Month: August 2020

Post Offices, Post Roads

There are parts of the northeast in which directions will still guide you to the post road, maybe even specifically to the Boston Post Road.

In colonial times it ran from its namesake city through southeast Massachusetts into and across  Rhod Island and down through Connecticut to New York for interchange with the hinterland and Southlands beyond.

Why? Why do we still know of post roads?

Because post roads are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution, at Article I, Section 8:

“The Congress shall have the power…To establish Post Offices and Post Roads…”

See, our right to have an unfettered postal service is inviolate, constitutional, and was an absolute insistence of one Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention held in his city of Philadelphia in 1787.

The Founding Fathers, at least those 39 who signed the Constitution, knew all too well how much the endeavor to achieve independence from Britain, the one to which those other Founding Fathers — the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor — had depended on colonial Committees of Correspondence being able to exchange – via riders riding hard and fast over primitive post roads — the ideas and ideals of liberty (complex graf I grant you but read it again.).

That’s why they put it in the Constitution of the United States of America, the one that says, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union….”

Without our post offices, we are not a perfect union, we are not one people.

We don’t hardly ever buy stamps anymore to send something down the post road. We email, we text, we attach. Small wonder the postal service is losing money. But it was constitutonally never meant to make money. It was meant to serve us, “We the people…”

So, right now,  today, go to your local post office, the one the Constitution guarantees you. Buy a lot more stamps than you need or will ever again use — knowing we’ll never use them.

Do it for “Rare ole Ben Franklin.”  Do it for the Founding Fathers. Do it for the liberty they bequeathed us. Do it for yourself. Do it for the value of being an American. Do it as an investment in your country.

Above all, do it to share the ever-constant need to commit “our lives,  our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the American cause of liberty and democracy.

A Fair Shot

On July 2 1932 Chicago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first nominee of a major party to accept in-person a major party nomination for president.

With Louis Howe, Missy LeHand, and others in his close circle of staff and family, FDR traveled by air through awful weather that tossed their plane to and fro and up and down to reach Chicago.

Arriving, he went directly to Chicago Stadium to deliver his acceptance.

In his resonant, confident voice FDR told a nation brought to its knees by the Great Depression, and in despair of finding its way out, he would lead the way.

At the very end of his address, he declared to the assembled convention and to an America of 120 million people listening in by radio:

“I pledge to you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the Amerian people.”

It is a lasting and memorable note in the speech, one that echoes and reverberates in American history and reaches through history in the laws and programs he enacted that still shape our lives, like Social Security.

At that moment, in that single sentence, FDR gave a name to his program to bring America back from the depths of the depression – to restore hope and confidence. The New Deal did what FDR summed up later in a Fireside Chat as his method of governing.

“It is common sense,” said FDR  “to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

FDR pledged a New Deal and through it delivered Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations  Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Columbia River Project, and, much, much more including later, the GI Bill.

In that spirit, Harry Truman pledged himself to a “Fair Deal,” which included the still elusive national wish for a program of national health insurance.

Truman had to settle for less in those archly. reactionary times but he got a Fair Housing Act, implemented FDR’s GI Bill, broke into the vaults of segregation with a law that prohibited racial discrimination in interstate travel, and with lasting integration of the nation’s armed forces.

Nearly 30 years after FDR first accepted his nomination to be president, John F. Kennedy did the same in Los Angeles in an address in which he spoke of a “New Frontier”. He died before crossing it but he launched the American moon shot program, created the Peace Corps and forcefully furthered the progress of higher education integration in the south.

In 1964, his election year, Lyndon Baines traveled to Ohio where during a speech he told his audience, “And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”

His Great Society gave the nation the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1965 immigration reform act that opened the nation’s borders to the diverse America we see today — that gave Kamala Harris’s parents, one a Jamaican, the other from the subcontinent of India, entry to the United States.

The Great Society created Medicare, gave us WIC and Medicaid, Title 1 and Title 9 in its vast reform of the role of the federal government in public education, including public broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not name their administrations but expressed their optimism in slogans — Clinton’s Up with People and Obama’s “Yes we can”.

They continued the advance of social and economic fairness and progress from the New Deal to the Fair Deal across that New Frontier to the Great Society: Clinton with the Children’s Health Insurance Program;  Obama with an economic recovery act that brought the nation back from a fiscal and financial crisis and — above all — enacted the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, a landmark in the century-long battle to create health coverage and care for all Americans.

Why is that a century-long effort? Because the first president to suggest instituting a system of national health care was? Was TR, Republican Teddy Roosevelt.

And that brings us to the here and now of the fateful 2020 presidential election.

Introducing Kamala Harris as his running mate this week, Joe Biden called for a  “Fair Shot” for all Americans.

He thereby may have named the purpose and program of the administration he would lead if elected.

Because if he takes the reins of government next January, Biden’s Fair Shot administration will have more to do than any since 1933, when FDR brought the New Deal with him to Washington and America.

 

A Jar of Beans

In his eulogy for John Lewis remarking on voting rights, President Obama referred to jelly beans in a jar.

The reference is real.

In many places in say, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and the rest of the deep south in the bad old days of outright Jim Crow — before the 1965 Voting Rights Act that Lewis fought for, was beaten for — when Black people tried to register to vote they’d be told they had to pass a test or two or three.

One or the most notrorious was the bean jar. The prospective registrant would be shown a gallon or even 5-gallon clear glass jar filled with beans, jelly, or otherwise. The aspiring voter would be told he or she needed to give the exact number in the jar.

Of course, that’s impossible and was and is meant to be. Even if there had been an actual count of the beans and even if the person seeking to register had gotten that right, well who was to say it wasn’t wrong? But of course, no one botehred with that – that was not the point.

No, the point was to devise a test only for Black people that no one, Black or white, could have passed to be able to vote.

Having failed to guess the number of beans in the jar, the hopeful registrant would be told in demeaning racial terms “Boy (Girl), Y’all work on that and come back next year.”

No, Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch could not pass the test either. But their rulings eviscerating the 1965 Voting Rights Act take us back to the time of the jar of beans test – making them paradigms of Jim Crow. That old crow? He’s sitting right on their shoulder.

This is true, was true, this bean jar voting registration test. So is the fact that we have had forms of voting by mail for a very long time in the United States.

Elections were changed and subverted for nearly 100 years by disabling the franchise through race. But voting by mail? No. As we’ve learned again lately, the army that fought to end slavery got to vote by mail in 1864 – even as it fought up and down Virginia in the east and through Tennessee and into Georgia in the west.

No one can say there has not ever been a misuse here and there of this means of casting a vote; but to say that it is universally untrustworthy when it is almost universally trustworthy, well that’s as bad as that jar of beans.

Next time you’re in a candy store or a market with those big self-serve bins of candy,  take a look at the ones holding the jelly beans. Ask yourself if you would have been able to register to vote in say Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia or the Florida Panhandle in1920 or, or even 1960.

Or, this year, think about that when you fill in your mail ballot, then have a jelly bean or two or ten – you don’t have to count them to vote.