What the Hell Happened Wonder Republican Founders

The State of Wisconsin and the local Chamber of Commerce heavily promote the little school house officially designated the Birthplace of the Republican Party.  The most important organization of moderate to liberal Republicans, the Ripon Society, was named for the shrine.  Once an important voice in the party with many members of Congress and influential in shaping policy for the Party, it has slid into pariah status, it few remaining Congressional members automatically targeted for primary challenges and political oblivion by well funded right-wing attacks.

On March 20, 1854 a double handful of political malcontents—Whigs despairing of their failing party, Free Soilers, even an anti-slavery Democrat or two—met in a school house in Ripon, Wisconsin at the request of lawyer Alvan E. Bovay. They were upset by the Kansas-Nebraska Act then being debated in Congress which would junk the old Missouri Compromise and leave the door open to the extension of slavery in all of the western Territories by election—Popular Sovereignty. The meeting resolved that stronger measures must be taken to oppose the pet project of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The Ripon meeting is considered the founding meeting of the Republican Party. But it was just one of several such meetings held across the Midwest and in New York State contemplating or urging similar action. 

Another claimant for the title of Birthplace of the Republican Party is Jackson, Michigan where on where on July 6, 1854 several thousand gathered at an outdoor convention "Under the Oaks" to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act and promote a new party.  The meeting was promoted as a national convention, but except for a handful of dignitaries was attended mostly by Michiganders with a sprinkling of visitors from Ohio. 

 

The extension of slavery was not the only part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that stirred passions and brought recruits. A now little remembered provision in the act forbad non-citizen aliens from voting or holding office in the Territories. That sounds benign today, but Wisconsin was being rapidly settled by waves of immigrants—Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Finns, and Welsh—who usually established settlements with their own countrymen. These people could not organize their communities if they did not vote and hold office. Wisconsinites naturally feared that such measures might then be extended even to established states.  Anti-slavery people also recognized that this would diminish the ability of anti-slavery residents including most immigrants from opposing slavery in Popular Sovereignty elections. 

 

A state-wide convention was held in Madison that July to formally establish the Republican Party and nominate candidates in the fall election. The delegates resolved: 

 

That we accept this issue [freedom or slavery], forced upon us by the slave power, and in the defense of freedom will cooperate and be known as Republicans.  

 

Influential editor Horace Greely had supported the name for a new party that June in his New York Tribune. “[Republicans] fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery.” and no one had any better ideas. 

 

The infant Wisconsin party had immediate success. In the elections of 1854 Republicans won two of the three House of Representatives seats, a majority of the State Assembly seats, and a large number of local offices. And with control of the state Senate they were able to elect a U.S Senator. A year later they took the Governorship. Such impressive results obviously made Wisconsin a leader in the movement to create a national party. But others were busy as well. 

 

 In New York state wily political boss Thrulow Weed and ambitious Senator William Steward brought not only Whigs and Free Soilers but the locally powerful former American Party—Know Nothings—members together with the backing of Greeley’s Tribune. The name Republican was previously associated with slave holder Thomas Jefferson, ancestral founder of the Democrats. The irony was lost on no one. 

 

As in Wisconsin local parties in New York, Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere in the North had success while the old Whig and shaky Free Soil parties continued to crumble. In July 1856 these local organizations met for the first time in a national convention in Philadelphia. By this time the Kansas-Nebraska Act was in full effect and the virtual civil war between pro and anti-slavery faction in Bleeding Kansas was stirring passions. 600 delegates attended, mainly from the northern states but also including the border states of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, plus the District of Columbia. The Territory of Kansas was seated as a state. 

 

Dashing and handsome John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, was nominated as the Republican Party's first presidential candidate.  He did surprisingly well.
 

The party nominated the dashing, arrogant, but somewhat dim soldier and explorer John C. Frémont. To hear him tell the tale, he had personally lassoed California for the Union by unilateral action during the Mexican War. His Army superiors and the naval officer in charge of California were not amused and the Pathfinder had been court martialed for mutiny. Despite this dust up, Frémont was a popular hero and he had the advantage of a determined and much smarter wife, Jessie and her powerful father, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, still a Democrat but opposed to violation of the old Missouri Compromise. 

 

Young up and coming Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln narrowly lost the nomination for Vice President to New Jersey’s William L. Dayton. The Whigs failed to nominate a candidate in 1856 and overnight the Republicans went from third party to major party status—the only minor party in American history to make the leap. 

 

The Democrats nominated colorless but capable James Buchanan, the Secretary of State and former Senator from Pennsylvania and like other Democratic Presidential candidates, a “Northern man of Southern Principles.” The Know Nothing American Party put up former President Millard Fillmore who promptly denounced the party’s nativist platform and ran as a savior of the Union. Fillmore went nowhere. Buchanan swept the South and was able to hold onto some northern states. Frémont surprised almost everyone and won a third of the popular vote and 11 Electoral votes including New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts. 

 

In the 1858 mid-term elections, Republicans won a majority in the U.S. House, a strong minority in the Senate, and a majority of northern Governorships. Southerners quickly became convinced that a Republican victory in 1860 would be a fatal blow to their “way of life”, the popular euphemism for slavery. 

 

The Republicans still sometimes--when they are not pandering to Southern White voters, Neo-Confederates, and Alt-Right bully boys--claims to be the Party of Linclon, the first Republican President.

 

When the Republican’s next met several powerful politicians expected to be the nominee—especially Seward and Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase. Both had strong bases and credentials as ardent opponents of slavery. But by shrewd maneuvering, particularly by appealing to border states by painting himself as a moderate who would “not disturb slavery where it existed” and as a champion for maintaining the Union, Lincoln walked away with the nomination. 

 

The Democrats shattered three ways by section and their strongest candidate, Lincoln’s old debating opponent Douglas, could not win enough Electoral votes. The Republicans were in and in short order the Confederacy seceded. You know the rest of that story. 

 

After the Civil War the Republicans were the ruling party with only three interruptions for the next 65 years. But they quickly developed factions. The Radical Republicans—whose reputations have been tarnished by generations of diligent pro-Southern historians—remained committed to racial equality in the old Confederacy. Many Republicans, including their large, loyal base of Germans in the Midwest, tended to support the rising labor movement. New England and New York elected officials tended to be far more liberal on most issues than Northern Democrats, support of the union movement aside. 

 

On the other hand the Party quickly became the darling of the vigorous robber baron class of capitalists and monopolists of all stripes. That led to corruption in high places in government but the steady stream of money proved a siren song hard to resist. Factions of the party fought hammer and tong over issues like anti-trust laws and labor reforms for decades. In the late 19th Century Marc Hanna formalized the dominance of Big Business capitalists through his Civic Federation and a “grand bargain” that gave labor a symbolic but powerless “seat at the table.” 

 

In the meantime, in the Midwestern heartland of the party a kind of reflexive small town/successful farmer conservatism took root that was mostly entrenched stodgyism—reflective resistance to most change, anti-labor, Protestant, and more than slightly tinged with nativism. 

 

In the early 20th Century Robert La Follette and others in the upper Midwest infused the party with a new brand of Progressivism. Theodore Roosevelt, the accidental President and “that damned cowboy!” to party conservatives, brought his own brand of progressivism to the White House and in 1912 split the Republicans to form his personal Progressive Party--Bull Moose--helping hand the Presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Many of Teddy's progressive followers never returned to the Republicans. 

 

                                                            "Fighting" Bob La Follette of Wisconsi brought Progressivism to the Party.

 

As for those Democrats, they had their own divisions. In the South they returned to power after the end of Reconstruction, erased its reforms, instituted Jim Crow, and ruled the Solid South unopposed. Because they returned their Senators and Representatives time after time, virtually for life, the Southerners by seniority became enormous powers in Congress. 

 

On the other hand agrarian radicalism on the plains and out West led by William Jennings Bryan re-infused the Democrats with a brand of Jeffersonian suspicion of banks, hard money, and monopolies. And the big cities of the East and Midwest large immigrant populations, rebelling at the increasing nativism—and eventually prohibitionism—of the Republican dominance became overwhelmingly Democrat. That in turn brought the party to closer identification with the labor movement. 

 

After World War I the various factions of the Republican Party, each for its own reasons, ranging from pacifist revulsion at the carnage of the Great War, to xenophobia, to high tariff protectionism, to fervent belief in American exceptionalism, tended to unify around what became known as isolationism. The Great Depression seemingly permanently upset the Republican apple cart. 

 

They were ousted as the ruling power by re-invigorated Democrats, the New Deal, and a seemingly irresistible rise of liberalism. The Republicans reacted in two ways. First with sputtering outrage at “That Man!” Then party liberals got the upper hand with candidates like Wendell Willke and Thomas E. Dewey who simply promised a slightly more moderate continuation of the New Deal. “We can do it better,” was their argument. 

 

Japanese bombs ended isolationism as a viable political position, although forms of it via conservative voices like Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, would linger into the post war years. 

 

What really began to change the Republican Party was its decision to paint itself as the champion of Anti-communism. That began the long assault on party liberals, particularly the scorned Eastern Establishment as being either “pink” themselves or soft. The huge personal popularity of Dwight Eisenhower was able to hold that rising faction at bay, but the John Birch Society, the godfather organization of modern ultra-conservatism, reviled him. When Eisenhower began intervening on behalf of court ordered desegregation in the South, archconservatives began aping of Southern Democrats calls for states rights and the sacred right of private property as a sufficient reason for businesses to deny Blacks public accommodations. 

 

                            A Birch Society book by it's leading figure was an attack on popular Eisenhower. .

 

The Federal Government, including its ensnarement with the world community via the United Nations and other organizations, became increasingly the enemy for this still minority tendency. There were still plenty of pro-Civil Rights Republicans who gloried in being the Party of Lincoln as well as liberal internationalists. 

 

In 1964, however, conservatives led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, gave the back of their hand to party liberals and the Eastern Establishment represented by Nelson Rockefeller. Liberal, or even self-described moderate Republicans, would never again seriously vie for party leadership, even when Goldwater went down in spectacular flames against Lyndon Johnson. The long, slow withering of liberal Republicanism was under way. 

 

Taking advantage of Southern outrage at Democrats for the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960’s and the example of George Wallace’s electoral successes, Richard Nixon inaugurated the successful Southern Strategy to usurp Democratic power in the South. Soon the South was solid again—solidly Republican. 

 

Despite his conservative rhetoric and political game plan, in retrospect Nixon’s presidency was not only moderate, but fairly liberal. Had he not personally surrendered to his demons and gone down in disgrace, he might have left behind a fairly moderate party. Instead his embittered hard core supporters blamed liberals—Democrats and Republicans alike. 

 

But you can’t win national elections based only on the South. Republicans began exploiting cultural resentments over hippies, anti-war protestors, and eventually bra burning feminists and abortion and in the process peeled away segments of traditional working class support from the Democrats. Becoming the perpetual party of against and demonizing liberalism was becoming intoxicatingly successful. And with the folksy charm of Ronald Regan conservatives were triumphant in the party. 

 

When his one-term successor George H.W. Bush, was ousted by charismatic Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican strategists decided that Bush had not been a true conservative after all and that a real right winger would have won the day. 

 

 Resentful conservatives did two things. First they began to contest party moderates and liberals in primaries and even non-partisan local elections. And they turned to the so-called Moral Majority of the burgeoning Evangelical movement for reliable foot soldiers and highly motivated voters. 

 

An infrastructure of think tanks, radio talk shows, and eventually a cable TV network, was financed by the deep pockets of supposedly libertarian billionaires, was set up to amplify orchestrated messages. Primaries became places where Republican candidates could only win by constantly trying to outflank each other on the right. 

 

By the early 21st Century old fashion New England liberal Republicans were extinct and socially moderate conservatives, derided as country club Republicans in the vast White suburbs were equally endangered. The creation of the Astroturf Tea Party Movement along with its anti-immigrant xenophobia, resentment of the poor as shiftless takers, and simple diffused rage, was welcomed by the Republican establishment, and then made its prisoner. 

 

Then in swooped the somehow populist billionaire celebrity Donald Trump and usurped the GOP entirely, making it his personal creation and a rubber stamp for his most authoritarian ambitions. For the results, pick up any newspaper. 

 

 

The party started in that Wisconsin school house persists only in its name. The ghosts of those founders must look down aghast at what the not-so-grand old party has become.

Resurrection—Vintage Murfin Verse for the Vernal Equinox

A newspaper photo in a local weekly paper taken at my job as head custodian of Briargate School in Cary, Illinois when my collection We Build Temples in the Heart was published in 2004.

Note—Tomorrow, March 20, is the official first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but it is close enough to revisit this.  

It was a bitter and blustery day in McHenry County almost 25 years ago when I was walking to the train station to get to work in the next town the line early one cold equinox morning and I was struck with this which was included in my 2004 Skinner House collection We Build Temples in the Heart.

 Resurrection 

     From that frigid morning

                when the fog of humanity

                 hangs palpable before our faces 

                 and that fat red sun 

                 pops before our eyes at the 

                far end of the reaching blacktop, 

    then, when from the highest, barest twig the cardinal sings 

              his whistle in the graveyard, 

             our hearts know resurrection and murmur— 

                 Yes, Yes. 

    We are a cold people in a cold land, 

             and every creeping inch of yellow willow hair, 

             every footprint in newly giving earth, 

             every ratchet tap of woodpecker on lifeless wood 

             resonates with resurrection and nods recollection. 

    It is no wonder that in hot lands,

            perpetual in green, 

           moist and ever fertile, 

          the natives snickered at tales of a hanging god, 

          turned on naked heels, 

          and ran to sensible deities who would not 

          abandon them only to hound them on return 

          with foolish promises. 

    But here, at turning time, 

          our arctic hearts surrender 

          to the sureness of the resurrection that surrounds us, 

          and in the echo of this miracle 

          understand redemption too, 

                in the merciful thaw 

                of our glacial souls. 

    —Patrick Murfin

Read ‘em Their Rights—The Miranda Warnings Still Irk Authoritarians

Reading the Miranda Warnings has become routine police procedure.

It still drives ‘em crazy after all these years. On March 18, 1966 the United States Supreme Court handed down the ruling that required persons in custody be advised of their right to remain silent until they see a lawyer—the Miranda Warning. It was a bitterly divided 5-4 split decision in the case of Miranda vs. Arizona. Ernesto Martinez Miranda, a career petty criminal, was arrested in 1963 by Phoenix police on a robbery charge. While being interrogated in custody, he confessed to a rape. He was convicted and sentenced to a long prison sentence, despite the objection by his lawyer that he had never been advised of his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. 

Career petty criminal Ernesto Miranda confessed under questioning by Phoenix Police to rape setting in motion the court case that immortalized his name.  In his new trial Miranda was convicted on ample evidence even without the confession and served a long stretch in the Arizona State Prison.  After release in 1972 he had minor scrapes with the law and returned to prison for a year for violating his parole with possession of a gun.  He was stabbed to death in a bar fight in 1976 and not much mourned.

The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the conviction on the grounds that Miranda never specifically requested an attorney to advise him of his rights and that the government had no duty to do so. Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former prosecutor, wrote the opinion that not only overturned Miranda’s conviction, but outlined dramatic new procedures for police integrations and made it clear that confessions obtained without following proper procedures would be “tainted fruit of a forbidden tree” and could not be used in evidence. 

Dissenting justices worried that all suspects would immediately clam up and that all lawyers would advise their clients to keep quiet. 

 

Despite being a Republican and a former prosecutor, Chief Justice Earl Warren personally wrote the sweeping decision establishing the Miranda rights--just one of the many reason he became a top Right Wing bugaboo.

It turns out, however, that a lot of criminals just can’t stop themselves from babbling to police and a lot of lawyers advise their clients to confess in exchange for a plea bargain. 

After the decision, cops were issued little cards with the required verbiage to cut the court’s mustard. They would pull it out and read: 

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense. 

Although police were originally outraged, the ritual of “reading ‘em their rights” soon became second nature. These days few cops need those little cards. They can easily rattle of the language just as they are reaching for the cuffs. Cases do occasionally get thrown out when the procedures are not properly followed, but probably no more frequently than for other police misconduct like inappropriate searches. 

The case of the wounded Boston Bomber suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a litmus test of American attitudes about the Miranda warnings in terrorism cases.  Turns out most American didn't give a shit about Constitutional guarantees and a lot would have paid to witness the guy's public torture....Donald Trump took note.

Still, complaints that the courts are soft on crime have been a staple of the right wing ever since. Controversies over whether to try terrorism suspects in civilian courts during the post 9/11 War on Terror often centered on claims that “Mirandizing” them would somehow endanger the national security by interfering with intelligence gathering. Of course, the same objectors were also enthusiasts for the Spanish Inquisition style of integration. 

Although seemingly well established by decades of routine use and supported and even expanded by repeated court rulings there are disturbing signs that the Miranda warnings may face attack and even successful roll back. On the campaign stump Trump made attacks on liberal judges a red meat staple only a hair below the diatribes against the media and protestors. The crowds went wild every time. 

As President the Cheeto in Charge has consistently showed that he will actively pursue the most radical parts of his campaign agenda if it does not involve disturbing his personal business interests or that of the ultra-wealthy oligarchy that supports him. He has ramped up across the board attacks on the integrity of the courts and displayed open contempt for Constitutional niceties. While spreading hair-on-fire panic about Islamic terrorism, immigrant crime sprees, and violence in Chicago he promises to un-handcuff the police and return to the days when they “knew how to handle” protestors and crime. He has dismissed all of the Obama Federal Prosecutors in his first term and Biden appointees and career prosecutors who were involved in investigations into his numerous crimes. He promises to appoint only get-tough-on-crime anywhere except in the Executive Branch hardliners to the Federal Bench and with a compliant Republican majority in the Senate there and Judges he has appointed there is almost nothing to stop him from succeeding in rolling back well established law and all manner of civil rights and liberties. 

The unthinkable may be at hand.

The Americanized St. Patrick’s Day—Not a Quiet Catholic Feast Day Any More

This vintage St. Patrick's Day greeting card is emblematic of the adoption and popularization of the holiday in the U.S.  In reality the acceptance by Yankee Uncle Sam--presumably Protestant--of Catholic "bog trotters" was far from smooth or cordial.

Note: For those of you unaware, this is my natal anniversary. I turn 76 today. Bet you wondered how I got the name. Anyway, I am rerunning a classic post. Meanwhile to the Irish and wan-a-be-Irish, enjoy the day. Have fun but try not to live down to some unfortunate stereotypes. And for Christ’s sake don’t drink the damn green beer, an abomination and insult to the soul! Have a dram of Jameson’s with a Guinness back for me! 

 

 

 

 

Up until the mid '60s St. Patrick's Day remained a religious festival in Ireland and the annual parade in Dublin, seen here in 1905, was mostly a religious procession, often led by the St. John's Total Abstinence and Benefit Society.  Now the parade is an American style extravaganza awash in Kelly Green, dancing leprechauns, shamrocks, and scantily clad girls.  General rowdiness is the rule of the day, largely due to the large annual pilgrimages to the Auld Sod by Irish Americans, now generations removed from the island.
 

Acknowledging the elephant in the room—today is the Feast of St. Patrick, originally a low-key religious celebration in the Auld Sod. In the U.S. it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is, as they say, a whole other kettle of fish. For better or worse this quasi-holiday is an Irish American phenomenon. Let’s trace the metamorphosis from religiosity to ethnic muscle flexing, to Irish nationalism, to partisan political display, to equal opportunity public drinking festival. 

 

It all began on March 17, 1762 with the very first St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere in the world. Irish soldiers in a British regiment headquartered in New York City marched behind their musicians and drew cheers from the small local Irish minority, both Catholic and Protestant—mostly Protestant in those days. It became if not an annual event, one which was observed most years. When the Redcoats left the city at the end of the American Revolution various local Irish mutual aid societies like the Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick held often competing events which, if they happened to intersect, sometimes devolved into brawls. 

 

After the United Irishmen uprising of 1798 was crushed by the British imposing a harsh repression including the banning of the wearing o’ the Green, a new wave of Irish refugees flooded New York, Boston, and other eastern cities. They inoculated the annual St. Patrick’s Day observances with a new political significance and wearing green (instead of the traditional Irish colors of blue and gold) became a protest against British rule in the homeland and a call to action to overthrow that rule. 

 

In trying to market to Irish Americans, not everyone got it right.  This tone deaf greeting card featured the pug-nosed Irish stereotypes featured in Know Nothing and anti-immigrant publications.  The figure on the left has a sash identifying him as a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.  The one on the right supposedly is from a competing organization that had frequently brawled with the AOH for supremacy on St. Patrick's Day.
 

The Potato Famine unleashed yet another wave of immigration bringing throngs of displaced peasants to the already growing slums of the city. Competing Irish aid societies finally decided to unite behind a single, massive demonstration in New York in 1848. The theme of independence for Ireland was mixed with an act of aggressive defiance by the now largely Catholic masses against the nativists from Tammany Hall who controlled the city government, the Know Nothings, and street gangs who harassed and bullied them. In 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was organized in the United States in support the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret oath society agitating for the establishment of a “democratic Irish republic.” The St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and other cities became powerful recruiting tools for the Fenians. Social events around the day annually raised thousands of dollars, much of it to support fantastic plots and buy arms. On more than one occasion Fenian plots to attack Canada brought the U.S. and Britain perilously close to war, which, of course was the objective.

 

 

By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city.

The failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 in which labor leader James Connolly, fresh from several years in America as an IWW organizer, and an Irish-American unit of Hibernian Rifles were both involved, led to a fresh round of frenzied support for independence back home. The campaign of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the Irish Civil War between the Free State government and republican rebels were both largely financed by Irish Americans. Even after the establishment of the Republic in 1937, Irish-Americans continued to fund rebel groups aimed at uniting Ulster to the rest of the island, including support for Sein Fein and the Provisional IRA in their armed struggle through The Troubles. All of this was reflected in the parades and other celebrations of the day which had become dominated by Rebel songs. 

 

Traditional Irish music and step dancing were nearly eradicated by Britain's policy of cultural genocide but were preserved and nurtured by American clubs and societies like this mid-20th Century step dancing group.  Dancing academies are now staples of St. Patrick's day parades and Knights of Columbus corned beef and cabbage dinners.
 

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations also were important displays of Irish culture. Traditional Irish music and dance were so suppressed at home that both nearly disappeared. Irish-Americans like Chicago’s Police Chief Francis O’Neill collected and preserved the songs and began schools to teach them and traditional Irish step dancing. Both were re-introduced into Irish culture as a result of these efforts and put on display in St. Patrick’s Day parades, banquets, and concerts. 

 

Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Alber Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position.  Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder
 

The Irish also excelled at political organization in this country. Unlike other ethnic groups with large concentrations like the Germans, they were able to create viable political organizations with alliances with other ethnic groups that allowed them to control many city governments for decades. In Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley brought the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, previously a South Side neighborhood event, to the heart of the Loop and dyed the Chicago River green every year in a display of political power. Politicians of all ethnicities jockeyed to be as close as possible to Hizonor in the front ranks of the parade. 

 

By the late 20th Century St. Patrick’s Day had spread well beyond its ethnic roots. Everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day became a byword pushed by breweries, bars, and distilleries making it one of the biggest party days of the year. Green beer and vomiting teenagers have become new symbols of the holiday. 

 

The semi-legendary Saint whose feast day is the occasion of all of the hoopla.  He wasn't Irish and did not drive the snakes out of the island--they never lived there to begin with. 

 

And what about St. Patrick? Well, what about him!

All About a Fallen Woman and the First Great American Novel

 

The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merlem 1861. Hester Prynne and daughter Pearl are in the foreground and Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth can be seen dimly in the background at left.

 

 

On March 16, 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, widely regarded as the first great American novel was issued by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, the publisher of choice for the New England transcendentalist literary elite. 

 

Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a member of an old family that, much to his chagrin and embarrassment, included one of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials. He later added a w to the spelling of the family name in a vain attempt to disguise the connection. 

 

After his sea captain father died when he was two, his family sent him to be fostered with wealthy local relatives who saw that the boy was educated Bowden College in Maine, which aspired to be the Harvard of the North and which was considerably cheaper than the Harvard of Massachusetts. Among his classmates were lifelong friends Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce.  A shy and brooding young man, but strikingly handsome, he wished only to write. 

 

Despite a receding hair line, Nathaniel Hawthorne was still matinee idol handsome in this 1848 Daguerreotype taken two years before the publication of his masterpiece.

A Democrat in ultra-Whig Massachusetts he was able to secure political appointments at the Boston Custom House to support himself as he wrote. He published an undistinguished first novel anonymously and sold short stories to various literary magazines. His first collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales drew local interest in Boston. He began to move in the intellectual orbit of the emerging Transcendentalists. Hawthorne courted Elizabeth, the eldest of the brilliant Peabody Sisters, but to everyone’s surprise, especially the heart broken Elizabeth, proposed to her frail sister Sophia, an artist. 

 

 The Peabodys were always in a condition of dire genteel poverty. Hawthorne decided to raise money for his marriage by investing $1000 and joining the Brook Farm community. He was put in charge of the manure pile. It was not a happy experience and he soon departed. He later satirized the community in his Blithedale Romance. 

 

Sofia and Hawthorne married in 1842 anyway and moved to the epicenter of Transcendentalist life, Concord where they lived for three years in The Old Manse, later the home of Longfellow. While there he completed a second story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse. The couple were madly in love and devoted to each other. 

 

In 1846 with the return to power of the Democrats in Washington, Hawthorne got the lucrative appointment as Inspector of Revenue at the Port of Salem. The move back to his—and Sophia’s—hometown was a mixed blessing. On one hand his growing family was secure. On the other hand, the dreary duties of the custom house sapped his energy for writing. But he did have time to explore the legacy of Puritan morality. When the Whig’s return ousted him from his position, he turned those musings into The Scarlet Letter. 

 

The shocking tale of the noble but fallen Hester Prynne and the tormented Rev. Dimmsdale, a sexually predatory preacher who was the cause of Hester’s shame, was a literary sensation and one of the first American best sellers. More than 2,500 copies flew off bookstore shelves in the first ten days. 

 

Hawthorne moved his family to a farmhouse near Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts to dedicate himself to writing. While there he met and became fast friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the physician, wit, and poet, and Herman Melville, to whom he became a mentor. During these years he completed The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and his collection of classic mythology for children, The Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. 

 

The Wayside, formerly the Concord home of Bronson Alcott and his family including young Louisa May, was twice Hathorne's home.

 

Summer in the mountains were pleasant but Winter was brutal and lonely. The family moved once again, this time back to Concord into the old home of Bronson Alcott where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were neighbors and close friends. He named the house The Wayside. He also found time to complete a campaign biography for old pal Franklin Pierce. 

 

When Pierce won the Presidency, Hawthorne was rewarded with appointment as United States Consul in Liverpool. After his appointment lapsed when the Pierce administration ended, Hawthorne and Sophie made the grand tour of Europe before returning to Concord and the Wayside. He completed and published The Marble Faun in 1860 and was working sporadically on several other romances. 

 

But Hawthorne’s health was failing. In 1864 Pierce took him back to the Berkshires to restore his health. Hawthorne died there with his old friend at his bedside at Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 18, 1864. At his funeral in Concord Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, and Holmes were among his pallbearers. Sophia died in London seven years later. In 2006 her remains and those of their daughter Una were relocated to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord and laid next to Hawthorn’s. 

 

The Scarlet Letter became a staple of 20th Century high school English classes, although it has increasingly been protested by fundamentalist parents who think that Hester got just what was coming to her, the little slut, and sometimes banned by timid or rightwing dominated school boards. 

 

Meanwhile being branded by a scarlet letter became a widely used cultural metaphor for public shaming and mob mentality bullying. 

 

Perhaps the most memorable of all of the film versions of Hawthorne's masterpiece was the MGM silent starring the ever-suffering Lillian Gish.  Here she is condemned in a mob scene before a castle-like building unlike anything found in old Salem.
 

The semi-salacious nature of the plot made it a natural for several stage and film adaptations. The first movie version was a 1911 one reel film with King Baggot, Lucille Young, and William Robert Daly shifted the focus to Baggot, then a major star, as the tortured Dimmsdale. Hester fared better in the third version released in 1926 as a prestige MGM feature with their biggest melodrama star, Lillian Gish. Colleen Moore, Hardie Albright, and Henry B. lWalthal, the star of Birth of a Nation, were featured in the first sound version, a 1934 release shot on location at Salem’s Pioneer Village. German director Wim Wenders made a European film starring Senta Berger in 1973 which has seldom been shown in the United States. 

 

In 1995 Demi Moore, Gary Oldman, and Robert Duval headlined a star studded cast. But the film took great liberties with the novel and was roundly mocked—the film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 14% approval rating, based on 35 reviews. It won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Remake or Sequel and Moore was nominated for Worst Actress. 

 

There was also a PBS miniseries made by WBGH in Boston in 1979 as an answer to the tony BBC costume/literary dramas that dominated the public airways. The production featured Meg Foster, John Heard, and Kevin Conway. 

 

And inevitably there were porn versions and take offs. Yes, you can see up-close and personal just how Hester earned the A.

The Day George Washington Stared Down a Coup

Washington's Newbugh Address quashed a coup d' etat against Congress and military rule. 

The American Revolution in the military sense was essentially over in March of 1783 except for minor skirmishes and associated Indian warfare on the far western frontier. Everyone was waiting for Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in faraway Paris to conclude a final peace treaty. George Washington’s victorious Continental Army had to be held together just in case talks broke down or a change in ministry in London decided to take another crack at subduing the wayward former colonies.

 

A dysfunctional government run collectively by a fractious Congress under the terms of the Articles of Confederation and without direct power of taxation was unable to pay its troops—even its officers, and scarcely able to deliver to the Army basic provisions for survival. The Army was idle and hungry. An idle, hungry army is a very dangerous thing. 

 

Afterwards other revolutions won by rebel armies after protracted wars would come to similar cross roads. It almost never ended well. Usually the victorious General would place himself at the head of his troops and overthrow what civil revolutionary authority there was, declaring himself President, Dictator, or Monarch and consolidating his power by lavishing the spoils of war on his officers and men. Other times revolution devolved into bitter civil war. Almost never did it end with civil government intact and hardly a shot fired in anger. One man, General Washington himself, prevented calamity in one of the most important acts of his distinguished career and one that is little remembered today. This is what happened. 

 

Washington's Headquarters at Newburgh.

 

The bulk of the Army had been encamped at Newburgh, New York to keep the British Army under close surveillance and bottled up in New York City since March of 1782. As another winter approached, all eyes turned to Congress where proposals to provide pensions when the Army was disbanded were being debated. 

 

In 1780, to squelch earlier discontent among the troops, Congress had pledge to, on the model of the British, put all officers on half-pay for the rest of their lives. Now the treasury, such as it was, was empty and with no power to compel the states to fund the Confederation government, there was no way to make good on that promise. Worse, in January Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris announced that the coffers were empty and that he was suspending paying the Army. Previously Morris, a financier and one of the wealthiest men in the new nation, had met such emergencies by personally guaranteeing notes—and buying many of them himself. That he refused to do so at this juncture was part a plan of a faction of Congress known as the Nationalists to put pressure on the new government to assert limited powers of taxation, notably the ability to levy an import duty or impost. This was bitterly opposed by a larger block of Congress and many states had passed instructions to their delegates forbidding them to vote in favor of payments of pensions fearing that it would force the adoption of taxation. 

 

The Nationalists who included Morris, Gouverneur Morris of New York, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton who had left the Army to take a seat in Congress from New York, backed the impost plan not only to meet obligations to the Army, but to pay the many debts of Congress amassed during the Revolution. They hoped that a possible crisis involving the Army might force Congress to move. They were in more or less confidential communication with officers in the Army, including some senior commanders. 

 

Among those was one of Washington’s favorite officers, General Henry Knox, who was encouraged to draft a memorial to Congress signed by other senior officers of such impressive stature that they could not be dismissed as mere malcontents. After expressing dissatisfaction with the suspension of pay, the memorial offered a compromise on the pension issue. Instead of half pay for a life time, they indicated the Army would be satisfied with a lump sum payment. It concluded with a not very veiled threat that “that any further experiments on their [the army’s] patience may have fatal effects.” Private messages were also sent to Secretary of War Benjamin Lincoln, himself recently out of the Army and the officer delegated by Washington to receive the surrender of the British at Yorktown, which made clear the dangerous state of moral in the Army. 

 

The memorial was delivered to Congress by General Alexander McDougall and Colonels John Brooks and Matthias Ogden in late December 1782. McDougall and Brooks lingered in Philadelphia to lobby Congress and monitor the situation. They met with a special committee in early January to explain the seriousness of the situation. That committee reported to the whole body on January 22 at which time Robert Morris shocked Congress by announcing his resignation in despair of the body acting. The nationalists twice tried to pass legislation calling for pensions at full pay to end on a specific date as an alternative to the original lifetime half pay or the Army’s immediate lump sum. On February 4 Congress rejected the proposal for the second time. 

 

Brooks hastened back to Newburgh to rally the officer corps for more decisive action. McDougall wrote Knox under the significant pseudonym Brutus suggested that the Army refuse to disband when peace was announced until their demands were met. That action would be virtual mutiny in the face of an order from Congress to demobilize. Knox was sympathetic but non-committal. 

 

Meanwhile other dissenting forces in the Army became involved. That included the staff of Washington’s chief rival General Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga and a clique of younger officers long dissatisfied with Washington’s leadership and outside the thrall of the cult of personal loyalty to him. Nationalists in Congress may have believed that these officers might be the core of a coup d’état should it become necessary. 

 

By mid-February rumors that a peace treaty was at hand swirled around both the capital in Philadelphia and the camp in Newburgh, bring the situation closer to crisis. Hamilton wrote privately to Washington, his patron in the Army and who was said to regard him like the Marquis de Lafayette as a son. Taking advantage of the relationship, Hamilton warned the General of the dangers in his camp and urged him to “take the direction” of the army’s anger—in other words be ready to assume command of a coup against Congress. Shocked, Washington wrote back that he sympathized with the plights of both the Army and of Congress but flatly said that he would be no part of a plan to use the Army as a threat to the civil government in contradiction to the republican principles on which the war had been conducted.

 

Washington's trusted and loyal chief of artillery, Major General Henry Knox dashed plotters' hopes when he refused to participate in or lead a refusal of the Army to disband and menace Congress.
 

On February 21 Knox dashed the hopes of Congressional Nationalists who had hoped that he would lend his prestige to a threat not to disband the Army undoubtedly after consultation with Washington. In letters he expressed again sympathy for the Army’s plight but declared he would not participate in any mutiny or revolt and expressed the hope that the Army would only be used “against the Enemies of the Liberties in America.” 

 

Without the support of Washington and Knox—indeed with their declared opposition—the Nationalists turned their attention to Gates as their best bet for a man on a white horse. They sent Gates a signal of their support should he decide to move with Pennsylvania Colonel Walter Stewart, returning to duty after an illness. He arrived at camp on March 8 and met with Gates. Rumors about an impending demonstration of some kind swirled through the camp. On March 10 an unsigned letter, later attributed to Major John Armstrong, Jr. who was an aide to Gates, began circulating in camp calling for a meeting of field grade officers the next day, March 11 at 11 am. 

 

As soon as Washington got wind of it he denounced the “disorderly... and irregular nature” of the anonymously called meeting in his general orders of the day the morning of the 11th. Without explicitly banning the meeting, he proposed his own meeting of officers on March 15. The letter was carefully worded to give the impression that Washington himself would not attend. Instead, he directed the meeting to be chaired by the “senior officer present” knowing full well that would be Gates. 

 

Major General Horatio Gates, the victor at the turn-the-tide Battle of Saratoga, chaired the Newbugh meeting of rebellious officers and was apparently prepared to assume command of a mutinous Army if Washington would not. 

 

The next day a second anonymous letter appeared claiming that Washington’s endorsement of a meeting on the 15th was a signal the General would support a threat in force to Congress. Washington was furious. 

 

For the next three days the camp was awash in rumors and whispered plot. On the appointed time on Saturday, March 15 the officers assembled in the New Building or Temple which had just been constructed and was the largest facility in camp capable of holding such a meeting. As expected, Gates took the chair. Shortly after he called the meeting to order, Washington suddenly and unexpectedly appeared and asked permission to address the assembly. 

 

His sudden appearance caused quite a stir—and for one of the few times in his experience in the Army the greeting was not unanimously adulatory. Younger officers and those who had not personally served close to him hooted and jeered. Gates must have been none to glad to see his commander but had no choice but to allow him to speak. 

 

Washington asked for permission to address the meeting--he could hardly have been denied.

 

Washington came to the front of the room and turned to face his officers. He gave a short speech with unusual heat and passion, a departure from his carefully cultivated image of lofty probity. He had carefully drafted the statement but gave it without notes as if extemporaneously. He called upon the assembly to oppose anyone “who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.” 

 

Then he drew sheets of paper folded in half length-wise from inside his coat. It was a letter from a member of Congress. He fumbled with the paper and seemed to have difficulty reading it. He then drew from another pocket a new pair of spectacles. Almost no one except his closest aides had yet seen him wear them. He slowly unfolded them and perched them unsteadily on his nose. 

 

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Many of the officers wept. The sympathy and sentiment of the room swung immediately to Washington. After reading the letter, which really added little to the issue at hand, the General bowed and left the building without waiting for a response. He didn’t have to wait.

 

The conspiracy or potential coup or whatever had been afoot collapsed. A motion was made to denounce the anonymous letters. It passed virtually unanimously with only Colonel Timothy Pickering protesting. Other motions affirmed the loyalty of the Army. A committee consisting of General Knox and Colonel Brooks was appointed to draft a final resolution which expressed the “utmost confidence” of the Army in Congress and the “disdain and abhorrence” for the irregular proposals circulated earlier. 

 

Washington's spectacles--the key prop in a bit of business that swung sympathy and loyalty to him. 

 

How much of the proceedings that morning was carefully stage-managed in advance by Washington and Knox and how much was happy accident is hotly debated by historians. I am in the camp that recognizes Washington as a brilliant tactician. The old fox knew exactly what he was doing. The speech went down in history as the Newburgh Address, but it was a bit of stage business that carried the day.

 

Meanwhile Washington sent copies of both the anonymous letters and his address to Congress, which was debating, yet again, the pension issue. Even steadfast opponents now realized how narrowly disaster had been averted. The Nationalists saw an opportunity. They advised the creation of a committee to study the intelligence and come up with a solution. Shrewdly, they stacked the committee with steadfast opponents of any pension plan. But presented with mounting evidence of deep dissatisfaction in the Army and the prospect that in the future Washington might not be able to so deftly turn aside open rebellion, one anti-pension delegate, Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut,  came forward with a proposal for a lump-sum payment, including arrears pay. 

 

As finally approved, the pension plan called for half-pay for five years, mirroring the solution proposed by Knox and twice rejected before. The payment was not in cash, but in government bonds, highly speculative securities many thought would be worthless. Many officers sold their bonds to speculators for pennies on the dollar. But those who held onto the bonds were made whole. Thanks to the adoption of the Constitution, the new ability of the nation to levy import duties and taxes, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s determination to fully pay off all of the Revolutionary War debt, the bonds were redeemed by the government at full value in 1790. 

 

But Congress was not yet out of the woods. Discontent spread to the still uncompensated non-commissioned officers and there was some minor rioting in camp and talk of marching on Philadelphia to claim their back pay. Once again the specter of the Army refusing to disband was raised. 

 

 

Robert Morris stepped up with $800,000 in personal notes to pay non-commissioned officers and enlisted men three months pay to encourage them to obey and order to disband after victory was concerned.  His sacrifices contributed to his financial failure  and he was sent to debtor's prison after the war.

 

On April 19, eight years to the day since the Battles of Lexington and Concord, with news of a final Peace Treaty confirmed, Washington declared the war over. Congress quickly ordered him to disband the Army and voted each enlisted man and non-commissioned officer three months’ pay. Since there were still no funds in the treasury, Robert Morris stepped up $800,000 in notes on his personal accounts to the troops. 

 

Many soldiers, in need of cash just to get home, sold their notes to speculators at deep discounts. The notes, whether retained by the soldiers or by the speculators were also paid off by Hamilton. Soldiers left camp over the next few months either on a furlough from which they never expected to be recalled or outright discharged. 

 

The notes were given them upon their separation. This caused difficulties when a Pennsylvania regiment was swept by rumors that they would be discharged before getting their notes. They departed camp and marched on Philadelphia in June, sending Congress scurrying to Princeton, New Jersey. There is evidence that some supporters of the Newburgh plot also had a hand in this dangerous mini-uprising including Walter Stewart, John Armstrong, and Gouverneur Morris. 

 

But the crisis passed. The Army was formally disbanded in November except for small garrisons at West Point and on the frontier. Washington went to New York City where he was given a hero’s public welcome and met for one last time with his officers, including many of the players in the Newburgh affair, for an emotional farewell at the Fraunces Tavern. Then he retired to his Virginia plantation, disappointing those who hoped he would become king and they his hereditary nobles.

 

Robert Morris stepped up with $800,000 in personal notes to pay non-commissioned officers and enlisted men three months pay to encourage them to obey and order to disband after victory was concerned.  His sacrifices contributed to his financial failure  and he was sent to debtor's prison after the war. 

 

Perhaps the saddest fate of all of those involved, except for Hamilton who died in that infamous duel with Vice President Aaron Burr, was that of Robert Morris. He had expended much of his personal wealth for the cause. To recoup his losses in 1791 he contracted with Massachusetts to purchase what is now essentially all of Western New York west of the Genesee River for $333,333.33. There were other deals involving land in and around Washington, DC and in the South, as well as contracts on Virginia tobacco for sale in France. First the French Revolution erupted destroying his market there and leaving him deeply in debt for annual commitments to purchase the tobacco. Then a financial panic in 1797 left him land rich and cash poor, unable to pay his many creditors. He lost most of his land and was actually held for two and a half years in debtor’s prison. 

 

Congress passed the temporary Bankruptcy Act of 1800, in part, to get Morris out of prison. In ill health, he spent the rest of his life in a modest Philadelphia home in retirement. He died in 1809.

 

The United States of America got and kept, for what it is worth, a Constitutional republic and a military subservient to an elected civilian government. But it was a closer thing than you probably imagined.