#Taft Administration

[deadpresidents]

President Theodore Roosevelt and President-elect William Howard Taft en route to the U.S. Capitol for Taft's Inauguration, March 4, 1909.

Over ten inches of snow fell on Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day, leading to the Inaugural ceremonies being moved indoors from the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller administered the oath of office to Taft inside the Senate Chamber.

[todaysdocument]

“Now before any Negro can register [to vote] he must go into a little side room and read and write to the entire satisfaction of one or two white men  . . . “ Letter from C. Dearborn to Pres. Taft, 7/18/1912

File Unit: 150719-62, Section 2, 1904 - 1974

Series: Straight Numerical Files, 1904 - 1974

Record Group 60: General Records of the Department of Justice, 1790 - 2002

Transcription:

"Hottentot"

AN EXTERNAL REMEDY

SERIAL NO. 30154.

[stamp] JULY 24 9-23 AM 1912

[stamp] THE WHITE HOUSE / JUL 21 1912 / RECEIVED

[handwritten] Justice

[stamp] RESPECTFULLY REFERRED FOR ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND CONSIDERATION

"HOTTENTOT" will afford quick and valuable relief for Headache, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, Pleurisy, Pneumonia, Indigestion, Acute Indigestion, Congestion, Female Complaints, Asthma, Diarrhoea, Cramps, Colic, Tonsilitis, Eczema, Piles, Erysipelas, Bronchitis, Gout, Peritonitis, Cerebro Spinal Meningitis, Ringworm, Sore Eyes Soft Corns, Bunions, etc.

"Hottentot" is manufactured only by C. DEARMAN, Tulsa, Oklahoma. P.O. Box 183.

OFFICE 212 N. FRANKFORT ST.

TELEPHONE 1188.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. A. 7/18/12.

Hon, W.H. Taft, President of the United States of America.

Washington, D.C.

Honored Sir: -- I am asking you in the interest of the qualified Negro voters of the State of Oklahoma and more [word struck out] especially the city of Tulsa, Okla to arrange with the Department of Justice in a way whereby immediate action will be taken to secure the right of every qualified Ngro voter in the State of Oklahoma and especially in the city of Tulsa, Okla. to vote in the coming elections without being intimidated and otherwise prevented from voting.

The tactics of the election officials in the city of Tulsa, Okla. now, are as follows: As pertaining to the Negroes each and every one must register only at the court house, regardless of how many times they have here-to-fore voted,.

It is stated by the election officials that any one not registering during the present registration will not under any circumstances be allowed to vote in the coming election,

Now before any Negro can register he must go into a little side room and read and write to the entire satisfaction of one or two white men, if it takes six hours continuous reading and writing to satisfy them there is no one to object but the Negro trying to become qualified to vote, and his objections dont amount to anything unless he pledges to support the democratic ticket, the majority if not all of which the election officials are. [Words struck out] they allowed my writing to pass which is very poor and which you will find enclosed, they refused to allow other negroes waiting to pass that to my mind is much better than my writing, Why? because I kick good and hard when ever it is necessary, and vote just as I please. But the majority of negroes will not kick either [letter struck out] thru fear or indifference and those are the ones that I am praying and pleading for. The question that I often ask my self is, that if the continued oppression of and the discrimination against the negro should at some future day cause war, would those that are foremost in oppressing and discriminating against the negro, be foremost on the battle field, [word struck out] well I have an idea that they would be the very first to beat a hasty retreat at the first sound of the bugle.

Hoping that immediate action will be taken,

Very truly yours.

[signed] C. Dearman.

[stamp] RECORDS

[stamp] 150719-62 / DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE / JUL 24 1912 / MAIL & FILES DIVISION / Harr-Logan / ACTION

[charlesoberonn]

List of US Presidents and how many future presidents were born during their administrations

Before Independence: 8. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, William Harrison

Before Presidency: 2. Van Buren, Taylor

Washington: 3. Tyler, Polk, Buchanan

Adams: 1. Fillmore

Jefferson: 3. Pierce, Lincoln, Johnson

Madison: 0.

Monroe: 2. Grant, Hayes

Quincy Adams: 0.

Jackson: 3. Garfield, Arthur, Harrison

Van Buren: 1. Cleveland

Henry Harrison: 0.

Tyler: 1. McKinley

Polk: 0.

Taylor: 0.

Fillmore: 0.

Pierce: 2. Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson

Buchanan: 1. Taft

Lincoln: 0.

Johnson: 1. Harding

Grant: 2. Coolidge, Hoover

Hayes: 0.

Garfield: 0.

Arthur: 2. FDR, Truman

Cleveland: 0.

Harrison: 1. Eisenhower

McKinley: 0.

Teddy Roosevelt: 1. LBJ

Taft: 2. Nixon, Reagan

Wilson: 2. Kennedy, Ford

Harding: 0.

Coolidge: 2. Carter, H.W Bush

Hoover: 0.

FDR: 1. Biden

Truman: 3. Clinton, W. Bush, Trump

Eisenhower: 0.

JFK: 1. Obama

LBJ: 0.

Nixon: 0.

Ford: 0.

Carter: 0.

Reagan: 0.

H.W Bush: 0.

Clinton: 0.

W. Bush: 0.

Obama: 0.

Trump: 0.

Biden: 0.

[theculturedmarxist]

On Friday, the US Chamber of Commerce issued an open letter to President Joe Biden imploring him to appoint a “mediator” and force through a tentative agreement between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) and the over 22,000 dockworkers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

In the letter addressed to Biden and acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, Suzanne P. Clark, the CEO and president of the Chamber, wrote that the group was “very concerned by the premeditated and disruptive service actions that are slowing operations at several major ports along the West Coast.”

Beginning last week, and continuing through this writing, dockworkers at several West Coast ports have refused to show up to work after it was revealed that the PMA was proposing an across-the-board $1.56 “raise” for dockworkers, well below the rate of inflation. The fury of rank-and-file workers across all three tiers, A, B, and casual, prompted the ILWU, worried that workers would take matters into their own hands, to unofficially authorize job actions that led to the near-shutdown of major ports and terminals.

Dockworkers have been laboring on 29 ports, from Washington to California, without a contract since last July, while the PMA and ILWU have been negotiating in secret for 13 months. These secret negotiations, Andy, a Los Angeles-area dockworker told the WSWS, have left him and his coworkers “frustrated...we don’t know what is going on. We have no say in anything, it is outrageous.”

Commenting on the long hours that dockworkers put in during the pandemic, and the “thanks” they have received so far from the PMA, Andy said, “Me and a lot of other people got over 2,000 hours. We didn’t step out of line, we did everything they asked. The PMA are talking about not giving us enough retroactive pay, that insulting $1.56 pay increase.”

On Friday, June 9, the PMA issued another statement confirming that while job actions had lessened at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland, the “Ports of Seattle and Tacoma continue to suffer significant slowdowns as a result of targeted ILWU actions.”

The PMA asserted that the ILWU was refusing to dispatch lashers, leaving ships idle and resulting in “a backup of incoming vessels.”

Terrified at the prospect that these limited actions could spiral into a “serious work stoppage at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach” that “would be devastating to...businesses,” Chamber Commerce CEO Clark, on behalf of Wall Street, urged Biden “to appoint an independent mediator to help the parties reach a voluntary agreement.” Clarke wrote that this “step is necessary to avoid potentially billions of dollars in economic damage to the American economy.”

Raising the prospect of invoking the anti-union Taft-Hartley law against dockworkers, and possibly deploying soldiers in the case of a strike, Clarke added that Biden should “consider additional steps that may be necessary in the event of a widespread work stoppage.”

This is the third statement issued by a major big business lobby over the last week calling on Biden to intervene in the dockworker negotiations, on the side of capital. On Monday, representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation also called on the White House to impose a contract on dockworkers.

While Biden himself has not directly commented, his actions last year show that the self-declared most “pro-union” president is more than willing to run roughshod over workers’ democratic rights in order to satiate Wall Street’s unquenchable hunger for profits. Furthermore, high-level officials, in his administration and outside of it, have made clear that the White House has been actively involved in the dockworker negotiations from the outset.

In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, Gene Seroka, the executive director at the Port of Los Angeles, confirmed that the same labor officials who blocked a railroad strike last year, and subsequently dictatorially forced through a rotten pro-company agreement rail workers had already rejected, were again intervening in the contract talks.

“Here’s what’s been happening,” Seroka said. “Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su has been working with both sides, individually and collectively, trying to keep these talks moving.” Su was the deputy labor secretary under Marty Walsh last year during the railroad betrayal.

“Julie and her staff have been working tirelessly, not putting out press releases or coming on TV. They are talking with both sides to keep this progress moving,” Seroka continued, adding, “From the secretary of labor’s seat, this continues to be a top priority.”

While he claimed not to know the exact details, Seroka confirmed that the major conflicts in the contract remain pay and “robotics.” Seroka noted that during the pandemic, “Dockworkers were out on the job six days a week.” The ILWU has confirmed that at least 43 members died of COVID-19, no doubt a significant undercount.

While dockworkers were risking infection and death to move cargo, the companies have pulled in record profits. Shipping giant Maersk, one of several companies represented by the PMA, posted $30.9 billion in profit in 2022. And while shipping rates have declined from their 2021 highs, last month Maesrk still reported a first-quarter profit just under $4 billion.

In interviews with WSWS reporters on Thursday, Los Angeles area dockworkers reflected on the precarious and dangerous character of their work, the hated tier system, which was negotiated in by former ILWU President Harry Bridges in the 1960 Mechanization and Modernization agreement, and the need for dockworkers to unite as a class against the major corporations.

A casual worker said that she has been “a casual for 19 years. I need four more years to make it to Class A. It’s been a long, long time, and we don’t have any rights. My brother is an A man, we were always taught in our family to get union jobs, but things are very tough these days. It’s stressful. I had an accident last month because I had a seizure, which was caused because I was so angry with my boss.”

Commenting on the anti-Asian sentiment that has been whipped up by both big business parties as part of the war drive against China, the dockworker said she was “against all this anti-Asian violence and hate. They are trying to blame Asian people for all the problems, trying to pit worker against worker. We are all facing the same problems.”

A longshoreman who has been a Class A man for 15 years noted that the ILWU along the West Coast had yet to conduct a strike authorization vote nearly a year after the contract expired. “The Canadian longshoremen are having strike authorization votes [Thursday] and Friday. That’s important because the PMA was trying to use the Canadian access from their ports to railways to Chicago and back East to reroute shipping since West Coast longshore have been carrying out job actions here.”

Commenting on the miserly $1.56 raise, a pay cut in real terms, given that inflation in California is over 7 percent, he said, “For us here, I wasn’t happy about that tiny raise the PMA is offering us.”

In a message to other dockworkers, Andy warned about the ongoing conspiracy between Biden, the ILWU and the PMA. “They are all just oligarchs. Biden is doing the same thing Trump would do. The same thing George Bush would do.”

“It really is an international struggle,” he added, “That’s why the internationalism is so important. I mean if me, and all the other dockworkers in the world, got together and decided we weren’t going to move cargo until our demands were met? That would be amazing.”

The fight to link up workers in a joint struggle against the major international carriers requires the development of rank-and-file committees, controlled by the workers and independent of the ILWU union bureaucracy.

Workers cannot let the initiative remain in the hands of the ruling class and its state! It is urgent that workers begin communicating among themselves and coordinating actions to counter the conspiracy between the companies and the Biden administration, assisted by the union apparatus.

[racefortheironthrone]

knecaped by the irs?

Whoops, misremembered the government entity in question (sorry, it's been over a decade since I read For All These Rights in grad school). It wasn't the IRS - although the IRS is highly influential in whether private insurance systems (either for-profit or non-profit) are financially viable by deciding whether they have to pay taxes on contributions, payments, and benefits - it was Congress.

Namely, via the Taft-Hartley Act. (Surprise, surprise.) While the most famous provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act have to do with so-called "right to work" and the expulsion of Communists, the law also mandated that employers had to:

"share equally in the administration of any welfare or retirement plan. Unions could not run them independently...The new Taft-Hartley Act also restricted labor's ability to determine the uses to which monies deposited in social security funds could be put....Republican Senators Robert Taft and Joseph Bell made clear that these restrictions were meant to prevent unions from "indiscriminate use [of employer funds] for so-called welfare purposes." Jenn Klein, For All These Rights, p. 221)

What this meant was that union-controlled welfare funds and health cooperatives could no longer exist, and would either be run entirely be employers or as a joint-venture where the employer could object to any change the union wanted to make and appeal directly to the courts.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Max Eden

Published: Nov 20, 2023

According to the Department of Education, “misgendering” a student could violate federal civil rights law. Last month, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced the resolution of its investigation of California’s Taft College for creating a hostile environment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. OCR investigated the school after a male student was “misgendered” by his professors. The student, who did not notify university administrators that he identified as female, told his professors that he was “trans-femme” and preferred to be addressed by plural pronouns. (Because I’m not employed by a university and am therefore not legally compelled to speak falsely or use improper English, I refer to the student by male pronouns.) 

The student’s professors tried to use the plural pronouns but didn’t always succeed. It is understandably difficult for someone delivering collegiate-level instruction to remember to refer to a man as “they” or “them.”

One professor, seemingly realizing her “mistake,” caught herself mid-word and ended up uttering “he-she.” That’s not quite “they,” so the OCR considered that a civil rights violation. The student then told another female professor that he was upset by the failure to address him as he desired. That professor apologized and met with the dean of students to discuss strategies for remembering to use the student’s “proper pronouns.” She seems mostly to have managed to do so, but occasionally she slipped up, too, again contributing to the OCR’s finding. A third female professor referred to the student by male pronouns, realized her “mistake,” and apologized, explaining that when she looked at the student, she saw his physical appearance and referred to him accordingly. Depending on OCR’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, this could be a double civil rights violation—on both gender-identity and sex-stereotype grounds.

The funny or horrifying thing, depending on your point of view, is the faculty’s concern and exasperation in response to the student’s protestations. One professor, after meeting with the dean, had the school’s mental-health services contact the student. Another threw up his hands and exclaimed that he was “too old” to use preferred pronouns. A third asked the student if he had ever tried not thinking about his pronouns so much. A fourth suggested that if the student was so upset about inadvertent misgendering, maybe college wasn’t right for him and he should become an activist instead. The supposed civil rights violators here were mostly female, Californian professors, disproportionately a conscientious and progressive lot. Even they couldn’t quite manage to use preferred pronouns every time and seem to have found the demand annoying.

When OCR investigates a university or a school district, it threatens to pull federal funding unless the institution “voluntarily” agrees to its demands. The office uses this formidable power for institutional coercion and social transformation. Congress gave the OCR its authority to ensure that African Americans and women were treated equally in education; now, the Biden administration is using the office to force people to call men women—never mind the First Amendment.

The Taft College case suggests a few lessons. First, it’s clear that the Biden administration’s interpretation of federal civil rights law requires public schools to perform “social transitions” (treating students as if they are the opposite sex). If this rule is applied in a non-college educational environment, such transitions can occur without school administrators informing or consulting parents. States, in response, should pass “Given Name Acts,” requiring school staff to refer to students by the name and pronoun on their birth certificates or provided to the school by their parents.  

Second, OCR’s very interest in this case suggests that American educational institutions may not have many genuine civil rights problems anymore. Federal law requires that the OCR investigate all legitimate claims, but the office can choose how it allocates staff members’ time. The apparent depth and commitment of this investigation suggests that either OCR is shortchanging serious problems, or that it has nothing better to do.

Third and finally, when Republicans are in power, they should work to defund the OCR. Republicans opposed the Obama-era OCR’s forcing, respectively, school districts to adopt dangerously lenient discipline policies, colleges to use kangaroo courts to prosecute alleged sexual misconduct, and schools to let males into girls’ bathrooms. During the Trump administration, however, congressional Republicans dramatically boosted OCR’s funding, probably because they didn’t want to be branded as opponents of “civil rights.” If Republicans truly oppose ideologies like critical race theory and radical gender theory, however, they should yank funding from the Department of Education’s office of wokeness enforcement.

==

"if the student was so upset about inadvertent misgendering, maybe college wasn’t right for him"

This is the correct answer.

You can't call it a deeply personal sense of self when it requires others to participate, any more than a Xian can call their faith in their god a deeply held personal conviction and then demand even non-believers participate in prayer. That violates the secular principle of freedom of thought and conscience, and makes it a means of authoritarianism and control, not merely "being kind."

If it collapses when others aren't on board, then it's a performance; Judith Butler overtly states that gender is performative, and only real to the extent it is observed by others.

[eternal-echoes]

One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice. The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.” Conservatives’ detestation of war has no “touchy-feely” origins. It springs from conservatism’s roots, its most fundamental beliefs and objectives. Conservatism seeks above all social and cultural continuity, and nothing endangers that more than war. In the 20th century, war brought about social and cultural revolutions in the United States, including a large-scale movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. Nineteenth-century reformers had labored successfully to make it possible for women (and children) to leave the dark satanic mills and devote their lives to home and family, supported by a male breadwinner. The Victorians rightly considered the home more important than the workplace. A man’s duties in the world of affairs were a burden he had to carry to provide for his household, not something women should envy. This happy situation was overturned in both world wars as men were drafted by the millions while the demand for factory labor to support war production soared. Back into the mills went the women. The result was the weakening of the family, the institution most responsible for passing the culture on to the next generation. The threat war poses to the cake of custom is exacerbated by one of its foremost characteristics: its results are unpredictable. Few countries go to war expecting to lose, but wars are seldom won by both sides. The effects of military defeat on social order can be revolutionary. Russia’s involvement in World War I gave us Bolshevism. Germany’s defeat made Hitler possible. As the First World War shows, if a conflict is costly enough, the victors’ social order can suffer nearly as badly as that of the vanquished. Not only did the British Empire die in the mud of Flanders, but postwar Britain was a very different place from Edwardian Britain. The plain fact is, conservatives loathe unpredictability. They also know that vast state expenditures and debts can destabilize a society, and no activity of the state is more expensive than war. America’s adventure in Iraq, driven in no small part by the quest for oil—which will now mostly go to China—has already cost a trillion dollars, with another trillion or two to come caring for crippled veterans. Even the peacetime cost of a large military can break a country, as it broke the Soviet Union. American conservatives used to be budget hawks, not warhawks.

...

One gain that comes out of war is as disturbing to conservatives as any of the losses: an aggrandizement of state power. The argument of “wartime necessity” runs roughshod over all checks and balances, civil liberties, and traditional constraints on government. In the 20th century, American progressives knew they could only create the powerful, centralizing federal government they sought by going to war. It was they, the left, who engineered America’s entry into World War I. Nearly a century later, 9/11 gave centralizers in the neocon Bush administration the cover they needed for the “Patriot Act,” legislation that would have left most of America’s original patriots rethinking the merits of King George. Just as nothing adds more to a state’s debt than war, so nothing more increases its power. Conservatives rue both.

Link

I don’t particularly believe that all women should be stay-at-home moms. Each woman is different so God is going to call them to where He see fits to provide her feminine gifts there that men can’t provide. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s intrinsically evil for women to work; I think it’s more of how it’s done. Personally, I think corporations expecting both sexes to devote so much of themselves for the sake of company’s profit that employers don’t give their employees adequate time off to spend time with their families and the fair wage to support that contributes to family decay. But I believe that the article is right; family is one of the ways where the culture (and faith) is passed onto the next generation. If the family isn’t healthy, so goes the nation.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The foothold created by prisoner-built roads in the Canal Zone enabled colonial officials, army engineers, and politicians in the United States to train their sights on a Pan-American Highway, which would run north-south from Alaska to Argentina. Convict road building in Panamá became part of the massively increased federal support for convict road building projects across states, territories, and colonies under US jurisdiction. Federal officials, meanwhile, pushed their modernizing agenda for prisons and roads at the convenings of international organizations like the Pan American Union (PAU) and the Pan American Prison Congress. The Pan-American Highway was shrouded in the rhetoric of hemispheric harmony, and PAU Director General L.S. Row described the “Good Roads Movement” as encapsulating “the very essence of true Pan-Americanism.”

E.W. James, chief of the inter-American regional office of the Public Roads Administration, promised the highway would open up great tracts of land and offer US motorists scenes of “exotic interest,” discovery, and adventure. Probably “no white man” has ever traveled between Central and South America overland, he wrote referring to the Darién Gap between Panamá and Columbia. He provided a list of voyages along portions of the highway, including that of Zone policeman 88, Harry A. Franck. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific World’s Fair in San Francisco, the US Office of Public Roads staged the most comprehensive road exhibit to date. By the end of World War II, the inter-American portion between the United States and Panamá included 1,557 miles of paved roadway, 930 miles of all-weather, 280 miles of dry-weather, and 567 miles of trails. “The last quarter century in the Western Hemisphere has been preeminently an era of road building,” James proudly concluded.

Forced transportation was central to the chattel mode of incarceration, along with degrading hard labor. Throughout the period of US canal construction, 1904–1914, police and prison officials routinely deported people from the Zone. Indeed, when he was appointed police chief, George Shanton saw it as his first order of business. Before he was even expressly granted expanded deportation powers, he gathered members of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” and other “American gunmen” to round up any “bad men” in the newly occupied territory. 

“We went after them and some we found necessary to kill off but the great majority were gradually rounded up and placed in the stocks, later being put into bull-pens which we constructed,” he told the Boston Globe years later. “The next thing to do was to get them out of the country altogether,but we were in a position where we could not legally deport them. So we rounded up some old three masters […] and, bundling the birds all aboard, shot them off to the Islands thereabout.” 

His nonchalance masked a more systematic process of targeted depopulation that combined Spanish-speaking Afro-Panamanians, French-speaking Martinicans, and English-speaking Jamaicans and Barbadians under the general category of “negro criminal,” who were then indiscriminately sent off to neighboring Caribbean islands. “With them out of the Zone,” Shanton wrote, “we were then in a position of refusing them entrance should they attempt to return.”

Canal Zone District Attorney William Jackson argued that the “great expense” the government had incurred by paying to transport some twenty thousand workers from Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies “abundantly justified” expanded powers of deportation and judicial cost savings measures. The Canal Zone government paid the cost of deportation, he added, and rightly recouped the “enormous expense incident to jury trials.” As with other labor recruitment contracts, some officials worried they were skirting a line too near slavery. Responding to John Steven’s request to import more Chinese laborers, for instance, Secretary of War William Taft wrote, “peonage or coolieism, which shortly stated is slavery by debt, is as much in conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution as the usual form of slavery.” Others were less concerned. Despite apparent ambiguities in charting these degrees of unfreedom, they knew for certain that the Thirteenth Amendment’s convict clause provided that those convicted of a crime would become slaves of the state. Following a paradigm of patriarchal governance, Canal officials also assumed that other forms of dependent or coerced labor—of women, children, and colonial subjects—were part of the natural order of things. Evidently paying the passage of a small fraction of the total Canal Zone workforce had metaphorically, if not contractually, already indentured much wider segments of the population in the eyes of certain administrators.

...

The police and prison guards charged with implementing the forced labor program brought their own ideas about dependency, deviance, punishment, and work. Racialized labor control schemes had been vitally important to their jobs throughout the American empire. Zone policemen like Harry Franck and Robert Lamastus remarked that their fellow officers were mostly Southerners and almost all military men. Police Chief George Shanton, for instance, had served in the Rough Riders during the US wars in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. His successor had been a Confederate blockade runner, and the police chief after him was a former US Marshal in Indian Territory. When a police chase was on, wrote Harry Franck, everyone from the lieutenant down to the newest rookie would swarm out of the police station: “[T]he most apathetic of the force were girding up their loins with the adventurous fire of the old Moro-hunting days in their eyes, and all, some ahorse, more afoot, were dashing one by one out into the night and the jungle.” With this turn of phrase, Franck evoked the experience of colonial violence from fighting in the predominantly Muslim region of the Philippine archipelago to characterize the rush of tracking alleged outlaws in the Panamanian jungles as a kind of manly “adventure.”

Robert Lamastus, who was put in charge of working prisoners outside the penitentiary, exemplified many of these elements guards brought to the road gangs. With his family back in Kentucky, heavily indebted after the Civil War, he had gone fortune-seeking in the far reaches of the Northwest, joining the army in Alaska. He dreamed of striking it rich prospecting for gold or purchasing land to clear and cultivate. Yet his letters home made clear that he envisioned himself directing rather than performing hard physical labor; referring to farm work, for example, he exclaimed that there were “plenty of easier ways of making a living besides working like a slave for it.” Lamastus joined the police force in 1907 and was rapidly promoted. Within two years he was making $107.50 per month, five times what he earned when he first enlisted in the army, and the following year he received an additional $10 a month to serve as labor foreman over prisoners at Culebra. “We are building roads with them,” he wrote home, “I start work at 7 in the morning and I am through 5:30 in the evening.” 

After successfully completing his road building assignments in the town of Empire, he was made Assistant Deputy Warden in charge of all outside work. “I was promoted on the 19th of Dec. my pay is $125 per mo.” he proudly wrote home. In addition to his salary, as Gold Roll employees, white police and prison officers like Robert Lamastus also received the full range of government benefits including paid housing, health care, and vacations. The racially segregated social and economic hierarchies he and his colleagues helped establish in the Canal Zone therefore ensured that white American men, as a group, would stand to gain the most from the incarceration and forced labor of Zone inhabitants deemed criminals.

The Canal Zone governors, wardens, police, and prison guards who implemented the prison labor program drew on techniques of labor extraction and domination that had characterized the American expansion under slavery, settler colonialism, and war-making. While they were not all members of the ex-Confederate diaspora who sought to spread white supremacy across the Caribbean to Brazil, or across the Pacific to Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia, most shared lived experiences of slavery and colonial violence. They also shared a vision of patriarchal mastery and racial hierarchy in which white men assumed themselves to be the head, performing mental and skilled labor, and racialized others to be the body, performing unskilled, physically demanding, menial labor. Their vision of white settler-colonial agricultural development depended on roads being built throughout the Zone and across Panamá. It also provided prison administrators and guards a unique avenue of upward social mobility. After a career commanding prison labor in the Canal Zone and directing the Panamanian island prison colony at Coiba, for example, Robert Lamastus went on to set up coffee plantations in Boquete, Chiriqui, that have remained in his family to this day.”

- Benjamin D. Weber, “The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone,” International Labor and Working-Class History No. 96, Fall 2019, p. 88-90, 91-92.

Image at top is: “Road Making by Convicts” from Willis J. Abott, PANAMA And the Canal IN PICTURE AND PROSE. New York: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1913. p. 352.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.4 (after 1900)

1901 – McKinley inaugurated president for second time; Theodore Roosevelt is vice president. 1908 – The Collinwood school fire, Collinwood near Cleveland, Ohio, kills 174 people. 1909 – U.S. President William Taft used what became known as a Saxbe fix, a mechanism to avoid the restriction of the U.S. Constitution's Ineligibility Clause, to appoint Philander C. Knox as U.S. Secretary of State. 1913 – First Balkan War: The Greek army engages the Turks at Bizani, resulting in victory two days later. 1913 – The United States Department of Labor is formed. 1917 – Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first female member of the United States House of Representatives. 1933 – Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. He was the last president to be inaugurated on March 4. 1933 – Frances Perkins becomes United States Secretary of Labor, the first female member of the United States Cabinet. 1933 – The Parliament of Austria is suspended because of a quibble over procedure – Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss initiates an authoritarian rule by decree. 1941 – World War II: The United Kingdom launches Operation Claymore on the Lofoten Islands; the first large scale British Commando raid. 1943 – World War II: The Battle of the Bismarck Sea in the south-west Pacific comes to an end. 1943 – World War II: The Battle of Fardykambos, one of the first major battles between the Greek Resistance and the occupying Royal Italian Army, begins. It ends on 6 March with the surrender of an entire Italian battalion and the liberation of the town of Grevena. 1944 – World War II: After the success of Big Week, the USAAF begins a daylight bombing campaign of Berlin. 1946 – Field Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim, the 6th president of Finland, resigns from his position for health reasons. 1955 – An order to protect the endangered Saimaa ringed seal (Pusa hispida saimensis) is legalized. 1957 – The S&P 500 stock market index is introduced, replacing the S&P 90. 1960 – The French freighter La Coubre explodes in Havana, Cuba, killing 100. 1962 – A Caledonian Airways Douglas DC-7 crashes shortly after takeoff from Cameroon, killing 111 – the worst crash of a DC-7. 1966 – A Canadian Pacific Air Lines DC-8-43 explodes on landing at Tokyo International Airport, killing 64 people. 1966 – In an interview in the London Evening Standard, The Beatles' John Lennon declares that the band is "more popular than Jesus now". 1970 – French submarine Eurydice explodes underwater, resulting in the loss of the entire 57-man crew. 1976 – The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention is formally dissolved in Northern Ireland resulting in direct rule of Northern Ireland from London by the British parliament. 1977 – The 1977 Vrancea earthquake in eastern and southern Europe kills more than 1,500, mostly in Bucharest, Romania. 1980 – Nationalist leader Robert Mugabe wins a sweeping election victory to become Zimbabwe's first black prime minister. 1985 – The Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for HIV infection, used since then for screening all blood donations in the United States. 1986 – The Soviet Vega 1 begins returning images of Halley's Comet and the first images of its nucleus. 1990 – American basketball player Hank Gathers dies after collapsing during the semifinals of a West Coast Conference tournament game. 1990 – Lennox Sebe, President for life of the South African Bantustan of Ciskei, is ousted from power in a bloodless military coup led by Brigadier Oupa Gqozo. 1994 – Space Shuttle program: the Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on STS-62. 1996 – A derailed train in Weyauwega, Wisconsin (USA) causes the emergency evacuation of 2,300 people for 16 days. 1998 – Gay rights: Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc.: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that federal laws banning on-the-job sexual harassment also apply when both parties are the same sex. 2001 – BBC bombing: A massive car bomb explodes in front of the BBC Television Centre in London, seriously injuring one person; the attack was attributed to the Real IRA.

[thefictionaledition]

All the president’s menus - the Taft administration

The audacity of hoops by Dennis Rodman

Conservative women from queen Victoria to Victoria Jackson

Class presidents through history

[deadpresidents]

Which President, in your opinion, was the most reluctant to seek the position? Which wound up hating it the most by the end of his term?

I am a strong believer that nobody truly becomes President of the United States "reluctantly". That's not exactly the kind of job that seeks you, especially the modern Presidency.

For a significant slice of American history, many of the people nominated for President acted as if they were being called upon to run when, behind-the-scenes, they were very active in building their campaigns and corralling supporters. Until the 20th Century it was frowned upon to openly run for the Presidency, but almost all of the Presidents wanted the gig.

I'd say that George Washington was probably more reluctant than most of his successors and likely would have preferred retiring to Mount Vernon after the Revolution, but I think he also recognized that he was the guy who needed to be the President that set the precedents. I think Ulysses S. Grant would have been perfectly happy to not be President, but once he was elected in 1868 he also wanted to keep the job. He even tried to run for a third term in 1880.

That 1880 election might have been the one case where the winner -- James Garfield -- genuinely wasn't interested in the Presidency at that point. He had gone to the Republican National Convention to support fellow Ohioan John Sherman (and defeat Grant's hopes for a third term) and gained some major attention after giving a well-received speech placing Sherman's name in nomination. When the candidacies of Sherman and James G. Blaine -- another anti-Grant candidate -- stalled, Garfield became a compromise choice and was eventually nominated on the 36th ballot. Garfield was apparently legitimately shocked by the events leading to him leaving Chicago as the GOP nominee.

By most accounts, William Howard Taft was far more interested in a potential seat on the Supreme Court than becoming President. At heart he was a judge and believed himself to be better suited for the judiciary than the Executive Branch. But Taft turned down three offers by Theodore Roosevelt to be appointed to the Supreme Court (in 1902, 1903, and 1906) because he felt obligated to complete his work as Governor-General of the Philippines and then Secretary of War. But Taft's wife desperately wanted him to become President and by the time of President Roosevelt's third offer of a seat on the Court, Taft was already being talked about as Roosevelt's hand-picked successor in the White House. And, as with all other Presidents, once he had a taste for the job, he didn't want to give it up, running for re-election in 1912 against his former friend, Roosevelt.

Gerald Ford is the only other President who hadn't spent a significant portion of his political career with his eyes on the White House. Ford spent nearly a quarter-century in the House of Representatives and his main ambition was to be Speaker of the House, but Republicans weren't able to win control of the House when Ford was in Congressional leadership positions. But even with Ford being a creature of Congress, he did attempt to put himself forward as a nominee for the Vice Presidency, first in 1960 and then in 1968, and Nixon kicked the tires on picking him as his running mate in 1960. No one wants to be Vice President without seeing it as a potential stepping stone to the Presidency, particularly at that point in history before Vice Presidents were empowered with some real influence within the Administrations they served in.

As for who wound up hating it by the end of their time in office, I think it's safe to say that John Quincy Adams didn't shed too many tears when he was defeated for re-election in 1828. And I'm sure he wouldn't use the word "hate", but nobody can convince me that George W. Bush wasn't thoroughly ready to escape Washington by late-2007. There were times in 2008 when he seemed like he just wanted to hold a snap election like they have in parliamentary systems and go home to Texas. If some Presidential insider published a book that said that Bush asked if he could just give the keys to the White House to Barack Obama in July 2008, I wouldn't be the least bit shocked.

On the other hand, if there were no term limits, Bill Clinton would have been running for President in every election since 1992 (and the crazy thing is that he's still younger than both of the presumptive 2024 nominees). I'm kind of surprised that he didn't make an effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment in the past 20 years. Clinton loved being President and was trying to find something Presidential to do until minutes before his successor was inaugurated in 2001.

[mdsc951]

𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗱��𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗗𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗢𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗖𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘂𝘀, 𝗛𝗶𝘀 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗗𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 wasn’t just an abolitionist leader, author, and statesman – he was also a music lover. He wrote passionately about the importance of music in communities of enslaved people in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In fact, he wrote that music gave him his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.” Later, when Frederick Douglass was free from slavery, music continued to play an important part of his life. In his home, he shared all kinds of music with his family and guests. An avid violinist, one instrument he owned was a copy of a Stradivarius that is now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. It seems his love of music rubbed off on his 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗼𝗻, #𝗝𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗽𝗵𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗿𝘆𝗗𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀, who had an international career as a #violinist 🎻. Joseph Henry got one of his first big breaks at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. The same year, he performed in Washington D.C. along with Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, a famous singer known by the name “Black Patti.” Joseph Henry made his first White House appearance in 1899 to perform for William McKinley. (Later, he returned to play for president Taft.) Though McKinley welcomed Douglass, he also welcomed music that stereotyped African Americans. For example, A Valentine’s Day concert program under McKinley’s administration featured minstrel songs such as “Mammy’s Little Alabama Coon.” Frederick Douglass may not have ever performed at the White House himself. He did, however, attend an important White House performance. In 1878, Marie “Selika” Williams sang for President Hayes at the White House, marking what may have been the first appearance by an African American musician there, according to White House Historical Society emerita director Elise K. Kirk. (at DuSable Museum of African American History) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeTT-KULONl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[kp777]

By Brad Plumer

Brad Plumer spent time in the oil fields of California, where many communities are built on fossil fuels.

Photographs by Alisha Jucevic

The New York Times

July 7, 2022

TAFT, Calif. — Every five years, this city of 7,000 hosts a rollicking, Old West-themed festival known as Oildorado. High schoolers decorate parade floats with derricks and pump jacks. Young women vie for the crown in a “Maids of Petroleum” beauty pageant. It’s a celebration of an industry that has sustained the local economy for the past century.

This is oil country, in a state that leads the country in environmental regulation. With wildfires and drought ravaging California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, wants to end oil drilling in the state by 2045. That has provoked angst and fierce resistance here in Kern County, where oil and gas tax revenues help to pay for everything from elementary schools to firefighters to mosquito control.

“Nowhere else in California is tied to oil and gas the way we are, and we can’t replace what that brings overnight,” said Ryan Alsop, chief administrative officer in Kern County, a region north of Los Angeles. “It’s not just tens of thousands of jobs. It’s also hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue that we rely on to fund our schools, parks, libraries, public safety, public health.”

Across the United States, dozens of states and communities rely on fossil fuels to fund aspects of daily life. In Wyoming, more than half of state and local tax revenues comes from fossil fuels. In New Mexico, an oil boom has bankrolled free college for residents and expanded medical care for new mothers. Oil and gas money is so embedded in many local budgets, it’s difficult to imagine a future without it.

Disentangling communities from fossil-fuel income poses a major obstacle in the fight against climate change. One study found that if nations followed the urging of scientists and cut emissions from oil, gas and coal deeply enough to avert catastrophic warming, United States tax revenues from oil and gas production, currently about $34 billion per year, could fall by two-thirds by 2050.

While Kern County produces 70 percent of California’s oil, it is also the state’s largest supplier of wind and solar power. But renewable energy doesn’t generate as much tax revenue as fossil fuels, partly because California exempts solar panels from property taxes to spur construction. And jobs in the wind and solar industries generally don’t pay as much or last as long as those in the oil fields.

So Kern County is feuding with the governor. Local officials, who have unsuccessfully sued to block Governor Newsom’s restrictions on drilling, are backing a plan for up to 43,000 new wells and have threatened to halt solar projects in response to the state’s oil crackdown.

Whether Kern County can transition to cleaner energy could offer a model, or a cautionary tale, to the rest of the nation.

“California is about 10 years ahead of other places on climate policy, but I expect we’ll see similar issues pop up across the United States,” said Kyle Meng, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “When you look at how deeply oil and gas is woven into the fabric of many communities, providing money for schools and hospitals and roads, the shift to clean energy can get really complicated, really fast.”

Read more.

[lboogie1906]

Alice Allison Dunnigan (April 27, 1906 - May 6, 1983) was the first African American female correspondent at the White House and the first African American member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries.

She was born in Russellville, Kentucky to Willie and Lena Pitman Allison. Her father worked as a tobacco sharecropper, and her mother took in laundry for a living. She married a tobacco farmer (1925). She began teaching in the Todd County School System in Russellville while taking courses in journalism at Tennessee A&I University. She began preparing Kentucky fact sheets to supplement the required texts. The sheets turned into a manuscript in 1939 but were not published until 1982 under the title The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition.

She juggled a freelance writer position for the Chicago branch of the American Negro Press and night courses at Howard University in statistics and economics. She took a job writing for the Chicago Defender. She started working full-time at the ANP and secured a capital press pass. She was able to cover news events of the Congress, which was kept off limits to most reporters, the public, women, and African Americans. She became the first African American to gain a Congressional press pass.

She was one of three African Americans and one of two women in the press corps that covered the campaign of President Harry S. Truman. She was barred from covering a speech given by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a whites-only theater and was forced to sit with the servants to cover Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s funeral.

She worked for Johnson when he served as vice president and in the Johnson Administration. She was an information specialist for the Department of Labor. She served as an associate editor with the President’s Commission on Youth Opportunity in 1967. She retired from government service in 1970.

She wrote her autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House. She published The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians in 1982. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #sigmagammarho

[racefortheironthrone]

As a labor historian, what do you make of the current railway dispute in Congress?

I'd recommend reading the reportage of my colleague Erik Loomis, to start with, because he's been following the story a lot more closely than I have.

The historical context here is that there is a long history of the Federal government seeking to intervene in strikes that are viewed to be widely disruptive to the national economy - in addition to the long and bloody 19th century history of Hayes and Cleveland and others suppressing strikes with the National Guard and the Army, you can trace the story back through Theodore Roosevelt and the anthracite coal strike of 1902, Woodrow Wilson and the Adamson Act and the Railway Labor Board during WWI, then the creation of the Railway Labor Act of 1925, then FDR and his rather complicated legacy that spans the gamut from "if I were working in a factory, I'd join a union" to "a plague on both their houses," then Harry Truman and his nationalization of the steel industry but also vetoing Taft-Hartley, and on and on.

What happened in this instance is that there had been a rather troubled negotiation and mediation between the 12 railway unions and a bunch of freight railroads, dating back to 2019. Under the Railway Labor Act, the Biden Administration in July set up a Presidential Emergency Board to impose a Tentative Agreement and institute a "cooling-off" period that would prevent a strike that the Biden Administration was worried would lead to inflation. This Tentative Agreement was agreed to by some unions and not others, largely around the sick day issue.

In late November, Biden asked Congress to enact the Tentative Agremeent into law under the Railway Labor Act. Now, the Biden Administration could have forwarded any package it wanted to to Congress, but ultimately chose just to send the Tentative Agreement. This royally pissed off Bernie Sanders who wanted to deal with the sick day issue, which is why the House passed both the Tentative Agreement and a separate bill that would have enacted 7 days of paid sick leave. The Senate then passed the Tentative Agreement on a bipartisan vote, but then the Republicans in the Senate filibustered the sick leave bill, so that it failed despite getting 52 votes to 43.

[richardnixonlibrary]

#Nixon50 #OTD 4/4/1974 President Nixon met with Senator Marlow W. Cook (R-KY), Senator Robert Taft, Jr. (R-OH), Thomas P. Dunne, Administrator of the Federal Disaster Administration, James T. Lynn, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and others to discuss damage assessments in the nine-state area hit by severe storms and tornadoes the previous day. (Image: WHPO-E2558-09A)