“A Brutal And Cowardly Attack”: Charleston Church Massacre Inspired By White Supremacy
“I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go,” declared the young white gunman as he emptied clip after clip of a .45 caliber handgun into the small group of African-American churchgoers at a Wednesday evening Bible study.
After sitting amid the congregation for nearly an hour, he stood up and started firing the handgun he’d recently received as a birthday present. He kept firing, reloading his gun five times in a rampage that left eight people dead on the floor of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Another, the ninth, died on the way to the hospital. The church had been founded by worshipers fleeing racism; white slaveholders had previously burned it to the ground for its connection with a thwarted slave revolt; and in the civil rights era it became a symbol and headquarters of the movement. Now it was once again in the crosshairs.
The church sits less than a dozen miles from the park where Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was gunned down by a white police officer. The calls of “Black Lives Matter” were still ringing throughout Charleston, when gunshots again cut down black lives.
The victims of this brutal and cowardly attack inside the sanctuary of a house of worship included a South Carolina state senator, a librarian, and a recent college graduate.
The alleged killer, later identified as Dylann Storm Roof of nearby Lexington, fled the scene in his black four-door sedan adorned with an ornamental license plate that read “Confederate States of America” with the image of the Confederate flag. After a 15-hour manhunt, Roof was arrested without incident nearly 250 miles away, during a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina.
Though new details continue to be unearthed, a portrait of 21-year-old Roof as a withdrawn, troubled man with an interest in white supremacy is starting to emerge.
The Daily Beast quoted a classmate from White Knoll High School about his reputation for spouting racism. “Just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” said John Mullins. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”
“Southern pride” still runs deep in parts of South Carolina. The wounds of slavery and the Civil War are still unhealed, in many ways. Despite many protests, the Confederate flag continues to fly over the state capitol building. In January 2000, at the dawn of the new millennium, 6,000 Confederate flag supporters marched through Columbia, the state capital, according to Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics.
This spring, just 90 miles from the shooting, a statewide Tea Party convention invited a white nationalist leader to speak. The organizers canceled his appearance after the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights exposed his ideology. At that same convention, however, Tea Party officials and potential presidential candidates shared the stage with a Tea Partier who promotes a book that refers to blacks as “pickaninnies,” claims that slaves were treated humanely, and insists that slavery was just as inhumane for the slavemasters.
Beyond the racist jokes and Confederate flags on his car, Roof displayed more of the warning signs of involvement with white nationalism on his Facebook page. His profile photo shows him in the winter woods staring into the camera, clad in a black jacket with two flags affixed above over his chest: an apartheid-era South African flag, and a flag used to represent the unrecognized state of Rhodesia, after the former British colony of South Rhodesia fractured and a white minority attempted to take control of the country. Both patches are worn by white nationalists in the United States to express support for white minority rule.
Roof’s recent arrests also indicate that he may have had additional targets in mind for his killing spree. Last February he attracted attention at the Columbiana Centre, a shopping mall, when he asked store employees “out-of-the-ordinary questions” such as how many people were working and what time they would be leaving, according to a police report. A police officer questioning Roof at the scene discovered that he was illegally in possession of a controlled substance; he was arrested and charged with felony drug possession. In April, Roof was charged with trespassing on the roof of the same mall.
In a sad commentary about the dominance of local gun culture, the same morning that The Charleston Post and Courier ran a front-page story about the shooting with the headline “Church attack kills 9,” some readers found the headline obscured by a sticker advertising “Ladies’ Night” at the ATP Gun Shop & Range in Summerville, South Carolina.
By: Devin Burghart, Vice President of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights; the National Memo, June 18, 2015
“The More Things Change…”: The Charleston Massacre And The Cunning Of White Supremacy
According to Matt Ford at The Atlantic, the Charleston, South Carolina, church where a white gunman murdered nine people was
The oldest black church south of Baltimore, and one of the most storied black congregations in the United States, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church’s history is deeply intertwined with the history of African American life in Charleston. Among the congregation’s founders was Denmark Vesey, a former slave who was executed in 1822 for attempting to organize a massive slave revolt in antebellum South Carolina. White South Carolinians burned the church to the ground in response to the thwarted uprising; along with other black churches, it was shuttered by the city in 1834. The church reorganized in 1865, and soon acquired a new building designed by Robert Vesey, Denmark’s son; the current building was constructed in 1891. It has continued to play a leading role in the struggle for civil rights.
Denmark Vesey is one of the most prominent names in America’s long history of racial terror. And the killer didn’t choose just Vesey’s church but his anniversary. Based on fragmentary evidence, white Charlestonians in 1822 came to believe that Vesey’s revolt “would begin at the stroke of midnight as Sunday, June 16, turned to Monday, June 17.” And they identified Vesey’s church as the center of the conspiracy.
White militia began to arrest both freemen and slaves, 10 that weekend, and many more in the days that followed. Vesey, a freeman, was captured on June 22. It’s not just the executors of the “war on terror” who have used euphemisms to describe torture. A Charleston official referred to the interrogations the captured men were subject to like this: “No means which experience or ingenuity could devise were left unessayed to eviscerate the plot.”
Then, after a quick trial and guilty verdict, Vesey and five others were hung on July 2. More arrests were made, and more executions followed, 35 in total, often in front of immense crowds.
Here’s the historian Ira Berlin, summing up what is known of Vesey’s life:
It is a story well worth the telling. One of millions of young Africans sold into the Atlantic slave marts in the 18th century, the young Telemaque—later transmuted into Denmark—was plucked from a cargo of some 400 slaves by Captain Vesey, who was taken by his ”beauty, alertness and intelligence.” Vesey assigned the lad to his cabin, taught him to read and write, and allowed him to learn a trade—and much else.… The Veseys, both the captain and his slave, eventually alighted in the city of Charleston, mainland North America’s largest slave port. There, Captain Vesey retired to a comfortable respectability, supported in part by the earnings of his slave, who was permitted to hire himself out on his own.… While Denmark Vesey crossed the line from slavery to freedom, he did not…affiliate with Charleston’s growing community of free people of color. These artisans and tradesmen, with light skins that betrayed their mixed racial origins, aspired to the privileges of the master class, whose deportment, speech and values—including slave ownership—they emulated. Rather than being satisfied with a pale imitation of freedom, Vesey became increasingly discontented. In the back alley groggeries and weekly Bible classes, he denounced slavery as criminal usurpation, citing the Scriptures, the Declaration of Independence and even Congressional debates. He sneered at those who accepted bondage and deferred to whites, declaring that they deserved to be slaves. The angry old man awed even those he did not intimidate. Vesey believed slavery would only end with fire, and understood that a successful insurrection rested upon uniting the fragmented black population. While he may have dismissed the assimilationist-minded free people of color, he believed the other elements of the black community could be brought together. To those taken with Christianity, he quoted the Bible. To those mindful of power, he spoke of armies of Haitian soldiers in waiting. To those fearful of the spirit world, he enlisted one Jack Pritchard—universally known as Gullah Jack—a wizened, bewhiskered conjurer whose knowledge of African religious practices made him a welcome figure on the plantations that surrounded Charleston. And while he drew followers from the slave quarter and the artisans’ shops, he also enlisted from the master’s household, recruiting even the personal servant of South Carolina’s governor. Vesey coaxed and cajoled, implored and exhorted, flattered and bullied until his scheme was in place.
Berlin writes that “while slaveholders sent Denmark Vesey to the gallows and committed him to an unmarked grave, they failed to consign him to historical oblivion.… Former slaves preserved his memory, even as former slaveholders denied it. Today it seems clear that Denmark Vesey will not remain buried much longer.”
Maybe others remembered him as well, though it might just be a coincidence that “the clean-shaven white man about 21 years old with sandy blond hair and wearing a gray sweatshirt, bluejeans and Timberland boots” chose the anniversary of Vesey’s preempted revolt to massacre nine members of the congregation Vesey founded.
Or maybe history, along with white supremacy, is just cunning that way.
By: Greg Gandin, The Nation, June 18, 2015
“As Dangerous As Thomas And Scalia”: Meet The Right-Wing Religious Zealot Who’d Rather Follow The Bible Than The Law
Happiness is boring a hole in your Hebrew slave’s ear with an awl, or so might well say Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice and Baptist zealot Roy Moore.
Before I get to Moore and his grotesque, faith-lathered absurdities, though, a quick digression. Not a week goes by without our egregiously pious politicians outraging rationalist champions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate and onetime Southern Baptist preacher, indicated he would, as head of state, obey the Supreme Being, not the Supreme Court, at least as regards same-sex marriage.
His rival and fellow evolution-naysayer Ben Carson urged his Christian co-religionists to stand up to “progressive bullying,” even though Christians account for seven out of ten Americans, and hardly amount to some beleaguered minority nonbelievers could push around, even if they wanted to.
And the Republican National Committee continues its affiliation with the Christian fundamentalist activist group, American Renewal Project, whose director, David Lane, is now calling for the establishment of Christianity as “the official religion of America.” Lane may have taken cues from that morose stalwart of antipathetic reaction, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Don’t forget, a year ago Thomas, a Roman Catholic, aired the malodorous opinion that the First Amendment (which starts with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) “probably” – italics mine, yes, sic, only “probably” – “prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion,” but should not hinder individual states from doing so.
With justices like Thomas, and if a Republican wins in 2016, the Supreme Court may well end up serving as the Doric-columned ossuary of the remains of our once gloriously godless Republic.
Now we come to Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. Speaking last week at the Family Research Council, a hyper-conservative Christian lobbying group in Washington, D.C., Moore defined the pursuit of happiness as a by-product of observing the often malicious edicts and baleful pronouncements pervading cock-and-bull fables originating with pastoral, semi-nomadic primitive tribes two or three millennia ago in a land far, far away; that is, the Bible. Moore declared, in obtusely baroque verbiage, that “It’s laws of God, for He is so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual that the latter cannot be obtained but by observing the former, and if the formerly be punctually abated it cannot help but induce the latter. You can’t help but be happy if you follow God’s law and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy. We need to learn our law.”
Translation: doing what the Bible says makes you happy.
Some readers might recall Moore from 2003, when he fought a federal injunction ordering him to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments he had arranged to be erected within the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. Denouncing federal judges who held that the “obedience of a court order [is] superior to all other concerns, even the suppression of belief in the sovereignty of God,” Moore refused to comply, and was sacked from the court. Thousands of his supporters descended on the site. More than a year passed before the authorities managed to truck away the offending chunk of granite, a monstrosity so heavy it threatened to crash through the building’s floor.
A decade later, already a folk hero to the brute masses of his state afflicted with the malady of faith, Moore, as unrepentant as ever, found himself reelected to Alabama’s highest tribunal. Once again, he could not sit still. When the Supreme Court in Washington legalized same-sex marriage in Alabama last January, Roy forbade state employees and probate judges from carrying out such unions. In a contentious interview with CNN, Moore then proclaimed that “Our rights contained in the Bill of Rights do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.” He denied he was defying the Supreme Court; rather, he was protecting marriage, “an institution ordained of God.” His allegiance, as should now be clear, is not to the Constitution he has sworn to uphold, but to gobbledygook myths and a bogus Tyrant in the Sky. In other words, to the Bible and God.
One might be tempted to dismiss Moore as yet another faith-mongering, red-state ignoramus, but his status as chief justice should give us pause. Moreover, for decades now, those of the religious right have been laboring to force their superstitions, by hook or by crook, on the rest of us. In far too many states, for example, they’ve succeeded in legislatively thwarting Roe v. Wade to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Just last year, they won a Supreme Court case legalizing prayer in town meetings. And if non-belief is steadily gaining ground, those who remain Christian are increasingly evangelical — which is to say, politically active and well-funded. We thus find our cherished secularism under credible, and growing, threat.
In view of this, it behooves us to take Moore’s advice and look at what the Bible actually says. But which part are we to review, the ferociously censorious Testament 1.0, or its supposedly more clement 2.0 update?
Both. The Bible, often obscure and contradictory, could not be clearer about this. In Matthew 5:18-19 Christ decrees: “till heaven and earth pass away . . . whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments [in the Bible] and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” In Luke 16:17, He reminds us that, “It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the [Bible’s] law to become invalid.” His cohort Peter informs us (in Peter 2: 20-21) that “there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation.” Disregard, then, those who would have you think that the Old Testament has, in effect, expired, as well as mealy-mouthed apologists who say it’s all a matter of how you read the text. And remember, 28 percent of Americans take the Good Book as literal truth, talking snakes and jabbering donkeys and all. It’s not much of a jump to go from literal truth to literal application.
The Bible deluges us with a hailstorm of injunctions, far in excess of the Ten Commandments (first presented in Exodus 20:22-28, but also, with inexplicable alterations and sundry additions, in Exodus 34 and Deuteronomy 5). Aside from don’t kill, murder, or covet wives and asses, and so on, just what does the Bible ordain?
For starters, slavery. Much of Exodus 21 is basically a slaveholder’s manual and contains my opening line about boring through your Hebrew slave’s ear with an awl, which is what it says he deserves if he should fail to decamp on schedule. (Servitude is to last six years.) After departure, the slave’s wife and children belong, of course, to you, his master. If you need cash, feel free to sell your daughter as a sex slave. Beat and have sex with your slaves, but whatever you do, don’t “smite” their eyes or their teeth, or you’re obliged to free them. Remember, though, that Christ orders your slaves to obey you with “fear, trembling, and sincerity, as when [they] obey the Messiah” (Ephesians 6:5), so don’t spare the rod unnecessarily. Exodus (21:29) also warns you to keep your livestock in check. Don’t let your ox gore anyone, or you and the beast must be stoned to death. Do redeem the firstling of an ass with a lamb (whatever that means), but if you don’t, break the former’s neck. Otherwise, don’t “oppress” any “sojourners,” “vex” any strangers, or “afflict” any widows or “fatherless children.” Etcetera.
If believers require orders from some “holy” book to keep from doing these things, as those who claim our morality comes from God suppose, they should be kept off the streets, and certainly away from children.
When it comes to His earthly visiting quarters, the Lord legislates with lavish abandon, proffering binding instructions for ark-building, tabernacle-adornment, and altar-construction, on which His subjects are to scant nothing — not gold, not silver, not bronze. U.S. lawmakers chose to lighten the expense burden by providing churches with tax exemptions. Ancient Israelites found recompense in celestially sanctioned regional hegemony over the “Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite” (Exodus 34). Israelites were divinely enjoined to “destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their idol poles . . . . For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders.” This criminal pronouncement from long ago inspires radical Jewish settlers today and helps maintain the insolubility of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
God then hits red-staters where it hurts, ordaining that “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks” — tattoos — “upon you: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:27). Brothers, no mullets: “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27). Nevertheless, dress nattily: “Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together” (Deuteronomy 22:11). Sisters, betake yourselves to a nunnery — for clothes, if nothing else. “Women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire” (l Timothy 2:9).
Before setting out to follow Jesus, remember to violate Commandment 5 and abhor your parents. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Do, however, abhor discreetly, for if you curse Mom and Dad aloud, they have the right to cut you down on the spot (Leviticus 20:9). Don’t talk with any wizards (ibid, 20:6) or get it on with your sister-in-law, or eat fat (ibid 3:17), or attend church for thirty-three days after birthing a boy (you’ll be unclean), or sixty-six days if it’s a girl, you’ll be doubly unclean (Ibid 12:4-5).
I could go on and on, but you get the point. Thomas Jefferson described “the Christian god [as] a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.” In modern parlance, the Lord is psychotic, and stands in need of urgent psychiatric treatment for an out-of-control Type A personality, pathological solipsism and wanton sadism. It should surprise no one that damnable nonsense is His rule book’s warp and woof, with even the supposedly more humane New Testament deserving disdain as a farrago of “forgeries and lies” (to quote Thomas Paine). The Bible, in the end, merits mercilessly swift dispatch into the dustbin of history, or preservation as an anthropological curiosity, nothing more. Anyone considering it our wellspring of joy is not to be trusted.
So how is it that Chief Justice Moore suffers no opprobrium for saying that you “can’t help but be happy if you follow God’s law?”
Because we commit a sort of secular sin of omission and let him, either out of mistaken notions of politesse or the erroneous belief that criticizing religion as ideology equates with insulting someone personally. This has to stop. Every time we encounter faith-deranged individuals spouting supernatural nonsensicalities, we should request explanations and evidence. We might also cite the above-noted biblical passages and ask how they possibly square with modern life in a developed country. If they say those parts don’t apply nowadays, ask them which verses in the Bible permit them to so pick and choose. By steady, patient questioning, you will expose faith for what it is: finely crafted garbage.
We should not suffer evangelical fools gladly or allow them to determine the boundaries of discourse. We should take to heart the key maxim of British philosopher and mathematician William K. Clifford: “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” We should point out that we have no problem with privately held religious beliefs, but we will protest and object to any attempt to impose such beliefs or restrictions deriving thereof on us or others.
Resist. You have a world of hard-won rights and secular sanity to preserve, and everything to lose.
By: Jeffrey Tayler, Contributing Editor at the Atlantic; Salon, May 31, 2015
“The Tragedy Of Ben Carson”: How A Brilliant Doctor Turned Into A Right-Wing Provocateur
The Ben Carson phenomenon is a case lesson in how some really smart, impressive figures in certain fields should never talk about politics.
Carson is now an official presidential candidate, representing a subset of grassroots conservatives who enjoy being played. This is not an insignificant number of people. He is, to the horror of the people who run the Republican party, polling viably. No would-be candidate has a more dedicated corps of volunteers supporting him. Whether it’s CPAC or the First in the Nation Summit in New Hampshire, the Carson people are everywhere, handing out stickers and buttons and t-shirts and assorted other tchochkes from dusk till dawn.
But why? What is it that they like about someone who’s quite obviously trying to separate conservative movementarians from their money?
Carson’s rise to prominence among Tea Party conservatives, or whatever we’re calling that element of the GOP now, should be bizarre to everyone. It’s especially baffling, though, to people like your trusty Salon writer, who grew up in the mid-Atlantic in the 1990s. Most elementary and middle school students from Maryland were at some point assigned to read Ben Carson’s autobiography, Gifted Hands — typically ahead of a visit from the man himself. Carson was raised in Detroit, rising from abject poverty to Yale, eventually becoming the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, one of the best medical centers in the world. To children and adults alike, he was the reigning regional saint. (Along with Cal Ripken Jr., who didn’t pull off masterful feats of neurosurgery but did play in thousands of consecutive baseball games.)
Carson launched his second, lucrative career as a conservative movement celebrity at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. This is one of those grand annual Washington events, sponsored by a Northern Virginia cult, that merits a visit from the President of the United States. Carson made President Obama sit through a chaotic 27-minute political rant against political correctness, progressive taxation, the national debt, etc., and conservative media went nuts. He went on a vapid spiel to President Obama’s face! He should run for president??
Who knew Carson would actually take them up on this? But here we are, replete with a gospel choir singing Eminem.
It’s sad that such a brilliant surgeon and role model for children has committed himself to a path of spectacular humiliation. Because that same free-flowing style he showed at the National Prayer Breakfast has been subject to diminishing returns in the last two years. The novelty is wearing off, and now he’s in a position where he makes a fool of himself just about every time his mouth opens.
The trademark of Carson’s brief political career is an all-out assault on the common literary devices of metaphor and analogy. Obamacare is slavery, and the United States under President Obama is Nazi Germany. ”I want to be clear and set the record straight: I don’t think Obamacare is worse than 9/11,” Carson found himself compelled to say at one point. He has compared criticizing police to criticizing plumbers.
He knows not one thing about foreign policy but speaks about it anyway. This produces comedy.
He recently opined that being gay is a choice and people become gay when they go to prison.
Carson says that he’s learned over the past couple of years not to “wander off into those extraneous areas that can be exploited” by the gotcha media. The problem here, as with so many other complaints about the gotcha media, is that the media simply transcribes the crazy things that he says. He might think that he has an off switch, but that’s doubtful. People who become conservative media stars become conservative media stars by saying crazy things. It’s part of their nature.
Carson’s legacy will not include a stint as President of the United States. It’s a shame that he’s decided to risk his real legacy, as a brilliant world-renowned doctor who came from nothing, by playing right-wing also-ran in a presidential contest.
By: Jim Newell, Salon, May 4, 2015
“The Tea Party Will Never Understand The Constitution”: What The Right Misses About Its Favorite Document
With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.
But as that list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution — namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys will attest, the answer is, not really. And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has decided to write a multi-book series about the Constitution so many Americans claim to love, but so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s latest addition.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the United States’s real founding father. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
So this book is part of a larger, multi-book project on the Constitution. The first was a biography of the document, the second was about its “unwritten” provisions, and this is the third. What’s your focus this time?
The third book in this project is a geographical slicing of the story; ours is a vast republic of massive diversity, and the Constitution looks a little different in different states and regions. I try to show all of that that through 12 stories … each of which says something general about the United States Constitution but does so through the window of a particular state. It discusses a person or an idea or a case or an event particularly associated with that region that also casts light, more generally, on our Constitutional project.
So how did what you call “brute geography” influence the way we understand the Constitution today?
The very breadth of the American landmass and its distance from the old world were huge elements in the American founding and in the Civil War experience. The idea of creating an indivisible union in the 1780s, the idea of forming a more perfect union, was an idea powerfully influenced by these two geographic factors: a wide moat between the Old World and the New World (known as the Atlantic Ocean) would be able to protect Americans from Old World tyranny in the same way the English Channel protected Britain from much of the militarism of the European Continent…
But in 1787, as Americans looked around the world, they saw that Britain was free, and Britain was free because England and Scotland had merged, had formed an indivisible, perfect union that would protect liberty because they had gotten rid of land borders on the island and only needed a navy to protect themselves. That worked for England and that would work for America even better, because we’d have an English Channel times 50.
This will become manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine; we’ll control our hemisphere and we’ll be protected from Europe … Our Constitution largely succeeds because there’s no major standing army in peacetime for most of American history, and that fact is created by some brute geographic realities.
I’m speaking to you now right around the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. He looms very large in your book; you describe him in some ways as almost prophetic. What made Lincoln’s understanding of the country and the Constitution so profound?
We live in Lincoln’s house. The Framers’ house was divided against itself; and, because of slavery, it fell. That failure is called the Civil War, and Lincoln rebuilt [the country] on a solid anti-slavery foundation, a foundation that would be strengthened after his death by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery everywhere, irrevocably), the Fourteenth Amendment (which promised racial equality) and the Fifteenth Amendment (which promised equal voting rights).
I begin the book with Lincoln because he transformed the Union. He saved it and transformed it and … his story was very much influenced by, literally, where he came from. He has a vision of the Constitution that’s very much influenced by Illinois, in particular, and by the Midwest more generally. He comes from a part of the country that was the Northwest Territory, that was always free soil even before the Constitution, and he has a very free-soil vision.
How so?
The language of the 13th Amendment is borrowed, word-for-word, from the language of the Northwest Ordinance. Lincoln thinks that the nation created the states, which, of course, Robert E. Lee … could never buy into. Robert E. Lee would say that the states created the Union; but the Midwest [perspective] would say … before Illinois was a state, it was a territory; the Union created these new states out of nothing. That’s a very Midwestern perspective on the Constitution.
Lincoln is, far and away, the most important constitutional decision-maker of the last two centuries; and arguably the most important constitutional decision-maker and interpreter ever.
But Lincoln was never a judge nor a constitutional scholar. He was a politician.
Most people are taught in high school that the most important constitutional decision is Marbury v. Madison, but that’s not even the most important constitutional decision of 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was far more important than Marbury v. Madison, because it doubled the landmass of America and made sure that the country would survive. When you understand that, you understand that many important constitutional decisions are made not by judges but by presidents.
The two most important constitutional decisions ever are Lincoln’s decision to resist [the South’s] unilateral secession, and Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would lead to an end of slavery — that is transformative, and Lincoln made those decisions unilaterally as president. Had these issues reached the U.S. Supreme Court, controlled as it was [during Lincoln’s time] by Roger Taney, a fierce opponent of Lincoln, the Court might very well have tried to invalidate Lincoln’s projects.
We live in a Constitution utterly transformed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and we would have none of those but for Lincoln.
Lincoln aside, though, you also argue that geography has played a big role in the Supreme Court — which, of course, is supposed to be the chief interpreter of the Constitution. How did geography influence the Court’s history?
Let’s take the most infamous judicial ruling of all time, the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It emerges from a Supreme Court that’s profoundly malapportioned: five of the nine justices on the Dred Scott court come from the slave-holding South, even though only a third of the population lives in that region.
Part of that is because entire antebellum system is skewed towards the South because of the three-fifths clause, which gives slave states extra clout in the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral College. Presidents are picking justices, and the presidency tilts towards the South because of the three-fifths clause; almost all your early presidents are either slave-holding Southerners or “Northern men of Southern sympathies” — that is, pro-slavery Northerners.
If we view the Constitution and American history with more of a focus on the role played by geography, what are some the implications for U.S. politics today and in the near-future?
One of the things I’m trying to tell you in this book is how we can see presidential elections and our political polarization in new ways if we’re attentive to states and regions.
Our parties are polarized geographically; that this is not the first time that’s so (early on, it was the South against the North; Jefferson against Adams). The geographic alignment is remarkably similar to the geographic alignment in Lincoln’s time with this interesting twist: the Democrats have become the party of the North and the coasts and the Republicans have become the party of the former Confederacy. The parties have basically flipped, but it’s the same basic alignment…
One of the other big things I want you to see is how regions and states are hugely important in, for example, presidential politics. I talk about the significance in this book, in particular, of Ohio and Florida in the Electoral College and also of Texas. Is it a coincidence that Marco Rubio comes from Florida? That Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida who was born in Texas and whose father and brother had their political bases in Texas? That Rand Paul was born in Texas and his father ran for president from Texas? That Ted Cruz is from Texas? That Rick Perry is a former governor of Texas?
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, April 21, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 