his reputation on his fourth voyage by finally locating the sea route to Asia. Ironically, he landed on the coast of Nicaragua and Panama, the area future visionaries saw as the best place to construct a man-made canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The Panama Canal is now the route Columbus hoped nature had provided.
Columbus’s expeditions decimated the native Taino population of the Caribbean. It began an age of exploration that led to the triangular trade of the colonial era, where raw goods produced with enslaved labor were shipped to Europe, where rum and other manufactured goods were produced and traded in Africa for more enslaved African people. Thus, his expeditions are important because they permanently changed the relationship between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
How should we teach students about Columbus?Though I am no longer in the classroom, every time I research a topic for a blog post, I evaluate how I would change my lessons. In the past, when teaching Columbus, I assigned my students an excerpt from historian David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust. Stannard’s descriptions of Columbus’s treatment of the indigenous people are horrific. His descriptions of contemporaneous Europe are equally horrible. The students debated whether men from a violent place would treat strangers non-violently.
Here is one way to change that lesson. First, I would divide the students into groups to analyze each of Columbus’s four voyages and ask them to consider the stated goals of each trip, plus what he learned from each expedition. Next, I would assign Documents and Debates: Early Contact from Volume 1 of TAH’s Core Document Collectionso that students read and discuss how the treatment of Native Americans was debated in Columbus’s time before exposing them to a historian’s interpretation. Students should learn that the debate over Columbus’s actions and, thus, his legacy began in the 1490s and continues today. They are free to read the primary and secondary sources and reach their conclusions about the man and his times.
Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.
The post Christopher Columbus’s Fourth Voyage appeared first on Teaching American History.
Gordon LloydWord has reached us of the death of our long-time colleague and friend, Gordon Lloyd.
Gordon was born in England, raised in Trinidad, and became a naturalized American citizen after coming to the United States for graduate study. He taught for many years at Pepperdine University. At the time of his death, Gordon was the Dockson Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine. Gordon earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at McGill University. He completed all the coursework toward a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago before receiving his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in government at Claremont Graduate School.
Gordon was an authority on the American Founding. He taught courses and seminars on the Founding for many years with Teaching American History, especially in its Master’s program in American history and government.
Gordon edited three volumes on the Founding for TAH’s core documents series, The American Founding, The Constitutional Convention, and The Bill of Rights. TAH also published Gordon’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, by James Madison, a Member. Gordon believed that Madison’s account of the convention was not a mere collection of notes, but a carefully prepared memorandum of an extraordinary event. His edition of Madison’s work restored it to what Gordon believed Madison intended it to be.
Years ago, Gordon gathered everything he knew about the Constitutional Convention in one encyclopedic exhibit. We have restored that exhibit on this website, making all but a few features (that were created with outmoded software) again available
In addition to the Founding, Gordon worked on issues of public policy, most recently with David Davenport. Their last collaboration, to be published later this year, is Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate.
Below we provide a description of Gordon’s Constitutional Convention exhibit and an interview with him about it that appeared on the blog a few years ago.
Reintroducing The Constitutional Convention WebsiteWe’ve revived our online exhibit on the Constitutional Convention, making its encyclopedic coverage of the events, themes, and participants in the convention again available.
Professor Lloyd’s exhibit maps the process by which 56 delegates from thirteen newly independent states, each jealous of their own interests and prerogatives, managed to hammer out a framework of government that has served our nation for over two centuries. The exhibit presents the founders’ deliberations through a variety of lenses:
- An introduction provides historical context, including:
- the state governments established shortly after the Revolution began;
- the initial national government, the Articles of Confederation, its deficiencies and the calls to replace it, the assembling of delegates to the Convention, and the setting of ground rules for the debates;
- the assembling of delegates to the Convention and the setting of ground rules for the debates.
- For those interested in the details of the daily debates, Lloyd offers a calendar-linked, day-by-day summary of them, based on the notes James Madison took during the convention and later edited.
- To give a sense of the convention as a whole, Lloyd discusses it as a four-act drama—including rising tension, moment of crisis, resolution and denouement.
- Lloyd provides short essays on eleven major themes discussed during the debates, and details on the delegates, including:
- a record of which delegates were in attendance on which dates, and
- lists of delegates by their ages, education levels, economic interests, titles of honor, and prior experience in public service on the continent, with links to portraits and brief biographies of most of the delegates.
- Finally, there’s an annotatedgallery of artists’ interpretations of the convention and an amusing account of the dinner at City Tavern given to honor George Washington when the convention ended.
An Interview with Gordon LloydHow did you first become interested in the American Founding?As an undergraduate at McGill University, I studied politics and economics, and tried to do the same in my doctoral studies, although I had to transfer from the University of Chicago to Claremont Graduate School in order to write a dissertation that would treat politics and economics together. In the founding, I saw economic and political concerns clearly linked. The Revolution was fought because of “taxation [an economic issue] without representation [a political issue].” Feudalism entails a hierarchical economic organization, but republicanism—the politics of consent rather than automatic obedience—entails a different organization. It was Madison who said that the number one political question concerns the distribution of property. That being so, how can you not treat politics and economics together?
Your work on the website pulls together a great deal of information, ranging from a day-by-day account of the Constitutional Convention to a month-by-month account of the ratification process, and including biographies of the men involved. Are there any books on the founding that do this?
Not that I know of. There are books that focus on aspects of the founding—the Convention, the ratification process, The Federalist, the Bill of Rights. My approach is to show the connections between all these things. Instead of writing a book on the interconnections, I thought that a website could serve as a foundation for people in the next generation to do this work. The idea arose around 2005, as [MAHG program cofounder] Roger Beckett and I were brainstorming ways to promote study of the founding.
The first sentence of the exhibit plunges us into the story: “The year was 1787 . . . . ” You do not begin with a thematic statement. Did you want to avoid telling readers what to think about all the information you provide?Yes. I want to give teachers and students the tools to answer the questions for themselves. My purpose is to reattach Americans to their country, after years of history textbooks that lead Americans to hate or distrust our founding because of its imperfections. Doing this may restore the debate that took place at our founding and that remains relevant today.
When I go around giving talks about the website, I often use a lecture I call “Ten Ways to Love Your Framers.” You can study them through a pictorial approach, a biographical approach, a textual approach, by viewing the histories of the convention and ratification processes as suspenseful dramas, etc. I don’t say that one way is the only way.
What, above all, should Americans understand about the Constitutional Convention? It was the first time in human history that a government had been designed and established by a group of people representing different geographical areas. Fifty-five people sitting in a room together, debating rationally, managed to produce a government that has lasted and changed the world.
I hope those who visit the site will get a sense of the dynamic of events over the 88-day period between May 29 and September 15, 1787. Delegates met five hours a day, six days a week, constantly discussing the serious disagreements among them. Each delegate had to decide when to stick to his guns and when to compromise. If you have argued forcefully for your position, how do you gracefully change your mind? Some delegates were thinking, “I’d like to take the next carriage out of here, but honor requires me to stay.” Others did leave. There was a period of about ten days at the end of June that some would leave out of the account, when delegates were deadlocked and nothing was decided. But if you leave out this period, you miss a sense of what it takes for people to get so frustrated that they figure out a way to compromise.
That’s what I think Americans miss in this history—the dynamic of doubt and hope, the tension-relieving discussions in alehouses. Seventy delegates were selected to attend the Convention; 55 of these showed up in Philadelphia, and in the end there were 39 signers. The last group had committed themselves to see the process through to the end; they felt that the opportunity to achieve a workable republican government would perhaps never arise again.
Some used their rhetorical influence to move things forward; others worked steadily behind the scenes. Studying the ways the different delegates dealt with disagreements and deadlocks reveals a lot about human nature. And there is nothing wrong in reminding ourselves of the messiness of joint decision-making.
In your view, who were the most influential convention delegates?Madison is obviously a very influential delegate, made more effective with Washington’s support. But the role of Roger Sherman of Connecticut is underestimated. He signed the Declaration and the Constitution. He’s the only one to have participated at every step of the founding, from the Articles of Confederation, which he also signed, through the Constitutional Convention—attending almost every session—through the ratifying convention for his state, to the creation of the Bill of Rights. If you track the interactions between Sherman and Madison from 1776 to 1787, you’ll see in a nutshell the two sides of American politics at the founding. They were the two poker players who struck a deal between the proponents of a strong central government and those who preferred more power to be retained by the states.
How do you explain the delegates’ success in devising a plan for government that has served us for more than two centuries? Was it luck? Divine providence? I’d say yes, and yes. But the Convention demonstrates a fact of life: to do something extraordinary, you need an extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary people to seize it. There are moments in life when people rise to the occasion.
Today, have we lost sight of what the Constitution was meant to do? From the very beginning, people have differed over how to respect the document. Do we interpret it literally, or elastically?
Since the Framers began their work, we’ve had two debates: one horizontal, the other vertical. One concerns the separation of powers. We are always at risk of making one branch of government more important than another. The other issue is federalism: the relationship between the national government and the state governments. Major events—the Civil War, the New Deal, the Affordable Healthcare Act—have changed this relationship. Some competition at both the horizontal and vertical levels of our separate governing powers is healthy and built into our system. To the extent that we replace this competition with coordination and cooperation, because we decide to sacrifice liberty to efficiency or security, we’ll lose our way.
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Looking for a chance to flex your scholarly muscles this summer? Or in need of recertification hours? Teaching American History has a variety of PD opportunities available for educators this summer—join us! Learn More.
OnlineHIST 502 O4B / POLSC 502 O4B: The American Founding (June 19-29)This course is an intensive study of the constitutional convention, the struggle over ratification of the Constitution, and the creation of the Bill of Rights. It will include a close examination of Federalist and Antifederalist writings.
Instructor: David Alvis (Wofford College)
Schedule: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays, 7:15 pm to 10:30 pm ET
Course Materials:
HIST 501 O5B / POLSC 501 O5B: The American Revolution (July 3-13)This course is an intensive study of the principles of the American Founding and the documents that embody them, especially the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. These principles will be illuminated through a close study of the constitutional convention, the struggle over ratification of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and important constitutional controversies that have arisen in American history.
Instructor: Adam Seagrave (Arizona State University)
Schedule: July 3-7: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 6:15 pm to 9:30 pm ET; July 10-13: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 6:15 pm to 9:30 pm ET
Course Materials: Syllabus & Course Pack
On campusHIST 630 2A / POLSC 630 2A: American Statesmen-The Adams Family (July 2-7)The Adams family remains the most distinguished political family in American history. Four generations of the Adamses brought about a revolution, established self-government, participated in the transformation of the republic to a large scale democracy, and then witnessed the industrialized nation take its place on the world stage. Not only were the Adamses America’s statesmen, but they were the keepers of their family’s legacy and the historians of our nation. This course examines the writings of four generations of the Adams family in order to better understand the political transformation of America. These writings will also help us to consider the role of historians in America.
Instructors: Natalie F. Taylor (Skidmore College)
Course Materials: Syllabus & Course Pack
HIST 620 3A / POLSC 620 3A: The Reform Tradition in America (July 9-14)America has lived through three periods of sustained interest in reforming its political and social life, the first in the decades preceding the Civil War, the second in the decades preceding World War I and the third in the decade or two following World War II. The course examines aspects of these reform movements, particularly their connection to religion and Protestant theology.
Instructors: Dennis K. Boman (American Intercontinental University)
Course Materials: Syllabus & Course Packet
HIST 630 3B / POLSC 630 3B: American Statesmen-Washington and Jefferson (July 9-14)This course provides a critical examination of two of our great presidents: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Although it pays great attention to their presidencies and their political legacies, it also delves into their earlier (and, in Jefferson’s case, later) lives; their formative experiences; familial influence; seminal friendships, and other private matters that helps to better understand them. Great use will be made of primary sources – letters, speeches and other sources of documentary evidence.
Instructors: Jeremy D. Bailey (University of Oklahoma) and Marc K. Landy (Boston College)
Course Materials: Draft Syllabus & Draft Course Pack
HIST 631 4A / POLSC 631 4A: American Political Rhetoric (July 16-21)This course examines American political rhetoric in its broadest sense as the art of political persuasion and civic education. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, of using language –both written and oral –to convince others of one’s point of view. Yet many perceive such convincing as dangerous, especially to democracies where individual voice matters so much to politics. The line between persuasion and manipulation is not always clear, andthe effects of crossing it can be incredibly corrosive. How and when should we be rhetorically persuasive? Which rhetorical techniques are persuasive and how do they operate? To what extent do rhetoric and persuasion determine our understanding of politics? Surveying notable rhetoricians, we will engage in a careful reading of the speeches and writings of leading statesmen, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.
Instructor:Abigail Vegter (Berry College)
Course Materials: Draft Syllabus
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William Jennings BryanThe 1896 presidential contest pitting Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan against the Republican nominee William McKinley centered on economic issues. Bryan, nominated on the strength of his electrifying Cross of Gold speech at the Democratic Convention, called for the free coinage of silver and the elimination of the protective tariffs favored by the Republican party. The Republicans supported maintaining protectionism and the gold standard. Buried beneath each party’s platform statements on tariffs and monetary policy were similar positions on a foreign policy issue, Cuba. In 1895, Cuban insurgents launched an effort to seize control of the island from Spain and establish an independent Cuba. In their 1896 campaign platforms, both parties expressed support for the rebel’s “heroic” struggle.
William McKinley (c. 1900) Library of CongressWilliam McKinley won the presidency in 1896. He had hoped to focus on domestic issues as President, but the Cuban revolt demanded much of his attention. President McKinley offered to mediate between Cuba and Spain in 1897 but was rebuffed by both sides. Spain hoped to stave off its international decline, while the Cuban rebels worried that a ceasefire followed by extended negotiations would drag on and on. They wondered if their rebel army would disband if inactive for too long.
Meanwhile, American public sentiment for war grew, aided, and abetted by the era’s “Yellow Journalism.” The two largest newspaper organizations in the country, owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, engaged in a bitter circulation contest. They competed for sales with lurid stories and sensationalized headlines. When Hearst sent artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to supply drawings of Spanish brutality and oppression, Remington politely told his employer, “There is no war here.” Hearst allegedly replied, “You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war.”
Spain provided Hearst plenty of ammunition. Spain ordered Cubans to resettle in camps known as reconcentrados to control the Cuban countryside. The camps suffered from poor food, disease, and unsanitary conditions. Countless Cubans starved to death in the camps. The reconcentrado program horrified Americans. Yellow journalists painted the Cubans as heroic figures who only wanted their freedom. Instead, they claimed, the Spanish butchers were starving the Cuban people.
Then two events not in his control helped push McKinley toward war. On February 9, 1898, Hearst’s New York Journal published a letter written by Spain’s ambassador to the United States, Enrique de Lome, accusing McKinley of being a “weak” crowd pleaser. The insult enraged the American public. Just six days later, a U.S. warship, the USS Maine, in the harbor at Havana, Cuba’s capital, exploded and sank. The disaster cost the lives of 268 American sailors, more than two-thirds of the Maine‘s crew. Sensational headlines blamed Spain, accusing her of a military attack on a U.S. ship. A naval investigation concluded that an external explosion likely sank the ship, but the report did not blame Spain. Most naval historians now believe the explosion was internal – caused by a fire in a coal storage unit. (For more information on the debate, read the U.S. Naval Institute’s Report on the Sinking of the Maine, 1989).
Cuba in war time by Richard Harding Davis; illustrated by Frederic Remington (New York: R.H. Russell, 1897) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015646535/On March 26, 1898, McKinley sent Spain an ultimatum, although he avoided that specific word. McKinley wanted an armistice until October 1, followed by negotiations and a revocation of the reconcentrado program. If no agreement were reached by October 1, Spain and Cuba would submit to arbitration. When Spain failed to respond to McKinley’s ultimatum in a manner acceptable to him, he sent a message to Congress asking for authorization to intervene in Cuba militarily, a step everyone knew would inevitably lead to war.
What compelled McKinley to take this step?
The simple answer is usually the best, but not in the case of the Spanish-American War. The simple answer is that Spain blew up the Maine, the United States invaded Cuba for revenge, and trounced Spain in what Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war.” Most historians would not deny that the sinking of the Maine played a role, but few would call it determinative. They have some evidence to back them up. In his message to Congress, President McKinley cited four justifications for U.S. intervention in Cuba – none mentioning the Maine.
The Wreckage of the USS MaineFirst, McKinley said, “the cause of humanity” justified U.S. intervention to end the barbarous Spanish reign. Next, he argued that intervention was necessary to protect the lives and property of American citizens in Cuba. Third, McKinley claimed that Spanish control of Cuba threatened American business interests in the region. Finally, he argued that the threat was ongoing, citing the Maine explosion as evidence that Spain could not provide the order and stability necessary to end the threat to American citizens, property, and commercial interests. Still, he did notcite the explosion as a specific justification for U.S. intervention.
Historians have cited multiple reasons for McKinley’s decision to intervene in Cuba. Each scholar emphasizes one or two reasons over the others. Some cite partisan congressional politics as the driving factor. Congressional Republicans were concerned that Democrats could use the situation in Cuba to their advantage in the 1898 congressional elections, so they pressured McKinley to be more forceful. Others argued that commercial and business interests were the primary reason for McKinley’s position. Some Americans believed the Panic of 1893 began because of an excess supply of manufacturing products. They saw expansion in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans as a way to address the glut. Historian Nick Kapur argues that closely held personal values drove McKinley’s thinking, such as his belief in arbitration, his Methodist faith, and his aversion to war because of the horrors he witnessed in the Civil War.
The historian’s debate is a learning opportunity for high school students. The primary sources on TAH’s website and other sites raise questions that allow students to practice history as professionals do. Students can examine the domestic context that preceded the war, the reasons for McKinley’s call to arms, and reach conclusions about why they think he opted for war.
Cover ImageOr teachers might choose to concentrate on the consequences of the war. The American-Filipino War fueled an intense debate over American imperialism. Students should consider the balance between America’s economic and strategic interests and its faith in the principles of natural rights and consent of the governed. If you’re interested in helping your students sort through those issues, we recommend you examine our Core Document Collection Document and Debates Volume Two, where you will find a debate on American involvement in the Philippines during the Progressive Era.
Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.
The post The Spanish-American War: The Beginning of the American Century? appeared first on Teaching American History.
Samuel Sewell (c. 1850-1880: Newbury Historical and Biographical Sketches) British Museum.In 1700, a Puritan judge named Samuel Sewall published the first anti-slavery pamphlet in North America. It was titled “The Selling of Joseph,” and this pamphlet made several arguments against slavery, all based on interpretations of the Bible. Sewall knew his audience: Puritans justified or condemned political decisions based on theological reasons, and Sewall hoped to show his fellow New Englanders that the bulk of Scripture condemned holding one’s fellow man in bondage. In one of his most powerful arguments, Sewell quoted God’s stern prohibition on manstealing – in other words, kidnapping people in order to enslave them. In the Old Testament, manstealing carried the death penalty: “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).
Sewall’s argument did not convince enough Puritans to change New England’s laws. He was opposed in particular by those who were profiting from the slave trade. Proslavery Puritans pointed to verses in the Old Testament that permitted the ancient Israelites to enslave heathen members of foreign nations (e.g. Leviticus 25:44–46). Proslavery Puritans contended that Africans were heathens, and therefore should be treated as the ancient Israelites treated their own heathen neighbors. Moreover, the argument went, enslaved Africans were likely deserving of slavery because they were only enslaved after being taken as prisoners of war. And even if slavery itself was a less-than-ideal status, proslavery Puritans pointed to the (supposedly) harsh conditions of life in Africa in order to promote enslavement as a means of civilizing and caring for unfortunate darker peoples.
Cotton MatherOne reason why Samuel Sewall’s attempt to change Puritan attitudes on slavery failed may perhaps lie in his own compromise with prejudice. Sewall admitted that racial differences made New Englanders reluctant to free enslaved Africans, since freedom would mean having to share neighborhoods with people of a different race. He therefore focused on ending the importation of new African residents by banning the slave trade, rather than arguing for a wholesale abolition of slavery. But instead of joining Sewall in his opposition to the slave trade, Puritan leaders such as the Reverend Cotton Mather set forth an alternative position for New Englanders to take regarding their human property: so long as enslaved people were treated well, and taught the precepts of Christianity, there could be no real Biblical objection to slavery. In adopting Mather’s approach to the slavery controversy, Puritans sought to reconcile their faith, and their belief in the commonality of all humans before God, with the profitable business of buying and selling people.
William Penn, Portrait, head and shoulders, facing left. (date unknown). Library of Congress, /The Puritans were not the only Christians who wrestled with the problem of slavery in the New World. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 in part to serve as a refuge for Quakers, members of a Christian sect that faced severe religious persecution in Europe. Founded in the early 1650s by Englishman George Fox, the Quaker denomination was known for its embrace of several radical ideas. Among these was the notion that all people, including women, were capable of following the “inner light” of God within them. But while Quakers in today’s popular imagination are rather staid, known for being pacifists or wearing black hats while advertising oats, in the 1600s Quakers attracted controversy because they firmly believed they were acting for God, and that judgment for their enemies was imminent. Because they felt the apocalypse was close at hand, a significant number of early Quakers even welcomed their own martyrdom by defiantly and publicly continuingtheir controversial, fire-and-brimstone preaching.
By the 1660s, however, the radicalism of the first generation of Quakers had begun to subside. Realizing that the apocalypse was not, in fact, close at hand, Quaker leaders began to emphasize their commitment to pacifism and to create systematic teachings for Quaker congregations—known as “meetings”—to follow. In contrast to the more hierarchical structure of Puritan churches, Quaker meetings consisted of equal participation by all. Silent contemplation was broken when an individual felt he or she had received divine guidance, which could then be shared with the group.
Like the Puritans, the Quakers wrestled with the problem of slavery in the British American colonies. In 1688, the first sign of concern took the form of a “Minute,” or petition, primarily written by a recent immigrant to the Pennsylvania colony named Francis Daniel Pastorius. Pastorius was a young German lawyer who had helped to found the village of Germantown, which is now part of Philadelphia. Together with three other recent German immigrants, Pastorius framed a faith-based argument against slavery. It was first read at the local monthly meeting of Quakers, then sent on to the Quarterly and Yearly meetings in Philadelphia, PA and Burlington, NJ. The Yearly meeting records indicate that the petition was then sent on to London, to be debated by the larger group of Quakers there, but no evidence has been found that any action was taken on this particular petition.
Still, the “Minute Against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting, 1688” is an important document in the history of antislavery activism in North America. Within a few decades of its writing, the Quaker sect would become the first religious organization in the world to ban slaveholding among its membership. When the “Minute” is compared to Sewall’s antislavery pamphlet, the reasons why the Quakers beat the Puritans to the abolition finish line become more clear.
Whereas Sewall relied heavily upon specific Biblical stories (such as that of Joseph’s enslavement by his brothers) and Old Testament laws to bolster his case for ending the slave trade, the Quaker petition went right to the heart of the question: “There is a saying that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves.” This maxim, also commonly known now as the “Golden Rule,” was first given by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus told his followers that this ethical standard summarized all the other moral teachings of the Bible (Matthew 7:12). “Do unto others as you want others to do unto you” formed the core of the Quaker petition—after all, “Is there any that would be done or handled in this manner? [for example] to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” The Quaker petitioners acknowledged that Africans were racially distinct, but immediately pushed that excuse aside: “tho they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty to have slaves, as it is to have other white ones.”
After establishing the Golden Rule as the primary reason why slavery was wrong, the Quakers moved swiftly through a list of other objections. Like Sewall, the Quakers pointed to the Biblical prohibition on manstealing, and they also incorporated a similar argument regarding how slavery necessitated the cruel dividing of husbands from wives, thus contributing to adultery. Moreover, because their central thesis was Jesus’s command to “do unto others,” the Quakers asked their audience members to imagine how terrible it would be if they were the ones being stolen away and sold into slavery: “Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, than if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries, separating husbands from their wives and children.”
Quakers vergaderingen te Londen en Amsterdam (c. 1600-1700)Because the Quakers had emigrated due to religious persecution in Europe, they had an immediate empathy for others who were undergoing oppression. “In Europe,” the petition states, “there are many oppressed for conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed [because they] are of a black colour….Ah! doe consider will this thing, you who doe it, if you would be done [in] this manner?” The powerful return to personal responsibility for other people’s suffering formed the heart of the Quaker petition, and although the Germantown abolitionists did not succeed in persuading their fellow Quakers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and London to take immediate action on the issue, many other Quakers would soon come to the conclusion that slaveholding was incompatible with Christianity.
The Quakers had banned slavery within their own ranks by the time of American independence, and the group soon became one of the leading voices against slavery in the new republic. The descendants of Puritans in New England followed suit not long after: by 1804, slavery had been abolished in all the northern states. And by 1854, Abraham Lincoln had adopted a very similar argument to that of the Germantown Quakers: “although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.”
Professor Cara RogersCara Rogers is Assistant Professor at Ashland University. She teaches classes on the Enlightenment and the American colonial era. Her research focuses on race and slavery in the Jeffersonian Age.
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Professor Natalie Taylor leading a summer MAHG seminarThis summer on the campus at Ashland University, teachers in the Master of Arts in American History and Government program have an opportunity to study in a single course successive generations of America’s most distinguished political family, the Adamses. Summarizing the roles the family have played, Professor Natalie Taylor says, “Four generations of the Adamses brought about a revolution, established self-government, participated in the transformation of the republic to a large-scale democracy, and then witnessed the industrialized nation take its place on the world stage.” In the interview below, Taylor explains that her course will cover not only the lives and work of seven very interesting men and women; it will illuminate political and cultural developments in the United States from the Founding through the Progressive Era. Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College, where she teaches political philosophy, including Feminist Political Thought and American Political Thought. Her publications include The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2007) and an edited volume titled A Political Companion to Henry Adams (2010). You can read more about Taylor’s course, scheduled for Session 2 (July 2 – 7) here, where you will also find a link to the course syllabus and readings.
Adams family members of successive generations played key roles in American politics, from the era of the Revolution through the Civil War. Which members of the Adams family will your course cover?John Adams, 1793, by John Trumbull. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.75.52.Not only do the Adams family reappear in successive generations; in each generation, the members of the family who’ve played important roles in our civic life have been numerous. In fact, about five years ago, at a conference in Quincy, Massachusetts where I delivered a paper, I met a member of the family—a John Adams who today works in the State Department. Clearly, among family members there is still a sense of responsibility to engage in public service. But we’ll be studying those who’ve played prominent roles in our history.
John Quincy Adams, by George Peter Alexander Healy. Engraving published ca. 1898. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117119.We’ll look at seven members of the family: John Adams, a key leader of the Patriot cause, Washington’s vice president and our second president; his son John Quincy, who among other roles served as our sixth president and as a long-serving member of the House; and his grandson Charles Francis, who as Lincoln’s ambassador to London helped to prevent Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. We’ll also read works by John Adams’s great-grandson Henry, who achieved renown as a man of letters, writing often about the political activity and cultural changes he witnessed during the latter decades of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th. We’ll spend quite a bit of time thinking about the private lives of those four men, including their relationships with their wives, who are themselves rather interesting figures. We’ll read letters written by John’s wife Abigail and John Quincey’s wife Louisa Catherine.
We won’t spend time on Charles Francis’s wife, but we’ll certainly talk about Henry Adams’s wife Clover, a woman just as outspoken and intelligent as Abigail and Louisa Catherine. The novelist Henry James commented on her intelligence, calling her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats.” Yet her life ended tragically, in suicide. Her story perhaps exemplifies the disorientation Henry himself felt as he watched America change.So, actually, your course will begin in the Revolution and go past the Civil War; it will conclude in the Progressive Era. Will you spend time discussing the nation’s political and cultural development during its first 140 years?
That’s one theme of the course: America’s transition from a nation founded on republican principles to one that is a large-scale industrial democracy. Henry Adams, who was born in 1838 and died in 1918, spent much of his life contemplating this change. Nearing the end of his life, he felt the nation had been utterly transformed from the one that his family helped to establish. Compared to the country he knew as a child—and to the political establishment that, as an Adams, he was able to witness from the inside—America now seemed to run on a different kind of energy, in pursuit of different objectives.
It’s interesting that Henry Adams was troubled by the progressive turn in American politics he witnessed. His great-grandfather John Adams, like most of those of the founding generation, hoped the country would achieve progress of a kind. As he wrote in a letter to home Abigail, while serving as ambassador to France, he expected his descendants to enjoy a wider realm of career choices as the American republic became more secure and stable. He said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”There you have it—the “flowers of freedom!”
How well did John Adams predict his descendants’ futures?I think pretty well. All of the Adams family, actually, were interested in history and contributed to recording it. John Quincy Adams kept very extensive diaries; the Library of America published those about six years ago. In the course, we’ll read portions of his diaries and also many of his letters. Charles Francis Adams wrote a biography of his father John Quincy as well as other historical works. More than his father and grandfather, Charles Francis would have preferred writing history to holding office. But as an Adams who was part of the abolition circles, he was frequently called back into duty.
The women of the family also took care to record not merely the history of their own family, but that of the nation. Abigail and Louisa Catherine certainly aided in this effort, in part as lifelong letter writers but also as diarists. They intentionally wrote for future generations, even if only for their children. One issue we’ll examine during the course is the meaning of history, and what it means for citizens to take responsibility for preserving and interpreting our national story.
Charles Francis Adams. Engraving by Perine and Giles, between 1850 and 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-3789. Charles Francis collected the letters between Abigail and John and published them in 1840, later having them reprinted them on the centenary of the Declaration. Even in 1840, he knew people would be interested. While the men were building the nation in Philadelphia and Washington, the women back at home helped to sustain the revolutionary effort. He wants their story told as well, especially because of their critical work in educating children. In the course, we’ll read a lot of the correspondence between John and Abigail, while considering another important question: how do we raise up successive generations of self-governing citizens?
By the time we get to Henry, we see an Adams interested not only in history but in the arts. During the course, we’ll read portions of Henry’s history of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations. But Henry also wrote poetry and fiction. We’ll read his novel Democracy, which depicts Gilded Age politics through the lens of a female character loosely modeled on Henry’s wife Clover. Two of Henry’s later works—The Education of Henry Adams and Mont St. Michel and Chartres—almost defy genre categorization yet are considered masterpieces.
Henry Brooks Adams, ca 1885. Courtesy Harvard University Archives, W384291_1.Henry also collected European art, as many people of means in his generation did. He did really reap the benefits of his great-grandfather’s work. Yet for most of his life he felt puzzled by the contrast between older and contemporary art—he himself became a medieval historian—just as he was puzzled by the contrast between the political traditions of the founding generation and the politics of the Progressive Era.
Many in the Adams family served as diplomats. Has that been one of their more important contributions?Louisa Catherine Johnston Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, ca. 1821-1825. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-25772.Yes. It’s an interesting role for the Adamses to play, given that they are so identified with New England and particularly with Quincy. The reality is that every single one of them lived abroad for many years (even Abigail spent a few years in Paris and London during her husband’s ambassadorships). Still, when John Quincy married abroad, John and Abigail were wringing their hands at the thought of welcoming into the family a worldly English girl who grew up in aristocratic circumstances, spending many of her evenings dancing at parties. How would she ever take care of their rural New England home?
Despite the homespun republican attitudes they professed, the Adamses were really a cosmopolitan family. Perhaps, in a kind of Ben Franklin way, they cultivated their association with Quincy and New England as a way of keeping their moral bearings and inoculating their children against the corruption of the European courts. Perhaps Abigail was most responsible for that. She was the one who stayed behind, the one who insisted that the moral principles were to be found in Quincy.
Was John Quincy homeschooled by Abigail?
Portrait of Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth, photographed by Harris and Ewing between 1910 and 1920. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-13515.By Abigail, and by John, and by Thomas Jefferson, even—it takes a village! When John Quincy was about 12, his parents decided that he should travel with his father to Europe. His father was going to be Ambassador to Paris and then eventually to Holland; John Quincy went along to begin to learn the ropes of public service. Even before, when John Quincy was still at home with his mother and his father was busy in Philadelphia, John would write his son instructions about what he should study and why.
We’ll spend one session looking at Abigail as a model of republican motherhood during this time when John Quincy and his siblings were young. We’ll also discuss diary entries of John Quincy’s wife Louisa Catherine. She made a quite a harrowing journey with her little baby Charles Francis from St. Petersburg to Paris during the Napoleonic wars. John Quincy had been summoned to Paris ahead of her, leaving her to negotiate on her own the passage of her carriage through lines of troops. I expect teachers who are interested in Abigail will love Louisa Catherine—or they’ll love to hate her, because they’re very different.
It’s my impression that the Adams family, at least in the first couple of generations, had a more robust Christian faith than many of those in the founding generation.I would say that your impression is well founded. Both John and Abigail Adams came from families of ministers. Abigail’s father was a Congregational minister and John was meant to study theology at Harvard before he switched course and studied law. They also, I think, had a closer connection to the Puritans than subsequent generations did.
When Henry lost his religious faith, he saw that not as his own personal failure but as a generational problem, coincident with the rise of science. It’s a mystery to him how a sense of the spiritual and sacred could have disappeared, but he knows that science has something to do with it. He writes about this in his beautiful book Mont St. Michel and Chartres. The disappearance of the sacred and spiritual from Adams’ experience of America is one of his two major preoccupations; the other is the transformation of the republic into a democracy. He sees that change as leading to political corruption, as leaders begin working to advance industrial and commercial interests.
Is Henry your favorite Adams?Oh, yes! I enjoy his witty and often edgy prose. I also find his questions about the changes he observes in America rather compelling. They are questions that concern all of us as we consider the direction our political and social life is taking.
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One hundred and fifty eight years ago, President Abraham Lincoln gave his Last Public Address. This speech was delivered only two days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. In this speech he addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House that was celebrating the Union’s victory. Lincoln focused upon the social, legal, and political challenges of reconstruction, the process of readmitting the seceded states back into their “proper practical relation with the Union.” Throughout the war, Lincoln maintained that the rebellious states had never technically left the Union: the conflict was a domestic insurrection, not a foreign war between independent countries. But if this were the case, did the federal government have the constitutional authority to dictate terms to the states and to rearrange their domestic or local social arrangements, including their treatment of African Americans? If it did not, could the Union achieve its war aims? These questions became key issues separating Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in Congress.
The two sides also disagreed over whether the president or Congress should preside over reconstruction, and whether the terms should be more punitive, as the Radicals wanted, or more lenient, as Lincoln urged. Lincoln upheld as a model for his reconstruction plan the recently reconstructed state of Louisiana. He also endorsed limited black suffrage and civil rights.
Listening in the audience that evening was John Wilkes Booth. Outraged by Lincoln’s plan for the freed people, Booth swore that this was the last speech Lincoln would ever give. Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre three days later, April 14, 1865.
You can read more of Lincoln’s writings on emancipation, reconstruction, and secession in our latest volume, Abraham Lincoln, available in our bookstore.
We meet this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace, whose joyous expression cannot be restrained. In the midst of this, however; He from whom all blessings flow must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated. Nor must those whose harder part give us the cause of rejoicing be overlooked. Their honors must not be parceled out with others. I myself was near the front and had the high pleasure of transmitting much of the good news to you; but no part of the honor for plan or execution is mine. To General Grant, his skillful officers and brave men, all belongs. The gallant Navy stood ready but was not in reach to take active part.
By these recent successes the reinauguration of the national authority—reconstruction—which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike a case of war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with—no one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with and mold from disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and measure of reconstruction. As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer. In spite of this precaution, however, it comes to my knowledge that I am much censured for some supposed agency in setting up and seeking to sustain the new state government of Louisiana.
In this I have done just so much as, and no more than, the public knows. In the annual message of December 1863, and in the accompanying proclamation, I presented a plan of reconstruction, as the phrase goes, which I promised, if adopted by any state, should be acceptable to and sustained by the executive government of the nation. I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable, and I also distinctly protested that the executive claimed no right to say when or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such states. This plan was in advance submitted to the then cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of it. One of them suggested that I should then and in that connection apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the theretofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana; that I should drop the suggestion about apprenticeship for freed people, and that I should omit the protest against my own power in regard to the admission of members to Congress. But even he approved every part and parcel of the plan which has since been employed or touched by the action of Louisiana.
The new constitution of Louisiana, declaring emancipation for the whole state, practically applies the proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed people, and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the cabinet fully approved the plan. The message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal, and not a single objection to it from any professed emancipationist came to my knowledge until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons supposed to be interested in seeking a reconstruction of a state government for Louisiana. When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New Orleans, General Banks wrote me that he was confident that the people, with his military cooperation, would reconstruct substantially on that plan. I wrote to him and some of them to try it. They tried it, and the result is known. Such has been my only agency in getting up the Louisiana government.
As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated. But as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest; but I have not yet been so convinced. I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed to be an able one, in which the writer expresses regret that my mind has not seemed to be definitely fixed on the question whether the seceded states, so called, are in the Union or out of it. It would perhaps add astonishment to his regret were he to learn that since I have found professed Union men endeavoring to make that question, I have purposely forborne any public expression upon it. As appears to me, that question has not been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and that any discussion of it while it thus remains practically immaterial could have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet, whatever it may hereafter become, that question is bad as the basis of a controversy, and good for nothing at all—a merely pernicious abstraction.
We all agree that the seceded states, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those states is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these states have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge his own opinion whether in doing the acts he brought the states from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it. The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests would be more satisfactory to all if it contained 50,000, or 30,000, or even 20,000, instead of only about 12,000, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.
Still, the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, will it be wiser to take it as it is and help to improve it, or to reject and disperse it! Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new state government! Some 12,000 voters in the heretofore slave state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the state, held elections, organized a state government, adopted a free-state constitution giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These 12,000 persons are thus fully committed to the Union and to perpetual freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things, the nation wants—and they ask the nation’s recognition and its assistance to make good their committal.
Now, if we reject and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We, in effect, say to the white man: You are worthless or worse; we will neither help you, nor be helped by you. To the blacks we say: This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize and sustain the new government of Louisiana, the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts and nerve the arms of the 12,000 to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man, too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it than by running backward over them! Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
Again, if we reject Louisiana we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution. To meet this proposition it has been argued that no more than three-fourths of those states which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I do not commit myself against this further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned, while a ratification by three-fourths of all the states would be unquestioned and unquestionable. I repeat the question: Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new state government! What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other states. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state, and withal so new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper.
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Abigail Vegter, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Berry College and Honored Visiting Faculty member in the Master of Arts in American History and Government program.How does rhetoric shape citizens’ understanding of the political choices they face? In the political contests of our history, which arguments have exerted greater influence over outcomes: those that are rational, or those that are rhetorical? These are some of the issues teachers will consider during a summer residential course on “American Political Rhetoric” in the Master of Arts in American HIstory and Government program. Professor Abigail Vegter of Berry College will teach the course.
“Spanning speeches of George Washington to those of Donald Trump, the course will consider how the tools utilized by political actors teach us something about society at that time,” Vegter said. “We will both read and listen to audio recordings of key speeches throughout our history. By reading Lincoln’s Temperance address and watching Obama’s 2004 Democratic Convention Address, we will explore the rhetoric of unity and division. We will utilize both Washington’s and Kennedy’s inaugural addresses to trace how civil religious language has impacted political rhetoric over time. As a class, we will assess rhetoric and new media to determine how political communication has and continues to change in our American context.”
Vegter’s Research Bears on Rhetoric in Recent HistoryBarack Obama delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. YouTube.Vegter’s own research interests have prompted her to consider particularly fraught uses of rhetoric in contemporary politics. She studies religion and politics, especially the intersection of religion with the political controversy over the Second Amendment. She writes about “the relationship between religion and gun ownership, particularly looking at the role of identity in shaping policy attitudes and the policy process.” She used a variety of social science methods in writing her dissertation, Faithful Firearms: The Role of Religion in Gun Owner Identity, Gun Policy Attitudes, and Gun Policy Adoption. She also writes about morality policy, LGBTQ+ politics, and new methodological approaches to studying interest groups.
As Vegter points out, rhetorical appeals involve a two-way process: “At any given moment in history, our methods of political communication reflect the personal values of decision makers and the culture of our political world.” The appeal a leader makes must not only assert his or her own opinions; it must connect to the desires and values of the voters appealed to. Yet voters’ desires and values are mixed. As Lincoln suggested in his First Inaugural Address, human beings at times respond to the promptings of their “better angels,” at other times to arguments that are rationally or morally flawed.
How Rhetoric Reinforces Reason in Politics: An ExampleSometimes a powerful rhetorical argument is needed to elevate the rational and moral choice over what seems to be the commonsensical choice. Eighth grade teacher Melanie Stuthard provides an interesting illustration of this phenomenon.
Augustus St. Gaudens statue of Lincoln shows him gathering his thoughts just before beginning a speech. Photographed in 1916. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-46755.When Stuthard’s students take up the Kansas-Nebraska Act, she asks them to consider the idea of “popular sovereignty.” This, of course, was Senator Stephen Douglas’s solution to the problem of whether slavery should be allowed to enter the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. He argued that those living in those territories should vote to decide the question. Stuthard directs students to look up the dictionary definition of popular sovereignty. Then she asks them to write a response to the question: “In your opinion, is popular sovereignty an acceptable solution to the issue of allowing slavery into the new territories? Explain your answer.”
“Almost all of my students respond, ‘Yes, of course. You should always decide things by voting. That’s the democratic way,’” Stuthard says. Then she asks students to read an excerpt of Lincoln’s Peoria Address:
The doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted. . . . If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another. . . . Well, I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are, and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
— Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, October 16. 1854
Afterwards, Stuthard’s students write responses to another set of questions:
Melanie Stuthard, a 2013 James Madison Fellow and 2016 MAHG graduate, was named History Teacher of the Year for Ohio by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in 2014. She teaches at Revere Middle School in Bath, Ohio.
What does Lincoln say is the “sheet anchor of American republicanism?
[When Lincoln says,] “My ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ to which founding document (the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution) is he referring?
Lincoln believed it was the job of the federal government to keep slavery out of the western territories. Do you agree with Lincoln, or do you think Douglas was right to let the people decide? Explain your answer.
— Melanie Stuthard, “Unit 5, Slavery Divides the Nation,” A Collaborative 8th Grade US History Textbook
“Now students say, ‘Oh my gosh, Douglas is totally wrong! Lincoln is right!’ Students realize that you cannot vote to approve the enslavement of other people; doing so undermines the very logic of democratic government.”
The Power of Rhetoric TodayStuthard realized that even today, students’ unexamined assumptions about voting and majority rule would incline them to accept Douglas’s argument for popular sovereignty at face value. They needed Lincoln’s help to see the falsity of Douglas’s policy. In 1854, when racial prejudice was deep and widespread, citizens needed even more powerful persuasion to see what was wrong with Douglas’s arguments.
No doubt teachers in Vegter’s course will examine many rhetorical challenges comparable to the one Lincoln faced. Because the course on American Political Rhetoric will cover even contemporary political speech, teachers of both history and government should find it relevant to their students’ interests and their own teaching goals. Teachers in TAH programs often affirm a goal of helping students learn to think critically about the news they consume. Learning to analyze the logical implications of rhetorical appeals is an essential step in this process.
Vegter will teach the course—HIST 631 4A / POLSC 631 4A: American Political Rhetoric—during the fourth session of the summer residential program in Ashland, from Sunday, July 16 to Friday, July 21. You can read more about it, and examine the syllabus, here. To inquire about the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, visit this page.
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On March 29, 1973, the last American combat soldier, Master Sgt. Max Beilke, left Vietnam, completing the American military withdrawal. President Richard Nixon had announced on January 23, 1973 that the United States and North Vietnam had signed an agreement to end the war. Below is an introduction to Nixon’s announcement, written by Professor David Krugler, for the document collection on the Cold War he curated and edited. The collection contains eight of the most important documents on the war. The entire Cold War collection is available in the TAH bookstore for purchase or as a free PDF download.
Address to the Nation Announcing Conclusion of an Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in VietnamPresident Richard M. NixonJanuary 23, 1973IntroductionThroughout its first term, the Nixon administration struggled to end the war in Vietnam. By 1972, most U.S. troops had been withdrawn, as Nixon had promised (Document 34), but the bombing of North Vietnam continued in an effort to force its leaders to accept a peace treaty recognizing the independence of South Vietnam. By late 1972, an agreement was finally at hand; both sides accepted it in January 1973. Nixon described the agreement as “peace with honor,” but Vietnam remained in a state of war. Congress refused to fund continued assistance (economic aid and military weapons) to South Vietnam, which was unable to halt the advance of communist forces. Hampered by the growing Watergate scandal, Nixon was not able to order bombing in support of the South Vietnamese government. In April 1975, the United States evacuated its embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, as North Vietnamese troops captured the city. The South Vietnamese government fell, and Vietnam was unified under communist rule, fulfilling the goal the Vietnamese communists had had since 1945.
The costs of the war—billions of dollars, domestic turmoil, and more than 58,000 U.S. military deaths—continued to shape U.S. Cold War policies and politics for years to come. For instance, while President Ronald Reagan later defended the war as a worthy fight, President Jimmy Carter called it an example of the “intellectual and moral poverty” of automatically resorting to military force to achieve Cold War aims (See Document 40 in this collection).
Continue reading in our document library.
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Reid Benson, 2018 graduate of theMaster of Arts in American History and Government, teaches at Cass Lake-Bena High School on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation.“In my Native American history class, I’m trying to step back a little from all the negative history,” says Reid Benson, who is in his 12th year of teaching history at Cass Lake-Bena High School, located on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. Most of the school’s students are members of the Ojibwe nation. “I’m trying to focus on the questions, ‘How can we be positive going forward? How are we going to make our communities better and be proactive in protecting our rights?’” Still, an honest account of the past necessarily undergirds these hopeful questions, Benson says. A 2018 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, Benson continues to study, extending his ability to give students that honest account. In fact, he continues taking courses in the MAHG program.
It’s a sign of Benson’s commitment that he doesn’t just audit these additional courses; he takes them for continuing education credit, submitting the required exams and essays. Earlier in life, Benson considered studying in a research-oriented master’s program in history, before realizing he was not interested in the minutiae of research. Doing the coursework for MAHG, he’s “not worried about citations and footnotes—stuff that doesn’t seem all that important to me.” The program “is more about reading and thinking and talking about what you’re reading” with other dedicated teachers.
The MAHG program doesn’t require teachers to write a thesis based on original research on an arcane topic. (Those students who choose the thesis or capstone option as their culminating work typically write on topics of broader interest, topics they expect to cover in their teaching. Other MAHG students opt to take a cumulative exam.) Nor does MAHG offer courses in pedagogy, like the Masters in History Education offered at many universities. The MAHG program “assumes that you’re a pretty decent teacher already.” It aims “to teach you how to be . . . a better historian. That appeals to me quite a bit.”
What Inhibits Honesty About the Past“You can never teach everything there is to know” about America, Benson admits. Teachers must cover various learning standards within strict time limits. Because he uses primary documents, Benson must also devote a lot of class time to helping students learn to read carefully and critically. Still, he continues to educate himself . “A strong content knowledge allows you to pick and choose the history you cover in more astute ways.” It “makes you more confident in your delivery. Students are smart; they get it when you know your stuff,” Benson says. “Knowing your stuff” earns students’ respect and trust.
Benson says he cannot inspire students to consider “the possibilities” of American life without first “acknowledging all the terrible, terrible atrocities” against Native American and other minority communities. The Americans who did these things acted in disregard of their own admirable principles. “What my students find frustrating is the fact that so many Americans don’t acknowledge these things.”
Paul Revere’s engraving showing a likeness of Metacomet, copied after a sketch by John Verelst made in 1716. Metacomet was born in 1638, second son of a Wampanoag sachem (chief) who was riendly with settlers in New England. Metacomet became the Wampanoag chief in 1662. Increasingly worried about the settlers’ impositions on his people, he formed a coalition of tribes who waged what the unsuccessful “King Philip’s War” against the settlers between 1675 and 1676.This lack of acknowledgement owes, he thinks, to ignorance. “It’s surprising how little historical knowledge many Americans have. For example, people are often stunned to learn that one third of Native Americans weren’t citizens prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.” American Indian history is slighted in most US history courses—in part, Benson notes, because the documentary record is “patchy.” Some tribal languages were never alphabetized. The tribes preserved their history in the stories they told from one generation to the next. Few learned English in order to record their own perspectives on events. Many Native American primary sources are translated versions of speeches overheard by whites claiming knowledge of their authors’ languages. We cannot always be sure of their accuracy.
Benson’s students don’t usually enter his classroom knowing a lot about their own history, either. Besides their sense of having been displaced from their original tribal lands, the students are most aware of the boarding school educations forced on many of their elders. “The majority of my students know that a grandparent, or somebody else in their family, was a victim of boarding schools,” Benson says. According to a report recently released by the Department of the Interior, between 1819 and 1969 over 400 Indian boarding schools received federal funding. Most were established to prepare indigenous youth to assimilate into white culture. Some children were coerced into enrolling. Most of the schools forbade children from speaking their own tribal languages, even with friends outside of class. Designed to disrupt transmission of Native American culture, the boarding school program effectively disrupted transmission of Native American history, also.
Historical Memory and Academic AchievementBecause of this legacy, Benson and his colleagues struggle against the community’s distrust of academic achievement. The small school—with 222 students in grades nine through twelve—sends “between a half dozen to a dozen” of its yearly graduates to post-secondary schools. Some study in vocational programs such as nursing; some gifted athletes are recruited to college basketball teams. “I haven’t seen any of my students go into history yet. But we have some successful engineers and we’re beginning to see a few going into teaching. Seeing more indigenous graduates returning as teachers would be great for our community.”
Teaching indigenous youth, Benson takes care to highlight their ancestors’ impact on our country. Knowing this story will help them ‘to carve out their own space” in American society. Yet all Americans should study Native American history, Benson feels, just as Native Americans should study the broad sweep of American history. Everyone should examine the complicated processes by which our ancestors interpreted and applied—or failed to apply—their own political principles.
The Power of Primary DocumentsPrimary documents give students an honest account of the past, at least from the perspective of those who lived in the past and recorded their experiences. Eager to discover new Indian-authored texts, Benson recently read through Teaching American History’s core document collection, Native Americans, edited by Jace Weaver. He has already added nine of its documents to his curriculum. These selections span the 17th through 20th centuries. Reid has used the earliest, which records John Eastman’s 1675 interview with Metacomet (known to English settlers as King Philip), in which he explains the causes of the war of resistance he led against settlers in New England. He’s also used some 20th century documents, including the proclamation issued by 89 Native American activists who occupied an abandoned federal prison facility on Alcatraz Island in 1969.
Native Americans, edited by Professor Jace Weaver, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and Religion, University of Georgia and a visiting faculty member in the Master of Arts in American History and Government program.Benson teaches almost entirely through primary documents, having realized during his MAHG studies that the sources that fascinated him could also engage students. “Talking to some of the other teachers in the program, I realized I didn’t need to do anything that didn’t involve primary sources. I do selectively use secondary sources, but I don’t use a textbook. I think I’m a better teacher because of it.”
Primary sources reveal the thinking of past generations. “Reading a couple paragraphs of Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone speech is a really effective way to show that white supremacy was alive and well in the Confederacy. Reading all of the Gettysburg Address doesn’t take a lot of time, but you can pull some really, really important themes out of it.” Lincoln tells his war-weary auditors that their fight tests “the proposition that all men are created equal,” and Benson’s students see that Lincoln is quoting from “the second paragraph of the Declaration,” a statement of American political principles they earlier discussed in detail. Students realize that some Americans, like the Confederates, have rejected the founders’ avowed belief in human equality. Others have not “lived up to” it. Some, like Lincoln, work to recenter American life around the principle.
The Human Agency in EventsAn honest account of the past acknowledges the human agency in events. The social and political “systems” citizens participate in, systems that lend cover and sanction to injustices, cannot be discounted in history study, Benson thinks. However, “systems are harder for kids to understand” than the telling narrative about a citizen or leader’s consequential decision. “We recently observed the 160th anniversary of the 38 Dakota men who were executed in Mankato, the largest mass execution in American history. Lincoln was president at the time, so a lot of people want to throw him under the bus. Actually, he reduced the number of those sentenced to death from 392 to 38. It’s amazing that he took the time out of the Civil War to even pay any attention to the sentencing of these men. Part of our job as history teachers is to give more of that nuance.”
The Dakota 38 Memorial at Reconciliation Park in Mankato, Minnesota. Dedicated in 1997, it marks the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history where 38 Dakota Indians were hanged by the government during the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862.Today, more and more of America’s difficult history is aired in the news. Giving high school students an honest account of the past–one with detail and nuance–inoculates them against disillusionment and helps them think constructively about the future. During the year following the murder of George Floyd, as our history of racial injustice was publicly probed, university students around America protested on social media platforms: “Why were we never taught this?” A university student who’d taken Benson’s honors class posted a different comment: “I can’t relate to what you all are saying. Mr. Benson taught us all these things in high school.”
Exceptional Principles, Fallible Human BeingsThe history of injustices against Native Americans involves “people being people, for the most part,” Benson says—for example, greedy middlemen who took government funds meant to provision Indians journeying to reservations; settlers who seized Indian lands in violation of treaties; annuity payments that went missing. These stories contradict many Americans’ understanding of our nation as exceptional. Giving an honest account of the past “doesn’t mean we can’t hold up American political principles as exceptional,” Benson says. But we have to think about how to make them function, practically speaking.
“I also try to find stories that emphasize the positive,” he says. He can’t be sure that many of his students will continue their study of history. “You have to decide which stories to hammer home and which to just mention and then move on.” He talks about heroic Native American military service, celebrates the appointment of Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior, and carefully selects books as gifts to graduating seniors. He emphasizes the rights and responsibilities of citizens. “The 14th amendment declares all of us equal under the law,” he tells students. “I encourage activism, working to create the America you want to see—not letting other people do it for you. We’ve got to start with our own actions in our own communities.”
Watcha film of teachers at Benson’s school reciting their “protocols”–that is, stating their names, clans, and home communities—in the Ojibwe language. Students in an honors class at the high school coached the teachers as they learned their protocols. You can see Benson at 1 min., 25 seconds.
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Over 122 years of effort preceded the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, signed into law by President Biden on March 29, 2022. According to Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter and biographer of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnette, more than 200 earlier bills to make lynching a federal crime failed to pass through Congress. The first was proposed to Congress in 1900 by Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, the only African American serving in Congress at that time. Even earlier, Wells had urged President William McKinley to recommend such a law to Congress. These efforts and many later ones were frustrated by arguments that, under the Constitution, Congress had no authority to overwrite the criminal law of the states.
Wells’ Fight to Criminalize LynchingWells felt the federal government had clear cause to act when, in February 1898, an African American man who had just been appointed postmaster in Anderson, South Carolina was murdered along with his entire family. An angry mob set fire to his home, shooting those who tried to escape. In her autobiography, Wells notes, “we thought that now the federal government could step in and punish the perpetrators of this outrage against a federal officer.” Wells travelled to Washington, DC to visit McKinley and make her plea. McKinley received Wells courteously, assuring her that he had already sent secret service agents to investigate the lynching of the postmaster. But he was soon preoccupied with the war Congress had declared against Spain, and made no effort to fulfill Wells’ request.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Cihak and Zima (1893/94). University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-08637], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?one=apf1-08637.xml Wells went on documenting and protesting violence against African Americans throughout her long career. She continued to press for anti-lynching legislation, winning success in her own state of Illinois. She and other civil rights leaders in Chicago persuaded Governor Charles Deneen to draft a set of anti-lynch laws that were enacted in 1905. The laws met a serious political test when an unemployed black man was lynched in Cairo, Illinois in 1909. The sheriff, who had charged the man with murdering a white woman, took him out of jail and allowed him to be seized by a mob. In accordance with the new law, the sheriff was removed from office, but immediately petitioned the governor for reinstatement. Some black citizens of the area, knowing that the sheriff, unlike his Democratic replacement, had employed black deputies, backed the sheriff’s request. Wells traveled to Cairo and roundly denounced all those, black and white, who supported the sheriff. She won their respect and the support of the governor, who refused to reinstate the sheriff, signaling that the 1905 laws would be enforced. Wells credited Governor Deneen with ending the practice of lynching in Illinois.
The Dyer Anti-Lynching BillBecause such reforms were unheard of in southern states, the fight for a federal anti-lynching law continued. One of the more intense campaigns occurred between 1918 and 1922. Republican Representative Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri introduced H.R. 11279 on April 18, 1918, “to protect citizens of the United States against lynching in default of protection by the States.” Dyer decided to act because of mob violence the summer before In East St. Louis. A white mob, infuriated that black migrants from the South were competing with them for jobs and housing, attacked a black neighborhood, causing 47 deaths and the exodus of most of the black population from the city. Many of those who fled ended up in Representative Dyer’s district, becoming his constituents.
The NAACP organized a silent protest parade in New York City against the East St. Louis riot of 1917. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-00894. Representative Leonidas C. Dyer. Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives.Dyer grounded his argument in the Fourteenth Amendment. When states refused to prosecute those involved in lynching, the victims of the crime were denied equal protection of the laws. To those who argued that the Congress had no authority to legislate on matters of social policy within the states, he pointed out that Congress had already passed laws regulating child labor throughout the country and had moreover passed the Eighteenth Amendment, forbidding the sale of alcohol within the states.
Dyer’s original bill offered comprehensive measures to force states and counties to prosecute offenders. It not only proposed to try members of lynch mobs in federal court; it proposed fines against counties where lynching occurred and fines on state and local law enforcement officers who surrendered prisoners to murderous mobs. It even established guidelines for the selection of impartial juries in lynching cases.
The NAACP CampaignJames Weldon Johnson, between 1900 and 1920. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-42992.At first the bill made little headway, remaining stalled in the House Judiciary committee. In early 1919, the NAACP launched an effort to push the bill, publishing a report, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1919. Soon afterward, James Weldon Johnson, NAACP Executive secretary, began lobbying congressmen to move the bill forward, often visiting Dyer to encourage him to keep up the fight.
Johnson’s autobiography details the NAACP’s fight for a federal anti-lynching law—the careful data collection that led to the 1919 report; Johnson’s constant lobbying of congressmen and senators; and the political maneuvers that led to the passage of an amended version of the bill through the Republican-controlled House in January 1922. He also describes the difficult battle that followed in the Senate, where the Republican Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, William Borah of Idaho, professed uncertainty about the bill’s constitutionality. “The gist of the argument” that troubled Borah, Johnson writes, “was that lynching is murder and, therefore, the federal government has no more constitutional right to step into a state and punish lynching than it has to do likewise and punish murder.” Johnson countered this argument when he testified before Borah’s Committee:
Lynching is murder, but it is also more than murder. In murder, one or more individuals take life, generally, for some personal reason. In lynching, a mob sets itself up in place of the state and acts in place of . . . . due processes of law guaranteed by the Constitution to every person accused of crime. In murder, the murderer merely violates the law of the state. In lynching, the mob arrogates to itself the powers of the state and the functions of government. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill is aimed against lynching not only as murder, but as anarchy—anarchy which the states have proven themselves powerless to cope with.
James Weldon Johnson, Testimony Before Senate Judiciary Committee, 1922
Johnson’s logic echoes that of Lincoln in 1832, when he warned in his Lyceum Address that mob violence could undermine self-government itself.
Political Maneuvers Blocking the LawNo doubt Johnson’s testimony helped to ensure the bill being reported out of the Judiciary Committee for consideration on the Senate floor. At this point, however, the Senate Majority leader, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, showed little eagerness to continue. Lodge’s inactivity puzzled Johnson, since the Senator had earlier favored federal protections for African American civil rights.
Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge, fearing southern filibusters would immobilize Senate business, abandoned the Dyer bill.Although Johnson does not explicitly accuse Lodge of deliberately tanking the bill, he tells us that Lodge asked the young and inexperienced Senator Shortridge of California to shepherd it on the floor. He describes Shortridge’s elaborate courtesies toward southern Democratic senators who repeatedly interrupt him with points of order, and Shortridge’s insistence on making a long speech during which several southern senators exited the Senate, depriving it of a quorum and preventing a vote. Later, he describes his dismay when he reads in the newspapers that the Republican leadership have decided to permanently abandon the bill, due to southerners’ threats of a filibuster that would prevent any other legislation being passed.
“It would be difficult for me to tell just what my feelings were,” Johnson says. “I think disgust was the predominate emotion. . . . My thoughts were made the more bitter by a fact which I knew and which every Senator admitted, the fact that the bill would have been passed had it been brought to a vote.” Johnson, who had “tramped the corridors of the Capitol and the two houses so constantly” during the campaign to pass the law that he could “have found my way about blindfolded,” had counted all the votes, and knew they constituted a majority.
Upholding Constitutional Self-governmentSummarizing the NAACP campaign between 1918 and 1922, Johnson declares that although the Dyer bill did not become law, “it made the floors of Congress a forum in which the facts were discussed and brought home to the American people as they had never been before. Agitation for the passage of the measure was, without a doubt, one of the prime factors in reducing the number of lynchings in the decade that followed to one-third of what it had been in the preceding decade . . . . It served to awaken the people of the Southern states to the necessity of taking steps themselves to wipe out the crime,” he concludes.
It’s true that, by the time of Emmett Till’s murder, lynching had ceased to be a spectacle carried out and witnessed as entertainment by a mob. It had become an extralegal execution planned and carried out in comparative secrecy, under cover of night. Yet it remained, in the South, a way of punishing and preventing perceived threats to white supremacy. Naming the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act after Mamie Till’s beloved son symbolizes a nation’s regret for allowing decades of racist violence. But it also signals a gathered determination on the part of the American majority to condemn and prevent the use of terror to undermine constitutional protections for individual rights or to circumvent constitutional self-government.
The post The Fight for a Federal Anti-Lynching Law appeared first on Teaching American History.
One year ago, on March 7, 2022, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was passed unanimously by the Senate. Having been passed by the House a week earlier, it became the first anti-lynching law ever to make its way through Congress. It was signed into law by President Biden on March 29, 2022. The law amends the already existing federal law against hate crimes.
It imposes criminal penalties—a fine, up 30 years of imprisonment, or both—on anyone who commits a hate crime that results in death or serious bodily injury. It also makes anyone who conspires to kidnap, kill, or commit aggravated sexual abuse liable to these punishments.
Below we repost Professor David Krugler’s account of the trial of those who murdered the fourteen-year-old boy for whom the law is named—Emmett Till. His mother’s decision to publicly enact her grief and outrage, and his murderers’ widely reported acquittal, helped to galvanize the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement. But the activists of the 1950s and 60s were hardly the first to demand justice for the victims of racial violence. Next week we’ll discuss some of the earlier efforts to secure a federal anti-lynching bill.
The Trial of the Murderers of Emmett Tillby Professor David KruglerCeiling fans stirred the sweltering air deep in the Delta on Friday, September 23, 1955. Twelve white men exited the jury room in the Tallahatchie County courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. During the last several days, this all-white jury had heard testimony in a murder trial. Two white men, J.W. Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant, were charged with the murder of Emmett Till, age fourteen, an African American who had come South from Chicago to visit family. The courtroom was jammed, as it had been all week, with more than 200 hundred observers, the majority white, attending. Dozens of reporters were also present, filing stories with both regional and national newspapers. The sheriff segregated the black reporters, requiring them to cram around a folding table in a corner while the white press was seated close to the judge and jury.
The courtroom crowd indicated there was something unique about the proceeding. It was the fact it was being held at all. The state of Mississippi rarely investigated, let alone prosecuted, the murder of blacks by whites. Between 1882 and 1951, white mobs lynched 534 African Americans in Mississippi without fearing arrest, trial, or conviction. “That river’s full of [blacks],” a white man matter-of-factly told a reporter for The Nation, referring to the Tallahatchie River, where Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body had been found.
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For his MAHG capstone, Marc Turner prepared ten lesson plans on South Carolinians who were catalysts of the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights MovementAs soon as he learned that he could write a capstone project as the culminating work for his Master of Arts in American History and Government degree, Marc Turner knew the theme he’d pursue. He would help students learn about some of the uncelebrated heroes of his adopted state, South Carolina. They helped catalyze the 20th century Civil Rights Movement.
Turner, who grew up in Oregon, has taught in South Carolina for 29 years. Currently he teaches at Spring Hill High School. It’s a magnet school in Chapin, a suburb of Columbia, the state capital. Turner has devoted many spare hours to exploring “the South Carolina universe,” drawing his own children into his quest. (They still rib him for having roused them from bed and packed them into a van one long-ago spring break morning, so as to drive them 90 miles to the Revolutionary War battlefield at Cowpens.)
A Rich Archive of Local HistoryThe Reverend Isaiah DeQuincey Newman was a Methodist pastor and Civil Rights activist. In 1983 he became the first African American to serve in the South Carolina Senate since Reconstruction.In 2017, Turner worked as a Master Teacher in the Summer Teacher Institute of the University of South Carolina Center for Civil Rights History and Research. Teachers who participated learned little-known stories from local civil rights history, meeting many of the key activists in the era’s student-led protests. In 2019, the center opened an exhibit called “Justice for All,” a rich collection of written and visual documents by and about activists in the state’s civil rights struggle who became catalysts of the national civil rights movement. After the document collection was digitized and a traveling version of the exhibit was produced, Turner began thinking about how he might help make the resources in this exhibit more accessible to secondary school teachers. He wanted to help the center teach young South Carolinians how activists from their own state helped to propel civil rights gains across the South.
For his capstone, Turner developed ten lesson plans on these activists’ work, using primary documents from the center’s exhibit that he carefully curated. The lessons span an era beginning in the late 1940s and culminating in 1983, when one leading activist, I. DeQuincey Newman, was elected to the South Carolina State Senate. They illuminate some of the groundwork that made the civil rights gains of the 1960s possible, while pointing toward goals that later activists would continue to push. Turner provided each lesson plan with questions to guide students’ inquiry. He also wrote formative and summative assessments, so that students completing the lessons would realize what they had learned.
Read more about Turner’s work at Meet Our Teacher Partners.The post The Unsung Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement appeared first on Teaching American History.
Most teachers of American history and government admit to a fascination with Abraham Lincoln. Because he so clearly explains American political principles, many teachers use Lincoln’s words as touchstones throughout their courses. Yet many of the same teachers find Lincoln’s motives somewhat elusive.
We asked three teachers who attended a 2022 TAH multiday seminar in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois—Charles Martindell, Justin Crews, and Brett Van Gaasbeek—to explain why Lincoln’s writings spoke to them and their students. All three are graduates of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program. All say their MAHG studies persuaded them to teach through primary documents. All teach more of Lincoln’s writings than those of any other author.
Lincoln Explains Our Political Principles“Before MAHG, “I didn’t realize the depth and continual relevance of Lincoln’s thought,” said Charles Martindell, formerly a teacher at Pleasant High School in Marion, Ohio, and now a TAH staff member. Like Crews and Van Gaasbeek, he learned of Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union in MAHG and began showing it to students when they first read the Constitution. In this private note to himself, Lincoln asserts that the Constitution was written to protect the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, especially the principle of human equality.
Charles Martindell, MAHG graduate, former high school teacher at Pleasant High School in Marion, OH, currently TAH Graduate Programs Resource Manager“In a sense, Lincoln’s thoughts on the founding are more important”—or at least more accessible to students—”than the founders’ thoughts on the founding,” Martindell said. “Lincoln viewed the founding in hindsight,” at a time when the founders’ assertion of human equality had been called into question. “Slavery had become far more entrenched, and racism much more enshrined in the science of the day than the founders anticipated.”
Martindell’s MAHG degree qualified him to teach a dual enrollment course on “Democracy in America.” Students earned college credit for the political theory course through Ashland University. “We spent a few weeks of the course examining the question, ‘What did the founders mean when they said that all men are created equal?’ After all, many of the founders held slaves.” Among other documents, students read Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech, and Lincoln’s Peoria speech.
These documents yield three alternate interpretations of the founders’ meaning, Martindell said. “Taney claimed that the founders said one thing, but meant another. What they really meant was people of their own kind were created equal. Alexander Stephens argued that the founders literally meant what they said—but they were wrong. Lincoln’s view was that the Founders meant what they said. And they were right.”
One might easily arrive at Taney’s interpretation, Martindell said, if one neglected to do “much research on the founders. Lincoln did the research.” To demonstrate the founders’ “hostility” to slavery, the Peoria speech cites the 1787 Northwest Ordinance; the refusal to use the word “slave” or “slavery” in the text of the Constitution; and five different acts of the earliest Congress to restrict or end the international slave trade.
“In fact, it’s remarkable”—given the rapid expansion of slavery, despite the founders’ expectations—”that Lincoln . . . could look back at the founding with reverence, and with hope” that the principle of equality would one day lead to slavery’s extinction.
Lincoln’s Rational LeadershipJustin Crews, MAHG Graduate and history teacher at Troy Junior High School, Ohio Justin Crews‘ fascination with Abraham Lincoln began at an early age. He grew up in Lincoln City, Indiana, near the site of Thomas Lincoln’s 160-acre homestead, where Lincoln grew from a child of seven into a youth of 21. At one time, Crews’ parents owned an acre of this homestead site; it was seized by eminent domain when the decision was made to create the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. As the centerpiece of the memorial, the National Park Service created a “working pioneer homestead,” where Crews’ mother took a job as an historical interpreter. “I spent my summers with her, dressed in 1820s costume, learning and demonstrating how to use tools Lincoln used as a boy. It was there that Lincoln learned to split rails. I split a few myself—two or three a day, whereas Lincoln split about 300.”
Today Crews teaches US history, from the European discovery and settlement through the Civil War and Reconstruction, at Troy Junior High School, on the western border of Ohio. “Students know about me and Lincoln; they know they will get a heavy dose of Lincoln when they enter my classroom,” says Crews. Photos of Lincoln and quotations from his speeches and writings hang on its walls. The eighth graders have had no experience reading primary documents before entering Crews’ class, so they struggle a bit to understand Lincoln’s Fragment on Constitution and Union—his comparison of the Declaration to a painting of an “apple of gold” and of the Constitution to a silver frame protecting it. To make the point, Crews often rolls up this sleeve to show them a key clause of the Gettysburg Address, replicating Lincoln’s own handwriting, tattoed on his upper arm:
Justin Crews’ tattoo captures a key portion of the Gettysburg Address.
a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal
“That’s Lincoln’s tribute to Jefferson and the principle of equality, which is the apple of gold,” Crews says. Showing off this tattoo “makes a difference to students. When they see a teacher has a passion for history, they become interested.” He also asks students to read excerpts of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, including this passage:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? —Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! —All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest . . . could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a Trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. . . . As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
In the same speech, Lincoln gives his prescription for avoiding national suicide:
Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be molded into . . . sound morality, and . . . a reverence for the Constitution and laws.
Crews hopes his students come to see Lincoln as the preeminent exemplar of “unimpassioned reason.” Lincoln could “separate his personal feelings from what he thought needed to be done.” He could “read the pulse of the people and then pull them to where he felt they needed to be. He didn’t get them all the way over. But he was able to shift the national conversation through his reason, and through his ability to speak to the people in ways that they could understand.”
Lincoln’s RhetoricLincoln’s ability to reach ordinary citizens with his words makes him “the easiest author to teach,” says Brett Van Gaasbeek. “He’s brilliant, and he’s folksy, and folksy translates to kids, especially to those from backgrounds similar to his.” Van Gaasbeek teaches at Cincinnati Northwest High School, in what was once a thriving working-class neighborhood but now houses those left behind by a changing job market.
Brett Van Gaasbeek, MAHG graduate and teacher at Cincinnati Northwest High School in Ohio.“It’s an interesting place to teach, because the student population is so diverse” —about 50% Caucasian; 40% African American, and 10% Asian or Hispanic. Many are immigrants. Outside of school, most care for younger siblings or work long hours in service jobs. “It’s hard to interest them in the issues debated by Clay, Calhoun and Webster. The don’t even see the relevance of William Lloyd Garrison or Frederick Douglass. For them, the struggle over slavery is long past. They come alive when we discuss Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.”
Nevertheless, Lincoln gets through. Van Gaasbeek spoke of recently teaching Lincoln’s Lyceum Address to his advanced placement and dual credit students. He’d begun by setting the context. “Lincoln was born in 1809, and gave this speech when he was 29. Where does this put him in our history?” A student replied, “well, he’s not a founding father.” Van Gaasbeek then asked an avid follower of football to list the greatest quarterbacks, starting from today and continuing back to the 1980s. After struggling to come up with the earlier stars, the student agreed that each generation must have learned from their predecessors. Van Gaasbeek drove home the point. “Great quarterbacks watch what other guys do. What is Lincoln saying about our political institutions? If the perception is we’re not getting any better, are we failing to train the next generation?”
When students reached Lincoln’s line, “We must live through all time, or die by suicide,” one said, “He was speaking in 1838; the Civil War began in 1861. Was he predicting this war 23 years beforehand?” Another said, “This problem Lincoln’s talking about—is that why people were so upset about January 6?”
Augustus St. Gaudens’ sculpture of Lincoln (photographed here in 1916) captures him in a moment of meditation just prior to delivering a speech. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-46755.In the next weeks, these students would read the Peoria and House Divided speeches, excerpts of the Lincoln-Douglass Debates, the First Inaugural, Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural. Afterwards, Van Gaasbeek would ask them whether Lincoln was consistent in his view of abolition. “From 51 students, I’ll get 51 different responses,” ranged at slightly different points in the middle of a continuum between avidly in favor of abolition and uninterested in it, Van Gaasbeek predicted. They will all understand something about Lincoln and his priorities, even though they’ll reach different conclusions.
Van Gaasbeek thinks Lincoln speaks to students today much as he spoke to citizens of his own time, making each feel a connection to him. “He handled the greatest crisis this nation has ever faced, speaking in a way that made people feel better about it.” As the war neared its end, Lincoln delivered the Second Inaugural Address, telling those on both sides of the conflict that the bloodshed they suffered was needed to “cleanse them all of the sin of slavery. He doesn’t cast blame—except to blame us all.” Van Gaasbeck believes that most of those listening must have felt convicted, and readier to forgive the other side—because Lincoln goes beyond rhetoric to poetry that changes hearts. “What a testament to a leader who for four years has himself been blamed by critics on all sides for causing a terrible war. . . . Even on his worst day, Lincoln is the person we would all aspire to be.”
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A conversation with Joseph Fornieri and David Tucker, ContinuedThis is the second part of our edited interview of Joseph Fornieri and David Tucker, who collaborated to edit TAH’s new document collection, Abraham Lincoln. Last week Fornieri and Tucker discussed the value of Lincoln’s writing to those studying the meaning of the founding and its centrality in American political life. This week they discuss recent controversies over Lincoln’s purposes, and whether Lincoln’s views on abolition evolved or remained consistent.
TAH’s latest collection of core documents gathers many of Lincoln’s most important writings.ET: You’ve discussed the many reasons today’s students can understand Lincoln and learn from him. Yet teachers also say Lincoln puzzles their students. After reading Lincoln, students reach varying conclusions about his actions as President. Some criticize him for delaying emancipation, accusing him of racism. Others conclude Lincoln’s views “evolved.” Do you see an evolution?DT: I do not; he always opposed slavery. Some of those who criticize Lincoln for not immediately proclaiming emancipation refuse to recognize the constitutional limitations on the president’s power. Many assume the president can do anything—you’ll hear people say, why doesn’t the President do this or that? That wasn’t Lincoln’s view of presidential authority. He thought it contradictory to assert unconstitutional powers in order to preserve liberty; he would have undermined liberty by asserting those powers. He always wanted to deal with slavery in a way that was strictly constitutional and legal. During the war—obviously not a normal constitutional situation—he used his authority as commander in chief to declare emancipation. His sentiments didn’t change. What changed were the circumstances in which he found himself.
JF: I agree. Lincoln was anti-slavery in principle from beginning to end. Some seem to minimize the challenges of creating a multiracial society in which the freedmen had voting rights and were integrated into all areas of society. Lincoln realized this would take time. Principle has to be tempered not only by the consideration of constitutional limitations, but also by political and societal limitations, mores. In 1854, in Peoria, Lincoln distinguished between the extension of slavery and the existing institution in the southern states. While he’s clear that slavery is wrong, he had no authority to interfere with the existing institution. He hoped that it would be abolished, proposing colonization of the freedmen. But in the same speech he raised questions about the practicality of colonization. In proposing it, he seems to be accommodating the prejudices of his audience, who were willing to oppose slavery but not willing to go so far as to embrace an interracial society. And in fact, the advocacy of black civil rights in the state of Illinois at this moment would have played into the hands of the popular sovereigntists. Stephen Douglas had race-baited Lincoln and stoked fears that Lincoln would make the state of Illinois “a black colony.” Illinois was one of the most racist “free states”: it actually had a black exclusion law that prohibited free blacks from entering the state. Moreover, Lincoln’s own state legislature condemned the Emancipation Proclamation! Today we see citizenship, suffrage and integration necessarily following emancipation. But that didn’t happen overnight. During Reconstruction, the federal government had to intervene to protect the civil rights of blacks.
Early in his presidency Lincoln spoke again of colonizing freedmen somewhere outside of North America. He advertised his interest in colonization right before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, in a speech to a group of African American leaders he invited to his office—
“Frederick Douglass appealing to President Lincoln and his cabinet to enlist Negroes,” mural by William Edouard Scott, ca. 1943. Recorder of Deeds Building, Washington, DC. Photo by Carol Highsmith, 2010. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-highsm-09902 DLC . ET: That incident is notorious, isn’t it?JF: That’s why Dave and I wanted to include it in this volume. James Oakes points out that this is one of the only times Lincoln invited reporters to a private meeting. He suggests that Lincoln was speaking not to the black leaders in the room, but to the white audience beyond. Black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, were none too pleased. But then Lincoln dropped the idea. Once blacks served in the army, he saw this as establishing a path to citizenship. He supported black citizenship and limited black suffrage in the last speech of his life. Is this an evolution? I see it as a logical extension of his early anti-slavery views.
DT: But it’s also true that Lincoln, like Jefferson, believed that it would be very difficult for blacks and whites to live together, due to white prejudice and black resentment of their unjust treatment. Our history shows there is truth in that. There has been a lot of mutual suspicion. I think we ought to be a little more charitable to Lincoln and Jefferson for being frank about the problems that a multi-racial society presents.
Joe’s mention of the opposition of the Illinois legislature to emancipation brings up one of our aims in all the CDC volumes. We try in the introductions to provide background to the document without over-interpreting it, because we want readers to struggle with these questions the way we do. With regard to the colonization speech, I think Joe did a good job in that introduction of presenting the background without dictating a particular interpretation of it.
JF: After reading Lincoln for 25 years, I have an opinion, but it’s not dogmatic. Human beings are complicated. You can find many different Lincolns in the biographies: the reluctant emancipator who was forced into glory; the great centralizer, according to Thomas DiLorenzo; the cunning pragmatist; the utopian millenarian waging a holy crusade against the South. People really come to Lincoln through their own lens.
Part of the difficulty was Lincoln himself. If you look at the letter to Horace Greeley, there is deliberate equivocation when he says, “My paramount object in this struggle is to preserve the Union. And what I do about slavery is subordinate to that goal.”
DT: He does add a comment about his personal wish; but in speaking as the president, his primary obligation is the union.
JT: I would go further and say that for Lincoln, preserving the Union means preserving the principles of universal freedom for everyone. Dave, you mentioned in your introduction to the Conkling letter that Lincoln’s rhetoric aims at building a broader coalition. He wants to get the war Democrats who disliked the Emancipation Proclamation to understand why he issued it, and to support him in the coming election.
In this painting by David Gilmour Blythe (published as a lithograph in 1863) , Lincoln –in an office strewn with papers–stops to think while writing the Emancipation Proclamation. In one hand is his pen; the other rests on his Bible, which sits in his lap atop a copy of the US Constitution. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-18444.DT: Lincoln’s primary purpose was to preserve political freedom. Slavery is a direct contradiction of political freedom. But Lincoln pointed out, as others did, that it was slowly destroying the freedom of white people. Southerners were suppressing speech, prohibiting the use of the mails to transmit abolitionist ideas.
JT: The South argued that abolitionist speech was offensive, violent and subversive. They wanted to censor it to protect their identity, dignity and way of life. But free speech, as Frederick Douglass said, is the weapon that enables the forces of freedom to burst the chains of oppression.
DT: Ultimately, political freedom derives from human equality. But you can’t pursue equality in such a way as to undermine political freedom, because then you’re contradicting yourself. So that tension between equality and liberty, between equality and the rule of law—that’s what Lincoln dealt with throughout his career.
It’s extraordinary how he was able to work through the institutions and the prejudices of people around him and achieve what he did.
ET: Still, if you argue Lincoln was consistent, can you say he was consistently frank?—for example, in the First Inaugural, when he invites the South to come back in and says he won’t interfere with their peculiar institution? Or when he writes to Alexander Stephens, giving the same assurance, but adding “surely the only difference between us is that you think slavery is right, and we think it is wrong”—couldn’t the South see through that?JF: I always laugh when I read that quote. That’s a big difference!
DT: But I don’t think that Lincoln would have precipitated the Civil War the way the South did. The South could have said, Okay, we’ll drop our secession plans if we all agree that slavery will persist another couple hundred years before eventually disappearing. People have debated whether slavery was an economic system that could have survived. I’m no authority, but perhaps it could have. Even if you accept the view that slavery was an economically and socially backward system, people could have clung to it, simply because they liked having slaves. I think it’s fortunate that the Civil War, terrible as it was, occurred to end slavery. Lincoln, of course, hoped the war would end more quickly. In the first several years of his presidency, he floated the idea of compensated emancipation in the border states. He was trying to think of nonviolent ways to deal with the problem.
ET: But he could not convince slaveholders to take the deal. Before we close, would each of you talk about one document in the collection that is particularly important to you?DT: I think the Fragment on the Constitution and Union offers the key to understanding everything about Lincoln and the Civil War and his approach to these problems. That’s why we made an image of it for the cover of the volume. It explains why, ultimately, he was right in trying to mediate between these extremes of the slaveholders and the abolitionists.
JF: You could say that Stephen Douglas wanted the picture of silver without the apple of gold. The abolitionists, in effect, as Lincoln warned in the Temperance Address, wanted the apple of gold without the picture of silver.
ET: Why did Lincoln never use that image in any of his speeches?JF: It’s one of many gems that were later discovered—notes to himself Lincoln wrote down on scrap paper, then put away in his desk or his hat. His secretaries found this treasure trove of notes after he died, some of which he’d already incorporated into speeches. For example, the “Meditation on the Divine Will” seems to prefigure what he says in the Second Inaugural Address.
DT: I don’t know why Lincoln never used the Fragment. It was occasioned, we think, by the letter Alexander Stephens wrote to him in December 1860. Stephens, quoting Proverbs 25:11, asked Lincoln to offer “a word fitly spoken” to calm sectarian tensions (ironic, since Stephens would soon deliver the Cornerstone Speech, one of the most intemperate and provocative pre-war speeches). It could be Lincoln was trying out ideas for his First Inaugural Address, but then decided he needed a more legalistic and restrained statement. That address was so restrained that Seward urged he give it a more inspiring ending. He and Lincoln collaborated to write that beautiful reference to the “mystic chords of memory” and so on.
JF: My favorite document is the Peoria Address. We talk a lot today about “interdisciplinarity.” The Peoria Address integrates the historical case against slavery with an appeal to morality and legal precedent. It really follows Aristotle and Cicero’s rhetorical format: a strong appeal to ethos at the beginning, then to logos, then to pathos. It’s philosophical in its probing of human nature, logical in wrestling with the political realities of the time. It touches our intuitive awareness that slavery is wrong. Lincoln subsequently would recycle, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, many of the arguments from Peoria, even quoting extensively from it. It’s written in 1854, well before his Senate and presidential campaigns. Here he first discusses the Constitution. explaining that while the founders thought tolerating slavery a necessity, they did not endorse it. Quite the contrary. Lincoln likened slavery to a cancer. Once the viability of the fledgling country was assured, the cancer had to be cut out.
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Ryan DeMarco tells his APUSH students what he learned at Teaching American History seminars about Jefferson and slavery and about the Dred Scott decision.
“Sometimes history teachers can lose a sense of the nuances,” says Ryan DeMarco, who teaches Advanced Placement US History and Comparative Government to 11th and 12th graders at North Cross School in Roanoke, Virginia. “Today, you hear the attitude that Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy, because he owned slaves. Well, he did, but can’t we take a deeper look before dismissing his contributions to the nation?”
Participating in an online seminar led by Cara Rogers on Thomas Jefferson, DeMarco “learned a lot about Jefferson that I didn’t know going into it.” He read writings of Jefferson he had never before encountered, while also learning facts of Jefferson’s life from Rogers, who is writing a book about Jefferson and his views on slavery. Jefferson’s thinking about slavery, and his own involvement in the practice, were much more complicated “than I ever imagined,” DeMarco concluded.
Correcting a Lesson on Jefferson and SlaveryThe following Monday, DeMarco shared what he’d learned with his APUSH students. “I took 15 minutes at the start of class and said, ‘I went to a professional development on Thomas Jefferson this weekend. Let me tell you what I learned about Jefferson in relation to slavery. I hadn’t known it was illegal for Jefferson to free his slaves, due to his unpaid debts. A law passed in Virginia in the 1780’s effectively rendered Jefferson’s slaves the property of his creditors. Thus, he could not have arranged to free them upon his death even if he wanted to.’
“Telling my students about this was a moment of self-correction for me.”
DeMarco, now in his sixth year of teaching, has learned such moments of self-correction earn students’ respect. “When you share facts you’ve just learned, admitting that they altered your opinions, you model growth. You model learning.” Sharing recently acquired knowledge with students also shows students “that you care about them, and you want them to have the best information possible.”
Seminar Discussions Guided by ScholarsAs an undergraduate, DeMarco specialized in Russian and German history. He went on to earn a Masters in Russian foreign policy at the University of Edinburgh. This background prepared him well for the Global Studies program he now leads at North Cross. It prepared him less well to teach APUSH. That’s why he seeks out professional development that offers “an expert’s perspective” on American history.
“I am a TAH fan!” DeMarco wrote TAH program staff, urging them to continue the online interactive seminars. They’ve brought content-focused seminars to those like him living in rural areas. They’ve put him in contact with teachers from other parts of the country. “Part of the guilty pleasure for me in these seminars is learning from the other teachers . . . . What documents do they assign? How do they talk to students about the historical issue we’re discussing? Many teachers are far more knowledgeable on American history than I am,” says DeMarco.
He finds the free TAH seminars more engaging than those offered by other well-known programs, often taught by historians with best-selling books. Those programs feature recorded lectures. “The courses are self-paced, and you’re on your own. I had to be very self-motivated to follow through on the reading.” Knowing there will be discussion during the TAH seminar, DeMarco reads the document assignments ahead of time, noting his questions about them. “I love being able to ask the professor questions and get clarification.”
Questioning the Dred Scott DecisionIn a recent seminar on “Slavery and Its Consequences,” DeMarco wondered why Roger Taney wrote his inflammatory ruling in the Dred Scott case. Couldn’t Taney have led the court to simply dismiss the case, on the grounds that Dred Scott, as an enslaved man, lacked citizenship rights and thus had no standing as a plaintiff? He asked Professor Eric Sandsthis question. Sands replied that Taney “thought he was playing the role of a statesman” when he wrote his opinion.
There were lots of readings to cover, and lots to discuss. The conversation moved on, leaving DeMarco wondering why Taney thought his opinion the work of a statesman. So, we emailed Sands to ask him about this. Sands replied:
Yes, Taney could have made his ruling much simple and far less pernicious by just denying Scott’s standing to sue–and then dismissing the case. There was no reason he needed to go further than this, declaring all blacks non-citizens, and then invalidating the Missouri Compromise–Well, other than the fact that, as I think I said in the seminar, Taney thought he was playing the role of a statesman. But DeMarco’s instincts on the case are spot on.
I think Taney thought he had rectified the slavery issue (at least as it pertained to the territories). And part of his ruling was that depriving someone of their slaves in the territories was a violation of the Fifth Amendment–that is, of he clause stating: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Taney’s ruling meant that slavery couldn’t be kept out of the territories.
It’s kind of staggering how sweeping the ruling was. But, given its breadth, it’s not surprising the ruling led to crisis.
Professor Eric Sands, Berry College
After we sent DeMarco Sands’ response, he shared what Sands said with his students. “My students were surprised, suddenly realizing that a single person’s choices can have a major impact on American history. We compared the impact of Taney’s ruling to that of Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry. Which event played a greater role in triggering the crisis that led to the Civil War? Of course, the actions of Taney, Douglas and Brown all helped to bring the war.”
Dred Scott and Judicial OverreachSometimes, it’s the cautious inaction of earlier Americans that we need help understanding: why earlier Americans didn’t act more decisively to bring their actions into line with their convictions. DeMarco helped his students grapple with their frustration with Jefferson, whose financial indebtedness, it must be admitted, resulted in part from questionable decisions he made. (He entertained lavishly, sometimes to serve diplomatic purposes that he thought served the nation; and he thought his reputation as a gentleman required him to sign his name guaranteeing a friend’s loan. That friend defaulted, ruining Jefferson financially.) It is possible to deplore Jefferson’s personal failure to free his slaves while understanding the human flaws that led to that failure—and while honoring Jefferson for writing the Declaration.
At other times, history shows that those who act decisively can set in motion events they don’t anticipate. When Taney flattered himself that he could settle the question causing a fundamental sectional conflict, he actually inflamed the existing tensions.
“I try to help students understand that the world we live in did not emerge out of nothing. It is the result of other people’s choices,” DeMarco says. “We have to reckon with that. And we must remember it as we make our own choices.”
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A conversation with Joseph Fornieri and David TuckerTeaching American History has released a new document collection, Abraham Lincoln: Core Documents. A compilation of Lincoln’s most important speeches, letters, and private notes, the volume was edited by Joseph Fornieri, Professor of Political Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and David Tucker, Senior Fellow at the Ashbrook Center and General Editor of the TAH Core Document Collection. Both Fornieri and Tucker are faculty in TAH programs. Fornieri has written numerous articles and four books on Lincoln, including Abraham Lincoln: Philosopher Statesman(Southern Illinois University, 2014). He also edited Free Speech: Core Court Cases(2020), a volume in TAH’s core document series. Tucker’s books include Enlightened Republicanism:A Study of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Lexington Books, 2008); Resistance and Revolution: Moral Revolution, Military Might, and the End of Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); and three volumes in the core document series, most recently Slavery and Its Consequences (2020). Below, the editors talk with TAH Communications Editor Ellen Tucker about Lincoln’s pivotal importance to American history and political thought.
ET: This is the first core document volume TAH has published that features a single author. Why produce a collection of Lincoln’s writing?David TuckerDT: We’ve always considered Lincoln’s words the foundation of Teaching American History. Everybody involved in setting up our programs looked to Lincoln as the statesman, the person who best understood the United States and its principles, and was most effective in defending and supporting them. For Lincoln, liberty and equality went together. Explaining and defending this understanding of equality, as expressed in the Declaration, preoccupied him throughout his career.
Second, everything Lincoln said about his own time applies to our time. The political situation he faced is very similar to that we face today. On both the left and the right, people deny human equality. We also hear moral condemnation of those on the other side. Lincoln warned about this; he opposed the tendency to moralize politics and to condemn your opponents in a way that implies that they can’t be fellow citizens. Throughout his career, Lincoln tried to combat bad ideas without condemning his opponents’ character. When you take the moral high ground, you imply that your opponents are inferior, that they are less than you, and unequal.
ET: Joe, do you see this as David does? Do you see the idea of equality as being disputed in current discussions of national politics?Joseph FornieriJF: I do. As Lincoln said in1864, “the world has never had a good definition of liberty, and we are sorely in need of one today.” Lincoln talks about two contrasting definitions. For the antebellum South, freedom means the right to hold human beings as property. They interpreted the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment as guaranteeing them that right. Of course, for Lincoln and the Republicans, freedom is, at the very least, the right to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Interestingly enough, although as a country we’ve overcome some misunderstandings of equality and liberty, there’s still a debate over the meaning of these terms. For example, in the name of equality, the identity politics of today divides people by race or class or gender in a way that strikes at our common humanity. Whether you’re on the right or on the left, when you speak of racial or ethnic superiority on the one side, or a privileged victimhood on the other side, that strikes at the common bonds of citizenship, denying the fundamental equality between these groups.
Earlier you asked David, “Why Lincoln?” TAH is committed to civic literacy. Lincoln provides great answers to some of the enduring questions about what it means to be American. He also bridges principle and practice. As David said, the power of his writing, in articulating, defending and extending our core principles, is magnified by his actions to save and preserve the American experiment. He’s also a friendly critic of that experiment, as we see in his criticisms of the Mexican War. All these things warrant a special volume dedicated to Lincoln.
ET: Teachers often tell me that Lincoln’s writing is easier for students to understand than say, Madison’s or Hamilton’s—and that for this reason they rely on him to teach American history and principles, even to explain the thinking of the founders. What makes Lincoln’s writing so accessible to readers today?JF: There’s an irony here, in that Lincoln had no formal education. He was spared the excesses of Victorian prose, with its 3000 semicolons. He had a logical mind which he honed as a lawyer. Even as a boy, he later said, when he listened to adults talking, he had a compulsion to restate their ideas in his own mind, to explain them in the simplest manner for himself and for others. This made him an amazing teacher. Of course, his rhetoric was not only clear; it was often poetic. Look at the Gettysburg Address! This comes from his self-education through reading The Columbian Orator and Shakespeare. He had a great ear for the rhythms of speech.
ET: He was also a great joke teller. You can’t tell jokes well unless you’ve got timing down. But tell me, what is The Columbian Orator? Title Page of the Columbian Orator. Caleb Bingham (ed.) 1817JF: It’s a collection of great speeches and essays, meant to train Americans coming of age during the founding period in the art of persuasion and oratory. It was first published around 1793 and went through about 16 editions. You have writers from Plato to Cicero to Edmund Burke. Both Frederick Douglass and Lincoln turned to it as part of their remarkable self-education. Douglass mentions it several times in his three biographies; it’s the one book that he carried with him out of captivity. Edited by the anti-slavery minister Caleb Bingham, it shows that at the time of the founding, there were decidedly anti-slavery voices exercising an important pedagogical influence on subsequent leaders.
DT: To your question about Lincoln’s accessible style, I’d add that he clearly knew the Bible very well. The Bible was a common stock of images and language for Americans of the nineteenth century, although it is less so today. Also, Lincoln perfected a common-sense approach to arguing cases before juries. He grew up among common Americans, and the stories told about him show that he had a real grasp of how ordinary Americans thought and responded. Those basic responses of people have not changed much in 150 years.
ET: I was talking recently with a teacher in a very diverse school, about 40% African American, and 10% Latino and Asian. This year, when his students read the Fragment on the Constitution and Union, one of them said of the apple of gold, “That’s got to be Biblical.” So Biblical literacy has not entirely disappeared.Teachers speak of teaching Lincoln’s writing more often than that of any other author, as if Lincoln is central to their teaching of American history and government. Some view Lincoln as providing a bridge between the founding and our post-Civil War understanding of ourselves, even though our politics and institutions changed so much following the Civil War.A golden apple in a silver frame: Lincoln’s explanation of the relationship between the Constitution and DeclarationJF: Lincoln wrestles with the contradiction in our founding: we are a nation that declares all men are created equal and yet we allow slavery. We’re still dealing with the legacy of that. Lincoln also deals with other causes of tension, such as federalism—the division of power between the state and national governments. He addresses the relationship between law and morality and between principle and practice, as Dave mentioned. He also speaks of the perennial temptation to political utopianism, a pitfall for anyone who invokes principles in politics.
I do think he provides a bridge. Lincoln sees the founding pointing in the direction of freedom for all. The compromises made with slaveholders didn’t nullify the principles. I see Lincoln affirming, defending and extending those founding principles with a logical consistency. A lot of my historian friends use the term “second revolution” when they talk about Reconstruction or the Civil War era. That’s fair; the war brought sweeping changes, destroying an institution that was interwoven in southern society for hundreds of years. But we should not overlook the continuity between our founding principles and political life today.
DT: We can also relate to Lincoln’s view of the founders. The founding generation all spoke of progress; even George Washington uses the word. Lincoln hoped for progress, yet his hopes were tempered by our history with slavery. Readers are often exasperated by Jefferson’s attitude, his tone of riding serenely above our problems, “trusting in the wisdom of the people,” and so on. (They overlook other instances when Jefferson speaks pessimistically.) In Lincoln’s writing there are misgivings about whether America can deal with the problem of slavery. We can appreciate that. The founders did not express so many misgivings. Unanticipated events made slavery a bigger problem than they thought it would be. Lincoln faced this, and that makes him more relatable.
JF: It’s interesting, however, that some speak of systemic racism as a blight on American society today yet seem to discount the struggle of Lincoln and the Republican Party in the mid 19th century to limit the spread of slavery, almost as if its death was inevitable. This minimizes the role of statesmanship and human agency in history.
DT: Slavery had become embedded, not just in the South, obviously, as a social institution, but even in the northern economy, with factories producing cheap cloth for slave clothing and so on. It was not, I think, as big a part of the American economy as some want to claim—yet it represented a significant economic interest. It’s remarkable that we actually got rid of it.
ET: Some years ago, I read about the Moravians of North Carolina. I was struck by how they changed after migrating to the South from Pennsylvania, where anti-slavery sentiment prevailed. They settled among slaveholders, and, realizing they had a lot of work to do to erect a new community, they decided to rent the slaves of their neighbors. This corrupted the community. Whereas in the beginning, they invited the enslaved people into their Christian fellowship, eventually they had to build them a separate church.DT: Yes, slavery was very corrupting.
JF: And don’t forget the attitudes in the north. Look at what happened after the Battle of Gettysburg, with the draft riots that turned into race riots.
Next week, the conversation continues, as Fornieri and Tucker discuss the historical controversies regarding Lincoln’s actions and purposes as a statesman.
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The Watergate scandal began to break just as I began my freshman year at East Carolina University in 1972. The Washington Post was the first newspaper to recognize the significance of the story. The courage they showed in investigating the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington and subsequent cover-up by the Nixon administration made heroes of the lead Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Many young college students who had never thought of writing for newspapers now considered journalism careers because of the enormous impact of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. I was one of those students. ECU lacked a journalism major, so I majored in Political Science and minored in Journalism.
In college, my admiration for the two leading national newspapers—the New York Times and the Washington Post—grew as I learned about each paper’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Like their editors, I was convinced that the government’s lies about the Vietnam War justified the scrutiny publication ensured. Journalists like Woodward, Bernstein of the Post, and Neil Sheehan of the Times introduced me to other journalists who became favorites—David Halberstam, David Brinkley, James “Scotty” Reston, Art Buchwald, to name a few.
After graduation from ECU, my first two job offers came from a small-town newspaper in eastern North Carolina and an AM radio station. I turned both down. Believe it or not, working as a reporter for small-town newspapers and radio stations was not as lucrative as teaching. Over the years, I have befriended several people who made a different call, tolerated the low entry pay, paid their dues, and became successful reporters. They are—to a person—intelligent, hard-working, committed journalists of high integrity.
Consequently, I reject the popular notion that the media lies. Yes, some journalists have concocted stories. All journalists, like all people, have their own biases, and they make errors, but I reject the idea that they arrive on the job each day determined to twist the news in service of some grand agenda. On the other hand—not unlike historians who select sources they believe help explain the events of the past—there is bias in the stories that newspapers choose to print and twenty-four-hour news programs decide to broadcast. Decisions about how prominently to portray these stories and how often to follow up on the initial reporting are choices that may also reflect bias.
A case in point is the New York Times coverage of Adolph Hitler’s so-called Final Solution – the plan to exterminate all Jews living in Europe. According to Journalism Professor Laura Leff of Northeastern University, “No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so.”
The New York Times, which began publishing in 1851, is regarded as one of the world’s best newspapers. Its reputation for reliable, comprehensive coverage was secure by the early 1940s. Its foreign correspondents, including 30 reporters stationed in Europe, were well-positioned to uncover and report the Holocaust. Indeed, the Times did not ignore the story. In fact, historian David Wyman argues that “the Times provided by far the most complete American press coverage of Holocaust events.” Yet, as Laura Leff points out in her book, Buried By The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper total coverage mattered less than the placement of the news and the frequency of stories about the Holocaust. Although the Times published nearly 1200 stories on the Holocaust during WWII, only 26 of 24,000 front-page stories dealt with the Holocaust, and many of those failed to report the targeting of Jews by the Nazi regime.
Leff also argues that scholars can best answer questions about the wartime coverage of the Holocaust by the press by examining one specific news outlet in-depth – such as the Times. “Deep-seated professional and cultural traditions play a part.” Leff writes. “But so do the idiosyncrasies of an individual newsroom. A publisher’s particular sensitivity, a managing editor’s preference for evenings at home, a nighttime editor’s religious orientation, and a reporter’s gambling habit can be as important in determining the contents of tomorrow’s paper as the need to attain a particular profit margin or maintain the appearance of objectivity.” These factors exist in addition to the petty jealousies and ambitions circulating in any large institution.
So why did the Times downplay the Holocaust during the War? What was the impact of this decision? In the decades following WWII, several reasons have been suggested for the Times’ editorial decisions about reports of what was happening to European Jews under Hitler’s reign. The sheer volume of news during WWII contributed to the Times’s thinking. The military maneuvers, the horrific death toll, and the incomprehensible level of destruction may have led some news organizations – including the Times – to think that by emphasizing what was happening to the Jews, they would enter an unseemly competition over which victims were suffering the most.
The press also recalled the numerous stories of atrocities during WWI and the Spanish Civil War that were false – mere propaganda designed to dehumanize the enemy. And the Times’ owners and editors may have been concerned that the level of anti-Semitism within the United States might undermine public support for the war – that too many Americans would not want their sons fighting to “save the Jews.” The U.S. government did not emphasize the war’s impact on Jews. Editors may have felt they were simply following the Roosevelt administration’s lead.
For journalists to act on the information they gather, they must evaluate the accuracy of the information, assess the credibility of their sources, and judge its relative importance – is there a public need to know or public interest in the story? In other words, is the information newsworthy? Reporters in the field must rely on their editor’s judgment about their reporting – does the editor or publisher agree that the reporter’s story is newsworthy?
Times reporters may have questioned the credibility of the reports of Jewish extermination, and the reports may have become subsumed by the catastrophic death tolls during the war. They and their editors may have felt that singling out the Jews as a target for extermination may not have had enough relative importance compared to the overall story of the war.
Then there is the impact of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the CEO, and publisher of the Times. Sulzberger was Jewish. He believed Judaism was a religion and not a race or people – a belief Leff argues impacted his reluctance to emphasize the unique targeting of Jews by Hilter’s regime. Though Sulzberger worked to free some – though not all – of his Jewish relatives living in Europe, his paper never called for a large-scale effort to rescue the Jews enduring the extermination campaign. Could a single newspaper, even one as influential as the Times, have shifted public opinion about the Holocaust sufficiently to impact the government’s response to the Holocaust? We will never know, but the fact remains they chose not to try.
Neither did the United States government. Teaching American History sponsors One Day Seminars on FDR’s response to the Holocaust. Teachers examine primary sources detailing what the U.S. knew about the Nazi campaign against the Jews and why they chose neither to launch a rescue attempt nor bomb the death camps – as some Jewish groups suggested. In one of these seminars, the discussion leader, Dr. David Krugler, asked the teachers to say – if they were comfortable doing so – whether they would have wanted the Allies to bomb the camps had they been a victim. Krugler told us that a Holocaust survivor once attended this seminar. This survivor said he wished the Allies had bombed the camps even if the attack killed him. It would have served as “a moral condemnation of the Nazi’s Final Solution.” That’s the kind of statement too many in the world press were hesitant to put in their newspapers.
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Congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865 was a long-awaited, monumental reform in American life and politics. Yet it accomplished both more and less than we may have been taught to think. It proclaimed an end to the chattel slavery that had existed in America since earliest colonial times. It also introduced to the Constitution a new potential for federal authority over state actions. Yet it left open a loophole that states would exploit to continue profiting from coerced labor and to perpetuate an unjust social order.
Preparing the Ground for the AmendmentThe Caning of Charles Sumner. New York Public Library. To those who had long advocated for abolition, the outbreak of the Civil War signaled that the time had come. While Lincoln maintained his measured and cautious approach to matters of abolition in his early administration, grassroots activists and influential congressional Republicans began pushing for an amendment to abolish slavery. And they thought the most promising champion of such an amendment would be Senator Charles Sumner. After all, Sumner had been one of the most fierce anti-slavery voices in the federal government in the 1850s — his outspokenness leading to the one incident that American history students likely know about him, his infamous near-death caning on the Senate floor by Congressman Preston Brooks in 1856.
Charles Sumner, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpbh-02793.By the beginning of 1864, the Emancipation Proclamation had established a consistent yearlong military policy to welcome and incorporate enslaved people who fled to Union lines, both validating the efforts of those self-emancipating since the beginning of the war and prompting many more enslaved people near active fighting to flee to Union lines. All this activity heightened the moral imperative to permanently abolish slavery. Sumner had recovered from his injuries and resumed his anti-slavery and equal rights work in the halls of Congress. Seizing the momentum, two black abolitionists delivered a petition with 100,000 signatures to Sumner advocating a freedom amendment in February 1864. Sumner took this momentum into committee meetings on the proposed amendment.
Grounding the Amendment in the American Political Tradition While the final language of the Thirteenth Amendment may seem striking for its time — and certainly more forceful than the strategically precise language of the Emancipation Proclamation, carefully framed as an act of “military necessity” — it was neither as sweeping as some supporters desired, nor was it foreign to federal history. Sumner initially found inspiration in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and he sought to craft an amendment that proclaimed not only liberty but also equal citizenship. However, the larger Senate Judiciary Committee deemed it more prudent to anchor themselves in the political tradition of the American founders. Accordingly, the committee slightly modified language from Article 6 of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which had banned slavery from the Northwest Territory. So, the proclamation of the Northwest Ordinance —
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted …
— once pasted into the Thirteenth Amendment, became:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Lincoln hadreferenced the Northwest Ordinance in his arguments defending congressional oversight and regulation of slavery throughout the 1850s. In resurrecting this anti-slavery clause, the Thirteenth Amendment’s wordsmiths aligned themselves with the thinking of their party leader and grounded the amendment inthe established American political tradition.
Introducing a New Conception of Federal AuthorityWhile Sumner may have been disappointed that his equal rights clause didn’t make it into the final amendment, the Committee did adopt his preferred phrasing for Section 2 — language with striking ramifications for American federalism:
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This statement suggested a new constitutional posture. If the first five words of the First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law” — established the stance of the Bill of Rights toward political threats and federalism, “Congress shall have power” presented a very different attitude. While the Bill of Rights supposed the central government to be a threat to liberty, Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment presents the central government as (in Sumner’s later words) the “custodian of liberty” against threats from state governments. So this language (later repeated in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) explicitly empowered Congress to enforce, and not merely to declare, freedom — to police the work of Reconstruction. (Alas, we know that after a brief period of enforcement, the Southern backlash against Reconstruction, and a shifting Northern emphasis on reunion over reconstruction, led the federal government to retreat from this work. So the power lay largely dormant for generations until the Second Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century.)
The Senate adopted the eventual Thirteenth Amendment in April 1864 by a 33-6 vote, sending the legislation to the House of Representatives — where it stalled in June. A combination of resistance and reticence (particularly from border-state Unionists and Northern Democrats) denied the amendment the two-thirds majority necessary for adoption. It would take over half a year, and another election season, for that majority finally to cohere.
How the 1864 Election Led to Congressional Passage[Abraham Lincoln, head-and-shoulders portrait, traditionally called “last photograph of Lincoln from life”]. Gardner, Alexander. (1865) Library of Congress. As he explained in a letter to Senator J.T. Hale in January 1861, Lincoln believed that “carr[ying] an election on principles fairly stated to the people” constituted a political mandate. In other words: platforms and campaigns matter. The 1860 Republican Party Platform opposed the expansion of slavery without explicitly threatening the institution in the states where it already existed — points that Lincoln reinforced in his First Inaugural Address. Lincoln’s antislavery actions in his early administration were accordingly cautious, pushing decentralized emancipation efforts through local action in border states and Union-occupied territories. After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union effort became an increasingly explicit freedom campaign — militarily, but also politically. The Congressional road to the Thirteenth Amendment can be seen in this light.
In the roughly year and a half between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1864 campaign season, Congress passed a number of smaller antislavery measures (building up to the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act in June 1864). Meanwhile, signatures on grassroots abolition petitions delivered to Congress grew to 400,000 throughout early 1864, lending popular support to these political efforts. The 1864 Republican Platform was a culmination of this public and private action, redoubling the party’s antislavery commitments by both underscoring the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation (against its political opponents) and endorsing an abolition amendment to the Constitution — statements that, in tandem, affirmed the war effort to be as much about freedom as union.
“Scene in the House on the Passage of the Proposition to Amend the Constitution, January 31, 1865” (Harper’s Weekly: New York, NY, February 18, 1865). Internet Archive, .These platform points stood more as policy commitments than active campaign material through the 1864 election season; Republicans remained cautious on the campaign trail, cultivating antislavery sentiment without forcefully stumping for it. Nonetheless, GOP congressmen took the party’s success that fall — in the presidential, congressional, and key state-level elections — as a mandate to push their abolition amendment through to passage and ratification. At the beginning of the lame-duck final session of the 38th Congress, Lincoln signaled his commitment to abolition. He declared in his 1864 Annual Message that the “voice of the people … [had been] heard upon the question” of slavery in the 1864 election. Less than two months later, the House finally acted on that accord. Enough June holdouts changed their votes to surmount the two-thirds majority threshold needed for adoption. On January 31, 1865, the House voted 119-56 in favor of the amendment. President Lincoln signed the bill the following day, sending the amendment on its ratification journey (which would be completed in December).
The Unfinished Work of Abolition[Chain gang prisoners and guards, Thomasville, Georgia] Joseph Kirkbride (c. 1890) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002711524While the Thirteenth Amendment was hailed as a great step forward in the American experiment, the punishment exemption in Section 1 (“except as punishment for crime”) left a glaring loophole by which states could impose second-class citizenship through racist legal codes. The rise of black codes in the South — which spread as the Thirteenth Amendment was being ratified throughout 1865, and boomed after ratification that December — sought to reestablish a social order as close to slavery as possible while technically complying with federal law. These abuses of power (among other unfinished Reconstruction matters) provoked Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and ultimately the Fourteenth Amendment, both of which sought to establish clearer terms for citizenship and freedom — and more closely approximated Charles Sumner’s initial hopes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
In recent years, reformers and activists have focused on the punishment exemption to critique exploitative prison work conditions. And in the November 2022 midterm elections, five geographically and politically diverse states voted on initiatives to strike punishment-exemption clauses from their state constitutions: Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oregon, and Vermont. The initiatives passed in all these states except Louisiana, where legislators abandoned their own measure in fear that its ambiguity might ironically create further loopholes. It remains to be seen what effect this momentum will have on incarceration practices or prison industries — or even on potential revisions of the Thirteenth Amendment itself — but this process echoes the journey of the Thirteenth Amendment even as it critiques it. Like the Thirteenth Amendment, these modern initiatives have arisen through the collaboration of politicians and citizens, all advocating for structural change. Then as now, the work requires all of us who engage with it — as students of history or citizens in the present — to insist on adherence to the principles of liberty and equality in our governmental institutions.
Additional SourcesAyers, Edward. The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America. New York: Norton, 2017
Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: Norton, 2010
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty: An American History, Brief Sixth Edition. New York: Norton, 2020
“The Senate Passes the Thirteenth Amendment” United States Senate.
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In 1854, Abraham Lincoln said of Thomas Jefferson that he “was, is, and perhaps will continue to be our most distinguished politician.” We may now say this of Lincoln. And just as Lincoln meant that one must understand Jefferson’s politics and principles—his deeds and his words—to understand the United States, so must we now say that to understand the United States we must understand Lincoln’s deeds and words. We offer this volume as an aid in the effort to understand Lincoln and, through him, what remains the world’s most important experiment in self-government.
This collection offers twenty-six of Lincoln’s most important speeches and writings, each accompanied by an introduction that provides historical context. The most important context was, of course, the struggle over slavery.
Slavery and the Early RepublicWashington as Statesman at the Constitutional Convention. Junius Brutus Stearns (1856). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 50.2.1. Slavery—and who bore the responsibility for its existence in America—was discussed when the Continental Congress reviewed Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. Later, those drafting the Constitution included three provisions concerning slavery, without ever mentioning the peculiar institution by name. (At the convention, James Madison remarked that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”) First, the framers allowed “all other persons” besides “free persons” and “Indians not taxed” to be counted as three–fifths of a free person for purposes of taxation and representation (Art. I, sec. 2). This was a compromise among the delegates who wanted to count enslaved people when determining a state’s population (and thus the number of representatives in the House of Representatives and Electoral College votes) and those who did not. Second, the Constitution provided that the importation of “persons” by a state could not be prohibited for twenty years after its adoption—until 1808. This was a compromise between those who wanted to ban the importation of slaves immediately and those who wished there to be no prohibition at all on the slave trade (Art. I, sec. 9). In addition to these two compromises, the Constitution also contained a provision that “no person held to service” in one state would be discharged from that service in another. Rather, the Constitution made it an obligation to return such persons to those to whom their labor was due (Art. IV, sec. 2). This provision became known as the fugitive slave clause. To implement it, Congress passed the first fugitive slave law in 1793.
Slavery and an Expanding CountryIn 1807, in what Lincoln called “apparent hot haste,” Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves beginning on the first day of January 1808. Four years before the passage of this law, the United States had acquired the Louisiana territory. After Louisiana was admitted to statehood in 1812, the next territory from this acquisition to apply for admission as a state was Missouri, in 1819, under a constitution that permitted slavery. At the time, there were eleven free and eleven slave states. Missouri was not admitted as a slave state until Maine applied for statehood and was admitted as a free state. As part of this compromise, Congress included in the Missouri statehood enabling act the provision that in the remainder of the Louisiana territory slavery would forever be prohibited north of latitude 36º 30´ N. (Lincoln recounted the history of the struggle over slavery from the founding through the sectional conflict in Document 4, his speech on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.)
The Mexican-American War and the Fruits of VictoryIn 1836, Texas separated from Mexico through a revolution and declared itself a separate republic, claiming territory to the west and north encompassing parts of the current U.S. states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. When Texas joined the Union in 1845, war with Mexico followed (Mexico considered Texas still part of its territory). Early in the war, when President James Polk asked for an appropriation for peace negotiations, Representative David Wilmot (D-PA) proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill stating that slavery would not be permitted in any territory gained from Mexico in the peace negotiations. The bill passed the House but not the Senate. Subsequent versions of Wilmot’s amendment met the same fate. The treaty that eventually ended the war, which had to be ratified only by the Senate, contained no prohibition of slavery. The contest between free state and slavery advocates over this territory and what remained of the Louisiana territory was the final phase of the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War.
A View of Yerba Buena, 1846, (Parker Hall: 1933), Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, LC-DIG-pga-07022.Following the Mexican War, California applied for admission as a free state. At that point, the number of free and slave states was equal (fifteen each). California’s application for admission thus precipitated a crisis, just as Missouri’s had thirty years before. The crisis was resolved by the Compromise of 1850, which consisted of five separate pieces of legislation. Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), a Democratic senator from Illinois, was responsible for getting the legislation passed. The bills admitted California as a free state; set the boundary between Texas and New Mexico and compensated Texas for giving up land claims beyond that boundary; set up territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, with the provision that the territories could eventually enter the Union as either free or slave states; abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia; and strengthened the federal fugitive slave law.
Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska ActWhen it came time to organize territories north of Texas that were part of the Louisiana purchase, Senator Douglas again took the lead. In 1854 he proposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill, accepting an amendment that rescinded the Missouri Compromise line of 36º 30´, which was supposed to have been established forever, and leaving the decision regarding slavery to each territory’s inhabitants (Document 4). Douglas called such decision making “popular sovereignty”—the people should decide without the interference of the federal government—declaring it the simplest and fairest way of resolving the controversy over slavery. The bill’s immediate practical result, however, was to foment civil violence. Everyone understood that once slavery became established in a territory, it would receive the protection of territorial law. Thus protected, slavery would grow and become ever harder to abolish. Free state and slave state advocates in and beyond Kansas and Nebraska fought to gain the advantage and determine whether this peculiar form of property would be allowed. As one scholar put it, “the Kansas-Nebraska Act legislated civil war on the plains of Kansas.”
Stephen Arnold Douglas. (Currier & Ives Lithography Company, 1860) National Portrait Gallery. The civil war in “Bleeding Kansas” magnified the sectional conflict and pointed toward the greater civil war that would begin six years later. This conflict became even more likely in 1857 as a result of the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court held (7–2) that persons of African descent were not citizens and had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Court went further and declared that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories because the right to hold property in slaves was “distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” If the right to hold slaves was in the Constitution, however, did that not imply that Southerners had the right to take their property into any state? The Dred Scott opinion suggested at least the possibility that a future Court ruling might declare slavery to be the national norm, permissible even in those states that had decades earlier declared it illegal.
Abraham Lincoln and the Problems with Popular SovereigntyLincoln returned to politics during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska act, recognizing the danger to self-government and human liberty should Douglas’ understanding of “popular sovereignty” prevail. If the people in a territory chose to admit slavery—ignoring the Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal—then they would undermine the principle on which their own freedom was based. Among the people, popular sovereignty was the strongest and the most obvious and easily grasped principle of the Republic. Unlike Douglas, Lincoln through his words and deeds had to show the people that the only thing more important than that principle was its ultimate cause, human equality. More difficult, he had to show the people that preserving their liberty meant restricting their freedom: there were some things that the people could not rightly choose to do.
Civil War Commences[Abraham Lincoln (full)- taking the oath of office]. (Brown Brothers, 1861) Library of Congress. Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 on a platform of preventing the spread of slavery beyond the states where it already existed, and affirming the Declaration’s claim that all men were created equal. Lincoln defeated the other three presidential candidates with a plurality of the vote and amassed more Electoral College votes than his three opponents combined. His election precipitated the secession—as they called it—of seven states, ultimately joined by four others. Lincoln denied that secession was legal or constitutional. The states that claimed to have left the Union were thus in rebellion
What Lincoln could accomplish to end the rebellion and save the Union, which he considered his principal duty as president, depended on four considerations, each requiring his careful attention:
- northern support for the war;
- the opinions of those in the border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri);
- the actions toward the rebellious states of foreign powers, especially Great Britain;
- and the success of Union military forces against the rebel armies (Documents 15, 16, 20).
In the North and the border states, opinions on slavery and the Union varied. Some were so strongly in favor of slavery that they were willing to let the Union go to preserve it; others were so strongly opposed to slavery that they were willing to dissolve the Union to rid themselves of it. Still others were unwilling to surrender the Union and were willing to compromise with slaveholders to keep it together. Pervading public opinion, even among antislavery stalwarts, was an unforgiving prejudice against African Americans, evident in the offensive terms that appear in some of these documents. Lincoln, however, understood that preserving the Union ultimately meant ending slavery. Slavery was incompatible with the Declaration’s claim of equality, and the Constitution and the Union existed to serve the Declaration. In everything he said and did to preserve the Union and end slavery, Lincoln took into account the opinions and prejudices of the varied audiences he addressed.
As for the success of Union military forces, for the first years of the war they had little. The tide turned, however, when Lincoln put in command generals prepared to seek decisive victory over Confederate forces. The turning point came first at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, and then in the all-important Virginia theater of the war after Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) took command (1864) of all Union forces.
The End of SlaveryThe prospect of Union victory raised the question of how to return the rebellious states to the Union. Historically, defeated rebels had received harsh treatment. “Radical” Republicans favored this approach. Lincoln sought a more moderate course, making acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolishing slavery a requirement for regaining their civil status, and seeking some way to provide for the formerly enslaved. Early in his second administration—just as he was about to embark on the arduous task of reconstruction—Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.
The post Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle over Slavery appeared first on Teaching American History.
A golden apple in a silver frame: Lincoln’s explanation of the relationship between the Constitution and DeclarationThe image featured on the cover of TAH’s new document volume, Abraham Lincoln, might puzzle the casual observer. Why a golden apple in a silver frame? Looking closer, you might ask why this apple is superimposed on words from the Declaration of Independence—and why the silver frame is inscribed with words from the Preamble to the Constitution?
Show this image to any teacher who’s studied Lincoln in TAH programs, and you’ll get an immediate explanation—“That’s the apple of gold in the frame of silver,” they’ll say. They’ll explain that Lincoln used this image in a private note to himself, the “Fragment on the Constitution and Union,” in which he spelled out his understanding of the relationship between the central principle of the Declaration of Independence and the purpose of the nation that came into being when thirteen newly independent states signed the Declaration. Teachers will also say that Lincoln used the analogy to explain how to properly understand the Constitution: that it was a framework of government designed to perpetuate the principle of human equality.
An Analogy Teachers RecognizeDuring a recent summer session of the Master of Arts in American History and Government, three teachers from three different regions of the country—Shannan Ross of Texas; Lauren Goepfert of New York; and David Widenhofer of Pennsylvania—talked with a TAH staff member about the documents they’d studied in MAHG. They spoke of how those documents had helped them and their students better understand our nation’s history. Talking together during a time when they noticed a dearth of civility in public political discussions, they noted that the documents also gave them hope for our nation’s future. A few minutes into this conversation, one of the teachers alluded to Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union.
TAH: When your students discuss what it means to be American, do they begin to feel confident that they have a voice in our politics—that what they do and say as citizens can make a difference?Shannan RossShannan Ross: I hope for that. But at the moment, they are watching adults not behaving like adults should when discussing government and politics. It discourages them. We grew up in a generation where this stuff wasn’t happening; our students haven’t seen enough sunrises and sunsets to know the cycle changes. But I have hope because I listen to my students’ point of view. I hear them saying, “This is isn’t how we want it to be. We have the power to change it. . . .
Lauren GoepfertLauren Goepfert: I’m an optimist; I always have that hope. I always theme my class around the question, “Are we living up to the ideals that were put forward in the Declaration? Are we building on those ideals? If so, how are we doing that?” As we discuss the issues in our past, sometimes students feel we are making progress, and sometimes they feel we’re not there yet. When they say, “not yet,” I ask, “How can we do better? How can we achieve that ‘golden apple’?”
TAH: The “golden apple in the frame of silver.” Do all of you use that image in your classrooms? That image from the Bible, Proverbs 25:11—“A word fitly spoken is like an apple of gold in a frame of silver”—that Lincoln quoted and applied to the American founding? [Everyone nods.] One teacher I know asked a student artist to paint a picture of this idea that he could hang in his classroom, so that during classroom discussion, he could point to it and ask students how it informed the historical issue they were discussing. Did you all know this fragment of Lincoln’s before you started the program?Ross: I did not.
Goepfert: No.
David Widenhofer: No. Dr. Monroe introduced that to me.
Goepfert: . . . My exposure to these documents through MAHG has meant my students are now exposed to these documents. Had I not known about the apple of gold in the frame of silver, they would never have known about it.
TAH: How do you explain that fragment to students?Goepfert: It’s Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union.
TAH: So, is Lincoln saying: The Constitution is like a frame of silver around the apple of gold, which is . . . ?David WidenhoferGoepfert: The Declaration.
Widenhofer: I can’t remember which Supreme Court case it is, but in it, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says, “We have to keep one eye on what the Constitution says and what the Founders intended, and the other eye on the ideals of the Declaration, so that we are always growing as a society, trying to become that ‘more perfect union’ that the preamble of the Constitution speaks of.”
Teacher Roundtable, July 2021
There is a reason why so many teachers in TAH programs find the Fragment on the Constitution and Union one of the most important documents they teach. It gives them and their students a way of making sense of the somewhat contradictory story of our founding and subsequent development as a nation.
The Constitutional Crisis Lincoln ConfrontedAt the time Lincoln wrote the fragment, he was struggling with a Constitutional crisis. Most likely he wrote this note to himself prior to his first inauguration, while musing over a letter he’d received from Alexander Stephens, who was soon to be elected Vice President of the Confederacy. Stephens had already resigned from Congress in order to throw his lot in with the secessionists; yet he urged Lincoln to defuse the situation he and other Confederates were inflaming. Could not Lincoln speak a few calming words prior to his inauguration as President? “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver,” Stephens urged.
Stephens implied that what was needed from the incoming president were reassurances that his administration would not threaten the South’s slave labor system. Lincoln mildly replied: “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves . . . ? I wish to assure you . . . that there is no cause for such fears.” Then Lincoln pointed out the real issue dividing South and North: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That . . . certainly is the only substantial difference between us.” This was the position Lincoln, who did hope to avoid war, and who also saw himself as bound by Constitutional restrictions from acting to dismantle the slave system, steadily maintained as he campaigned and as he entered presidential office.
How Lincoln Viewed the DeclarationPrivately, however, Lincoln spelled out another difference between himself and Stephens. He assigned an entirely different meaning to the “word fitly spoken.” The most important commitment the nation ever made was to the principle embedded in the Declaration, that “all men are created equal.” Whereas Stephens would soon declare in his own inaugural speech that these words were a manifest lie, Lincoln saw them as the principle the Constitution was written to frame and protect:
The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity. No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.
The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.
The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity. No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.
The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.
Lincoln makes another Biblical allusion that Stephens did not—to Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath, when he was accused of violating Sabbath law. Humankind was not created to serve Sabbath regulations, Jesus replied; rather, a day of rest was set aside for the health of humankind. The law itself allowed a farmer to break the rule of Sabbath rest to pull an ox out of a ditch into which it had fallen. Just as the law allowed the farmer to preserve the life and health of his ox, so did it, properly understood, allow Jesus to heal a man with a withered arm or forage food for himself and his hungry disciples on the Sabbath. Exactly in that way should the Constitution be understood, Lincoln implies. Its various provisions—even those that seemed to contradict the principle of equality—were hammered together so as to allow the principle of human equality to survive the expediencies of political life, in which compromises had at times to be made. The founders had granted concessions to Southern slaveholders to keep their fledgling government from dissolving and dying before it became securely established.
Lincoln’s Deeper PurposeBut some Americans, especially those in the South, had abandoned any sense of the centrality of the Declaration to our system of government. Southerners maintained that the Constitution had been written to legitimize the use of slave labor. Lincoln admitted that the Constitution implicitly acknowledged slavery, through the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave recovery provisions; but he denied that it ever explicitly supported the idea that there could be property in human beings. The provisions of the Constitution Southerners pointed to used vague references to “all other persons” and “persons held to service or labor.” Nowhere in the Constitution could one find the word “slave” or “slavery.” Lincoln saw the founders’ careful wording as designed to make room for the eventual disappearance of slavery.
One may well conclude that, in understanding that Lincoln wanted to set in motion a process to end slavery—even if only gradually—Southerners were not wrong to fear Lincoln would cause the end of their peculiar institution. There was nothing he could have honestly said to allay such fears. Still, he strove to preserve the union first of all, believing that the principle of human equality would not survive the dissolution of the only government yet dedicated to that principle.
Some students and teachers, reading Lincoln’s exchange of letters with Alexander Stephens, may see him as splitting hairs. Others may judge him more harshly, seeing him as compromising his commitment to human equality. Yet teachers in TAH programs who read the letters alongside the Fragment on the Constitution and Union usually conclude Lincoln pursued a deeper purpose. They teach the fragment to help students understand our country’s bumpy road toward the realization of its ideals.
The post Lincoln’s Apple of Gold appeared first on Teaching American History.
It’s a pattern familiar to most Americans. Various media sources publish “best books of the year” each December, accompanied by a preview of books scheduled for release in the new year. Although several political books hit the non-fiction best-seller list in 2022, none delivered the impact a 46-page pamphlet did when it was published early in the American Revolutionary War. It is a safe bet that no book published in 2023 will do so, either.
American history teachers are familiar with the broad context behind the publication of Thomas Paine’s CommonSense in early 1776. Paine, an impoverished immigrant from Great Britain, arrived in British North America in November of 1774, armed with little more than a raw talent for political rhetoric and a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s letter enabled Paine to gain employment in the Philadelphia newspaper business. There he began honing his writing skills and started Common Sense in late 1775. Philadelphia publisher Robert Bell published the 46-page pamphlet on January 10, 1776 and hyped it in Philadelphia newspapers. It was an instant hit.
Common Sense: The Right Pamphlet at the Right TimeNo one is sure how many copies of Common Sense were printed in 1776. Estimates range from 70,000 to 500,000, with most estimates falling between 100,000 to 150,000. Regardless of the exact number, Common Sense enjoyed enormous popularity. Those who could not buy the book borrowed copies from friends or neighbors. Illiterate Americans heard it read aloud.
Thomas Paine arrived in North America at an auspicious time. Beginning with the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 and continuing until the battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775, the British Parliament tried several times to raise funds for colonial defense and to reduce British debt incurred during the French and Indian War, 1754-1763. Although colonial resistance to Parliament’s actions was fierce, Paine “found the disposition of the people such, that they might have been led by a thread and governed by a reed. Their attachment to Britain was obstinate, and it was, at that time, a kind of treason to speak against it. “Their ideas of grievance operated without resentment, and their single object was reconciliation.” Paine’s clear prose sliced through what historian Joyce Appleby called “the excruciating indecision” gripping the colonists by arguing that reconciliation was unwise and no longer viable.
Paine’s approach gave supporters of independence straightforward rhetorical tools that helped move public opinion toward their cause. “What had until recently been unspeakable and even unthinkable,” historian Robert M. S. McDonald writes, “Paine now put in print.” Parliament was not the problem. The problem was the nature of monarchy—the unjustifiable divine right of kings in general and the British monarchy specifically. Reconciliation was no longer possible because of the inherent nature of monarchy and the specific actions of the British monarch, who had begun using the powerful British military to squash the rebellion. The shift in the colonists’ thinking found its way into the Declaration of Independence’s lengthy list of grievances against King George III when the document was announced less than six months after Common Sense hit the market.
A Controversial FigureThomas Paine. William Sharp. (London: E. Trueflove, 1794) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008676218/Common Sense was not the first incendiary writing Paine published. In 1772, while working as an excise officer in England, Paine published a tract supporting a petition calling for the reform of the job. Fired from his post, he separated from his wife and auctioned his personal property. After this debacle, he sailed to America, where he applied his animosity toward the British system in favor of American independence. Like his essay supporting Britain’s excise officers, his first political writing in the New World was also controversial. In March of 1775, Paine published “African Slavery in America,” in which he attacked the international slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in the colonies as a violation of Christian principles for which its practitioners must answer to “the final Judge.”
The financial struggles Paine encountered in Great Britain continued in America despite the commercial success of Common Sense. Robert Bell, Paine’s original publisher, claimed—perhaps using doctored books—that the costs to print and promote the tract put him in the red. Bell’s claims forced Paine to seek other publishers, but the vagaries of 18th-century colonial publication kept him from enforcing his rights to authorship. Consequently, Common Sense enjoyed widespread marketplace saturation, with Paine producing subsequent editions with various appendices. Nevertheless, Thomas Paine never made a penny from Common Sense.
Making Revolution ReasonableOne way to analyze Common Sense is to find examples of Paine’s “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” Did he make arguments the average colonist could understand? Did he use simple metaphors and common sense to make his case for independence? In other words, was Common Sense, in fact, common sense? Here are three examples illustrating why Paine’s prose was so accessible to the late 18th-century reader or listener:
The Stamp Act Repeal* challenging the perception that America would always benefit from its association with Great Britain because it has benefitted in the past, Paine wrote, “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.” * challenging the argument that America would prosper best if England protected her trade, Paine argued that American commercial produce “by which she has enriched herself, are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.” * Paine asked his readers how could America remain under the dictates of a European King when America is “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe?”
One might imagine these examples being quoted, shared, and debated in the taverns and pubs of Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston in the spring of 1776 as the consensus for independence grew.
Thomas Paine was not the only revolutionary voice pushing for a formal declaration of independence in 1776. Others, such as independence stalwart John Adams, also believed the moment had come, but perhaps Adams was tipping his hat to Paine when he wrote in 1819, “What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people.” Through his authorship of Common Sense, Thomas Paine played a vital role in changing the colonists’ minds by shifting their thinking from reconciliation to independence.
Ray TylerRay Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog
The post Common Sense: The Book of the Year (in 1776) appeared first on Teaching American History.
Our popular document collection on World War II, edited by Jennifer D. Keene, has been published in a second, corrected edition. After using the collection in many Teaching American History seminars, Keene asked for a new edition, in part to correct the typos that are inescapable in publishing projects, but also to address questions teachers themselves had raised. “For example, the new edition changes or redefines some of the terms used in the document introductions. I broadened the meaning of ‘casualties’ to include non-combat related deaths among military personnel, and I used the word ‘incarceration’ to refer to the internment of Japanese American citizens which more accurately describes the reality of their imprisonment,” Keene explained.
Keene is Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Many of the books she has authored and edited focus on her chief area of specialization, World War I. These include The American Soldier Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) and Doughboys: The Great War and the Remaking of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is giving this expertise to a volume soon to be added to our Core Document Collection, World War I and the 1920s.
Jennifer Keene, 2021 Summer MAHGKeene is also the lead author for an American history textbook, Visions of America: A History of the United States that uses a visual approach to teaching students U.S. history. Teachers who have studied with Keene in the MAHG program have benefitted from her insightful use of photographic documents.
Recently we talked with Keene about World War II and the new edition of her collection.
Among documents showing the war shaping debate over civil rights and liberties, which do you think teachers will find most surprising or useful?WAC–This is My War Too (1941-1945) National Archives, 515988I think students will find the documents on women’s roles during the war both amusing and revealing. They challenge the notion that women found liberation through war work. I included a recruitment brochure, “Questions and Answers about the WAAC” (Document 22) because it documents not only the regulations of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps but the propaganda effort to overcome women’s hesitancy to join, lest they be perceived as less feminine. The brochure reassures women that they can wear tasteful makeup and neutral nail polish. The G.I. Roundtable debate, “Do You want Your Wife to Work After the War?” (Document 30) seems hilarious to us today, because it assumes that whether a woman works is a husband’s decision. It shows that during the war, the question of women working was framed by traditional gender expectations. Yet a range of women were involved in the war effort. In the second edition of the volume, I was able to add information about African American women who served as WAACs and the numbers of Japanese American women who joined the WAACs out of the internment camps.
One of my favorite documents in the collection encapsulates the racism faced by African American soldiers during the war. Corporal Robert Trimmingham’s letters to the US military magazine Yank(Document 24) are interesting on several levels. His account of watching German prisoners of war escorted into the front door of a restaurant and graciously served a meal, while African American soldiers took a hurried meal in the kitchen, shows the depth of racial injustice in American society. At the same time, the fact that the US government actually published the letters shows that military leadership recognized the problem of discrimination against African American soldiers and wanted to signal a promise of change.
Portrait of Michael Yonimitsu, Manzanar Relocation Center. Ansel Adams (1943) Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppprs-00254.Another of my favorite documents is Ansel Adams’ photographic record of Manzanar, Born Free and Equal(Document 27). Through images and sparse text, he depicts the Americanness of a group of incarcerated Japanese Americans. Just before Adams visited Manzanar, loyalty questionnaires had been administered, and those whose answers were deemed disloyal had been quarantined in a different place. Others, whose answers were found to indicate loyalty, had been made eligible to leave the camps and go to university, take jobs with employers who vouched for them, or enlist in the military. Adams’ book attempts to erase the otherness of all those he photographs. Unlike Trimmingham’s letters, the book was not widely distributed, and appeared late in the war, but its impact was felt later, when Japanese Americans sought an apology and reparations for their losses during the incarceration. The book also reveals that during the war there were Americans like Adams who objected to the internment. It models a gentle way of protesting policies we find unjust.
The post Primary Sources for Educators: World War II appeared first on Teaching American History.
Historic locations. A supportive and engaged educator community. Free professional development. What more could you ask for?
Applications are now open for our Spring 2023 weekend seminars! We are hosting ten seminars on a variety of topics in American history and politics. The deadline to apply is December 19. This year, we will be in:
- Austin, TX
- Yorba Linda, CA
- Dana Point, CA
- Little Rock, AR
- Dallas, TX
- Atlanta, GA
- Boston, MA
- Rochester, NY
- Springfield, IL
- St. Louis, MO
Each Multi-Day seminar runs for three days, from Friday evening to Sunday noon, and brings together a small group of teachers from around the country. During the seminar, the teachers discuss primary documents on the seminar topic with the guidance of a scholar, who acts as the seminar leader. The seminar also includes a visit to a local historical site.
Teaching American History hosts weekend seminars at no cost to American history and government teachers. Meals, materials, double-occupancy rooms, and historical site visits are covered 100%. At the end of each course, teacher participants receive a letter of participation for 15 contact hours and a $600 stipend for travel costs or other expenses.
For more information about our Multi-Day seminars and to see the schedule of events please click here. Ready to apply? Click here to fill out our brief application.
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Our popular document collection on World War II, edited by Jennifer D. Keene, has been published in a second, corrected edition. After using the collection in many Teaching American History seminars, Keene asked for a new edition, in part to correct the typos that are inescapable in publishing projects, but also to address questions teachers themselves had raised. “For example, the new edition changes or redefines some of the terms used in the document introductions. I broadened the meaning of ‘casualties’ to include non-combat related deaths among military personnel, and I used the word ‘incarceration’ to refer to the internment of Japanese American citizens which more accurately describes the reality of their imprisonment,” Keene explained.
Jennifer Keene, 2021 Summer MAHGKeene is Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Many of the books she has authored and edited focus on her chief area of specialization, World War I. These include The American Soldier Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) and Doughboys: The Great War and the Remaking of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is giving this expertise to a volume soon to be added to our Core Document Collection, World War I and the 1920s.
Keene is also the lead author for an American history textbook, Visions of America: A History of the United States that uses a visual approach to teaching students U.S. history. Teachers who have studied with Keene in the MAHG program have benefitted from her insightful use of photographic documents.
Recently we talked with Keene about World War II and the new edition of her collection.
We just marked the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. What is the importance of that event in American history?You can’t underestimate the importance of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is a seminal moment for the United States. First, it ended a two- and a half-year debate over whether or not to enter the war that had begun in Europe, in a definitive way. Nothing like that had happened to silence debate about our entering the First World War. The case for the First World War was flimsy. Because there were many reasons to think that America should never have entered it, when the First World War ended, Americans were not yet convinced that the United States had to step up to a larger international role. But Pearl Harbor ended that debate. Second, the attack led to the nation’s entrance into a two-front war, a much more significant commitment in terms of troops, treasure and time than the US made in 1917—and indeed the US commitment was seen as essential to winning on both fronts. Finally, the attack persuaded Americans that they should never again leave themselves vulnerable to attack.
It changed America’s role in the geopolitical arena, prompting our military and foreign policy involvements for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. It’s also logical to wonder how the attack on Pearl Harbor shaped world history; without the attack, would America have entered a two-front war? We were inching into the European war, but trying to stay out of the Pacific conflict. Would we have mobilized to the extent we did in time to prevent a German victory or a consolidation of the Japanese empire in the Far East? Either outcome would have been extremely difficult to dislodge.
Would you say, then, that after Pearl Harbor, Americans united to support the war effort in a way they had not during World War I?We should not assume that Pearl Harbor immediately unified the nation in every way. The attack gave Roosevelt the traction to come to the defense of Europe, and eventually to pursue the vision he shared with Woodrow Wilson, of America leading a worldwide movement toward greater democracy, national self-determination, and participation in systems for collective security. Of course, Roosevelt was a better politician and diplomat than Wilson. He faced formidable obstacles; he had to dance around neutrality legislation Congress had passed (Documents 1 and 2 in the collection are the First Neutrality Act of 1935, and Senator Bennett Champ Clark’s defense of it ). As late as April 1941, Charles Lindberg argued for a policy of “America First” (Document 8). Although today we want to dismiss Lindbergh because of his fascist sympathies, he did articulate a lot of people’s worries about getting involved in another conflict.
When Pearl Harbor occurred, Roosevelt turned on a dime. But he had prepared the ground. If you study his Four Freedoms speech in January, 1941 (Document 5), and the Atlantic Charter (Document 10) of August the same year, you’ll find many similarities to Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Of course, Roosevelt had advantages Wilson lacked. He could use radio to reach Americans in their homes; and he had a talent for expressing his vision through radio.
But when you study the American home-front experience—and I think the documents in the book really speak to this—you see that there’s still a lot of turmoil here. African Americans want to know, if we’re fighting a war for democracy overseas, do we plan to ensure the rights of Black people at home? Women see an opportunity to take roles in the war effort, but there is controversy over whether this will lead to permanent changes in gender roles. And of course, one of the worst abridgements of civil liberties in the history of the United States occurred with the incarceration of Japanese American citizens in camps, who were identified as suspects simply because of their ethnic heritage.
Your collection gives readers lots of insight into the situation on the home front. More than some volumes published in our core document series, you focus a great deal on social history. What do we learn by viewing WWII through this lens?I studied in a social history program at Carnegie-Mellon University, specializing in war and society. My first book, Doughboys: The Great War and the Remaking of America, analyzes both the impact of the First World War on American society—the way that the war became a transformational moment for the country—and the way that American society shaped the way we fought that war. In the document collection on World War II, I wanted to tell the story of the war from that perspective. Obviously, American wars are led from the executive branch, and the decision-making of the president matters a great deal. Presidential decisions determine when we make war or agree to peace, and how alliances and foreign policy are managed. Including the speeches of Lindbergh and Senator Robert Taft (Document 12) along with Roosevelt’s fireside chat on the Greer incident (Document 11) provides an opportunity for teachers and students to engage in the debates over whether to enter the war that occurred in 1941. But at the same time, in a democracy, executive decision-making is influenced by the domestic political situation, that is, the opinions of average Americans. And a president’s decision to go to war affects, in turn, the lives of everybody in this society.
To show this, I brought polling data into the collection (Documents 6 and 13). We know that the Gallup polls influenced Roosevelt; but we can also see polling results shifting toward support for the war after Roosevelt gave major speeches. I hope these documents give teachers and their students experience in reading and understanding polls, which offer so much useful data for social history.
I also wanted to bring a different lens to the familiar trope of World War II as “the good war.” From the perspective of the soldier who fights, it’s tough to speak of any war as “good.” I included an excerpt from James Fahey’s Pacific War Diary(Document 19) to illustrate the experience of those assigned to a naval ship undergoing bombardment. I included an example of Ernie Pyle’s war correspondence (“The Death of Captain Waskow,” Document 23) to show what it was like to witness heroic service during the brutal combat on the ground. As we get farther and farther away from the lived experience of the war, we tend to lose a sense of the costs of conflict. We also tend to forget the uncertainties and hardships of civilians at home.
I wanted to include visual evidence—a big interest of mine—of the war experience, so I included such images as Dorothea’s Lange’s photos of the placards announcing the Japanese American incarceration and of Japanese Americans awaiting the buses that would carry them to the camps (Document 17). Students can learn a lot from visual evidence, and they need to practice interpreting it. All of these documentary sources help students connect to history on a personal and emotional level.
We often look to the past to answer our questions about recent and current history. To fully understand the civil rights movement, or feminism and women’s struggle to secure their rights, we have to look to WWII. If we want to understand our ongoing debate over how to weigh national security interests against protection of civil liberties, we need to study World War II. After 9/11, we once again engaged this debate, and perhaps our memory of the Japanese American incarceration tempered some of our security measures.
Check back in to the blog in January, for Keene’s comments on some of the most interesting and unusual documents in the collection.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Michael Yonimitsu, WAAC, A. Philip Randolph The post World War II: An Educator Resource appeared first on Teaching American History.
The Teaching American History team had a great time at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Conference in Philadelphia this year! We met a lot of new teachers and loved seeing some familiar faces drop by to check us out.
Proudly on display this year was the published books in our Core Documents series. A lot has changed with that collection since the last time NCSS held an in-person conference. We now have 31 books that offer fascinating explorations of topics throughout American History, and more are on the way!
It was so uplifting to watch the faces of teachers at NCSS light up when they discovered what we do for the first time. Teachers browsed our library like kids in a candy store, their excitement growing as they learned that each document came with an introduction and set of focus questions. They were floored to discover that all of the books are available as a free PDF download on our bookstore.
Having access to documents is great, but feeling confident enough to set aside the textbook and teach with primary sources is invaluable. Accordingly, we’re excited to announce that registration is open for our online graduate classes (MAHG) for Spring 2023. And you can also preview the schedule for Summer 2023 now!
The same network of faculty that curated our collections of primary sources teach our graduate classes. They lead seminar discussions with you and other passionate educators from around the country, enhancing your expertise with each session.
Simply put, there is no better way to develop your mastery of teaching with primary sources than these classes.MAHG Summer 2022At the end of one of our classes, teachers feel a sense of rejuvenation and excitement, armed with new knowledge and new ideas to bring to their own students. Even better, they have the confidence to dive into the words of the past and challenge their own students to navigate the most complex and fascinating moments from America’s story.
Check out our schedule of upcoming classes and register for one today!
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In honor of the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, today we share a document from Dec. 7th, 1941 with you. This primary source, along with thirty-three others about the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, is available in the newly-released 2nd edition of our CDC volume, World War II.
At 6 am on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched two consecutive attacks on the American fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The Japanese sank or damaged 18 ships (including 8 battleships) and killed 2,405 Americans. Over the next 24 hours, the Japanese attacked British, Dutch, and American territories (including Guam and the Philippines) in Southeast Asia. In this diary excerpt, Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard recounted the president’s conversation with his Cabinet officers and Congressional leaders after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It reveals the sense of confusion and misinformation in the hours after the attack.
Source: Claude R. Wickard Papers, Department of Agriculture Files: Cabinet Meetings, 1941–1942 (Box 13). https://goo.gl/EirzuB
Secretary Claude R. Wickard | December 7, 1941At about four o’clock on the afternoon of December 7, I received a call from the White House saying that there would be a special meeting of the Cabinet in the President’s study in the White House proper at 8:30 that evening. I had been writing all afternoon and Louise had been busy so we had not listened to the radio, but I immediately concluded that the Japanese situation had taken a turn for the worse. Within a few minutes after the White House call we were able to get from radio reports that Honolulu and perhaps Manila had been attacked. Later the announcers said that Manila had not been attacked but that three or four hundred lives had been lost in attacks in Hawaii.
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941The Cabinet members were ushered into the President’s study at 8:40. Harry Hopkins was present. The President began by saying that this was the most important Cabinet meeting since 1861. He then told of the attack today in Hawaii. He said the attack was a serious one which he would describe later. He continued by saying that there was no question but that the Japanese had been told by the Germans a few weeks ago that they were winning the war and that they would soon dominate Africa as well as Europe. They were going to isolate England and were also going to completely dominate the situation in the Far East. The Japs had been told if they wanted to be cut in on the spoils they would have to come in the war now.
The President said that it would have been necessary to start making plans for today’s attack at least three weeks ago. He then related how the Japanese Envoys, even today, had asked for a conference with Secretary Hull at the hour when the attack was being made in Hawaii. He said that the Japanese had started a war [while] carrying on peace negotiations.
The President said that Guam and Wake Islands were also under attack. He said these Islands were poorly fortified and that they would soon be in Japanese hands. He then read a message which he said he was going to read tomorrow at a joint session of Congress. He said that the message was subject to revision as later events might warrant. The message was short and merely stated how Japan had attacked while still carrying on peace negotiations. It ended by stating that he was asking Congress to declare that a state of war had existed since Japan’s attack. He indicated that he did not know whether Japan had declared war or not. He also said there was a chance that the Germans would also declare war. There was considerable discussion of the proposed message. Secretary Hull said that he thought that there should be a complete statement on the events leading up to the attack. The President disagreed but Hull said he thought the most important war in 500 years deserved more than a short statement. Secretary Stimson said that Germany had inspired and planned this whole affair and that the President should so state in his message. The President disagreed with this suggestion.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1941) Library of Congress, LC-USW33-042784-ZCThe President went into the confidential reports of the attack which he said must be kept in strict secrecy. He first indicated that aircraft had been destroyed in large numbers in the attack. He then revealed that six out of seven of the battleships in Pearl Harbor had been damaged—very severely. I was shocked at the news; so were other members of the cabinet. The Secretary of the Navy lost his air of bravado. Secretary Stimson was very sober.
The President said that the Japanese were hoping to bring about the transfer of American naval vessels from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He said he wanted to avoid this if [at] all possible. He said that he didn’t want to tell Congressional leaders (of both parties—including Senators Barkley, Johnson, Austin and Connally, Speaker Rayburn, and Congressmen Jere Cooper, Martin, Bloom, and Doxey) who were waiting to come to his study all the things he had told us.
Wreckage of USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-132048.When they came in he said that it was very unpleasant to be a War President and then he recounted the series of events leading up to the attacks of today. He said that he wanted to deliver a message to a joint session of Congress tomorrow. After a short discussion it was decided to have him address the session at 12:30. Some of the Congressmen wanted to know if he were going to ask for a declaration of war. The President said he didn’t know yet what he was going to say because the events of the next fourteen hours would be numerous and all-important. The President revealed that at least battleships were damaged. This caused considerable consternation among the Congressional leaders. Connally asked what damage we had inflicted on the Japs. The President indicated he didn’t know but went on to say we had no information to indicate that we had severely damaged the Japs. Connolly exploded by saying: “Where were our forces—asleep? How can we go to war without anything to fight with?” The President told how the Germans might have been five hundred miles away at dark last night since they had twelve hours of sailing in the long darkness.
The President went on to say that the distance to Japan made it very difficult for us to attack Japan. He said that each thousand miles from base cut the efficiency of the Navy five percent. He pointed out that it would be necessary to strangle Japan rather than whip her and that it took longer. He once spoke about two or three years being required.
The meeting broke up about 10 o’clock. Everyone was very sober. The President began to dictate a statement for the press. Some of us stayed around for nearly an hour. I talked to the Vice President who said many times that it was all for the best. I reminded him that he had made a similar statement when we were at the Convention at Chicago last year when it seemed that everything was crashing around us.
Through it all the President was calm and deliberate. I could not help but admire his clear statements of the situation. He evidently realizes the seriousness of the situation and perhaps gets much comfort out of the fact that today’s action will unite the American people. I don’t know anybody in the United States who can come close to measuring up to his foresight and acumen in this critical hour.
As I drove home I could not refrain from wondering at the fates that caused me to be present at one of the most important conferences in the history of this nation.
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On November 19, 1919 the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.
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When the Harlem branch of the NAACP called for a mass meeting at Carnegie Hall to protest the St. Louis Race Massacre, Johnson suggested a more effective demonstration: a silent march down Fifth Avenue.
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When the United States Constitution was written, the writ of habeas corpus was the only English common law writ given specific reference in the document.
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40 years ago, on June 30, 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) fell 3 states short of ratification. To remember that event, we are re-running a blog that details the fight for the ERA.
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On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, putting it into effect.
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The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson institutionalized racial segregation for over half a century.
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Along with our other Core Document Collection volumes, The Judiciary is available in our online bookstore, as both a hard copy and an ebook.
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Did you know that the origins of Memorial Day and its remembrance of America's servicemen and women arose in response to the divisions left by the Civil War?
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Read our interview with Joshua Dunn, editor of our latest CDC volume, The Judiciary.
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At TAH, we believe the best way to understand history is through conversation.
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Through the MAHG program, Cody Stafford learned how to help students gain a deep understanding of key historical concepts, even during a fast-paced APUSH course.
Cody Stafford Choosing What to Teach American history is rich and detailed, but time in the classroom is limited. Even if one covered it all, simply “covering content doesn’t really help students learn anything,” says Cody Stafford, a history teacher at Unionville High School in Pennsylvania. Deciding what to emphasize, Stafford asks, “Which topics will most help students understand why Americans think the way we do, why our government does things the way it does, and why it’s structured as it is? For me, the Founding period and the Progressive era are the two ideological giants in the room that students really need to understand.”
Unionville, in a western suburb of Philadelphia, ranks highly on measures of school effectiveness. Stafford’s courses are challenging. In his AP US history class, he uses primary documents daily and spends several weeks teaching the writing skills students need to perform well on the AP exam. He gives particular attention to the Founders’ effort to shape a limited republican government and the Progressive effort to expand government’s role.
“We spend a lot of time looking at the Declaration, the Constitution and key Federalist papers, as well as a couple of Anti-Federalist papers, which we read all the way through.” This helps students grasp the understanding of government that informs American history through the Civil War. Later, Stafford’s students read progressive political theory—such as the essays of Woodrow Wilson—which helps them understand the entire 20th century. “If you understand the Progressive Era, you understand FDR and the New Deal, and you understand LBJ and the Great Society. You understand how these American leaders saw the role of government.”
How the Progressives Understood Government As an undergraduate, Stafford concentrated in European history. “I had never taken a course in American history that went past the Civil War. I knew nothing about the Progressive Era—until I came to Ashland,” to study in the Master of American History and Government program (MAHG). “Taking the Progressive Era course really changed the way that I think about US history.”
Stafford had taught the Progressive Era as a reform movement arising in response to the unregulated business growth that followed the Civil War. It fit into a pattern of alternating laissez-faire and reformist tendencies in American politics. In MAHG, however, he came to see that the progressives introduced a completely new understanding of the role of government.
“The founders saw government itself as the only threat to citizens’ natural rights. The progressives saw a new threat in business corporations.” Their economic might, and their status as individual persons under the law, gave them power over workers’ lives. “The only institution that could control big business was government. So they wanted to give government power to regulate those businesses.”
The progressives also felt “an overwhelming zeal for democracy” that reshaped American politics in the 20th century. Changes in electoral practices that made government more immediately responsive to the popular will would, they felt, restrain government from using its new powers unfairly. “But to the founders, ‘democracy’ was not necessarily a good thing. They created a republic, believing that the people making decisions needed to be in a position to make those decisions”—equipped with education, political experience and a reputation for wise decision-making.
Progressives reforms, such as the introduction of referenda and the 17th Amendment’s revision of the system for electing senators, eventuated in our current system of primary elections. This has encouraged the election of political newcomers, mavericks, and extremists.
“After the McGovern-Fraser Commission, if you’re a moderate, you’re out of luck—you’re not going to be running on your party’s ticket. The polarization we see today is a direct result of the primary system,” Stafford says. “I don’t know the answer to that. Do you tell people they don’t get to vote in primaries? Do you go back to the system where party bosses pick the candidates? Once you give democracy to people, you can’t take it back.”
Students Recreate the 1912 Election Professor John Moser Along with a clearer grasp of this discontinuity in Americans’ understanding of government’s role, Stafford also gained a new teaching approach from MAHG. During a course on US history after World War II taught by Professor John Moser, Stafford played a history game called Reacting to the Past (RTTP). In these games, students assume the roles, motives and opinions of key players in a pivotal moment of history. They recreate the event in a structured but open-ended way, sometimes leading to surprising outcomes. Moser’s post-war history course involved two RTTP games—one on the Yalta Conference and the other on the 1968 Democratic Party Convention.
The typical MAHG seminar involves “heavy discussion of three hundred pages of primary documents, which I enjoy,” Stafford said. But after a couple of weeks, “you can get a little burned out.” He took Moser’s class expecting a less intense experience. Instead, he found himself deeply engaged, playing the role of Winston Churchill at Yalta. He combed through the reading packet to master the positions of the other players as well as the positions and rhetoric of Churchill. He met with players on his team to devise a strategy that would divide the post-war world on terms favorable to Britain. “It was an all-encompassing experience, and I loved it. I knew I wanted to use something like that in my classes.”
The right moment to introduce a RTTP game came during the pandemic year of 2020 – 2021, when, after weeks of Zoom classes, Stafford’s students were weary “of watching me on a screen talking at them. I knew that Professor Moser had recently written a game, Progressivism at High Tide: the Election of 1912. So I reached out to him and he most graciously sent me all the materials.” Reviewing them, Stafford found they covered almost every element of the APUSH curriculum pertaining to industrialization and the Progressive response. Stafford’s students played the game and “absolutely loved it.” He worried students might not retain the lessons the game taught—until summer brought him his students’ AP scores. They scored higher on the Progressives than on any other content area on the exam.
How Historical Role-Playing Promotes Learning This year, Stafford has used two RTTP games: one on the Constitutional Convention; and, again, the game on the 1912 election.
To win each game, a team has to achieve a more favorable outcome than historically occurred. Wilson’s 1912 electoral victory was so sweeping that a team winning the game need not “win” the election, but only win significantly more votes than their party did historically. Students play so competitively that the game’s outcome can be surprising. “Woodrow Wilson’s team did not win in a single one of my classes this year,” Stafford said.
Students who play RTTP games gain “a very rich, deep historical understanding” of an era by exercising key learning skills, Stafford thinks. “They have to read and interpret primary sources, use them in the speeches they’re giving, and make their speeches persuasive. If you’re trying to persuade somebody to do something, you need to not only understand your own position; you need to know your opponents’ arguments also, so you can anticipate and counter them. The amount of work students put into this is incredible. They don’t even really see it as work—which is the way it should be when you’re learning,” Stafford said.
Historical role-playing allows students to learn in way that seems “natural to how we live,” debating issues as they happen in a fictive “real time” instead of analyzing the ideas and motives of historical third parties. Role-playing also frees students of self-consciousness. They can make a questionable point, if it’s “what they really think their character would have said, without it reflecting personally on them. Students I haven’t heard more than a few words from all year will stand at a podium, giving passionate speeches. It really is a transformative experience.”
Overall, Stafford says, “MAHG was honestly the best professional experience of my life. Through summers in Ashland, I made lifelong friends with teachers who share my passion for US History and government.” During the ‘distanced learning’ period of the pandemic, Stafford’s MAHG friends helped him keep his students focused. “A MAHG friend and I met over Zoom and made AP exam review videos together that I still post for my kids today.”
John Moser’s game Progressivism at High Tide: the Election of 1912, will be featured at one of our MAHG courses this summer: The Progressive Era, July 17-24. Several seats are still available. Please go to our Summer 2022 information page to learn more.
For more materials on the election of 1912, see our newly-released exhibit “The Presidential Election of 1912“.
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Join us for our last Documents in Detail episode for the 21-22 school year, during which we’ll look at a document that is both a piece of Congressional history, and an event that shaped policy, “The Revolt of 1910 Against Speaker Joseph Cannon.”
This program will take place at 7pm ET on Wednesday, 18 May 2022, and will feature Dr. John Moser as moderator; Dr. Joseph Postell, the volume editor; and Dr. Sarah Burns.
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Professional Development with Teaching American History Many US history and government teachers are familiar with Teaching American History’s professional development programs. We host a variety of teacher programs—from webinars to graduate courses. Each event uses a conversational approach led by a scholar with expertise in the topic or era. Participants read a packet of original documents on the subject curated by a scholar, who facilitates a series of ninety-minute conversations focused on the readings. Participants gather at tables arranged in a hollow square. This arrangement encourages a “conversation among peers.” The scholar/discussion leader is not “a sage on the stage” but an equal participant who has studied the colloquia topic in greater depth than most K-12 teachers. The conversations avoid pedagogy. Instead, the discussions are deep dives into the world the authors inhabited, the problems they confronted, choices they made, arguments they embraced—as expressed in their writings.
Multi-Day Colloquia Perhaps, our most popular content PD is our Multi-Day Colloquia held near—or in some cases—on a historic site, which participants visit as part of the seminar. Teachers enjoy visiting historical sites or museums, connecting with like-minded teachers from across the country, and feeding their passion for learning about United States history and government. Our generous donors cover the costs of meals and accommodations for the participants and stipends that help cover some of the travel costs to the MD site. The scholar/discussion leaders teach full-time in colleges and universities across the country. They enjoy leading the colloquia because teachers bring more background knowledge to the conversation than they typically hear from undergrad students in their home institutions.
The Multi-Day colloquia are spread over three days—typically a Friday through Sunday during the school year, but they may be weekdays in the summer. I have been fortunate to host events in Montpelier, where we toured James Madison’s home; Valley Forge, where we toured Washington’s encampment; and Santa Fe, NM, which included a visit to the Palace of the Governors, constructed circa 1610. Although Covid forced us to put the multi-day seminars on hold for two years, we have restarted them this spring and are keeping our fingers crossed that they will continue without interruption.
Museum of the American Revolution When I host colloquia, I ask myself several questions to evaluate the event’s success. Did all the teachers participate? Did the scholar’s teaching style facilitate discussion and encourage deeper connections to the text? Did the teachers enjoy the trip to the museum or historical site? Most importantly, did I learn something significant about the topic I would use in my classroom? Using this checklist, a weekend colloquia I recently hosted in Philadelphia was a roaring success. Entitled Apples of Gold: The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States in Context, it was led by Dr. Lauren Hall of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Seventeen educators from multiple states stayed in the Old City, visited the Museum of the American Revolution, and debated the meaning of the Declaration and Constitution as initially written and how their students see those founding documents today.
Lauren set the tone for our discussion in Session One. She told us, “I am not your primary interlocutor in this conversation. You are. When you share a comment or question—speak to the group, not me.” All the participants bought into Lauren’s suggestion. Numerous conversations about quotes lifted from the readings took place between the teacher participants. At the same time, Lauren listened to the discussions and interjected important context, interesting background about individuals we were discussing, and probing questions about the text that challenged us to think more critically.
Although I am no longer in the classroom, I still feel the tug when attending weekend colloquia. I gain new insights into documents I taught, new ways to teach the meaning effectively, and I nurture my passion for US history and government. The feedback I receive from the participants tells me they feel the same way.
We are in the process of finalizing sites for our Fall 2022 Weekend Colloquia schedule. Tentative sites stretch from Washington DC to the Reagan Library in California. Look for application information in your email to arrive in May.
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Editor’s note: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned attention again to NATO, as it has heightened awareness of the threat Russia poses to the liberal political order shared by NATO members. These members now include nations in eastern Europe, but not Ukraine. Given this renewed interest in NATO, we re-publish a revised version of a post published originally in 2014.
This week is the 65th anniversary of the signing of the treaty that established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The first peacetime military alliance outside of the Western hemisphere that the US joined, it marked a departure from the generally isolationist policy of the US prior to the World War II. During the early years of the Cold War, Truman and his policy advisors saw a need to provide collective security against an expansionist Soviet Union. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin, the Soviet-sponsored coup in Czechoslovakia, added to worries about Soviet meddling in Greek and Turkish affairs, and caused US officials to worry that Western European states could find their independence compromised. Through the Marshall Plan, the US had already demonstrated a willingness to support the political security of Western Europe through aid to its economic recovery. This helped many Western European states to see the advantage of a military alliance.
Abbie Rowe. Photograph of Harry S. Truman. Public domain. Collective security was the purpose behind the United Nations, but Truman’s speech at the signing of the NATO treaty included a careful reference to an impasse already arising in that organization:
Within the United Nations, this country and other countries have hoped to establish an international force for the use of the United Nations in preserving peace throughout the world. Our efforts to establish this force, however, have been blocked by one of the major powers.
This lack of unanimous agreement in the Security Council does not mean that we must abandon our attempts to make peace secure.
His speech also included a statement of political principles that Truman implied the parties to the alliance shared:
We believe that it is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable.
Our faith in this kind of unity is borne out by our experience here in the United States in creating one nation out of the variety of our continental resources and the peoples of many lands.
This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.
Truman made the same point in his speech to the Senate appealing for ratification of the treaty:
The nations signing this treaty share a common heritage of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. The American members of the North Atlantic community stem directly from the European members in tradition and in love of freedom. We have joined together in the progressive development of free institutions, and we have shared our moral and material strength in the present task of rebuilding from the devastation of war.
The love of freedom and a willingness to defend it remain the core of NATO’s commitment and explains its interest in helping Ukraine.
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History and Government Summer Classes Available Our Summer 2022 MAHG classes are rapidly filling up! For anyone still looking for professional development opportunities this summer, we still have a few spots open in the following courses:
HIST 680/POLSC 680: Law and Literature A study of the connection between American literature and law through both fiction and non-fiction, including The Crucible, Billy Budd, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. These primary texts will be supplemented with primary historical documents, including, for example, sermons from Puritan New England alongside a study of McCarthyism for the Crucible, and documents related to Civil Rights for To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Dates: July 3-July 8
- Registration form
- Instructors: Maura Grady and Gregory A. McBrayer
HIST 503/POLSC 503: Sectionalism and Civil War A study of the sectional conflict beginning with the nullification crisis. The course will not only examine the political, social and economic developments in the period leading to the civil war, but will emphasize the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and John C. Calhoun.
- Dates: July 3-July 8
- Registration form
- Instructors: Joseph R. Fornieri and Susan Hanssen
HIST 605/POLSC 605: The Age of Enterprise In the last decades of the 19th century, the United States took decisive steps away from its rural, agrarian past toward its industrial future, assuming its place among world powers. This course examines that movement, covering such topics as business-labor relations, political corruption, immigration, imperialism, the New South, and segregation and racism.
- Dates: July 17-July 22
- Registration form
- Instructors: William Atto and Brent J. Aucoin
HIST 505/POLSC 505: The Progressive Era The transition to an industrial economy posed many problems for the United States. This course examines those problems and the responses to them that came to be known as progressivism. The course includes the study of World War I as a manifestation of progressive principles. The course emphasizes the political thought of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and their political expression of progressive principles.
- Dates: July 17-July 22
- Registration form
- Instructor: John Moser
About MAHG Ashland University’s Master of Arts program in American History and Government (MAHG) was designed to address the need of social studies teachers for rigorous graduate-level study in the content of history and government. Offered on a unique schedule of weeklong summer seminars in a traditional classroom setting and live, interactive web-based videoconference courses, each course in the program focuses on the study and interpretation of the materials from which we build our understanding of the past: original historical documents.
MAHG Summer 2022 Registration Links * To request more information, please email us at https://apply.ashland.edu/register/MAHG_Inquiry. * Our registration form can be found at https://teachingamericanhistory.org/programs/master-of-arts/schedule/summer-2022-ac/registration. * We offer summer scholarships for teachers. The application can be found at https://teachingamericanhistory.org/programs/master-of-arts/mahg-fellowship-application/.
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This month we honor women’s history by highlighting one of our teacher partners. Michelle Adams Alderfer is a 2021 MAHG grad whose Chairman’s Award-winning capstone project was an original play about Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment. Below is our conversation with Michelle about the process by which Tennessee ratified the amendment and how she created a hands-on, primary-source driven project for her middle schoolers.
Teaching the 19th Amendment Beginning her capstone project for the Master of Arts in American History and Government, Texas teacher Michelle Adams Alderfer wanted to help her eighth-grade students appreciate American women’s decades-long struggle for voting rights. Middle-schoolers learn about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who founded the suffrage movement in the mid-nineteenth century. But many never hear the rest of the story. Most eighth-grade American history courses end at 1876, when Reconstruction ends.
Alderfer had always expanded her lesson on women’s rights, carrying it through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Her students learned that a new generation of activists led by Carrie Chapman Catt persuaded Congress to pass the suffrage amendment in 1919. After this, one more hurdle remained. The constitutional amendment Congress approved had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
Ratification, The Last Hurdle for Women’s Suffrage Carrie Chapman Catt, between 1909 and 1932. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-109793 Sometimes students didn’t grasp the purpose of this last Constitutional requirement. “The founders wanted to ensure the government they diligently worked to establish would not be easily altered,” Alderfer explains. They knew that “the Constitution would need to change as the United States grew and evolved, but they did not think that adaptations should be impulsively made. The ratification process they put in place ensures that any amendment is truly the desire of the American people.”
Still, the lengthy process allows opponents of amendments to deploy a range of legislative maneuvers to frustrate passage. To help students to understand these last obstacles to women’s suffrage, Alderfer decided to dramatize them. Her play, Hurrah, and Vote for Suffrage: A Four-Act Play about Tennessee’s Ratification of the 19th Amendment depicts the crucial weeks in August 1920 when the Tennessee legislature met in special session to consider ratification.
All eyes in the country focused on the debate in Tennessee. If it voted to ratify, it would be the 36th of 48 states to do so, making the amendment federal law. Supporters in Tennessee were divided from opponents not by party affiliation but by deep-seated feelings about women’s proper roles in family and public life. Outside the legislative sessions, suffragists lobbied the lawmakers, handing yellow roses to those who supported the amendment. Opponents handed red roses to lawmakers pledging to vote against it.
Legislative Maneuvers and a Mother’s Letter The amendment passed the Tennessee Senate but stalled in the House. Before the House vote, observers counted slightly more red roses in legislators’ lapels than yellow ones. Popular history credits one young red-rose-wearing legislator, Harry T. Burn, with deciding the outcome. At the last minute, he switched his vote—after his mother wrote him a letter asking him to do so.
“I expected students would be engaged by the story of the youngest member of the Tennessee House changing the course of history, especially after learning that he did so at his mother’s urging,” Alderfer said. “Yet the scope of the play grew as I researched the Tennessee vote. Burn’s last-minute vote change is more accurately seen as the culmination of weeks of battles between the suffragists and the ‘antis,’ prior to the special session as well as during it.”
Researching the history, Alderfer read most of the Tennessee House Journal for August 1920. She also read archived newspaper accounts. Initially, she planned to frame the play’s action with “the historical anachronism of a television news broadcast.” Jason Stevens, who advises MAHG students as they write capstone proposals, discouraged that plan. Still, Alderfer “needed a way to explain the action that this generation of students would understand.” She decided to add newspaper reporters to her cast of characters. Watching legislators speak during the House debate, “the reporters could ask each other, ‘Did he just say what I think he said?’”
Using Reporters to Explain the Drama After reading an early draft of Acts I and II, Alderfer’s faculty advisor, Natalie Taylor, suggested giving the journalists the main roles. “So, I rewrote what I’d already written,” Alderfer said. Now the story flowed easily. “I was so grateful Dr. Taylor made that suggestion!”
One of the play’s main characters, Albert Virgil Goodpasture, wrote a feature story in The Nashville Tennessean that supplied Alderfer with many historical details. The other main character is fictional. “I thought we needed the female perspective,” Alderfer said, so she invented an eager cub reporter named Diana Stanton (giving a nod to the Stanton—Elizabeth Cady—who founded the movement).
Alderfer depicts the two journalists as suffrage supporters who nevertheless try to cover events objectively. They watch public demonstrations for and against ratifications, then watch the legislative machinations from the Senate and House galleries, speculating on the changing game plan of the amendment’s opponents.
Defeating the Last Challenge to Suffrage Stanton writes daily reports on the proceedings, while Goodpasture takes notes for a post-mortem account of all that happens. The reporters discuss legislative moves to table the motion to ratify or to dismiss it as contrary to the state constitution. At one point, Speaker of the Tennessee House Seth Walker reverses position. An opponent, he sees the vote trending against him and unexpectedly votes to ratify. The reporters conclude that voting to approve will give the Speaker the procedural right to call for a new vote. After the House ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment, anti-amendment activists try a final ploy: they charge that Burn switched his vote because he was bribed. Walker’s plan to call for a new vote suddenly seems a possibility.
Alderfer in front of the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. During the ratification fight, Carrie Chapman Catt gave interviews from this hotel. In the play’s last act, Goodpasture and Stanton resolve the controversy. They interview the political operatives claiming to have witnessed Burns being offered money. Then they show the operatives affidavits from others who contradict this slander. Finally, they interview Harry Burn’s mother, who speaks proudly of her son and the effect on him of her letter.
Alderfer planned to write a play students might easily perform. In the end, she produced a long, challenging script, thick with rhetorical language. Many of the lines directly quote the words of pro- and anti- activists, as recorded in the newspaper accounts or in the Tennessee House Journal. Hence the play draws an accurate picture of the arguments made by those fighting for and against ratification. Goodpasture and Stanton repeatedly interview Carrie Chapman Catt, who was in fact present in Tennessee in August 1920, coordinating lobbying efforts for ratification. Catt describes the struggle in the stirring, confident language attributed to her by the contemporary press.
Alderfer’s capstone project, which won a Chairman’s award in May 2021, has enriched her lessons on the suffrage movement. During the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020, she shared much of her research with students. “I haven’t used the play itself yet,” she says, but, “stay tuned!” In the fall of 2021, she began a new teaching assignment at The John Cooper School in a northern suburb of Houston, Texas. She now teaches American history from 1607 through as much of the 20th century as time allows.
The History Students Need to Learn With so much to cover, how does Alderfer decide when to speed through history, and when to slow down and dig deep? Alderfer thinks carefully before responding. “Especially as the climate of our country has changed, I’ve become willing to let go of some events we covered before, for the sake of telling a broader story that includes more voices. But I also want my students to find history applicable. They need to understand how history relates to their lives today. That’s why I teach the Constitution in detail. Some teachers might cover the Bill of Rights quickly and then move on. But these are the actual rights of our students. Who knows how they may need to invoke these rights during their lives?”
Alderfer helps students understand the rights the founders guaranteed, as well as the rights later generations recognized and encoded. Because of her capstone work, she now can explain subtler matters that may also affect her students’ lives profoundly—such as “the nitty gritty of the legislative process” women had to navigate before winning the right to vote.
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A collection of our foreign affairs webinars, chosen specifically for America’s educators.
Foreign Affairs: An American Contradiction Now, perhaps more than ever, we see that the global community is surprisingly small. While the United States’ role in it has at times retracted or expanded, Americans themselves have always looked beyond their own borders, vigorously participating in a global network of trade, diplomacy, and intellectual exchanges. The Founders may have advised Americans to steer clear of foreign quarrels, but the tension between these two tendencies has been a constant source of discussion and debate in American history. Revisit the questions of American’s place in the world with your students through these content-rich archived resources from Teaching American History.
TAH’s Webinars Our webinars are a conversation about critical questions between two scholars and a moderator, with questions from the live audience. The discussion is rooted in a set of primary documents published on this site in advance of each program. Many teachers around the country have used these to provide historical background students can access at home. They’ve used these webinars in “flipped” classroom formats and to help students who missed lessons due to absence.
These can be accessed without any form of registration. Each link gives you access to the documents discussed during the webinar, a video of the webinar on our YouTube channel, and our podcast archive of each episode.
Enduring Questions in American Foreign Policy * American Controversies: Do American Principles Require American Interventionism? * American Presidency: Presidential War, Emergency, and Foreign Policy Powers * Great American Debates: Imperialists vs Non-Interventionists
Approaches to Foreign Affairs in Early America * Documents in Detail: George Washington’s Farewell Address * Documents in Detail: The Monroe Doctrine
Foreign Affairs in the Time of Empire * Documents in Detail: TR’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine * Documents in Detail: Wilson’s 14 Points Message * Moments of Crisis: Sinking of the USS Maine
Foreign Affairs during Conflict: World War II * Heroes of World War II * Moments of Crisis: Attack on Pearl Harbor
Foreign Affairs in a Bipolar World: The Cold War * Defining Moments of the Twentieth Century: How Best to Deal with the Soviet Union and the Spread of Communism * Documents in Detail: The Long Telegram * Moments of Crisis: Cuban Missile Crisis
Conflict in the Modern Era * Moments of Crisis: Iran Hostage Crisis
If you’d like to be part of the conversation at our next online seminar, please register for our event on April 23rd, “Wartime Diplomacy: FDR, Churchill and Stalin.” We also have a wide variety of Spring 2022 in-person seminars scheduled around the country. Register today!
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Roosevelt’s “Court-Packing” Plan For many students, the “Fireside Chat on the Reorganization of the Judiciary” (more memorably recalled as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan”) brings up, for the first time in their study of US History, questions about the actual number of Supreme Court justices. Most have not yet taken a Government course, and have never noticed that the Constitution does not specify how many justices the Court should have. The high drama and political intrigue behind the reorganization plan capture students’ imaginations, quite understandably, but can also lead to a misreading of context. That is to say, students often mistakenly believe that FDR’s March 1937 Fireside Chat is the first introduction of politics into SCOTUS numbers: because this is the first time they are hearing about it, they think this is the first time that it happened. And yet the story of changing SCOTUS numbers (to say nothing of changes on the federal bench at large) is full of fascinating political tactics.
“Historical Figures” To introduce my students to the fuller context of political maneuverings behind SCOTUS numbers, I like to pair FDR’s Fireside Chat with a political cartoon from 1937, “Historical Figures” by Herblock (the pen name of artist Herbert Block). Herblock sketches out the changing number of justices on the Supreme Court from the time of its creation until FDR’s proposed reorganization in 1937. He adds a sing-song rhyme to convey a memorizable history lesson. While “Historical Figures” gives us the basic narration, some exploration and explanation of context allows us to see the politics behind the additions (and occasional subtractions) of justices on the Court.
Historical Figures, drawing by Herblock [Herbert Block], February 19, 1937. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress “Congress decided at first to fix/the number of justices at six,” Herblock begins, referring to the Judiciary Act of 1789.
“1801: Congress planned on a change to five, but the six remained very much alive.”
To the degree that students know anything about the political intrigue of John Adams’ 1801 lame duck period, they know about the “Midnight Judges Act” leading to Marbury v. Madison, but not about that act’s intent to reduce the number of SCOTUS justices upon the next vacancy. This stipulation was repealed by legislative action in the first full year of Jefferson’s presidency.
“1807: Six high judges, supreme as heaven — and Jefferson added number seven.”
“1837: Seven High Judges, all in a line — two more added, and that made nine.”
“Court-Packing:” A History Jefferson’s Efforts to Influence the Supreme Court Initially students tend to find these additions to the SCOTUS bench — up to seven in 1807, and to nine thirty years later — uncontroversial, because these legislative acts matched the number of SCOTUS justices to an expanded number of federal circuit courts. After all, this is a time when SCOTUS justices “rode the circuit,” because the original Judiciary Act of 1787 also stipulated that they would act as regional judges when away from the highest court in the land. Nonetheless, Jefferson’s administration was not devoid of political contention around judges. President Jefferson lobbied for the impeachment of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Chase (successfully, though this impeachment did not end in his removal from the bench).
Jackson and the 1837 Judiciary Act In the case of Andrew Jackson’s appointments, the timing of the 1837 Judiciary Act — on Jackson’s last day in office — raises students’ antennae. Jackson was allowed to make the nominations under the act, since it took effect immediately. Strikingly, all five of Jackson’s second-term SCOTUS appointees came from slaveholding states, at a time shortly before anti-slavery politicians would begin to complain about the political “slave power” dominating federal affairs.
The Civil War and the Supreme Court “1863: Nine high judges were sitting when/Lincoln made them an even ten.”
“1866: Ten high judges, very sedate; when Congress got through there were only eight.”
“1869: Eight high judges who wouldn’t resign; Grant brought the figure back to nine.”
The twists and turns of Civil War & Reconstruction SCOTUS reorganizations reflected the politics of slavery, of war, and of civil rights. The 1863 reorganization added a 10th circuit and SCOTUS judge while also reducing the number of circuits representing slaveholding states. This effort was clearly geared towards reforming an institution that had come to be seen as (in the words of the January 3, 1862 edition of Minnesota’s Weekly Pioneer & Democrat) “the last stronghold of Southern Power”. Lincoln wanted to counter judicial obstruction of the Union effort. Three years later, in the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866, Congress passed a planned reduction to seven justices that denied Andrew Johnson the opportunity to appoint anyone to the high court (in the midst of tense congressional/presidential arguments over Reconstruction that would lead to Johnson’s impeachment two years later).
As Herblock’s poem indicates, SCOTUS never quite reduced down to seven, and the Judiciary Act of 1869 returned the number of seats to nine. The single addition was crucial, as SCOTUS had previously declared key Reconstruction economic plans (about issuing paper currency) unconstitutional; the reconstituted nine-member court reheard the key case and reversed the decision by a single vote.
Roosevelt’s Plan “1937: Would a justice feel like a packed sardine/if the number was raised to — say — fifteen?”
Herblock’s final rhyming question brings readers to his present moment, and reminds us (along with his amusing visual) of just how jarring FDR’s plan was. But, however jarring it may have been, FDR’s proposed 1937 judicial reorganization did not inject politics into SCOTUS numbers for the first time. FDR’s by-then established practice of talking to the public about policy through radio addresses may have made it seem utterly novel, but zooming out to survey the broader timeline shows us that almost every proposed reorganization of the federal judiciary has entailed a certain amount of political strategizing. Showing students that political jockeying over the Supreme Court is not a “modern” development does not require us to condone or condemn any specific reorganization. Instead, it reminds students that it isn’t weird that parties and politicians (in FDR’s time or ours) seem to treat the Supreme Court as a political football. In fact, it might be a more significant aberration if they didn’t.
Our newest CDC volume, The Judiciary*, will be available in our bookstore in May. This collection of documents presents an array of views on the role that the courts should play in American life and how they should interpret the Constitution and our laws.*
Additional Sources Federal Judicial Center: www.fjc.gov
Irons, Peter. The History of the Supreme Court: Course Guidebook. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2003.
Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, “Draft Final Report.” December 2021
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Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Supreme Court Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, September 6, 1936, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-47251. President Roosevelt was outraged when the Supreme Court invalidated two of the most important New Deal initiatives – the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (“Fireside Chat” On the Purposes and Foundations of the Recovery Program (1933); Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935); United States v. Butler (1936)) – on what he regarded as an outmoded interpretation of the Constitution. Like many liberals, he believed that much of the problem stemmed from a bloc of four conservative Supreme Court justices – the so-called “Four Horsemen” – who seemed to oppose any federal intrusion into economic affairs. Given that there was a total of nine justices on the Court, all the Horsemen needed to do to block any New Deal measure was to convince one more justice that their interpretation was correct. Roosevelt described the current situation with the Court thusly:
Last Thursday I described the American form of Government as a three-horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field might be plowed. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government – the Congress, the Executive and the Courts. Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not. Those who have intimated that the President of the United States is trying to drive that team, overlook the simple fact that the President, as Chief Executive, is himself one of the three horses.
It is the American people themselves who are in the driver’s seat.
It is the American people themselves who want the furrow plowed.
It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to pull in unison with the other two.
Roosevelt’s Plan to Protect New Deal Legislation Emboldened by his overwhelming reelection victory in 1936, the president in February called congressional leaders and members of his cabinet to a meeting at the White House, and informed them that the Judicial Procedures Reform Act was being put before Congress that same day. Many of the justices on the Supreme Court were elderly, the president explained, and needed more assistance in working through the Court’s heavy caseload. The act, therefore, proposed to add a new justice for every member above seventy years of age. Given the makeup of the current Court, this would allow Roosevelt to name no fewer than six new justices. There was nothing unconstitutional about Roosevelt’s plan, since the Constitution does not specify how many judges the Supreme Court should have. When some in Congress balked at Roosevelt’s plan – accusing the president of trying to “pack” the Court – he took to the airwaves in one of his famous “Fireside Chats.”
If by that phrase “packing the Court” it is charged that I wish to place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I make this answer: that no President fit for his office would appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would confirm, that kind of appointees to the Supreme Court.
But if by that phrase the charge is made that I would appoint and the Senate would confirm Justices worthy to sit beside present members of the Court who understand those modern conditions, that I will appoint Justices who will not undertake to over-ride the judgment of the Congress on legislative policy, that I will appoint Justices who will act as Justices and not as legislators – if the appointment of such Justices can be called “packing the Courts,” then I say that I and with me the vast majority of the American people favor doing just that thing – now. . . .
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Sources for Educators In light of recent events, we’ve chosen to highlight a program that took place several years ago, but still feels relevant today. This special webinar event originally took place on Wednesday, 1 April 2020. Speakers for this program were Dr. Jeff Sikkenga, of Ashland University, and Dr. Stephen Knott, of the United States Naval War College.
History can give us real insight into the problems that face America. In this webinar, we explored several good and bad examples of presidential leadership during crises, hoping to see the qualities and actions that distinguish presidential leadership at its best.
- George Washington/Richard Nixon – The Whiskey Rebellion and Watergate
- Proclamation on the Whisky Rebellion, George Washington, 7 AUG 1794
- Transcript of David Frost’s Interview with Richard Nixon, 1977
- James Buchanan/Abraham Lincoln – Slavery and Civil War
- Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln, 4 MAR 1865
- Franklin D. Roosevelt/George W. Bush – World War II and the War on Terror
- Executive Order 9066, Franklin D> Roosevelt, 19 FEB 1942
- Backgrounder: The President’s Quotes on Islam, George W. Bush
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In the years leading up to World War II, Churchill spoke openly of the threat to European liberty posed by Nazism and other emerging authoritarian governments.
A Threat to European Liberty
In the two years before the outbreak of World War II, Winston Churchill twice addressed the American people by radio, hoping to persuade them to throw American weight against Nazi aggression in Europe. Churchill had not yet been elected Prime Minister. When he spoke to the United States on October 16, 1938, he himself was still a minority voice demanding that the government of Neville Chamberlain cease its policy of appeasing Hitler’s demands for expanded territory in Europe. He appealed to American sensibilities in support of liberty:
Has any benefit or progress ever been achieved by the human race by submission to organized and calculated violence? As we look back over the long story of the nations we must see that, on the contrary, their glory has been founded upon the spirit of resistance to tyranny and injustice, especially when these evils seemed to be backed by heavier force.
While he warned that “the stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out,” he insisted “there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together.” He held out hope that an international alliance—joined by the US—would restrain Hitler.
The Coming Assault on Liberty When he spoke again, less than a month before Hitler invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war, his descriptions of the aggressions of Hitler and Mussolini—and by now, Japan—were more ironic, and his tone was more ominous:
There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world, broken only by the dull thud of Japanese bombs falling on Chinese cities, on Chinese universities or near British and American ships. But then, China is a long way off, so why worry? The Chinese are fighting for what the founders of the American Constitution in their stately language called: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And they seem to be fighting very well. . . . After all, the suffering Chinese are fighting our battle, the battle of democracy. They are defending the soil, the good earth, that has been theirs since the dawn of time against cruel and unprovoked aggression. Give them a cheer across the ocean–no one knows whose turn it may be next.
Cover Image You can learn more about the history behind America’s foreign policy decisions in our CDC volume American Foreign Policy to 1899
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TAH’s Saturday Webinar for 2 April 2022, and the fourth in our Populists and Progressives series for Spring 2022. This episode will focus on the changing views on and understandings of democracy, republicanism, and the structural and legal limits placed on government, through the lens of the populists and progressives.
Download your free copy of our Populists and Progressive Core Documents Collection here!
Panelists:
- Chris Burkett, Ashland University
- Scott Yenor, Boise State
- John Dinan, Wake Forest
Suggested Readings:
- The New Nationalism , Theodore Roosevelt, 31 AUG 1910
- The Right of the People to Rule, Theodore Roosevelt, 20 MAR 1912
- “The Constitution a Reactionary Document,” J. Allen Smith, 31 DEC 1907
Register Here The post Saturday Webinar: Democracy, Republicanism, and Changing Views on Limited Government and the Separation of Powers appeared first on Teaching American History.
Ryan DeMarco tells his APUSH students what he learned at a Teaching American History Seminar about the Dred Scott decision.
Ryan DeMarco, VA High School history and government teacher Visiting the Teaching American History website, Ryan DeMarco was delighted to learn of a free online, interactive seminar on “Slavery and Its Consequences,” to be taught by Eric Sands of Berry College. DeMarco is the history department chair at North Cross School in Roanoke, Virginia—a city at some distance from larger cities where in-person seminars are often held. He’d been looking for “a discussion,” not a lecture, on American history, but one led by a scholar with expertise. “I love being able to ask the professor questions and get clarification,” DeMarco said.
He registered, read the reading packet thoroughly and logged on for the Saturday course.
Louis Schultze. Dred Scott (1795-1858). Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society. A Question about the Dred Scott Decision . . . Early in the seminar, Sands led teachers in a discussion of the Dred Scott Decision, issued 165 years ago this month (March 6, 1857). Soon the conversation pushed on to other topics—the reading packet was thick, and the participants were highly engaged. But DeMarco remained unsure of one point: To achieve his evident aim of defeating Scott’s petition, did Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the opinion, need to write an opinion so dismissive of Black Americans’ rights?
Scott sued for freedom on the grounds that he had been held by his master for several years in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, areas where slavery was prohibited. On strictly legal grounds, couldn’t Taney have simply claimed Scott’s case had no standing?
Leads to a Post-Seminar Exchange with the Professor . . . We took DeMarco’s question back to Professor Sands.
Ryan DeMarco asks, “Could Taney have resolved the case more easily than he did, without going on the racist rant that made the ruling famous? Could the Court simply have ruled that Dred Scott lacked standing, because he was not a citizen?” Eric Sands “Yes, Taney could have made his ruling much simpler and far less pernicious by just denying Scott’s standing to sue—and then dismissed the case,” Professor Sands replied. “There was no reason he needed to go further than this and declare all blacks non-citizens and then to invalidate the Missouri Compromise —Well, other than the fact that, as I think I said in the seminar, Taney thought he was playing the role of a statesman. But the teacher’s instincts on the case are spot on.”
Do you mean that Taney thought that with his ruling he could settle the dissension over slavery once and for all, ending the perilous balancing act Congress had to perform every time it admitted a new state from the western territories? “Yes, I think Taney thought he had rectified the slavery issue (at least as it pertained to the territories). And part of his ruling was that depriving someone of their slaves in the territories was a violation of the 5th Amendment—that is, of the clause stating: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Taney’s ruling meant that slavery couldn’t be kept out of the territories,” Professor Sands explained.
“It’s kind of staggering how sweeping the ruling was. But, given its breadth, it’s not surprising the ruling led to crisis.”
And New Conversation in the Classroom When we shared Sands’ response with DeMarco, he shared what Sands said with his APUSH students. “My students were surprised, suddenly realizing that a single person’s choices can have a major impact on American history. We compared the impact of Taney’s ruling to that of Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry. Which event played a greater role in triggering the crisis that led to the Civil War? Of course, the actions of Taney, Douglas and Brown all helped to bring the war.
“I definitely appreciate the historical-legal clarification from Professor Sands,” DeMarco continued, noting that it raised an issue he might discuss in his comparative government class. “I wonder about the role the Supreme Court has played on other occasions, filling the legislative role of Congress when Congress is paralyzed and inept at making new laws to rectify certain issues, particularly more contemporary controversial issues. This history lesson gives me more to talk about with my students.”
Read more about Ryan DeMarco.**
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Hiram Rhodes Revels On February 25, 1870, the first African American ever elected to the office of Senator was sworn in. Hiram Rhodes Revels was elected by the Republican-dominated Mississippi legislature to fill out the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis. Revels had distinguished himself in a variety of leadership roles; he had worked from Maryland to Mississippi as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; he was a recruiter of black regiments in the Union Army; he served as an army chaplain; and organized schools for freedmen.
Hiram Rhodes Revels, Library of Congress Upon Revels’ arrival in the Senate on February 23, 1870, a few Senators tried to block the acceptance of his credentials. They argued that he and other African Americans had gained citizenship only four years prior, with the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. (The US Constitution stipulates in Article I, Section 3, clause 3 that “No person shall be a Senator who shall not have . . . been nine years a Citizen of the United States.”) The argument was specious, as Revels’ supporters pointed out. While residing years earlier in Ohio, Revels had exercised his citizen’s right to vote. After two days, Senator Charles Sumner made a forceful speech that brought the debate to an end.
“What the Black Man Wants” The strange argument over Revels’ credentials calls to mind a powerful speech made shortly before the end of the Civil War by Frederick Douglass. Speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on “What the Black Man Wants,” Douglass insisted on the granting of full civil rights for African Americans at the conclusion of the Civil War. Emancipation had been granted as a war measure, so as to add the strength of African American troops to the Union Army. But full citizenship rights, including suffrage, should follow. To not grant these would not only deny the equality of black men to other Americans; it would impugn the honor of a nation that would soon be working out a system to readmit the rebel states to the Union:
Do you mean to give your enemies the right to vote, and take it away from your friends? Is that wise policy? Is that honorable? Could American honor withstand such a blow? I do not believe you will do it. I think you will see to it that we have the right to vote. There is something too mean in looking upon the Negro, when you are in trouble, as a citizen, and when you are free from trouble, as an alien. When this nation was in trouble, in its early struggles, it looked upon the Negro as a citizen. In 1776 he was a citizen. At the time of the formation of the Constitution the Negro had the right to vote in eleven States out of the old thirteen. In your trouble you have made us citizens. In 1812 Gen. Jackson addressed us as citizens—“fellow-citizens.” He wanted us to fight. We were citizens then! And now, when you come to frame a conscription bill, the Negro is a citizen again. He has been a citizen just three times in the history of this government, and it has always been in time of trouble. In time of trouble we are citizens. Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?
Our Bookstore You can find Douglass’ speech and many more teachable and relevant civil rights documents in our Core Document Collection volume Race and Civil Rights. Paper copies and free downloads are available in TeachingAmericanHistory.org’s online bookstore.
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A poem that went on to be adopted as the “black national anthem” – “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” – was first publicly performed 122 years ago, at a community event celebrating Lincoln’s birthday in Jacksonville, Florida. The event took place at Stanton School, a public school for African Americans (founded during Reconstruction and named in honor of Lincoln’s War Secretary). The school principal, James Weldon Johnson, had written the song’s lyrics, while his brother John Rosamond Johnson wrote the musical setting and conducted a choir of 500 school children in its performance.
The Ambition and Genius of the Johnson Brothers J. Rosamond Johnson with his brother, James Weldon Johnson. Photographed by ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). Wikimedia Commons. James and Rosamond Johnson were young men of great talent seeking avenues for large ambitions. They had been raised to discount any limitations to curiosity and determined effort. Their mother, the first black teacher hired at Stanton School following Reconstruction, taught them to read and started them on their musical education before they entered school. Their father was head waiter at a resort hotel and well respected in the community.
Rosamond, the younger brother, settled on a career in music. He studied at the New England Conservatory and, after a brief period teaching music in Jacksonville, made a career in musical theater. James Weldon Johnson, who went on to a remarkable career in literature, theater, diplomacy, and social activism, chose Atlanta University, one of the first colleges for black students founded by the American Missionary Society after the Civil War. He later wrote that he did not become conscious of America’s race problem until he went to Atlanta. There he met students from poor rural families struggling against Jim Crow restrictions, engaged in lengthy discussions of racial discrimination, and imbibed a sense of responsibility to enlarge opportunities for other black Americans.
James Weldon Johnson’s Remarkable Career Throughout his life James Johnson embraced this mission, balancing it against what he called a “love of venture” that inspired him to pursue more personal ambitions. In many ways he fused the two goals. In 1894, shortly after taking over the principal’s position at Stanton, he decided to expand the curriculum beyond the eighth grade. Before letting the superintendent of schools in on his plans, he had already brought his oldest students through the first year of high school; the local school board then “accepted a fait accompli,” he wrote.
Soon after, without abandoning his principal’s position, he founded The Daily American, the first American newspaper tailored for an African American audience. This experiment was less successful; it closed within a year. He turned from that venture to studying law in his off hours, with the help of a local white lawyer. The first African American to pass the Florida bar exam, he opened a small law practice which he soon shared with a black friend whom he had in turn helped to pass the bar exam.
A New Venture Meanwhile, the Johnson brothers had been spending summers in New York City, writing songs for Tin Pan Alley. Shortly after the turn of the century, they felt their options for self-fulfillment were narrowing. A devastating fire had destroyed much of Jacksonville, in the wake of which racial discrimination increased. Shortly after writing “Lift Ev’ry Voice,” Johnson and his brother moved to New York City to pursue careers in musical theater full-time.
With a colleague, Bob Cole, they produced about 200 songs for Broadway shows, while also performing as a trio. They elaborated African American musical idioms while avoiding the stereotypes familiar from minstrel shows. That they came to be called “those ebony Offenbachs” suggests they gained surprised respect. Among their creations was a six-song suite, The Evolution of Ragtime.
A Literary, Political and Activist Life
During this period, Johnson studied creative writing at Columbia University and became active in Republican party politics. This latter work led to his appointment as consul to Venezuela in 1906. Consular work in Venezuela was not very demanding, and Johnson used the three years he spent in Venezuela to write his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In this story of a light-skinned Negro who eventually decides to “pass” as white, Johnson offered his most pessimistic assessment of African American possibilities, perhaps because his ex-patriot situation gave him the distance to reflect on America’s failure to ensure racial equality.
In 1909 Johnson was transferred from Venezuela to a more challenging consular position in Nicaragua, at a time when the Taft administration was anxiously monitoring political developments in the central American nation (it would eventually land troops there). After Woodrow Wilson was elected and Democrats began controlling patronage positions in the foreign service, Johnson resigned, returning to New York to become an editorial writer for The New York Age.
In 1916, W. E. B. Du Bois asked Johnson to become National Field Secretary for the NAACP. In this role, Johnson opened NAACP branches around the country and investigated incidents of racial violence. He went on to become executive secretary of the NAACP in 1920, holding the position during a decade of racist backlash against black veterans of World War I and black migrants from the South who were pursuing employment in Northern industry. Johnson worked successfully to build NAACP membership and political influence—but his lobbying efforts in favor of a federal anti-lynching bill failed to overcome Southern resistance.
As always before, Weldon pursued a personal calling concurrently with intense political advocacy. He published four books in the 1920s: an anthology of American Negro poetry, two collections of spirituals, and his own poetry collection, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. In 1930 he published another poetry collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day, along with a survey of African American cultural contributions to New York life, Black Manhattan.
At the end of that year, Johnson, wanting more time to write, retired from the NAACP and took a part-time teaching position at Fisk University. He wrote his own autobiography, Along This Way, as well as an argument for racial integration, Negro Americans, What Now? before his accidental death in 1938, while riding in a car struck by a train at an unguarded rail crossing.
Johnson’s Legacy Arguably, Johnson devoted his entire life—certainly his literary life—to raising awareness of and respect for African American culture. His poem “Oh Black and Unknown Bards” uses the elevated style of European poetry to marvel at the musical creativity of enslaved African Americans. In God’s Trombones he brought the musical rhythms of African American preaching into a new kind of American lyric, one that captured the Biblical insights of these same preachers.
From a musical point of view, I’d argue, Johnson’s most remembered composition, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” also fuses Euro- and African-American styles. John Rosamond Johnson’s setting is a victory march in 6/8 time. In it one hears the steady tramp of feet—left, right, left—punctuated by triplets that make the melody skip, turning the march into a waltz. For me, it evokes a mass of dancing humanity ascending a celestial highway. The song can be sung slowly and magisterially or—as often in today’s performances—in cut time, with soaring classical harmonies. Well-loved for over a century, it has been reimagined to combine the march style with R&B and funk rhythms by Ray Charles and, on another occasion, by a team of Al Green with Deniece Williams and others. Recently, Beyoncé performed it with dancers. In later life, Johnson said:
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.
The poem assumes that victory over racist injustice is nearly won, at the same time suggesting that this victory belongs to the kingdom of God, once mankind fully heeds God’s will for justice on earth. No wonder that Johnson, hearing his song taken up by school children across the South, felt an “exquisite anguish” at so much hope, so joyously broadcast to a still-flawed world.
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Today marks the 219th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison.
The Midnight Judges John Adams In the waning days of the Adams Administration in early 1801, the Federalist Congress tried to strengthen the federal judiciary and soften its defeat in the election of 1800 by creating a number of federal judgeships, including justice of the peace positions in Washington DC. President Adams signed one of those justice of the peace commissions for William Marbury. However, the commission did not make it from Secretary of State John Marshall to Marbury before the new Jefferson Administration took over in March 1801. In the meantime, Marshall had been confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
When the new Administration took office, Secretary of State James Madison refused to give Marbury his commission. Marbury thereupon sued Madison and asked the Supreme Court to issue Madison a writ of mandamus, a judicial order requiring Madison to hand over the commission. The Court had been given the power to issue such writs in Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789.
Judicial Review Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the Barron v. Baltimore decision. Print based on a portrait by Robert Matthew Sully. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-det-4a31386. Eventually, the Supreme Court took Marbury’s case, and in 1803 it handed down what has been widely viewed as one of its most important decisions. Many people believe that Marshall’s opinion established the practice of judicial review— the power of the federal courts to strike down unconstitutional laws and executive actions. Others go further and contend that Marbury declared the Supreme Court to be the final, authoritative interpreter of the Constitution. Neither is true. As one scholar has noted, the Supreme Court had already been practicing judicial review before Marshall arrived: from 1789-1801, it decided eight cases involving a constitutional challenge to federal laws and did the same in at least three cases involving state laws. While President Thomas Jefferson did not like the part of Marshall’s opinion declaring that Marbury had a right to receive his commission from Madison, Jefferson did not object to the opinion’s argument that the Supreme Court could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and therefore void.
Perhaps that is because Marshall did not declare the Court supreme over the other branches in its interpretation of the Constitution. In Marshall’s view, declaring a law “void” simply meant that it did not operate in a federal court; so in this case, the Supreme Court could not follow Section 13, which Marshall interpreted as unconstitutionally giving the Court original jurisdiction to issue a writ of mandamus to executive officials like Madison. Marshall did not say that the Court’s constitutional interpretation bound the other branches; he simply denied that the other branches’ interpretation bound the Court. It had the power to interpret the Supreme Law of the land for itself in order to decide the legal case in front of it.
The Importance of Marbury v. Madison Thomas Jefferson, White House Historical Association So why then was Marbury so important? It established the Supreme Court as a politically and constitutionally independent branch of the federal government, which was by no means clear in the early days of the Republic. In 1803, the Supreme Court was a weak institution facing great political pressure from the High Federalists on one side (who wanted the Court to assert its authority and embarrass Jefferson politically by forcing him to give Marbury his commission) and the victorious Republicans on the other side (who wanted Jefferson to refuse to comply and thus weaken the federal judiciary in favor of state courts). Marshall skillfully avoided both extremes: he pleased the Federalists by declaring that Madison owed Marbury his commission, but he avoided an unwinnable confrontation with Jefferson by saying that the Court could not legally issue the order to Madison. Instead of using the case to establish the practice of judicial review, Marshall articulated the doctrine of judicial review to decide the case in a way that protected and strengthened the independence of the federal judiciary, which he believed to be essential for a national republic governed by the rule of law and respect for the rights of individuals.
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2020’s Complicated Election Process This blog piece first ran in October 2020, prior to the last presidential election.
During the pandemic far more voters than ever before used mail-in ballots. Some are questioning whether our existing procedures for computing election results can handle the situation in a way that maintains voters’ confidence. With delays in reporting the state outcomes, temptations to question the process multiply, especially in a sharply divided partisan climate. This situation seems ripe to produce more contested election results.
Professor Jeremy Bailey We asked Professor Jeremy Bailey, Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and a faculty member in the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, to help us explore this possibility in the context of history and in the light of Constitutional principles. Bailey is the author of The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (University Press of Kansas, 2019), James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge, 2010), and the editor of our core document collection, The Presidency. That collection is currently being offered as part of a three-volume promotion including Congress (edited by Professor Joseph Postell) and Political Parties edited by Professor Eric Sands).
1. In our system, it is not the majority of popular votes that decide presidential elections; it is the majority of votes in the Electoral College. Yet on three occasions, no candidate received an Electoral College majority. What happened in each case? The original plan for voting in the Electoral College did not differentiate between candidates for president and vice-president. It’s only after passage of the 12th Amendment that Electors designated who would be President and Vice-President. But the earlier arrangement resulted in our first contested election, in 1800—because the two highest vote-getters were tied.
The Election of 1800 Everyone understood that the Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson was competing with the incumbent and Federalist candidate John Adams for the presidency. However, due to a snafu, Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr received the same number of votes. Someone in Jefferson’s party had forgotten to discard one of their ballots to avoid this situation. As stipulated in Article II, Section 3, this meant that the choice between Jefferson and Burr had to be decided in the House, where each state delegation gets one single vote. This resulted in a partisan contest, the Federalists trying to block the election of Jefferson because of his well-known opposition to Federalist policies. As we know, it took 36 ballots and the efforts of Alexander Hamilton—who thought Burr’s unprincipled ambition more dangerous than Jefferson’s Republican views—to persuade several Federalists to throw away their votes and break the tie.
The problem that threw the 1800 election into the House was fixed in 1804 by the 12th Amendment and its “designating principle.”
But what’s important about the election of 1800 is not its contested process. It’s that, for perhaps the first time in human history, power passed peacefully from one party to the other, with the incoming Jefferson administration adopting a posture of conciliation and harmony. Even though John Adams did not stay long enough in the capitol to hear it, Jefferson in his inaugural address declared, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans”—saying, in effect, we share the same principles. The election of 1800 showed that partisan election battles did not threaten our constitutional system.
Henry F. Darby, Henry Clay, c. 1849. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. & Mrs. Norman Hirschl, NPG.70.79. Election of 1824 In fact, the next difficult election—that of 1824—occurred because the party system had temporarily broken down. That brought a recourse to sectionalism, resulting in a four-way contest for the presidency. Due to the Twelfth Amendment, the winning candidate now had to secure a majority of the Electoral College votes. Because none of the four candidates did, once again the election had to be decided in the House, between the top three vote-getters: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford. Henry Clay, who came in fourth, convinced his own Kentucky delegation to vote for Adams—outraging Jackson, who had won a plurality of the Electoral College votes and whom Kentuckians no doubt preferred over Adams. You could say that the lingering anger over this election triggered the formation of a Jacksonian Democratic Party.
Election of 1876 The third contested election occurred in 1876. A very close election, its results were contested in three states. In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party claimed its candidate won. Without those states’ votes, Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden remained one vote shy of an Electoral College majority, with Republican Rutherford Hayes further behind. In this situation, the House would normally decide the outcome; but the existence of competing slates of electors in the states with contested elections argued for another solution. Congress decided to form a 15-member commission split evenly among representatives from the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. The party affiliation of the commission members were divided in the same way, with one of the five Supreme Court justices supposed to be a moderate of unknown party affiliation. Most historians think that an agreement was reached within the commission to give both parties something they wanted. The presidency was awarded to the Republican Hayes, in exchange for policy the Democrats wanted: an end to Reconstruction.
2. Many Americans today question the Electoral College system, noting that in both 2000 and 2016, the winning candidate lost the popular vote. This had not happened since 1888, when Grover Cleveland won more votes than Benjamin Harrison, but lost in the Electoral College. (In none of the cases mentioned did the losing candidate win a majority of the votes cast; the only time that happened was in 1876, when Tilden won 50.9 % of the popular vote.) Has the Electoral College become outmoded? Richard M. Nixon [head-and-shoulders portrait, facing front], between 1969 and 1974. Public domain, from the Library of Congress. Digital Id cph 3a53306. Election of 1960 Sanford Levison of the University of Texas Law School, one of America’s foremost Constitutional scholars, would add the election of 1960 to your list. He thinks Nixon received more votes than Kennedy did, when one includes some votes wrongly excluded in the South. Usually it is said that in Illinois and Texas, which were both very close, the counts may have been off. Nixon conceded the day after the election, yet quietly organized Republican attempts to contest the results, but these ran out of steam.
Role of the Electoral College This variance between popular and Electoral College votes occurs because we count votes by states. Squeaky victories in a handful of states are more important than runaway victories in other, perhaps more populous states.
We should remember that the Electoral College system is just one of several features of our Constitution resulting from the fundamental issue confronting the framers: the question of state equality versus proportionality of representation. The small states perceived correctly that the large states would dominate the presidency, so they had to exact as many concessions as they could in order not to get steam-rolled by the larger states. In addition to the Electoral College, we’ve noted that the procedure for resolving disputed elections in the House gives each state delegation a single vote. The framers also gave states an equality of votes in the Senate and made that the one thing that’s not changeable by Constitutional amendment. From my perspective, the Constitution is incoherent if you don’t understand that compromise.
Gov. George Wallace standing at the podium addressing an audience at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964. Leffler, Warren K. (August 1964) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011645477/ Election of 1968 One of the accidental effects of the Electoral College is that it creates battleground states. In these states, which have a variety of sizes and are in a variety of regions, every single vote matters. During the 1968 election, when both parties recognized the threat posed by an independent regional candidate like George Wallace, both wanted to amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. In addition to officials from small states who held the usual concerns, African Americans opposed this move, because they perceived that the votes of minorities weighed more in battleground states than in the popular vote count. I don’t know if that’s still the case today.
Today, most third-party candidates win no electoral votes. They may prevent either candidate from receiving a majority of the popular vote, but they don’t prevent one from achieving an Electoral College majority. Wallace, however, who ran as a segregationist, actually won five southern states. In our current climate, I can imagine someone like Bernie Sanders winning a couple of states in the Northwest, or a conservative candidate winning a couple of the Rocky Mountain states, and messing things up.
3. The contested elections of the 19th century went to the House for resolution (although, in 1876, the outcome was decided by a Congressionally appointed commission). But in the last contested election, that of 2000, the House was not involved. Why not? That case could have been decided in the House, because on the morning following election day, neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore had secured a majority of the Electoral College votes. In Florida, which controlled a decisive 25 electoral votes, the margin of victory for Bush was so slim that state law required a recount.
Election of 2000 The example of 2000 is the most important for our situation today. It reminds us that in our system of federalism and separation of powers, we have many different contending centers of authority. A candidate seeking to contest the election results will seek those centers of authority that favor his candidacy. In 2000, because Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations to the House, Al Gore did not want the decision taken there. He made it very clear that any election decided in the House would be considered illegitimate by his party. For Gore to win, he had to have the election settled decisively by the Florida Supreme Court, which leaned Democrat. He did not want it to be settled by the Florida Secretary of State or the Florida Governor, who were Republicans, or by the Florida legislature, which was also controlled by Republicans. Bush’s opposite strategy was to get the decision out of the Florida courts and into the federal courts, which ultimately led to a decision in the US Supreme Court.
The Constitution allows the states to decide electors in any way the state legislature chooses. Hence, we have 50 states and 50 different sets of rules determining the standards for recounts and challenges. Also, the political environment is different in every state. If you have two states where the count is very close, the same candidate may be seeking resolution through the courts in one state, while seeking it through the executive branch in another. If you are George Bush in 2000, you are relatively comfortable that even if a recount leads the Florida Supreme Court to rule that a new set of electors be assigned, the Florida state legislature will immediately create their own set of electors who will be certified in your favor by the Florida Secretary of State. That would lead to a question in Congress over which set of electors to accept. The House presumably would have ruled in Bush’s favor, because the majority of state delegations were Republican. Alternatively, if the House voted to exclude Florida’s votes altogether, then Bush would still win.
Election of 2000 and the US Supreme Court Gore asked for a complete recount, then used the Florida legal process to demand a hand recount in three southern Florida districts that were Gore-leaning, not in the whole state. Meanwhile, when Florida’s Secretary of State certified Bush as the winner, Gore appealed to the Florida courts. In response, Bush looked to the federal courts, which ultimately pushed the decision to the Supreme Court. Seven justices agreed that recounting some but not all of the votes in Florida violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. A bare majority of five agreed that there was insufficient time for recounts to continue. It is perhaps worth noting that had Gore won in court, he would have still lost to Bush in the vote count (and a subsequent recount organized by the Press Corps of the Miami Herald, CNN and the New York Times showed that had Gore been able to pursue his preferred strategy of counting “undervotes,” he would not have surpassed Bush. The “overvotes,” a strategy he did not pursue, would have been different.)
President George W. Bush 4. When did voting by mail become possible in the US? In the context of our historical practices for elections, should we worry about mailed in ballots? We’ve had vote by mail for a very long time, in the form of absentee ballots. But that’s different from universal voting by mail, which exists in only a handful of states. Moreover, some states have really strict requirements about absentee balloting, while others will give absentee ballots to anyone who requests them.
Neither of our parties is talking about this in an honest way. Trump muddied the waters by shouting that mail-in voting is fraudulent. On the other hand, the Democrats have not acknowledged that adding to our absentee balloting regime in large numbers is going to slow down our process tremendously. And in some states like Pennsylvania, counting cannot begin until several days after the election. Meanwhile, US law sets the “safe harbor day” for reporting Electoral College votes in early to mid-December; this is the date that came into play in Bush v. Gore.
Counting Mailed in Ballots The counting will occur in an environment that is potentially contested, with every ballot observed by lawyers from both sides to determine if it’s a “legal” ballot—and notice that absentee ballots invite more scrutiny as to whether they were legally cast. In states where the results are close, the losing party will contest the count, if that is their right under state law. Courts and executive branches will disagree about the proper legal remedy under each state’s law. Obviously, the American people are not acculturated to the prospect of long counts when everybody knows that those counts will determine who wins and who loses. We saw this in the Iowa caucus earlier this year.
One solution—we’ve already seen a couple of congressmen propose it—would be to push back the safe harbor date into January. One problem with this that it potentially creates opportunities for partisan actors at the local level to harvest questionable votes. Some worry about civil unrest, people taking matters into their own hands because they are frustrated by the delay. I’m more concerned about the effect on a presidential transition. The incoming Bush administration in 2000 perhaps didn’t take as much time as they should have in their intelligence briefings, because they were dealing with Florida. Yet you can expect that if Biden starts forming something that looks like a cabinet (as Bush did in 2000), Republicans (like Democrats in 2000) will condemn that as inappropriate.
The presidency is a tough job and the transition period is important. There needs to be an exchange of information between the outgoing and incoming administrations, but a contested election narrows that window, while also poisoning the well for communication.
5. What elements of our election process do you wish the American people better understood? I wish that the American people understood the House as the Constitutionally intended arbiter of contested elections. State law matters, of course, and when you think about state law, you’re thinking about state courts. But we shouldn’t think of the Supreme Court as the grand appeal here. We should think of the House as the grand appeal—that makes for more Constitutional harmony.
Second, we need to either explain more clearly the differences in states’ laws with respect to voting, or we need to bring those laws into uniformity. Given the current polarization, there is too much opportunity to see differences in the states’ electoral processes as some sort of deviant intent. Yet most states’ electoral laws come from an earlier era. If we prefer diversity in state laws, then we need to have an account of why that kind of diversity is in fact good.
Third, I think mail-in voting is a little reckless. I understand there are concerns about the spread of COVID, but mail-in balloting comes with a clear cost and the cost has not been sufficiently explained. We need to do a better job of explaining the costs of imposing this extra work on our state election authorities.
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Apply Now for Spring 2022 TAH Weekend Seminars After a two-year pause, Teaching American History’s weekend colloquia have returned. These colloquia gather teachers from around the country for two days of in-depth discussion on a topic in American history. Each seminar is led by a scholar with expertise in its subject, and each is centered around primary documents chosen to illuminate it. Held near sites of historical or cultural interest, each seminar schedules time to explore one of these sites.
There are still professional development opportunities available for teachers at our weekend seminars this Spring. Teaching American History covers room and meals and provides a $300 stipend for each participant. More information on professional development at our multi-day seminars is available here.
Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. Boston Public Library “Alexander Hamilton: The Indispensable Founder” Will take place in historic Oldtown Alexandria, VA, with a visit to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, February 25–27. Seminar Leader: Steve Knott, Naval War College
“The Political Theory of the American Founding” Visit the cultural hub of Northampton, MA, with a visit to the magnificent Forbes Library, which houses Calvin Coolidge’s presidential papers, March 18–20. Seminar Leader: Jason Stevens, Ashland University
Palace of the Governors and Our Lady of Victory Procession. Nevins Memorial Library “The Political Theory of the American Founding” Join us in beautiful Santa Fe, NM, where participants will tour the Museum of New Mexico at the Palace of Governors (built in 1610), March 18–20. Seminar Leader: Jason Jividen, St. Vincent College
“The American Founding: The Fight for Ratification” Will take place in Buck’s County, PA, and includes a tour of the nearby Old Barracks Museum, March 25–27. Seminar Leader: Eric Sands, Berry College
“From Brown v. Board to Little Rock and Beyond: School Desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement” Join us in Little Rock, AR, where we will take a tour of Little Rock Central High School. Seminar Leader: David Krugler, University of Wisconsin
Abraham Lincoln’s Home, Boston Public Library “Abraham Lincoln, Race, and the New Birth of Freedom” Visit the Lincoln’s Home National Historic District in Springfield, IL, April 1–3. Seminar Leader: Dan Monroe, Millikin University
“Parties and Party Strife during the American Founding” Meet us in Kansas City, where we will tour the National World War I Museum, April 22–24. Seminar Leader: Joe Postell, Hillsdale College
“Liberty and Equality in the American Founding” Will take place in Omaha, NE, and includes a tour of the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, April 22–24. Seminar Leader: Jeremy Bailey, University of Oklahoma
“What is New and what is Old in the American Founding: How the U.S. Constitution Improved on other Republican Forms of Government” Visit Tulsa, OK and join us on a visit to the Gilcrease Museum, which houses the most comprehensive collection of the art of the American West, April 29–May 1. Seminar Leader: Scott Yenor, Boise State University
If you are interested in any of these professional development opportunities, contact Stacy Moses at smoses@tah.org. Please indicate both your preferred and alternate choice of seminar.
Teachers who attend these seminars value the time away in a comfortable setting, learning both from the scholar facilitator and from their fellow educators. We’ll be offering a Fall roster of weekend seminars soon.
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Melanie Stuthard, a MAHG graduate, teaches at Revere Middle School outside of Akron, Ohio. When former students contact eighth grade American history teacher Melanie Stuthard, they always ask, “Do you still hold a Constitutional Convention in your class? Please tell me you do!”
They all recall becoming one of the historical characters who spent the summer of 1787 hammering out our framework of government. They remember their pride of accomplishment after researching their roles—and the fun of debating their classmates.
Many also remember that today’s political disagreements began in the debates they reenacted as thirteen and fourteen-year-olds.
Why Reenact the Constitutional Convention? “Years ago, I wrote my own curriculum, because I wanted to tell the story of history through the words of the people who lived it,” says Stuthard, who teaches American history from 1607 to 1877 at Revere Middle School in Bath, Ohio (a suburb northwest of Akron). Stuthard drew the readings for her curriculum from the primary sources she studied in the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program. She is a 2016 graduate, and a 2013 James Madison Fellow.
Yet even before rewriting her curriculum, Stuthard experimented with role-playing. What if students tried to enactthe point of view of particular founders? Would this help them grasp the issues at stake during the founding?
That was twenty years ago. Now Stuthard’s Constitutional Convention occupies a full month of the school year. “It’s the most important thing, so I spend a lot of time on it.” Before tackling the convention, “We spend quite a bit of time on the thought of those who fought the Revolution. The kids are ready to see how that translates into a new country and political system.”
Stuthard Assigns Convention Delegate Roles Strategically She acts as George Washington, presiding over the convention. She gives each student a carefully chosen delegate role. Some students, especially those who take the role of an anti-federalist—decidedly a minority view at the convention—need to be “very brave, willing to put themselves out there and be the underdogs.” Others, like those who play the roles of James Madison or Elbridge Gerry, engaging in every debate in Stuthard’s convention, need a real facility with words. The student who portrays Alexander Hamilton needs a thick skin, since Stuthard’s students always attack Hamilton’s plan for a strong national government with a president for life. (After students react to Hamilton, Stuthard interrupts the proceedings to tell them that in 1787, “delegates thought Hamilton’s plan so crazy that they responded to his speech with embarrassed silence.”)
All Stuthard’s students expect—at first—to “have nothing in common with the delegates they will portray.” Those assigned the roles of the South Carolina delegates are “really nervous,” and try to decline the roles. Stuthard says, “I am asking you to act. If you don’t take the pro-slavery point of view, those who oppose slavery will have nothing to speak against.” She knows that by the time of the convention, even these students will manage to represent the Southern perspective. “They will point out that all the states are profiting from slavery. The North is using products sold cheaply because they’re not paying for labor; and slave laborers are imported by northern merchants through northern ports.”
Melanie Stuthard during the 2015 reenactment, with students playing the roles (left to right) of Delegates Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticutt, Luther Martin of Maryland, and James Madison of Virginia. Students Research Their Roles, Learning the Value of Books But first, students must research their roles. Rather than giving them detailed descriptions of the debates the convention will cover, Stuthard gives them an electronic worksheet summarizing each issue in a sentence or two. Below each summary is a large empty block that students fill with comments their delegate made at the convention about that particular issue.
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Gordon Lloyd. When Stuthard first designed her convention, her students relied on secondary histories to research their characters’ opinions. Students given the roles of lesser-known delegates had trouble locating information. Then Stuthard began reading the primary sources for the Founding course in MAHG. “I started thinking, my eighth graders can understand these—if I help them along.” Now, her students mine Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787for information. They gasp when Stuthard holds up Adrienne Koch’s 700-page edition (Ohio University Press, 1987). “But I explain that in the back, there’s an index to all the delegates. So, you just look up your guy’s last name, then search the topics mentioned under it.” Soon her students are fighting over her twelve classroom copies of the book.
She gives them access to a pdf of Gordon Lloyd’s more recent edition of Madision’s Debates, which lacks the index but is searchable by delegate using the Command-F tool. This allows students to continue their research at home. “They learn the value of books for research. Today’s kids think they can Google anything. I tell them, ‘You will not find what you’re looking for through an internet search.’”
She also asks students to consult certain primary resources written after the Convention that clearly articulate the concerns the founders discussed. She gives them a collection of Federalist papers bound together with notable Antifederalist papers. Its table of contents lists each paper’s topic next to its title or number. “So now they are learning to use the front of a book. I tell them to skim through these topics, looking for a paper that discusses a topic their delegate will debate.” She explains, ‘If you see the phrase, ‘Dangers from foreign forces,’ you should think, ‘that’s probably a good argument for why we need to strengthen the federal government.’ Look at that paper. But once again, skim.Eventually you’ll hit on a sentence that states the main point. Copy that to your worksheet.’
Students Figure Out the Issues that Mattered to Their Delegate Then students work to fully understand what they’ve copied. “I tell them, ‘If you think you’ve found something useful, read it through multiple times. Try to figure out yourself what your writer is talking about. If you still don’t quite understand it, ask a classmate to read it and explain it to you. If they cannot, then come and ask me.’ One way or another, they figure it out, and then they are amazed at themselves.”
As students grasp their delegate’s ideas, they realize why certain issues mattered to that delegate. They start to understand the issues at stake in the convention.
Finally, the convention begins. Stuthard divides it into seven debates:
- Whether a new constitution is needed, as federalists propose, or could pose threats to liberty, as anti-federalists think.
- Which constitutional plan is best, especially with regard to the apportionment of representatives. This debate culminates in the Connecticut Compromise.
- How legislators and public officers will be elected or appointed, and their terms of office.
- Whether the constitution should place any limits on slavery.
- Whether and when Congress might end the importation of slaves from overseas.
- Whether the enslaved population should be counted in the apportionment of Congressional representatives.
- Whether to add a bill of rights to the completed draft of the Constitution.
Students enter the debates to voice the ideas their delegates voiced in 1787. They’ve prepared speeches representing their delegates’ main contributions, sometimes using direct quotations, sometimes not. They ad lib rejoinders to the speeches of their classmates.
The Themes of the Constitutional Convention Still Matter Melanie Stuthard as George Washington “These themes persist, because human nature doesn’t change,” Stuthard says. As her students become voting adults, they’ll see the imprint of history in the decisions they face.
The reenactment is structured so that the outcome of the debates matches the historical outcome. Yet students argue as if the outcome is unknown. “After watching the first debate,” Stuthard said, “my student teacher commented on a kid representing the anti-federalist position. ‘I cannot believe how willing he was to die on the hill of his position! And yet when the project began, he complained that you gave him an anti-federalist role.’ They transform themselves into their characters, then try to demolish opposing positions.”
By the end of the convention, students understand how the delegates reached compromise. They’ve probed tensions that will erupt later, especially between those who do and do not use slave labor. They realize that other questions they debated are “still in the news,” such as states’ objections to federal overreach or how to restrain a too powerful branch of government.
The post Reenacting the Constitutional Convention appeared first on Teaching American History.
Join us on Saturday 5 March from 11am-12:15pm when our panel of scholars discusses the role and evolution of parties and candidate during the age of the Populists and Progressives.
Panelists:
- Dr. Chris Burkett, Ashland University
- Dr. David Krugler, University of Wisconsin-Platteville
- Dr. Eric Sands, Berry College
Suggested Readings:
- Wanted – A Party, Woodrow Wilson, 1 SEP 1886
- Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, George Washington Plunkitt, 1905
- “The Right of the People to Rule,” Theodore Roosevelt, 20 March 1912
- The Progressive Party Platform, 7 August 1912
Register Here The post Saturday Webinar: Parties and Candidates in the Age of the Populists and Progressives appeared first on Teaching American History.
TeachingAmericanHistory.org is pleased to announce the relaunch of our Constitutional Convention exhibit! Originally created by our Senior Fellow Gordon Lloyd, this exhibit contains a wide range of primary and secondary sources from the American Founding. Much of the information contained on the original website has been retained and streamlined to improve accessibility for teachers and students. We hope you will find this teacher guide and the exhibit useful in your classroom!
The Introduction to the Exhibit guides teachers and students through the material contained within the exhibit.
Introductory Resources for Secondary Students The Signing of the United States Constitution, Louis S. Glanzman (1987) Commissioned by the PA, DE, NJ State Societies, Daughters of the American Revolution.Independence National Historical Park Collection. Introduction to the Constitutional Convention — Professor Lloyd’s short essay on the Convention from its inception to its conclusion. Chunked to improve student comprehension, it provides a brief history of the failures of the Confederation government, a detailed explanation of the delegate-selection process and a thorough overview of the Convention itself.
The Constitutional Convention: A Four-Act Drama — Lloyd divides the events of the convention into four stages, emphasizing the uncertainty and suspense delegates felt as they tried to reach compromise:
- Act I: Rising tension over the question of representation;
- Act II: Crisis, resolved by the Connecticut Compromise
- Act III: New tensions over issues such as slavery
- Act IV: Falling action as the delegates reach a final consensus.
Each act in this drama is linked to a series of days in James Madison’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.
Resources for In-depth Study Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Gordon Lloyd. A Day-by-Day Summary of the Convention, based on Madison’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, prefaced by links to relevant primary sources. These include:
- Plans for the Constitution presented by state delegations
- Reports from committees that met to resolve details of the emerging framework
To help our readers better contextualize the role of the Constitutional Convention in the American Founding period, we have provided a Timeline that details the evolution of American self-governance from 1776-1791.
Our Meet the Delegates section is perfect for anyone looking for research material for student projects or presentations. The chart formatting of these pages makes them suitable for middle school as well as high school students. We’ve also provided biographical data for a number of the delegates and will add to this section over the next several months.
Thematic Resources for the Constitutional Convention Engagingly written for the secondary student audience, these essays contain links to the relevant primary sources and cover the following:
Franklin at the Convention, Joseph Boggs Beale (c.1902-1903) Henry Ford Museum of Innovation, https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/464502#slide=gs-448090 Process, Purpose and Participants * Improving Continental Governance * Prioritizing Secrecy * George Washington and the Virginia Delegation
Balancing Power * Preserving the Power of the Smaller States * Attaining “Stability and Permancy” * Crafting a “Partly National, Partly Federal” Government * Reinventing the Traditional Principles of Republicanism
Establishing Limits * Defining Congress’ Powers: The Necessary and Proper Clause * Debating the Limits of the Judiciary: Prior and Constitutional Review * Compromising on the Slave Trade * Establishing the Electoral College and the Presidency
Extra Resources A gallery of Artistic Interpretations of the Constitutional Convention” by American artists throughout history.
Entertainment of George Washington at City Tavern offers amusing details of the social aspects of the Convention.
Advanced Resources Educators, post-secondary and advanced secondary students will find our “Attendance at the Constitutional Convention” section to be useful. Based on Professor Lloyd’s research, the attendance record will be updated on a regular basis to reflect current scholarship. We’ve also included a scholarly essay regarding the difficulties of assessing the historical record of delegate attendance. This section also contains an explanation of quorum requirements by state and Professor Lloyd’s essay on the Twelve “Turning Points” in the writing of the Constitution.
Also useful to students who are interested in delving into the inner workings of the Constitutional Convention is the Committee Assignments chart and the accompanying short essay. We’ve also provided a section on delegate correspondence that is linked to events at the Convention.
We hope you will find this teacher guide useful. Please share with us how you use this exhibit in your classroom! Send your comments to: etucker@ashbrook.org
The post A Teacher’s Guide to the Constitutional Convention Exhibit appeared first on Teaching American History.
TeachingAmericanHistory.org is happy to get back out on the road and bring our unique One Day Seminars to historical sites!
At Teaching American History we believe the best way to understand history is through the words of those who lived it and we do that through conversation at the big square table. Our professional development seminars are not meant to be passive lectures, they are interactive discussions between teachers and scholar using historical documents. Every registrant will receive a set of primary source readings approximately two weeks before the seminar so they may pre-read and prepare their thoughts and questions. Lunch is provided as well.
Join us at the table for some collegiality and fellowship with like-minded history nerds. We look forward to seeing you again.
Professional Development Opportunities in ALABAMA: James Madison, fourth President of the United States. Gilbert Stuart, ca. 1828. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19166 Sloss Furnace Historic Landmark Join us in Birmingham for a seminar on Feb. 26th entitled “Captains of Industry or Robber Barons?” with Dr. Will Atto. Revisit the Gilded Age, or Age of Enterprise as some call it, and read deeply about the ideas, actions, and legacies of the leading political and industrial figures of the times, exploring the question of whether these people are properly portrayed as either ‘Robber Barons’ or ‘Captains of Industry’. Register Here.
History Museum of Mobile Join us on March 5th for a discussion on “Mr. Madison’s War – 1812” with Dr. Dennis Boman. The War of 1812 represented the first instance that the young republic declared war on another nation. This seminar will explore the causes and events that led to the war, President James Madison’s policies and the aftermath of this Second American Revolution. Register Here.
Professional Development Opportunities in MICHIGAN: Dick, Sheldon, photographer. Sitdown strikers in the Fisher body plant factory number three. Flint, Michigan. Flint Flint. Genesee County Michigan United States, 1937. Jan.-Feb. Library of Congress, LC-USF34-040027-D. Michigan Firehouse Museum On April 30th we will be in Ypsilanti for a seminar entitled “Labor Leaders and Reformers in American History” led by Dr. Eric Pullen. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries organized labor formed one of the most significant movements for change in the United States. This seminar will explore the leaders and reformers of the movement and consider their lasting impact. Register Here.
Chelsea Historic Train Depot We will be in Chelsea on May 21st to explore “World War II on the Home Front” with Dr. David Krugler. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941, thrust the United States into World War II. Soldiers were quickly trained and mobilized; factories were repurposed to manufacture war material; and women worked the assembly lines, transforming the social and economic fabric of the nation. This seminar will explore how World War II affected America on the home front. Register Here.
Professional Development Opportunities in IOWA In partnership with the Iowa Council for the Social Studies we are holding three great seminars at the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum (located just outside of Des Moines). All three seminars are focused on the Cold War era.
Conference of the Big Three at Yalta makes final plans for the defeat of Germany. Here the “Big Three” sit on the patio together, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Premier Josef Stalin. February 1945. (Army) Origins of the Cold War Join us March 26th for “Origins of the Cold War” led by Dr. David Hadley. How did the alliances of World War II break down so quickly after 1945? How close were these alliances in the first place? What differences existed between the United States and the Soviet Union that acted as wedges between these two states and their respective allies? This seminar focuses on the ideas, events, and people – as expressed in key documents – of the years immediately after the end of World War II as well as how the Cold War began. Register Here.
Cold War on the Home Front 1945-1954 Dr. David Krugler will chair discussion of the topic “Cold War on the Home Front 1945-1954” on April 23rd. The rise of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union is a story that has often been told. How did these developments abroad affect life in the United States? This seminar will focus on postwar anticommunism, culminating in the McCarthy era, but will also focus on changes in home and family life, as well as popular culture in the postwar period. Register Here.
This is a photograph of a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Participants include President John F. Kennedy, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara in the White House Cabinet Room. National Archives and Records Administration, 595950. The Cuban Missile Crisis Dr. John Moser will wrap up this series with a conversation on “The Cuban Missile Crisis” on May 21st. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most studied and well-documented events in modern U.S. history. In this seminar, we will use a selection of primary sources related to the crisis to address key questions and to examine the decisions and actions of U.S., Soviet, and Cuban officials. Why did the Soviet Union place nuclear missiles in Cuba? How did the U.S. respond? What options did President Kennedy and his advisers (known as the ExComm) have to force the removal of the missiles? How was the crisis ended? How might it have ended? We will also learn how records related to the crisis became available after 1962, especially following the end of the Cold War. Register Here.
Professional Development Opportunities in NEW YORK Frauncis Tavern Museum The historic Frauncis Tavern Museum, where General Washington bid farewell to his officers in 1783, is a fitting venue where Dr. Stephen Knott will lead the conversation on “Washington and Hamilton: the Alliance that Forged a Nation” on April 30th. This seminar will examine the extraordinary partnership between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. This unusual alliance between a wealthy Virginia planter and a brash immigrant from the Caribbean helped to win the Revolutionary War and establish a “new order for the ages.” Indeed, no other founding collaboration was as important to achieving victory and nationhood as Washington and Hamilton’s. Register Here.
Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq. The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776, c. 1873. Public domain. West Point Military Academy On May 14th Dr. Rob McDonald will host us at the West Point Military Academy for a seminar on “Thomas Jefferson: Revered and Reviled”. Thomas Jefferson served as a lightning rod for controversy. While his supporters organized festivals in his honor, marched in parades and praised him in songs, Federalists portrayed him as a dilettante and demagogue, double-faced and dangerously radical. This seminar investigates the factors that made Jefferson such a divisive figure. How did his own actions combine with events beyond his control to shape the development of his two-sided image?
IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS SEMINAR: This is a federal military installation and you will be required to provide information from your state issued ID two weeks before the seminar that will be given to West Point for their security vetting process. Masks will be required to enter. Register Here.
The post In-Person Professional Development Opportunities appeared first on Teaching American History.
In an interview with historian Jason Sokol, Atlanta doctor Richard Franco described a harsh lesson his high school English teacher taught him. Franco believed that his teacher—who introduced him to great poetry, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth—understood that the human condition involved suffering. He taught Franco that great literature was often an author’s analysis of how humans coped with the emotional pain inherent in the human condition. Yet this teacher also opened Franco’s eyes to the depth of bigotry in his school when he argued—in class—that Blacks and Jews were inherently inferior to whites. Franco was not surprised when that teacher resigned following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. This teacher refused to be a part of an integrated school system. He would not teach students he considered inferior.
Harry F. Byrd. Harris & Ewing (between 1905 and 1945) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016862575/. Franco’s teacher was far from the only southerner to protest the Brown decision. Politicians across the South immediately condemned the ruling as an unconstitutional intrusion on states’ rights because state governments had traditionally controlled public education. Despite the court’s order—in a subsequent decision known as Brown II—that desegregation must proceed “with all deliberate speed,” Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd called for immediate “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation. Acting upon Byrd’s suggestion, Virginia’s Prince Edward County School Board effectively closed its schools. They refused to allocate taxes for public schools and reduced property taxes. White property owners used the extra cash to spend on private schools, and the school system made no efforts to educate its African American children.
Other school officials were not so concerned. DeKalb County, Georgia superintendent Jim Cherry called Brown “largely a distraction.” Rural school officials believed integration might happen in larger southern cities, but it was unlikely to infiltrate rural communities because “our Negroes know their place.” The Greensboro, NC school board were among the very few who recognized change was coming. The day after the Brown decision was announced, the Greensboro school board voted 6-1 to support the court’s decision, although they did not begin to integrate Greensboro schools until the 1957-58 school year.
By 1956, these initial responses to Brown by the white southern power structure gave way to a broad consensus of opposition. In March 1956, Virginia Congressman Howard Smith gave voice to that consensus. Smith had drafted a protest against the Brown decision and shown it to sympathetic senators, including South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell of Georgia. Thurmond and others revised Smith’s draft to appeal to more moderate voices in the South. Officially entitled “A Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it is now known as the Southern Manifesto. It is a defense of the doctrine of states’ rights and “separate but equal” racial segregation sandwiched around a denial that racial animosity existed in southern communities.
Sen. Strom Thurmond, Warren K. Leffler (1961) Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009632124/ The Manifesto argued that the court’s ruling abused its power because it substituted personal political opinion for the amendment process. It dismissed the court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as the basis of its decision by pointing out that neither the original Constitution nor the 14th mentions public education. It defended Plessy v Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine. The Manifesto’s authors maintained that Plessy “became a part of the life of the people of the states and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life.” Altering those habits and traditions could only result in chaos. The authors claimed that the two dominant races in the South had learned to get along peacefully. The Brown decision could only disrupt those “amicable relations.”
The Manifesto’s authors also raised the issue of states’ rights. The decision, they claimed, was an “encroachment on the rights reserved to the states and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution.” Nineteen United States Senators and eighty-two members of the House of Representatives signed the Manifesto, but a few notable southern congressmen did not. Non-signers included future President Lyndon Johnson; two other senators with national ambitions, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Sr. both of Tennessee; and powerful House members Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas and future Speaker Jim Wright, also of Texas.
Debating the dividing line between state and federal authority is as old as the Constitution. During the Ratification debate of 1787-88, anti-Federalists feared the ambiguity in the original document would lead to an expansive federal government more invasive than anyone anticipated. One reason for the Ninth and Ten Amendments’ language reserving the rights and powers not delegated to Congress to the people and the states was to erect a barrier against federal intrusion into state authority. Now nearly every day journalists report and politicians debate issues involving state’s rights, from abortion laws to gun rights to vaccine mandates. The list seems endless.
Historically, states’ rights arguments were also raised to defend white supremacy, from the antebellum era to the Civil Rights Movement. Growing up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, as Jim Crow succumbed to growing demands for Black social and political equality, I heard the arguments repeatedly. Restauranteurs should be able to serve those they wish. Local school systems know best how to educate their children without interference from federal courts. Sometimes the language was racist and vile—”I don’t want my white daughter sitting beside black boys in school.” Other times it used coded rants about “welfare queens” or law and order, for example. Always there was an underlying assumption that state governments would protect white supremacy while the federal government would not.
Little Rock Central High, 1957 Inevitably, the Brown decision made public schools a battleground in the struggle for full racial equality, from Little Rock Central High School in 1957 to the streets of Boston during the school busing crisis of the 1970-80s. As a southern boy attending North Carolina schools in the 1960s, I was largely shielded from the battle until I reached high school. I was born in Greensboro, NC, six months before the ruling was announced and was schooled in nearby Winston-Salem. Yet I did not attend an integrated school until my senior year in high school. When I read the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown II granting public schools permission to proceed with “all deliberate speed” in my Constitutional Law undergraduate class I wondered if Brown II gave some legal cover for tactics that delayed desegregation? Most white southerners were going to resist school integration by every lawful method available. When I recall decisions made by my hometown’s school board—where to place new schools, implementation of token integration of teachers and students in a few schools, legal resistance to busing for desegregation, closing schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and busing those students to predominantly white schools—I see evidence of deliberation but not speedy action.
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort nine integration pioneers into Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. I believe speedy action in response to Brown would have prevented much of the animosity that occurred when Winston-Salem schools finally implemented integration. In my high school, that animosity resulted in racial fighting. School officials canceled spring sports and the senior prom. They postponed classes for a week and moved graduation to a week-day afternoon to avoid more violence. Thankfully, today’s southern students generally attend schools void of that violence, but they can access that era by reading documents in Teaching American History’s document collection.
Teaching American History’s Core Document Collection: Race and Civil Rights picks up the story of the African American struggle for full equality after emancipation. This volume contains excerpts from two court cases relevant to school desegregation—Plessy v Ferguson, 1896 (Document 9) and Brown v Board of Education, 1954, (Document 16)—and excerpts from the Southern Manifesto, 1956 (Document 17).
Ray Tyler is a MAHG graduate and the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina.
The post The Southern Manifesto appeared first on Teaching American History.
A Master’s Degree with MAHG is Worth It! Ready for some meaningful professional development? Registration for MAHG’s Summer 2022 semester begins on February 1st at 8:00 am Eastern. View our schedules of online and weeklong on-campus courses. Already enrolled at Ashland? Register via Self-Service. Ready to get started on your master’s degree? Apply for admission today. Interested in taking one or more courses on a non-degree basis? Review our upcoming schedules and register today.
Near the end of the second 2021 summer session of MAHG, we asked two teachers new to the summer residential program to tell us what they were experiencing. Each had taught between five and ten years and knew they’d found their life’s profession. Still, two weeks of summer courses at the Master of American History and Government (MAHG) program in Ashland, Ohio seemed a big commitment.
Summer 2018. American Statesman, Washington-Lincoln Amy Livingston, now teaching US history to eighth-graders at Sweetwater Junior High School in Tennessee, began teaching in Florida, where she transitioned from a classroom assistant position to teaching 7th grade US civics. Traveling to Ashland meant leaving her three elementary school-aged children for the very first time in their lives.
Tina Boudell teaches 11th grade US history and Advanced Placement US history at Doral Academy, Red Rock in Las Vegas, Nevada. She’d learned about MAHG from the social studies coordinator at Doral Academy, Karlye Mattie, who told Boudell to expect intense, exciting week-long classes. Mattie also gave Boudell a few practical tips, pointing out, for example, that the bed linen packet she’d receive contained only flat sheets. “As I packed a new twin-long fitted sheet into my suitcase, I wondered, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I leaving my husband for two weeks?’”
By Thursday of the second week, Livingston and Boudell said the demanding program was fully worth the effort and the time away from family.
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MAHG Reading Preparation, Summer 2018 Ellen Tucker: Why do you commit to the MAHG program, especially since it requires you to take half of your credits on the campus of Ashland University? Boudell: Since starting my teaching practice, I’ve wanted to focus on primary source documents. I thought my undergraduate program taught me how to do that. Then I participated in a free TAH Saturday seminar held at my school. I saw that your entire program is primary source and discussion-focused. This program asks me to do what I want my students to be able to do, and I need to set that model for them.
Livingston: This program is just the gold standard. It helps me be the best teacher I can be. I even see that the way I teach is changing.
I’m more confident in my content area. I also look at things differently. In my Founding class, one of the essay topics was, “How does the Declaration of Independence lead to the Civil War?” My first thought was “Wait, what?”
I’m learning the story of us—the whole history comes to mean something. I want to get that across to my students. Many enter my class thinking history is just names, dates, people, and places—isolated events that have no meaning. But what happened in 1776 affected 1860 and the election of Abraham Lincoln. Getting students to draw those connections, seeing that it all does matter, has been really cool.
Tucker: Tina, have you watched students making new connections? Boudell: I’ve experienced it. In the Founding class I’m taking this week, we read Federalist 51, in which Madison says men are not angels, and so “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” I realized, “Yes, this is how our system of checks and balances works!” When students apply this idea to the current presidency, seeing how executive power is checked in our constitutional system, it becomes personal to them. They take ownership of their learning.
Professor Lucas Morel, MAHG Summer 2021 Tucker: How do primary documents help students practice critical thinking? Livingston: After students compare the arguments in two documents, they can come up with their own arguments.
Boudell: They learn not to rely on someone else’s explanation. Textbooks tell a secondhand story. If you want an overview of what happened, read a secondhand source. But if you want to know what Hamilton actually meant, you need to read his own words. I always tell my students, “You don’t want someone else telling your story for you. You want to be the author of your story. So, let’s see what the earlier Americans we’re studying actually said.”
Asking students to analyze the documents is crucial. My job is not to teach them what to think; my job is to teach them how to think. I appreciate that the professors here do the same thing. Of course, it’s intimidating at first when they ask, “What are your opinions?” I always feel, “no, that’s not my place!” But it’s really encouraging that we are not being indoctrinated in one historical view. We think critically for ourselves, and that is reflected in our teaching.
Tucker: Do your students struggle with the older language of, say, 18th century texts? Boudell: One thousand percent!
Tucker: How do you deal with that?
Boudell: It’s brought up the rigor in my class. Even when I taught 7th grade, I used some primary sources. Early in the year, that could mean struggling over a single document for two or more days. There are times when you say, “We’re just going to read these two sentences and talk about what they mean.” But once they learn to break down the language, it gets better. They apply their new skills to all the following documents. They can also apply those skills to other content areas—science, language arts, etc.
Tucker: Do students bring to class ideas about American history that they later rethink? Livingston: It often has a lot to do with race. The school where I teach now has a predominantly black student body. If you ask students, “What do you think?” and “Why do you think that?” discussion can be open and honest. For example, I might ask, “why didn’t those helping Jefferson finalize the language of the Declaration want him to keep the clauses accusing the British of imposing slavery on the colonies?” I do try to humanize the founders, to remind students that they were imperfect men trying to do the best they could at the time. They made some choices we wish they hadn’t. But we can try to understand the process they went through.
Tucker: What happens when students argue? Boudell: I do a lot of team-building at the start of the year. We talk about our emotions, how we can get angry or sad. We build on that to develop a circle of trust. We have an agreement that whatever is said in the classroom will not affect my view of you. After all, the founders disagreed—there were federalists and antifederalists. So, rather than debates, we have discussions. Discussions based on fact.
When a student says, “My Mom said . . . ” – that’s not going to advance the discussion. Your Mom’s a great person, but you can’t use that as the ground you’re gonna stand on. You have to find evidence in the sources. What were the people of history going through, and what did they say? If the discussion gets really heated between two or more students, I ask them to stay after class and I ask, “are we all good now?” They have to look at each other and acknowledge that they respect each other’s opinions. I’ve never yet had it turn awful.
Livingston: We do something called “Deliberations” in my classroom. I say, “We may not all agree on all issues, but we can probably agree on something. Let’s start with what we can agree on and work forward.”
Tucker: That kind of classroom experience sounds like a model for civic life at large. Boudell: Yes. I hate what happens on social media, when you see people tearing each other down. Knowing when to speak, and when not to, is a skill that I teach. Is the cost of using my voice worth it at this moment? If so, can I respond to your comment in a civil way? Can I ask questions to understand where you’re coming from?
Student in Jay Green’s class, MAHG Summer 2021 Tucker: What is the most important citizenship skill you hope students learn? Boudell: Critically thinking and listening.
Livingston: Learning how to develop their own ideas and thoughts.
Tucker: Is this program helping you figure out how to teach that?
Livingston: In the Supreme Court class I took last week, I reached the point of saying, “I don’t agree with this decision, but I can understand it.” That’s where we try to get in our classes. If we can do that, we can think about working together toward a more perfect union. The Constitution does not say “We are offering this framework to make a perfect union;” it says we’re making “a more perfect union.”
Boudell: We all have pasts that could embarrass us. We all grow. Has America changed? Yes! Tracking that becomes really important.
Tucker: What’s one way this summer at MAHG will change how you teach? Boudell: In my course on the Founding, I realized, “Oh, my gosh, the term federalism—I’ve been defining it wrong!”
Livingston: I find myself thinking, “can I just gather the students I had last semester for a few hours to correct the information I gave them?” But as we said before, the main thing has been to underscore the importance of primary documents. It’s not what Ms. Livingston taught us today; it’s what Madison said. And what the students themselves think after reading Madison’s words.
Boudell: The other day, my husband saw the supervisor who encouraged me to enroll in MAHG. She asked him, “Is your wife okay? Is her brain exploding?”
I told my husband that from only twelve days of classes I’ve learned so many things I can bring into my teaching. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. It’s worth the three weeks I’m spending here this summer, and the three weeks next year, and the year after that, and the time I’ll spend at home in online classes. It’s worth it because of the benefit to my students.
The post Professional Development with TAH appeared first on Teaching American History.
Our Documents in Detail webinar for February 16th, 2022 will focus on FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech. This document is drawn from our World War 2 Core Documents Collection, which you can download free as a PDF.
This one-hour program will air live at 7pm ET. All attendees of the live show will receive a printable certificate for continuing education, and will be able to ask questions of our panelists via Zoom’s QnA function.
Scholars
- Dr. John Moser, Ashland University
- Dr. Jennifer Keene, Chapman University
- Dr. David Krugler, University of Wisconsin-Platteville
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Talking with Peter Myers, editor of Race and Civil Rights
This month we released a new volume in our Core Document Collection, Race and Civil Rights, edited by Peter C. Myers. The volume covers the long struggle to secure legal, political and social equality for black and white citizens, a struggle that began the moment slavery was abolished. As Myers writes, the documents he selected address the question of “whether and how” black and white Americans can “come to coexist and thrive as fellow citizens.”
Myers is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, where he teaches political philosophy, American political thought, and Constitutional law. As a visiting professor in the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, Myers has taught courses on Race and Equality, the Civil Rights Era, Tocqueville, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass. In 2008 he published Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (University Press of Kansas).
We asked Professor Myers to talk with us about the collection.
1. Much has been written on race and civil rights in America. How did you decide which selections to include? It wasn’t easy! Given the Ashbrook focus on primary sources, I chose to focus on authors involved in activism—officeholders, leaders of activist organizations—and on court cases. That meant excluding a world of literary authors like Ellison, Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and others who’ve influenced our thinking on race relations. But it put the focus on practical efforts to bring change.
Robert Brown Elliott (1874) Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Collection/Search?Term=Robert+Brown+Elliott. I hoped to show the diversity of approaches to justice in race relations. I tried to include authors rarely celebrated today. For example, Robert Brown Elliot represents African Americans elected to Congress during Reconstruction; his speech to the House (1874) critiquing Alexander Stephens will interest teachers who use Stephens’ Cornerstone Address to convey what the Confederacy stood for. Albion Tourgée, who migrated to the South after the Civil War to try to help steer Reconstruction, played an important role. He argued for the plaintiffs in Plessy, originating the term Justice Harlan uses when arguing that the Constitution is “colorblind.” The educator Anna Julia Cooper emphasizes the key role of women in “A Voice from the South” (1892).
Many students are unaware of Civil Rights efforts prior to those of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Martin Luther King. I wanted to show the movement’s long duration. Because of permissions costs, we could not reprint King’s writings, yet we included some who developed strategies King later used. A. Philip Randolph’s call for a March on Washington in 1941 laid the groundwork for the 1963 March. Bayard Rustin describes the strategy of nonviolent resistance in his account of being arrested in 1942 for refusing to ride in the back of the bus. Rustin became one of King’s closest advisors.
Finally, I wanted to represent the current debate over what remains to be done to overcome racial injustice. Which voices would be relevant twenty years from now? Nicole Hannah Jones’ lead essay for the 1619 Project seemed a good bet, as it is backed by The New York Times. The Black Lives Matter movement is well known and funded, so we excerpted from its founders’ statements of purpose. We also included Robert Woodson’s introductory essay to the “1776 Unites” campaign. Woodson will be unfamiliar to many readers, but he has worked for years to promote enterprise and improve outcomes for young people in disadvantaged communities. He’s one of the unsung heroes of our day.
2. Race and Civil Rights documents disagreements among African Americans on how best to pursue civil rights. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois famously disagreed on whether African Americans needed industrial training or higher education. Was this simply a disagreement about strategy? George C. Rockwood. Booker T. Washington, three-quarters length, seated at small table, facing slightly left. 1909. Public Domain courtesy of the Library of Congress. It was both more and less than that. In TAH seminars, we read the Atlanta Exposition Address alongside Du Bois’ chapter on Washington in The Souls of Black Folk. I ask, “Does Washington really think that blacks should not pursue liberal education?” Teachers respond, “No, he thinks they should.” When I ask whether Du Bois opposes industrial education for working class blacks, teachers respond, “Well, no.” Some scholars describe the disagreement as a rivalry, noting that Du Bois resented Washington’s control over a great deal of northern philanthropy money. Still, the two fundamentally disagreed about the value of political agitation. Washington thought too much protest becomes undignified. If the effort fails, people conclude they are powerless. Du Bois—like Frederick Douglass—thought people gained dignity and self-respect in standing up for their rights, whether they prevailed or not.
W.E.B. Du Bois Du Bois wanted to tear down an unjust system. Washington thought that the post-Reconstruction era called for construction, not destruction: for building up new institutions. After all, he was not just training people to be better farmers; he was training professionals—people who would become teachers in the black community. He pushed for reform privately, bargaining through back channels for his community. He worked in much more difficult circumstances than Du Bois ever did—a fact that, later in life, Du Bois acknowledged.
You might say Washington and Du Bois developed the opposite poles of what, for Frederick Douglass, was a unified strategy. Du Bois emphasized protest; Washington emphasized self-improvement.
3. Do these approaches reunite in Ida B. Wells? While protesting lynching, Wells exhorts Black Americans to use their economic power. She says, “To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation.” Wells makes an interesting argument in her essay “Self-Help,” pointing out that self-help entails not only self-improvement but also self-defense. She cites an unpunished lynching in Memphis that caused many black citizens to leave the city and others to boycott the streetcars. This brought about “great stagnation in every branch of business” in Memphis. Wells, like Douglass and Malcolm X, also urges black families to buy guns and use them “for that protection which the law refuses to give.” A realist, Wells sees people responding to fear sooner than to love.
In less confrontational terms, this is really Washington’s argument. You can read two messages in his “Atlanta Exposition Address.” When he says, “Cast down your buckets where you are,” he’s telling white employers that they don’t need to hire immigrant labor; the Black population will supply the labor needed. But he is also alluding to the decision of some African Americans to leave the South. The threat of leaving was the one economic lever the Black population had.
4. A tension between the integrationist and separatist impulses pervades the collection. Some authors assert their respect for American ideals and their hope to gain civil rights and prosper in mainstream society. Others want to build separate communities and nurture a separate identity. One might expect greater enthusiasm for integration following passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Why, at that moment, does the Black Panther Party emerge, along with the publication of Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton? It’s a complicated thing. I would note that the integrationists have always comprised the much larger number of Black Americans. And separationists come in different gradations and modes.
Yet it’s predictable that, after so long a history of organized societal disrespect for a group of people, they would publicly assert their pride in their cultural identity—while claiming a right to public respect.
Black Panther Demonstration. Photo courtesy of the State Governors’ Negative Collection, 1949-1975, Washington State Archives Some see Black separatism as self-defensive. You can question the tone of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on a crisis in the Black family, but not his prediction that the enactment of civil rights laws would not solve our race problem. Once equal treatment under law is established, socio-economic inequalities appear more glaring. Some explanation will be demanded, and the explanation will offend somebody. It’s not hard to see how the question would arise, and would also inflame many people’s sensitivities: “Now that you have equal treatment and equal opportunity under law, why aren’t you achieving more?” Among the possible responses is a line of argument initiated by Black Power advocates: “Your standards of merit are not universal; they’re culturally specific.” This gives impetus to the identity politics that we’ve lapsed into in the post-Civil Rights Era.
Historical memory is perhaps the most important factor, also emphasized in the Black Power argument. Black people do not forget that they have been treated as a people apart. They sustained themselves by cultivating a sense of their distinct identity.
5. Some themes emerge in the documents that one might explore in a longer collection. For example, Albion Tourgée, writing during Reconstruction, speaks of the common ignorance and poverty of most whites and blacks in the South. He sees Jim Crow policies as designed to serve the interests of an educated Southern oligarchy. Other documents allude to problems in our criminal justice system. Tourgée was fiercely anti-oligarchic. When he advocates a greatly expanded system of public education, he makes plain his view that both blacks and whites have suffered under a racialized oligarchy. He wants to lift the working classes of both races. He’s also hard on northern Republicans in their approach to Reconstruction. He felt the South needed much more help in building a democratic culture than it got after the Civil War.
The problems with our criminal justice system have been much discussed recently, and they are long-standing. The Black Lives Matter statement mentions them in a tendentious way, yet it’s undeniable that for a long time, the system was overtly organized against blacks. Current police encounters are interpreted in light of that history. It would take a much longer volume to represent the range of perspectives on this.
Rev. Joseph Jackson. Public domain. Another theme is the role of religion in the struggle for civil rights. A longer collection might include Washington’s speech “Democracy and Education,” in which he makes very clear that his idea of education is not industrial education. It’s moral education, and it’s Christian moral education. Douglass also often spoke in terms of Biblical morality. Malcolm X brings a religious perspective to the fight for racial justice, and certainly Bayard Rustin does. I included a selection from the Reverend Joseph Jackson because he worked in the same religious tradition as King, yet reached very different conclusions. Even more than King, Jackson wanted to find resources in the existing American tradition to advance the cause of equal rights under law.
6. What important themes in the volume do you hope readers will explore? In addition to those we’ve already touched on, the differences in judicial approaches to Civil Rights are fascinating and significant. The cases are complicated, and the logic of many decisions might be challenged. The Plessy court may be wrong in its conclusion, and the Brown court right in its conclusion, but the logic of the rulings in each case is neither all right nor all wrong.
Also, both cases touch on “social equality.” This issue is central to Loving v. Virginia, a case I consider to be at least as important as Brown or Plessy. Segregation was always driven by a fear of intermarriage, or race mixing. I think the race problem in the US will be solved finally when blacks and whites regard one another, routinely and without controversy, as prospective family members. To build a truly common culture we need to start in the household. Loving v. Virginia addresses that issue in the most profound way.
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As we recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday this January 17, it’s worth reflecting on the road to a national commemoration of our most famous civil rights leader. The momentum toward a federal King holiday began almost immediately after King’s assassination, with Representative (and civil rights activist) John Conyers first proposing a federal holiday within a week of King’s death in 1968. Thereafter, congressional proposals for a King holiday became an annual occurrence. But fifteen years would pass before the holiday won federal recognition in 1983, eighteen years before the first federal celebration in 1986, and 32 years before all 50 states observed it in 2000. In addition to the political work in D.C. to achieve this goal, an advocacy campaign was waged on social, cultural, and economic fronts. A brief account of the holiday’s journey from vision to national practice tells us much about the nation’s journey in its understanding of King and the broader civil rights movement.
[Representatives with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholarship and Awards Committee march in the 21st annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade] (January 18, 2014) https://www.dvidshub.net/ Local governments initially established public symbols honoring King, particularly in communities where black citizens held significant political and social influence. The city of Detroit (Representative Conyers’ hometown) renamed a public high school for King in the fall of 1968, and the early 1970s saw a boom in renaming and establishing schools in King’s honor, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. Community activists sought to rename streets in King’s name. The first street renaming was in Chicago (1968), initiating this trend. Today one finds MLK schools and streets throughout the nation, but in the decade following King’s death, these public commemorations were an important plank in the movement, aiding political petitions for a holiday.
These public symbols partnered with a grassroots citizens’ lobby for the holiday. Public observances of the holiday began on the local level, starting with a 1969 observance by the year-old King Memorial Center in Atlanta. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and National Council of Churches both petitioned Congress to pass a King Holiday in the 1970s — with signatory support in the millions. The American labor movement, having found an ally in King during the mid-60s, also promoted the holiday throughout the 1970s. Picking up the momentum, state governments began enacting the holiday: Illinois in 1973, followed by Massachusetts and Connecticut in ‘74, and New Jersey in ‘75. By the time of the first federal observance, seventeen states already had King holidays.
Grassroots efforts and support slowly impacted the more sluggish federal response.Eleven years after King’s death the federal King holiday finally received a vote on the floor of the US House of Representatives. While the bill fell five votes short of its required two-thirds House supermajority for passage as a “special procedures” bill, it was an important political turning point. In the eleven years since his death, King’s legacy had become anchored in public spaces, and grassroots work was yielding political fruit. Advocacy took another step forward with Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song “Happy Birthday” from the album Hotter than July, which managed to be a huge success and became the musical anthem of the holiday push without ever being released as a single in the United States. Its success as an international single, however, helped draw global attention to the effort. From this point, Wonder became a regular presence in the King holiday movement, often advocating alongside Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. The efforts of activists, a celebrities, and politicians coalesced by the turn of the 1980s, creating a groundswell for the holiday.
Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh and Martin Luther King Jr. at the Illinois Rally for Civil Rights, June 21, 1964 Perhaps surprisingly, the effort to elevate the King holiday–combined with the effect of historical detachment–won much of the public over to the civil rights cause, making it more popular in hindsight than it was in its own time. My students, the oldest of whom were born nearly twenty years after the first federal King holiday, are surprised to see historical numbers on civil rights support: Gallup polling indicating public opposition to the March on Washington in 1963, as well as to other nonviolent demonstrations like sit-ins; or a 1964 New York Times article reporting skepticism among white New Yorkers of civil rights efforts; or that King’s public approval rating had fallen into the 30’s by 1966, when he began advocating more fervently against economic injustice and housing discrimination. It seems impossible to them that a historical figure with a holiday named after him could ever have faced such opposition from so many Americans, or that the civil rights movement did not enjoy the near-universal approval popular culture today would seem to indicate.
Yet in fact, Senator Jesse Helms, leading congressional opposition to the King holiday, threatened to filibuster the 1983 legislation while resurrecting accusations that King was a Communist sympathizer (like a number of other civil rights activists, King faced charges of communism throughout his career, despite his disavowals in sermons like 1962’s “Can A Christian Be A Communist?” and speeches like 1967’s “Where Do We Go From Here?”). Nonetheless, the King holiday movement had won sufficient public and political support to pass. President Reagan signed the bill into law in 1983, with the first federal holiday scheduled, and observed, in 1986.
From Federal to National Holiday But in American federalism, a federal holiday does not make an occasion a national holiday. In a decentralized system with 50 state governments, holiday mandates do not fall within federal power. In the case of the MLK holiday, the federal example and the energy placed behind it (in the form of the King Holiday Commission, established in 1984) promoted a nationwide wave of state recognition, so that 44 states recognized the holiday by the turn of the 90s.
Even then, states often titled the holiday in ways that softened the focus on King, remnants of discomfort with — if not outright antipathy to — the civil rights leader. An early example was appending “Human Rights Day” to the holiday (as in Idaho & Utah). The early 90s offered the most memorable example of resistance to the King Holiday, from Arizona, where, after a state referendum rejected the King Holiday in 1990, protest and boycott campaigns eventually influenced the National Football League to apply economic pressure by moving Super Bowl XXVII (1993) from Arizona to California — the first major relocation of an American sporting event for political reasons.
But Arizona was not the last state to adopt the King Holiday; that distinction belongs to New Hampshire and South Carolina, who became the 49th and 50th states to observe it in 2000. New Hampshire merged a more ceremonial “Civil Rights Day” with the King Holiday; South Carolina ended a practice of allowing state workers and localities to choose among the King Holiday or one of three different Confederate holidays — a practice seemingly subversive to the purpose and intent of the King Holiday, but which had been mirrored in four other former Confederate states where King’s holiday was merged with celebrations of General Robert E. Lee (and in the case of Virginia, also Stonewall Jackson). The King Holiday’s passage through the federal system underscored the contested nature of King’s legacy, and by extension the movement, decades after his passing.
The Real Meaning of the Holiday [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and staff volunteers gather around their entry vehicle for the 38th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Parade in Tulsa, Okla.,], Preston Chasteen (January 17, 2007). Army Corps of Engineers, https://www.dvidshub.net/. At the time of its passage, the King holiday was the third federal holiday identified with an individual, after George Washington’s Birthday and Columbus Day. The two previous holidays were understood as celebrating the achievements and accomplishments of particular individuals (and in the spirit of federalism, are also recognized by other names in some parts of the country: Washington’s Birthday is commonly broadened to Presidents Day, and communities critical of the Columbus holiday observe Indigenous People’s Day — indeed, a majority of states no longer refer to the October holiday as Columbus Day).
But the King Holiday, while commemorating an individual, was also framed from the outset as dedicating the nation to the work for which he lived and died. Rather than understanding it as a civil rights “mission accomplished” celebration, the King Center has always framed the holiday as a commitment to carrying forward the unfinished work of Dr. King. Similarly, at the time of congressional passage in 1983, TIME magazine reporter George Church noted that the holiday “symbolize[d] the commitment of all Americans to racial equality” — active rather than passive observance. Subsequent expansions of the holiday’s observance maintain this mode — as in the 1990s shift to framing the holiday as a broader “day of service.”
Seeing the King Holiday as an active national engagement allows us to elevate underappreciated passages from King’s great body of work. The more detached “celebratory” mode of engagement with King’s work — as a done deal, a feat accomplished, or mostly accomplished — tends to limit historical memory to a handful of exalted quotes. While these passages are powerful and essential to understanding Martin Luther King, focusing on them tends to reduce and distort public understanding (and the way we teach King’s message to students). These discussions emphasize the inspirational and aspirational closures of King’s speeches, especially the inspirational flourish at the close of King’s March on Washington speech, “I Have A Dream.” Another popular quote is King’s oft-used assertion that the “arc of the moral universe … bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service at Anacostia Park (2018) National Park Service, https://npgallery.nps.gov/ And yet in these speeches and so many others, you find King challenging the nation with a brand of critical patriotism, harkening back to foundational principles while simultaneously seeking “to dramatize a shameful condition” of social injustice. This is the King who celebrated the Founding Documents and Abraham Lincoln while highlighting contemporary conditions as a “default … on this promissory note” in “I Have a Dream;” who excoriated Jim Crow as “a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition;” who exalted the Bill of Rights and the “greatness of America” while demanding that the nation “be true to what [it] said on paper;” who critiqued the nation’s “Schizophrenic personality on the question of race;” which created disparities between democratic principles and practices. King felt that the nation’s first principles demanded this tough critical engagement with current injustice–that pursuing both civil rights and social justice was essential practice in the “more perfect union.” A responsible holiday in his name must reckon with this advocacy as well.
Finally, while King repeatedly spoke of the moral arc bending toward justice, he also constantly reinforced what he referred to as “the fierce urgency of now,” insisting that “human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals [against] the primitive forces of social stagnation.” Just as generations of citizens worked to establish the King Holiday, may we celebrate it today as an ongoing, unfinished mission.
Malik Ali, a 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.
Additional Sources Alderman, Derek. “School Names as Cultural Arenas: The Naming of U.S. Public Schools after Martin Luther King, Jr.” Urban Geography, Vol. 23 (November 2002).
Alderman, Derek. “Street names and the scaling of memory: The politics of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American community.” Area, Vol. 35 (June 2003)
Chandler, Stacy. “Making the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.” JFK Library Blog. August 27, 2020.
Church, George. “A National Holiday for King.” TIME Magazine. October 31, 1983.
The King Center Online: https://thekingcenter.org/
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/search.
National Constitution Center. “How the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday became a holiday.” Constitution Daily. January 16, 2021.
United Press International. “Dr. King Holiday Bill Fails to Win in House.” via The New York Times, November 14, 1979.
Weinfuss, Josh. “Looking back at the NFL moving the Super Bowl from Arizona due to Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.” ESPN. July 12, 2021.
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