No Love for Rhode Island

 

In the 1780s it was fair to describe York, Pennsylvania as a Federalist town. On Independence Day of 1788, the community’s notables celebrated with a parade honoring the states that had sent delegates to the previous year’s Federal Convention. They selected from the York Academy twelve white children, all prospective members of the American elite, to carry flags with the represented states’ names. The inherent message was clear: the proper inheritors of the Revolution, and guardians of the republic’s future, were the citizens, well-to-do and otherwise, who supported the federal Constitution.

Political cartoon, celebrating New Hampshire's ratification, 6.21.1788

That document's future still remained in some doubt. As of July 1788 ten states, including Pennsylvania, had ratified the Constitution, but New York had not yet done so and was in the middle of a contentious state convention. North Carolina's convention had not yet met, and when it did so it voted to defer rather than approve ratification. The York parade's organizers still believed, apparently, that these two states would ratify and sent representatives to the new Congress. They turned their fears for the Federalist movement's future into anger at one state which had not even sent delegates to Philadelphia: Rhode Island.

“Rogue’s Island” had earlier angered elite proponents of a stronger national Union by vetoing a tariff amendment to the Articles of Confederation, and by passing a paper money law perceived as unfavorable to creditors in other states. York’s leaders denigrated the Ocean State with a black flag, carried behind the other states' flags by an African-American boy "in crepe." On the banner were sewn or painted these words:

 

I will divide her among the nations

I will take away her name

For her iniquity hath abounded

Her unrighteousness hath vexed the land.

 

Strong words, adapted from Scripture (though your author has not yet been able to locate the book, chapter, or verse). Rhode Islanders, as far as these Pennsylvania Federalists were concerned, could not consider themselves part of the chosen people. Indeed, God would surely cast them down for separating themselves from the rest of the Elect, for worshiping the false idol of paper currency, and for failing to pay their tithe to the national regime. When in 1790 the new U.S. government voted to embargo trade with Rhode Island unless it ratified the Constitution, York's leaders doubtless supported this act of coercion. One could only negotiate with the unrighteous for so long.

Modern readers like myself are struck, of course, by the cruel detail of the young Black flag-bearer. The implicit message in his placement within the parade was that African Americans, too, belonged with the nameless and despoliated peoples who had defied God's word. At best the parade organizers intended the child, who may have been enslaved,* to play the role of a jester, a comic outsider employed to deride those his masters also considered their inferiors. Probably the parents of the twelve young pupils who marched in the ranks of the righteous thought that associating Rhode Island with a bondsman or outsider was funny. Some people get their laughs from punching down.

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Source: Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2020), 75.

 

 *Pennsylvania's legislature passed a gradual emancipation act in 1780, but slavery remained legal in the state for several more decade.

Any Good News in 2020?

 

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

2020 was a wretched year for many, particularly those of us who lost loved ones. Even (relatively) happy election news here in the United States did not dispel the gloom that pandemic and economic shutdown have cast upon the land. Luckily, Future Crunch has compiled regular updates on what good news the year has had to offer, and it turns out there was a fair amount of it. My summary of the highlights follows.

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In the United States, foster-care adoptions rose by 20 percent over a five-year period. Utah banned gay “conversion” therapy, and Virginia banned economic discrimination against LBGTQ people. The U.S. Supreme Court, in McGirt v. Oklahoma, upheld broad jurisdictional rights for Native American nations. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia banned child marriage, Iran criminalized child neglect, Sudan repealed sharia law, and Gabon decriminalized homosexuality. Kazakhstan eliminated the death penalty, with perhaps an exception for Borat. Worldwide, boys and girls reached gender parity in primary and high-school attendance.

The climate-induced wildfires in Australia and California gave environmental news an apocalyptic tinge, but there were many favorable developments on this front too. Austria and Sweden closed their last coal-powered electrical plants. Tesla produced its one-millionth electric car and Volkswagen rolled out its last non-electric car. Germany announced plans to turn 60 old military bases into wildlife refuges. The Seychelles and Belize created new oceanic wildlife reserves. India planted more than 250 million trees, while Senegal, with its rather smaller population, announced that its people have planted 150 million mangrove buds since 2010. China, for reasons doubtless related to the coronavirus pandemic, banned the eating, trading, and hunting of wild animals.

Our murderous old friend COVID-19 dominated this year’s health news, but the disease may come under control next year: researchers have developed three effective vaccines in less than twelve months. Health outcomes improved for other aspects of human life: HPV infections among English girls fell to zero, Scotland and New Zealand made sanitary products free for public distribution, and dementia and Alzheimer’s rates in the U.S. and Europe fell fifteen percent over a five-year period. AIDS deaths reportedly fell five percent in 2018-19, and a new anti-retroviral drug for women just debuted. Air-pollution deaths in China fell by 60 percent between 2013 and 2019. Globally, tuberculosis deaths declined by more than 15 percent during the same period. Africa officially eliminated polio, which now remains extant only in two countries in the world.    

And 150 new baby elephants were born in Auboseli National Park in Kenya. Toot toot.

The Blessings of Liberty: 1950s Ireland

The champions of Irish independence attained their penultimate* goal, the establishment of the Irish Republic, in 1949, nearly three decades after the end of the independence war. Political freedom rarely brings immediate material happiness, and this became obvious enough in Eire during the following decade. The 1950s, an era of rapid economic recovery and growing prosperity throughout Europe, was for Ireland a “lost decade” of stagnation and decay. The economy remained agricultural and undercapitalized. Many rural households lacked electricity and running water. Few young people received more than a grammar-school education, there being no jobs at home for the better-trained. Dispirited teachers told their students that their only employment choices were “the collar or the dollar:” taking religious orders or moving to the United States. Emigration grew to a scandalous height: one of every six Irishmen and women left the country by 1960. Of all the nations of Europe, only two suffered a net loss of population in the Fifties: Ireland and East Germany.

Irish Emigrants to Britain, ca. 1950

Those who left the German Democratic Republic did so for both economic and ideological reasons. Some of those who fled Ireland must have found their homeland nearly as oppressive as the Eastern Bloc. The Catholic Church served as an arm of the Irish state, controlling many of the nation’s schools and much of its public-school curriculum, and imprisoning thousands of unmarried mothers in the slave-labor camps known as “Magdalene Laundries.” Birth control, abortion, and divorce all remained illegal. Under the bishops' direction, the Republic comprehensively censored movies and books - Edna O’Brien, today one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors, had her first novels banned in the early Sixties. City-dwellers could perhaps afford to watch a Western movie, or catch an uncensored radio broadcast from elsewhere in Europe. Farmers and their dependents lacked even those narrow avenues of escape, so long as they remained in Eire.

John McQuaid, Prince of Ireland (1940-71)

Ireland's two principal political parties, Fine Gael (successors of Cumann na nGaedheal) and Fianna Fail, swapped control of the Dail (parliament) throughout the decade. Both remained wedded to a romantic, pre-war vision of a self-sufficient Ireland, and crafted economic policy accordingly. Both kept tariffs high and industry in the hands of licensed national monopolies. Thanks to this protectionist program and an increasingly unfavorable trade balance, the Irish endured both rising prices and rising unemployment in the first postwar decade. Credit the Irish government, at least, with discovering stagflation more than two decades before the rest of the world. 

Let us also credit one of the ruling parties, Fianna Fail, with realizing that it had to abandon its dogmas to prevent more young people from voting with their feet. Following the 1957 elections the serpentine Eamon de Valera and his chief deputy, Sean Lemass, decided their nation needed foreign capital more than "frugal comfort." The new economic program of 1958-63 lowered tariffs and provided tax credits to foreign companies (chiefly West German, at first) willing to build factories in the Republic. The Sixties was no golden age, but Ireland's economy and population did resume growing, and television helped dissolve the island's cultural conservatism and isolation.


Sources: Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future (Gill and Macmillan, 2004); idem, News from a New Republic (Gill Books, 2011).


* The ultimate goal was the reunification of the island in a 32-county republic. The IRA attempted to do just that in Operation Harvest (1956-62), which failed to do more than get most of its operatives arrested or killed.

Some Notes on U.S. Presidential Elections and Foreign Interference

The Wall Street Journal reported on September 20 that Donald J. Trump, president of these United States, recently called the president of Ukraine to ask him for a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden. Mr. Biden has business ties to Ukraine and, more importantly, is the son of former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden, currently a leading Democratic candidate for president. DJT allegedly threatened to withhold American military aid from Ukraine (which has in recent years had a spot of bother with Russia) unless he got what he wanted. It is not the first time Mr. Trump solicited foreign aid in a presidential election. Should he win re-election and make good his threat to seek a third term*, it won’t be the last.

Such solicitations remain rare in American political history. French minister to the U.S. Pierre Adet did attempt to swing the 1796 presidential election in favor of the Francophile Thomas Jefferson, but did so without Jefferson’s approval and without success. The Confederate States of America would surely have welcomed the election of Democrat George McClellan to the presidency in 1864, but, so far as I know, the CSA spent no resources to ensure Lincoln’s electoral defeat. Nearer our own time, Ronald Reagan’s campaign allegedly offered covert military aid to Iran in return for its retaining American hostages until after the 1980 election. A 1993 Congressional investigation into the so-called “October Surprise” conspiracy found no persuasive evidence.

Does history repeat itself? Sure hope so.

Prior our present Reign of Error, only one U.S. presidential candidate deliberately sought foreign assistance with his election bid: Richard Nixon. (Surprise!) In 1968 Nixon believed that a successful peace accord between North and South Vietnam would help the incumbent party’s candidate, Hubert Humphrey, win the presidency. Through intermediary Anna Chennault, he persuaded the president of South Vietnam to withdraw from peace talks with the North, implying that the RVN government would get a better deal from him than from the Democrats. Instead they got seven more years of war while Nixon got the White House. That Richard Nixon’s presidency ended poorly should hearten those critics of President Trump who hope that history, in this case, will keep repeating itself.

DJT deserves some back-handed credit, I suppose, for revealing the weakness of the safeguards against foreign electoral interference in the U.S. Constitution. The framers of that document did worry that “foreign powers” might seek “to gain an improper ascenden[cy] in our councils…by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union” (Federalist 68). They provided against such interference through the emoluments clause, making it illegal for federal office-holders to receive remuneration or patronage from other sovereigns; through the restriction of the presidency to “natural-born” citizens; and through the institution of the Electoral College, whose members’ good judgment would prevent a foreign potentate’s stooge from winning election. All of these protections proved useless against the Man from Mar-a-Lago. The emergence of political parties turned the Electoral College into a rubber stamp; fanatical primary voters and vote-suppressing state legislatures now play a vastly larger role in choosing presidents. Jus soli electoral qualifications have proven no guarantee of loyalty to the United States, as the hundreds of thousands of American-born men who fought for the Confederacy demonstrated. The emoluments clause hasn’t stopped DJT from raking in money - probably millions of dollars - from foreign governments making use of his real estate. Another clause of the Constitution, identifying bribery as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” hasn’t stopped President Trump from soliciting a bribe, in this case valuable political campaign services, from a foreign government, in this case Ukraine. That clause also identifies bribery as grounds for impeachment, which has proven a clumsy and ineffectual instrument of presidential removal, except in the case of…Richard Nixon. What an odd coincidence.   

* The Constitution currently prohibits twice-elected presidents from seeking another term, but as we’ve noted Mister Trump and his followers have little but contempt for that document.