Music is a language that helps us process loss. Throughout 2020, Americans have had to call on that language time and again as more than 223,000 of our fellow citizens have lost their lives to COVID. Overall, “25% of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household was laid off or lost their job because of the coronavirus outbreak, with 15% saying this happened to them personally.” On top of this health and economic crisis, we are facing the potential loss of our democracy to minority rule.
So many have suffered personal losses during this year, holes in their lives that shake their soul. For those who find nurture in roots, country, folk, and acoustic music, the death of singer/songwriter John Prine to COVID early in the pandemic still creates a void that is difficult to fill.
But we try.
Thankfully, music provides a way to remember lives and process loss. For this Saturday Soundtrack, I want to focus on the remembrance of a song that, in itself, is about loss: John Prine’s Paradise, from his remarkable first album.
Paradise, located in Muhlenberg County, is Kentucky’s most famous ghost town…thanks to Prine’s musical tale. In his telling, Paradise is well-named, until the arrival of Peabody Coal Company and strip mining. But that wasn’t the only negative impact on the community. Ash from the Paradise Fossil Plants began “pouring from the air like warm, toxic snow” according to one account. The Tennessee Valley Authority stepped forward and convinced the remaining townsfolk to vacate their community, paying them “miniscule amounts to abandon their once happy lives in Paradise.”
I’ve mentioned this song before in my writings, and I was delighted to come across a deeply moving tribute to John, posted earlier this month, by some of my favorite musicians and performers as they sing one of his best-known tunes.
This celebration premiered October 3rd on, “Let The Music Play On”: A Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Broadcast, featuring many of John’s friends. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is a Bay Area institution in San Francisco and Prine was a regular. His full sets from 2014 and 2017 are available to watch on the HSB website.
The artists in the tribute range from a handful of our most cherished roots musicians to some of the youngest and most innovative performers of our times. These are the type of people who are attracted to John’s music and his sensitivities as a songwriter. As you watch the video you will see in the order of appearance*:
The roots music band Birds of Chicago (with Allison Russell, also of Our Native Daughters, playing the clarinet) (0:00 and again at 0:30)
Then everyone comes back in and out to take it home.
“When I was a child my family would travel / Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born / And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered / So many times that my memories are worn.
[Chorus:] And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay / Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Well, sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River /To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill / Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols / But empty pop bottles was all we would kill. [Chorus]
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel / And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land / Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken / Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man. [Chorus]
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River / Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam / I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’ / Just five miles away from wherever I am.” [Chorus]
Paradise is, of course, a song about loss. Loss of youthful innocence and the loss of our environment. In accordance with Prine’s wishes, half of his asheswere spread in Kentucky’s Green River. The other half were buried next to his parents in Chicago.
In my youth, my father took me to Paradise to see “the world’s largest (steam) shovel.” Because that’s what engineers do. I think Daddy came to the realization later in life that Prine’s perspective was right. When Peabody filed for bankruptcy in 2016, many stories referenced that song in their reports.
John Prine was all about the details of life in a world that was cruel at times, but also where love shows through. And those details often focused on the everyday…until he spun them around through his quirky sensibility to see the wonder around us.
Peabody Coal Company’s Steam Shovel
Enjoy this celebration of one who left too early.
More to come…
DJB
*There is no listing of the performers on the official site, so this is taken from the comments section and from my knowledge of some of these musicians.
Image: Paradise Main Street, before Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled it away
Take any old laptop, add a legally blind store owner, conveniently forget to save security camera tape from the store before it is erased, throw in some Russian disinformation, turn to Rudy Giuliani and Rupert Murdoch — two titans of disinformation — to sell your story and “boom,” just like that you have a faux scandal!
Trying to control the flow of information is one of the chief threats to democracy, and in Donald Trump we may not have a master at the art, but it isn’t for lack of trying. Attorney, professor, and author Teri Kanefield writes, “Democracy is based on rule of law, which requires a shared truth (a functioning public sphere). Fascism, to thrive, must destroy the common factuality so that myth can take hold.”
The fake Hunter Biden laptop scandal is just the latest in a long list of attempts by Donald Trump and his enablers to destroy a shared truth and create a false myth. Trump has been conning people with lies his entire life. But you know you may have lost your touch on that front when even Fox News refused to run the initial story on the Hunter Biden laptop. In a Mediaite report, Chris Wallace of Fox called the story “suspicious” and said, “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”
Let’s go back and remind ourselves of what we know about this case, as verified by multiple real news outlets.
This is not the first attempt at using Ukraine to smear Joe Biden
Last year, Donald Trump tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine into making false claims about Hunter Biden in order to discredit his father. Trump got caught, was impeached, and got away with not even a slap on the wrist from Senate Republicans.
If at first you don’t succeed…
When that scheme didn’t work, Trump then turned to Attorney General William Barr, Senate Republicans, and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani for help in digging up dirt on his likely political opponent. Barr — who also acts like Trump’s personal lawyer — tried to go the “reputable” route and spent a great deal of time and our taxpayer money working with U.S. Attorney John Durham who opened up an investigation and flew around the world in an attempt to find someone the broader public would trust who would lend the slightest credence to Trump’s incredible claims. All of Barr’s effortsseem to have come up dry. Durham’s top assistant has resigned and there’s no report worth even a patently false summary (a Barr specialty) before Election Day. Senate Republicans had a similar lack of success. A year of investigations turned up nothing.
But when you’ve stopped worrying about reputable sources, you can “find” just about anything. Ask Rudy.
The “facts” sound like a cartoon version of spycraft
Giuliani has produced a hard drive. As writer Mark Sumner summarizes it, this is “A hard drive supposedly dropped off in Delaware by a man who lived in California, at a shop owned by a vocal Trump supporter, where the security footage was mysteriously wiped, the blind shop owner could not identify the person who dropped it off, there was no name or contact information provided, and no one ever returned for it.” How very convenient.
The timing is interesting…to say the least
Rudy began pitching this story and an article on the laptop first appeared in the Rupert Murdock-owned New York Post last Wednesday. That story ran only after Rudy failed to get Fox’s news division, among others, to run his unverified story. The Post article suggests that an April 17, 2015, email from Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Republicans have long tried — without success — to tie the former VP to his son’s business interests. The Post called the email a “smoking gun.” Fact check: It was not. Although the email and acquisition of the laptop allegedly occurred some time ago, the story only dropped three weeks before the election.
The one real email hints that this may be Russian disinformation
The Fox news division was only able to confirm the veracity of one email. The inclusion of one or more “real” emails in a fake story is a tactic used by Russian intelligence operations. The Mediaite story notes that, “According to an Associated Press report, the mixing of legitimate emails with false ones was a tactic used by Russian intelligence operations in the 2017 French election. Leaked emails that were called “utterly mundane” were included to lend credibility to falsified information designed to undermineEmanuel Macron’s reelection bid.”
There’s a lot more, but basically it appears that Rudy (who has shady ties with Russian intelligence) has pulled together a totally bogus story and got his pal Rupert Murdoch to run an article at the Post. With the article now in the media, the news division at Fox could report on it and the opinion hosts at Fox — like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity — could opine away at great length. Fox can now ask Republicans to comment on it. The Post, of course, reports on the comments their story is getting on Fox. Trump retweets it and brings it up at the debate as if he’s talking about real news. A Trump campaign official will rail at PBS news hosts about why reputable news organizations won’t take this story seriously. While Donald Trump tries to create a myth that supports his strange world view, Vladimir Putin laughs.
History tells us that fake news and disinformation are long-standing American traditions. “Fake news has existed as long as American journalism has been around,” notes Jacob Soll, a professor of history at University of Southern California.
The wreckage of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor
One of the best known examples came from Cuba. When I visited the country in 2001, I wanted to make sure I visited the Havana harbor, to see where the USS Maine exploded. A massive explosion of unknown origin sunk the battleship on February 15, 1898, killing 260 of the fewer than 400 American crew members aboard. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly placing the blame on Spain. But that’s when William Randolph Hearst went to work, or at least that’s how the traditional story goes. It may be another piece of misinformation. As the Atlantic noted,
“Hearst built a media empire out of tabloids in the Gilded Age. ‘The 19th century saw the birth of the journalism baron. That’s why Hearst has Hearst Castle in California—he made that kind of money.’ Hearst, who helped instigate the Spanish-American War by publishing false stories about Spain’s persecution of the Cuban people, famously told a correspondent in Cuba, ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’”
“Within three months, the United States had decisively defeated Spanish forces on land and sea, and in August an armistice halted the fighting. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain, officially ending the Spanish-American War and granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine or act of sabotage.”
It isn’t a coincidence that one of the most famous episodes of misinformation led to the United States moving aggressively into its stage of empire. Our history with places like Puerto Rico remains very troubled in large part because we do not treat the island’s residents as full citizens of our democracy. Controlling the flow of disinformation has huge consequences that can last centuries. If we want to work toward justice and a more democratic government, we need to push for the rule of law and a shared truth.
Yesterday we took a walk through Brookside Gardens. It was a beautiful fall day, the colors were vibrant, and the air was clean. Along the path were small signs of “Garden Mindfulness” with reminders to “feel the air moving across your skin” and to “bring awareness to those parts of the body where you could feel the wind.”
“…sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After the careful walking and looking down, the stillness of arrival was deeply moving.”
In these troubled times, we are all on a difficult journey. It is important to recall that sometimes the only way is the long one. Work that is meaningful takes time and the labor continues.
We can reach our goals only when we are mindful that journeys that move us toward justice never end.
She’s a ‘nasty woman.” A “crazed, crying lowlife.” A “dog” who has the “face of a pig.” “Low I.Q.” She is “ugly both inside and out!” A “monster!”
Okay, enough already. I don’t even have to tell you who said all those things. You’ve no doubt guessed correctly.
Sexism in America, like our country’s racism, never went away. But it also never had such a vocal champion in the Oval Office. For centuries, women have taken abuse from men. For much of that time they had few rights and legal remedies to help battle oppression. Sexism and abuse continues, as we see all too well in the actions of the current president, but today women have more rights, more ways to combat mistreatment, and a power that is already being seen across the country. Winning the right to vote in 1920 gave women the opportunity to play a significant role in addressing sexism, and they are taking advantage of that power to push against one of today’s chief threats to democracy.
This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of that milestone. I was enjoying a blogging hiatus in August on the exact date of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. However, I wanted to highlight this important achievement as part of my October series on how history and the places where history happened can help us understand the issues we are facing in 2020 as a country and a democracy.
This story, like so many I share, has personal connections.
The fight to gain the franchise for women began in earnest in 1848 at the famous women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. The vote was only one of twelve rights those gathered together by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for in their Declaration of Sentiments. The vote soon became a keystone of the women’s rights movement, but it took over seven decades of never-ending work before Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment to the constitution in 1919.
Of course constitutional amendments have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states before becoming law. In 1920, there were 48 states, and the vote for ratification came down to Tennessee. If the state legislature ratified the amendment, Tennessee would be the 36th state to do so and women would be granted the right to vote. If not, then the amendment would likely die.
This story revolves around a hotel in downtown Nashville, and the role it played in the fight over ratification.
I have stayed at the Hermitage, most recently when I was speaking for a conference at another Nashville landmark, the Downtown Presbyterian Church. Both represent places in our history where a practice of hope triumphed over despair.
In 1920, sitting just across the street from the landmark William Strickland-designed state capitol, the Hermitage was a hotbed of lobbyists, plying legislators with drink and probably much more as they debated ratification.
The twenty-four-year-old Republican Harry T. Burn was a first-term legislator from East Tennessee worried about re-election. He sought to avoid having to make a decisive decision on ratification, and twice voted to table the amendment after heated debate on a hot, muggy August day. But the moves to table the amendment, which would effectively kill it, ended up in a 48-48 tie. The House Speaker, an adamant opponent to women’s suffrage, called for an up-or-down vote.
Burn was in a quandary. He wanted to avoid having to go on the record, in order to help ensure his re-election. Yet he believed in the right of women to vote. More importantly, he had a letter in his pocket that he’d just received from his mother, Febb Burn, a strong-willed widow of a farmer who followed the women’s suffrage debate from their family home by reading four newspapers and a dozen magazines. Mrs. Burn would later tell a reporter, “Suffrage has interested me for years.” True to her strong feelings on the topic, she added that she liked the militants in the movement just as much as she did other, more conciliatory suffragists advocating for the cause.
But after having read a barrage of bitter speeches opposing giving women the franchise and realizing that her son’s constituents in McMinn County were fiercely in opposition to women’s suffrage, Mrs. Burn felt compelled to force the issue. She sat down in her front porch chair and penned a few lines in one of the most famous — or at least most effective — mother-to-son letters in history. She wrote:
“Dear Son, … Hurrah and vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. … I’ve been waiting to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet…. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. (Carrie Chapman) Catt with her “Rats.” Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha! With lots of love, Mama.”
Burn thought about that letter and the fact that all of the illiterate, uninformed male tenants on the family farm could vote; yet the intelligent, feisty, college educated widow and successful farmer who was his mother could not.
The pro-ratification lobbyists at the Hermitage, wearing yellow roses to signify their position, had almost lost hope. Burn, who wore a red rose on his jacket lapel, the symbol of the anti-ratification crowd, was not expected to change his vote. Yet seven decades of hope-filled action led a mother in rural Tennessee to call on her son to “be a good boy” and make the moral choice.
And he did.
Newspaper accounts of the day report that the “antis” were up-in-arms over Burn’s change of heart to the “rats”. He dropped his red rose to the floor and affixed a yellow one, offered by a fellow legislator, to his lapel. Burn was accused of everything from accepting bribes to being a “traitor to manhood’s honor.” To defend himself, Burn penned a short note for the House Recordthat gave the reason for his changed vote.
“I believe in full suffrage as a right” he states at the beginning, and then connects that with what he sees as the moral and legal right to ratify. Burns also saw the moment as one made for history, appreciating the fact “that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free seventeen million women from political slavery was mine.” Burn wanted to bring glory to his party with his vote.
And perhaps, with a conviction that makes this political decision such a warm and personal story, he notes, “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
Harry Burn added a comment about the Anglo-Saxon purity of East Tennessee Republicans, showing that he was a man of his time. Nonetheless, he stepped beyond some of the constraints of his age to free white women from “political slavery.” Many African American women would have to wait for the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to take advantage of the franchise.
Burn reportedly stopped by the Hermitage Hotel to express his appreciation to the suffragists who had held out hope against despair, before moving to another hotel where he sought to escape anti-attacks and public abuse. The good news moral of the story is that despite a strong lobbying effort by the anti-suffragists to defeat him, Burn was re-elected later that fall.
Here we are, 100 years later, and women are now leading the fight against those who would kill our democracy and end the right of women to control their own bodies. The numbers are strong, but the shift of men in their support from Trump to Biden showcases one of the ongoing challenges America has with sexism in politics. As William Galston writes for the Brookings Institution:
“If the 2020 election results confirm these survey findings, we will have to rethink the role of gender in recent elections. One hypothesis has been that Trump’s often crude and sexist behavior turned women off from Trump early on. And there’s no doubt that that has been part of the answer to this puzzle. But when we look back at these two races, the key point may not be women’s disaffection from Trump in 2020, but rather men’s antipathy to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Women in politics and journalism report high levels of threats against them; many containing violent sexual references. Just this week law authorities in Michigan arrested 13 people in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Governor of Michigan and one of only 9 female Governors.
In focusing on the dynamics of race and class in the emergence of populism, have we underestimated the continuing power of sexism directed against women who refuse to conform to the gender script?”
My answer to Galston’s question is “absolutely.” Women may have had the vote for 100 years, but sexism remains an issue in our democracy, just as it was when Harry Burn was accused of being a “traitor to manhood’s honor.” Maintaining a traditional hierarchy and control over women is often seen as much more important than maintaining a democracy.
Places like the Hermitage Hotel help tell the story of our history, both personal and collectively. They provide touchstones to the memories that flow through the brick, mortar, wood, and landscapes. And they support hope that is grounded in memory. A hope for religious liberty as at Downtown Presbyterian, or a hope for universal suffrage, as at the Hermitage. In the end, Harry Burn followed his mother’s advice and sided with the ratification forces headquartered at the Hermitage Hotel. And millions of women now honor Febb Burn for her feistiness and courage to speak out then, as millions are doing today by pushing — and voting — to keep our democracy alive.
In my journey to write with clarity and passion, I often turn to what others have to say. I look for inspiration in works such as Yale’s Why I Writeseries.
Writing should be easy, you say. Just turn on the computer and start typing, right? Or go old school, pull out the legal pad, and put pen to paper. Easy peasy.
Getting a bad first draft can be fairly effortless for me. I did it with this short post, for instance. In a rush, I unfortunately called it a day and hit publish. Wrong decision.
Writing well, as opposed to simply writing, is hard.
Understanding why one is compelled to write can be an even more difficult journey. In many ways, each of us needs to answer that particular question, which differs individual to individual, before good writing truly begins to sing.
I came to pick up the slim volume entitled Devotionby the musician and author Patti Smith because I was looking for inspiration and answers to those questions of how and why.
As I read what other writers have to say on the topic, not every choice is a winner; not every path should be followed. Thankfully, at 93 pages, Smith’s offering was short enough to digest in one setting without going down too many unproductive pathways. I generally refrain from posting reviews of books that do not move or inspire me. There are too many good works where I would prefer to direct your attention. But I’ll make an exception in this case. I can quickly move through what I found in Smith’s Devotion and then send you in the direction of works I believe will be more helpful.
Devotion is designed to give the reader a glimpse into Smith’s creative process. The first third — called “How the Mind Works” — reads more like “a week in the life of Patti Smith” while traveling around Europe visiting with her publisher and writing on trains. There is a great deal of what one reviewer described as “overblown language, artistic reverence, and pseudo-revelatory style.” She ends up in England at the grave of Simone Weil and writes a poem about it.
The section which follows — “Devotion” — is a short story about a young skater and her possessive suitor that comes across as dreamy, shallow, tedious, and somewhat creepy. I’ll just leave it at that.
The final section, “A Dream Is Not A Dream,” has Smith as a guest of honor in the Camus family villa. She takes in the beautiful landscape, is granted access to the handwritten manuscript of his unfinished novel The First Man, reads through it, and then ends the book with the question “Why do we write?” Her answer: “Because we cannot simply live.” True, and perhaps even inspiring. But you wouldn’t know it by the book that leads up to that final line.
In the end, Devotion could not fulfill, for me, the promise made in Why I Write. The Yale series asks the authors to explain the motivation that drives their work. Why write is an important question, and one worth exploring. For some, it may be for as simple a reason as that found in Paul Graham’s short essay Writing, Briefly:
“I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”
I first became aware of The Steel Wheels somewhere around 2008. I had picked up a CD of the Shenandoah Valley-based band on one of our Thanksgiving trips to Staunton and was introduced to and intrigued by the unique voice and careful songcraft of lead singer and songwriter Trent Wagler.
But it was at Merlefest in 2012 that the band pushed their way into the front part of my brain, and, I suspect, the brains of thousands of other music fans as well. After one of the main acts wrapped up their show, as I wrote at the time, a number of attendees were exiting the main stage area on the first night of the festival. Suddenly, The Steel Wheels began singing their powerful Rain in the Valley on a small side stage. And like bees flowing to honey, those leaving stopped, turned around, and were glued to their seats through a spirited 30-minute set.
As expected, later TSW shows throughout the weekend were packed, as word spread fast. And just like that, they quickly jumped up into my consciousness.
The band is based out of Harrisonburg where several of them met during their college years. In addition to Wagler, who handles the lead vocals, banjo, and guitar, the band consists of Jay Lapp on mandolin, guitar, more recently electric guitar, and vocals; Brian Dickel on bass and vocals; fiddler and vocalist Eric Brubaker; and the most recent addition, Kevin Joaquin Garcia, on percussion and keyboards. The band is coming up on its 10th album, and has — since 2013 — curated and produced their own festival in Mount Solon, Virginia. I’ve attended their Red Wing Roots Music Festival several times since that inaugural year, and it is always a treat.
I’m posting some of my favorite TSW tunes for this Saturday Soundtrack in the hopes you’ll enjoy the selections. We’ll begin with some of their older material like the beautiful Halfway to Heaven, the funky Breakin’ Like the Sun, and the wistful The End of the World Again:
Here TSW take an extended instrumental jam on Long Way to Go.
Next we’ll move into some of the band’s later tunes, including the title cut from their album Wild As We Came Here, the tune Scrape Me Off the Ceiling, one of their newer cuts, Broken Mandolin, and a cover of The Shape I’m In from Vol. 2 of their live album set.
I’ll end this exploration with The Steel Wheels take on the great bluegrass/gospel tune Working on a Building.
The Steel Wheels always deliver an energetic and entertaining live show. Catch them when touring begins again. Until then, enjoy what you can find online or on your favorite music streaming platform.
More to come…
DJB
Image of The Steel Wheels at Red Wing Roots Music Festival by DJB
Folk songs often bring us to the intersection of place, history, and memory. In certain cases, digging into those songs gives us a chance to recover the true stories, long-hidden, from our past, bringing a reckoning with the history that did happen and a reimagining for our collective future.
Recently, The Bitter Southernerposted a thoughtful article which examines how the popular folk tune Swannanoa Tunnel was taken from the wrongfully convicted black community in Western North Carolina. Forced to build the railroad tunnel as convict labor during the Jim Crow era, those convicts originally wrote the tune in the “hammer song” tradition of John Henry.
“Beneath the popular folk song…and beneath the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina, is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation. As our nation reckons with systematic racial violence, the story of this song points to the unmarked graves of the hundreds of wrongfully convicted Black people who died building the tunnel.”
Kevin Kehrberg and Jeffrey A. Keith, a musicologist and a historian, tell how the song’s original history has been recovered and the recordings repatriated with the descendants of the original artists.
For those who care about how recovered histories can help us understand and honor the full American story, Kehrberg and Keith demonstrate how something as simple as a folk song can lead to richer understandings of our past.
(NOTE: During October, I am writing articles on how history and the places where history happened can help us understand the issues we are facing as a country and a democracy. Besides this story of wrongful imprisonment and racial violence, you can find posts on the use of misinformation, religious liberty, voter suppression, and revealed history, in addition to a book review on how democracies die by clicking on the links.)
In following coverage of the fight over the Supreme Court*, don’t worry if you have become confused about the concept of religious liberty. Those making the most noise either do not understand — or do not want to understand — this fundamental First Amendment right enshrined in the Constitution. People who should know better often sow confusion around the history and meaning of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Before we go all 2020 and take a virtual road trip to visit the places that help us see why the religious persecution faced by earlier generations led to this all-important amendment, let’s begin with a quick summary of why religious liberty is on the radar screen today.
Recently two justices on the Supreme Court couldn’t pass up the chance to comment as they joined the court’s unanimous decision not to hear the appeal of Kim Davis, a Kentucky public official who refused to issue marriage licenses because of her personal religious views against same-sex unions. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito sided with their colleagues in the decision, mind you, but Thomas used the occasion to write a four-page missive about his views of religious liberty, which I would cite as misguided at best. Alito signed on for good measure.
The decision not to hear the case was the right one. To put it simply, her religious beliefs were not the reason Davis was in court. She was in court because she refused to do her legal duty, as clerk of Rowan County, to issue lawful marriage licenses.
Thomas, however, has a history of confusion when it comes to religious liberty. In a case just last year, he suggested that state governments don’t necessarily have to honor the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses at all. The implications are staggering** and, I would add even as a non-lawyer, un-American.
Thomas, in his thoughts on the Davis case, argues that religious liberties are somehow infringed upon when they are not privileged above civil law. And here is why that is a problem:
Justice Thomas, it seems, has one particular set of religious interests in mind: those ofconservative Christians.
If you happen to be aprogressive Christian or person of faith (like me) and you favor same-sex marriagebecause it aligns with your religious beliefs(as it does with mine), those concerns somehow are never raised by Clarence Thomas.
In a Washington Post op-ed, columnist David von Drehle helps clarify the challenge when he writes,
“As he did in 2015, Thomas notes that same-sex marriage is not mentioned in the Constitution; and once again, it is an empty feint toward originalism. Opposite-sex marriage is not mentioned there, either. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, certain devout Americans, called Shakers, condemned all marriage as “whoredom.” Originalism therefore appears to teach that protection of religious freedom (for example, the right of Shakers to condemn marriage) does not extend to imposing one’s beliefs on the unenumerated rights of other citizens.”(emphasis added)
That’s exactly what the originalism of the constitution teaches. Kim Davis doesn’t believe in same-sex marriages. That’s her right. But the constitution’s First Amendment is clear that her religious beliefs cannot be imposed on others taking permissible actions under civil law.
Thomas and Alito either fundamentally disagree with that position and/or are worried about some future case where those whose religious beliefs condemn same-sex relationships will be labeled “bigots.” But the Constitution doesn’t protect people who have different religious beliefs from criticism. If I want to criticize a conservative charismatic Catholic group for suggesting that women should be subordinate to their husbands, that’s my right. Likewise, if a conservative Catholic wants to criticize the Episcopal church’s support for same-sex marriage, that’s their right. What the Constitution does is to bar courts and governments from preferring one set of religious views over any other set — or over nonreligious views. And that is important to know because any serious study of religious life in America uncovers how quickly the persecuted become the persecutors in this country.
I come by my interest in this subject naturally as my father, that rare breed of liberal Southern evangelical Christian, worked tirelessly to tell his neighbors why Baptists — of all denominations — should understand and cherish the real meaning of religious liberty.
There are many times our historic places point us to the real story behind an issue and why it is important today. This is one of them.
Our virtual road trip will help us understand that history as we visit simple wooden buildings, elegant 18th century architectural masterpieces, and soaring western landscapes where we begin to see the tip of the iceberg of the true depth and breadth of our nation’s religious heritage, and why true religious liberty is such a precious gift.
One of the widely misunderstood stories in American history is the establishment of freedom of religion and the role of tiny Rhode Island in that struggle. In numerous trips to Providence and Newport through the years, I’ve often made the time to visit landmarks of the nation’s move to ensure that all had religious freedom, including the right not to worship.
The First Baptist Church, Providence, RI – one of the landmarks of religious freedom and America’s founding upon the principle of the separation of church and state
Providence is a city, as its name suggests, that celebrates its religious history. Few communities carry off having a “Steeple” street with the historical understanding that Providence brings to its houses of worship. And the most important of those sacred places in the country’s fight for religious freedom is The First Baptist Church, Providence, which was the very first Baptist church that was established in America. Along with the National Park Service’s Roger Williams National Memorial, The First Baptist Church, Providence tells an important colonial-era story of how a persecuted religious denomination led the fight for separation of church and state.
Before Williams and his views came to prominence in Rhode Island, the colonies used traditional approaches to religious tolerance. In other words, they were intolerant. The majority religions, all Christian and usually of the Anglican or Congregational denominations, persecuted those whose faith differed from the government-sanctioned variety.
The Puritans in Massachusetts, Williams first home, were no different. Having brought their antipathy to Catholicism and Paganism with them to America, the devout Puritans, among other injustices, launched the first war on Christmas. The Bible did not sanction the holiday, which in their eyes was both papist (invented by Catholics, they believed) and pagan (in that it co-opted the winter solstice festivities of pre-Christians). And “people tended to get excessively, well, merry…” notes religious scholar Steven Waldman. In 1659 the Puritans made Christmas illegal.***
That persecution and approach to tamping down religious dissent changed with Williams and his work with Baptists and others in Rhode Island. Roger Williams and his followers were convinced that religion was a matter of conscience between an individual and their God, and the founding documents for Providence indicate a clear division between the public, civil realm and the private world of belief. The phrase “only in civil things” used in the founding documents established the principal of religious liberty that was to become the First Amendment.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was certainly influenced by Williams’ work. Madison also learned about religious freedom from personal interactions with Baptists in Virginia, near his home, Montpelier.
Virginia’s Baptists were very much persecuted by the ruling Anglican church. Instead of government favoring one denomination or belief, as under the Puritans/Congregationalists in New England or the Anglicans in Virginia, Madison argued that the state should neither “constrain nor coddle” religion. Madison suggested that the best way to promote religion was to leave it alone. That was then, and still remains today, a radical concept. In forging a new way for church and state to relate, Madison believed that religious liberty would arise from a “multiplicity of sects” with different denominations and religions all working to find converts and followers.
In other words, Madison wanted open competition. He also wanted rules so that the majority religions could not use their status to hold down the newer and smaller sects. The first place we see that in the colonies is in Rhode Island. It was Madison who helped make that vision part of our national values. The First Baptist Church, Providence, the Roger Williams National Memorial, and Montpelier give this history a grounding in place.
One of the important facets of religious liberty in America is how it covers all religions, plus those who do not practice any religion. So Newport, Rhode Island’s Touro Synagogue is another stop we should make on our road trip. Dedicated in 1763, Touro is the oldest synagogue building in the United States. It is a structure of “exquisite beauty and design, steeped in history and ideals.” And while it is among the most architecturally distinguished buildings of 18th century America, it stands alone as the most historically significant Jewish building in the United States.
The congregation was founded in 1658 by the descendants of Jewish families who had fled the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal, to move to the Caribbean. Those same descendants then left the Caribbean seeking the greater religious tolerance that Rhode Island offered.
By the time those families came to Newport, the “lively experiment” that differentiated Rhode Island from the other colonies was already underway. Touro’s unique place in American history came about in 1790, after the founding of the republic. In response to a letter from its congregation, President George Washington eloquently defined the new nation’s standard for religious freedom and civil liberties. He declared that America would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington was building on Madison’s foundation. Yet, while Steven Waldman describes Madison’s work as the “ingenious, counterintuitive, and often-misunderstood blueprint for the religious liberty we enjoy today,” it is work that is very much unfinished and always in contention.
One of our challenges is that many Americans leave out large percentages of our fellow citizens because they consider religious freedom only from the Christian context. And the story of our country’s intolerance can be difficult to face in light of our professed belief in freedom of religion. In the history that actually happened, as opposed to the one we often tell ourselves, African spirituality and Islam were purged from the religious practices of the slaves, creating what one scholar calls a “spiritual holocaust.” At the time of the nation’s founding, Waldman notes, about 10% of the slaves, literally hundreds of thousands of people, were Muslims. There were probably more Muslims in America at the time than Jews or Catholics.
Native American spirituality, like the fight against the spirituality of the slaves, was purged primarily with violence. And it was that spirituality and history that brought me to New Mexico, Acoma Sky City, and Mount Taylor, a site threatened by uranium mining.
Mount Taylor in New Mexico, a site threatened with uranium mining. Visible from up to 100 miles away, it is a pilgrimage site for as many as 30 Native American tribes and it has special religious significance to the Acoma people.
Mount Taylor is a stunning landscape. Often covered with snow, it is visible from up to 100 miles away, including from the 357-foot mesa that houses the oldest continuously inhabited community in America. While it is a pilgrimage site for as many as 30 Native American tribes, Mount Taylor has special religious significance to the Acoma people.
Acoma Sky City — the historic home of the pueblo — sits on the top of a mesa that rises up like the tower on a cathedral from the New Mexico landscape. I first took my daughter to see the site as a young fifth grader. After reaching the top of the mesa, we spent the next hour and a half touring the historic Mission Church of San Estevan Rey, because this is a culture where Spanish, Catholic, and Native American spirituality comes together in a melting pot. On later visits I discovered more of the richness of that tradition, including the importance of Mount Taylor. When we consider the breadth of sacred places and religious beliefs in America, most of us have to expand our view.
To expand that view, consider the wealth of information that is available for those willing to learn more of the history concerning our religious heritage and freedom of religion.
Remember the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the dozens of important court cases they fought to gain their freedom.
Learn about the change that happened with the alignment of Jews and Christians during World War II.
The fight over prayer in public schools, where the Supreme Court ruled that the majority religion doesn’t get special privileges, is a misunderstood decision, long resisted by Protestants.
Stop and consider the impacts of the entry of millions of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists into our society in terms of religious freedom.
And many changes, such as the political alliance of conservative Catholics and Evangelicals after decades of fighting each other, have come in my lifetime.
I have also witnessed the religious right’s confusion of an individual’s practice of a religion and the push by corporations and others to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals because of the religious beliefs of the owners or managers. Those corporations operate in the business sector where we all live and work under a secular system of laws, public investment, and taxation. Recently the approach taken by the majority Christian religion to cast themselves as a persecuted minority has again raised its ugly head.
Any serious consideration of life in America realizes how quickly the persecuted become the persecutors in this country. Puritans, who fled religious harassment in Europe, quickly moved to hang Quakers. Evangelical Christians, who led the way for religious freedom early in our history, have seen many of their leaders turn against it in our own time. Conservative Catholics, long vilified in America, are now working through the courts to place their religious views on a majority who disagree with their theology.
The powerful effort to demonize, marginalize, and persecute others who are not Christians “represents a disintegration of the basic compact that sustains religious freedom for everyone,” Waldman maintains. The lines of attack today against Muslims are strikingly similar to those used in the past against Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Native Americans.
James Madison decried the “unchristian timidity” of those Protestants who wanted government support to prop up their church. Christians, especially of the right-wing variety, convey an image of a petty faith and an insecure God, more focused on power than Christ-like politics.
Williams embraced freedom. We should do the same. Mount Taylor, rising above the rugged and beautiful New Mexico landscape; the First Baptist Church, Providence; and Newport’s Touro Synagogue all tell me that to believe in freedom requires, in historian John Barry’s words, “faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience.” These landmarks tell me we can do better, if we work to understand the true meaning of religious liberty.
*This isn’t a post about Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation process, but my take is that no judge is qualified who believes that a president who has yet to serve a full term should get five years’ worth of court picks in a four-year term. (Scalia and Ginsburg died four years and seven months apart.)
***Thankfully the war on Christmas soon went away until it was rejuvenated in another day and time by FOX News as a false political wedge issue. And as a FYI, the Puritans morphed into Congregationalists over the course of the 17th century.
Initial image: Touro Synagogue (credit National Trust for Historic Preservation)
When I cast my vote last week, I placed it into the secure ballot box with hopes for a future where democracy, fairness, justice, and the right of all to be heard will flourish. I voted against a future at odds with that vision, a future captured in an idea that is currently running amuck in right wing circles:
“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Was I surprised by this statement? Only in the sense that Mike Lee said the quiet part out loud.
Lee, a Republican, tweeted his thoughts during the Vice Presidential debate. He was quickly supported by The National Review and others who, more often than not, pointed out that we are a republic, not a democracy. They look to 1787 and say America was never meant to be a democracy. If we only recognize those things in place in 1787 as valid, however, then Utah wouldn’t be a state, Mike Lee would not be a U.S. Senator, African Americans would be enslaved, and married women would be the property of their husbands. Progress, to most of us, has its benefits.
We could discuss in good faith the differences between a republic, a representative democracy (which is what we have), and a pure democracy like New England town meetings. We could but for the fact that the Republican party, in falling over itself to suppress voting in 2020, shows that it isn’t acting in good faith.
I am old enough to have voted for Republicans, responsible leaders such as Senator Howard Baker from my home state of Tennessee. And yes, understanding history I know that white Democrats suppressed voting for decades in the South during the Jim Crow era. Conservatives changed teams in the 1960s and 1970s, however. Different uniforms, same players.
You can play word games, but the fact of the matter is that the current leadership of the Republican party does not like it when too many people vote. Especially people in certain cities or in particular states. Why? Well, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, as is his habit: Republicans generally lose when voting turnout is high.
Rather than change to support more popular policies, the Republican leadership takes approaches to keep people from voting. Approaches which include:
Using social media ads to bombard voters with so-called “dark” advertising that might repulse people likely to elect Democrats, as they did four years ago. A recently uncovered database found 198 million Americans, potential Hillary Clinton voters, targeted with the single word “deterrence.” A disproportionately large number of these “deterrence” votes were African Americans.
Limiting the number of places voters can submit early ballots during a pandemic, especially in heavily Democratic areas. Until a federal court overturned his order late last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) ordered that ballot drop boxes be limited to one-per-county. Harris County, the state’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, would have had 12 drop-off locations reduced to one. Over 40% of Harris County residents are Latino and nearly 20% are Black.
Better yet, making ballot drop boxes unconstitutional. A federal judge in Pennsylvania denied the Trump campaign and Republican Party’s bid to make ballot drop boxes in Pennsylvania unconstitutional. The judge also refused to throw out other policies designed to suppress Democratic votes.
Claiming that mail-in balloting, which has been used safely and securely since the Civil War, is rife with fraud. And, for good measure, screw around with the U.S. Postal Service to suppress those votes and sow chaos. I don’t really think I need to go into this as everyone has been following it since the post office is one of those things that does date back to 1787 and it matters to all of us.
Gerrymandering and protecting minority rule. Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle (R) told donors that Republicans must maintain their Kansas State legislative supermajority so they can create gerrymandered state and federal districts to undermine the will of voters and ensure complete Republican control of the state.
And that’s just some of what was discovered this past week. To understand the range of ways the democratic will of the people is thwarted, read this list of 61 forms of voter suppression from the Voting Rights Alliance.
Building on work he has been studying for more than four years, New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait recently suggested that Senator Lee isn’t playing word games but is, instead, articulating a conservative orthodoxy that does not believe in democracy; a view long in vogue on the American right, but which Republican politicians were generally hesitant to express openly.
“The premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the far right does not merely view progressive taxation, regulation and the welfare state as impediments to growth, but as fundamentally oppressive.
…Republicans believe that the political system must retain, and ideally expand, its counter-majoritarian features: restrictive ballot-access rules that restrict the franchise to the most “worthy” citizens, gerrymandered maps that allow the white rural minority to exercise control, a Senate that disproportionately represents white and Republican voters, and a Supreme Court that believes the Republican economic program is written into the Constitution.”
History would suggest that those who have spent the past 400 years in various forms of oppression — people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals — may not agree with the hierarchy of Senator Lee and the Republican leadership. They may have seen what happens when white men can grab whatever they want. Ziblatt and Levitsky, in How Democracies Die, say: “It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight.”
History shows the lengths such groups will go to maintain power, as they did in the case of Jonathan Myrick Daniels.
Hayneville is the county seat of Lowndes County, Alabama. With a population just under a thousand souls it looks like countless other small towns in the rural South. Fort Deposit, slightly larger, sits close to Interstate 65 but has the same small-town personality. I passed both communities on occasion while driving between Atlanta and Mobile in 1980 to see a friend. The relationship soon ended and I didn’t think about those communities again until I was sitting in Washington’s St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in 2015, listening to Ruby Sales tell her life story.
Ruby Sales should have died in Hayneville on August 20, 1965.
Sales was a 17-year-old African American woman, and one of 29 young people who were working to integrate stores and register black voters in the days following the passage of the Voting Rights Act. One of the other members of the group was Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian who had studied at the Virginia Military Institute and Harvard before heeding Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for clergy to go to Alabama in the summer of 1965.
While picketing in Fort Deposit, the group was arrested and taken in a garbage truck to the county seat of Hayneville. Most of them stayed in jail for six days until all were released, but without transportation back to Fort Deposit. Sales, Daniels, and three other young people went to Varner’s Cash Store, one of the few local establishments to serve non-whites, to buy sodas. Their way in was blocked, however, by Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid special sheriff’s deputy who was holding a shotgun. Coleman threatened the group and leveled his gun at Sales. Daniels pushed her down, caught the full blast of the shotgun, and died instantly. Instead of Sales’s life ending at 17, it was Jonathan Daniels who gave up his life in the fight for freedom, justice, and the right to vote. Coleman was acquitted by an all-white jury and lived in Hayneville until his death in 1997.
Fifty years later, Sales — then age 67 — called herself “a remnant” of the great civil rights generation. Ruby Sales may see herself as a remnant, but her call for justice that day was strong and unequivocal. “I never imagined that there would be people working overtime to dismantle those changes,” she said. “I never imagined that…once again black people would be fighting for our lives.”
Our nation is a work in progress. Works in progress take work. And works in progress must be protected against those who want to go backwards in time to a system where a few white men controlled all the levers of power. The American people rejected Mike Lee’s view that “Democracy isn’t the objective” when they ratified the 15th Amendment (giving blacks the right to vote), the 17th Amendment (ensuring that Senators are elected, not appointed), and the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote).
We can learn from the places where history was made. We can learn from the ordinary people in ordinary places who do extraordinary things, like Ruby Sales and Jonathan Daniels. We can respond with the tools of grace and love instead of hatred and violence, but we can also respond with a strong determination not to let those who have never wanted a democracy take ours away. We can follow the example of those who have walked this path before us and help bend the arc of history a little further toward justice.
Vote, if you need yet another reason, because so many have sacrificed to ensure that everyone has the right to vote.
UPDATE No. 1: The day after I posted this, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave a master class on dark money and the threats to democracy. It is a 30-minute class, but worth every second. As Whitehouse said to sum up his presentation, when you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for the power in the shadows.
UPDATE No. 2: Yesterday I found this excellent piece on Vox that goes through an explanation of Chief Justice Roberts’ life-long crusade against voting rights. His evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs. Holder (2013) — against the strong, bipartisan vote of Congress — led immediately to a new, disturbing round of voter suppression across a range of Republican-led states that many are just beginning to fully understand. It is one of several reasons that discussions of judicial reform, and changing the size of the Supreme Court, have to be on the table after this election.
After yet another major violation of the Hatch Act, where an illegal political event was held on White House grounds on Saturday and labeled — with no sense of irony — a “Law & Order” rally;
Soon after a right wing terrorist plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan was thwarted by FBI actions;
It took me less than a minute to find these four recent threats to our democracy: flagrant disregard for the law, violent threats against political opponents, attempts to lock-in minority rule, and overt racism. That was enough to lead me to highlight this sobering work yet again.
Levitsky and Ziblatt are two Harvard professors who have spent twenty years studying the decline of democracies all around the world. Their research shows that more often than not, it is the slow decline of institutions such as the judiciary and press that lead countries to move from democratic to authoritarian governments.
This accessible book is highly recommended, and perhaps should be required reading for the entire country at this point in time. If you have any doubts about the seriousness of the fight to save our democracy, this is as good a book as any to consult.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE #1: During October, I am writing articles on how history and the places where history happened can help us understand the issues we are facing as a country and a democracy. Besides this book review on how democracies die, you can find posts on racial violence, religious liberty, voter suppression and revealed history by clicking on the links.
NOTE #2: My initial review of this work was buried in the middle of a series of short reviews of books read over my summer break. I bring it out here in a short, separate review so I can highlight and reference it at this crucial time.
MORE TO COME... 