2024
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“Trusted with kids, not with a vote…” (DC Vote, 2006), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010650572/; “Both will save your life. Only one has a vote in Congress…” (DC Vote, 2006), https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010650571/. ↩︎
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Ike Allen, “A History of Congress Messing With DC: 50 years of home rule—and federal meddling," Washingtonian, November 8, 2023. ↩︎
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President Biden will allow Congress to overturn new D.C. crime law, NPR, March 2, 2023. ↩︎
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“Welcome to All!,” color lithograph, Puck April 28, 1880, pp. 130–31, Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719044/. A high-resolution TIFF file is available for closer scrutiny. ↩︎
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Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, “What Fools these Mortals Be!": The Story of Puck (IDW Publishing, 2014) ↩︎
Is anyone really prepared to set store by exit polls this year? 🗳️
First time voting in person since 2016. First time casting a vote in NH since the 90s. There’s a long line, but it’s moving. Heard it’s the shortest it’s been all day. Most people in good spirits. Trying to guess who the Trumpies are, but only a handful seem obvious because it’s just neighbors voting and enjoying a beautiful day. Three kids in line who look like this is their first time. Happy for them.
This all feels like democracy. Fuck the electoral college.
Broadcasting Election Results and Taking Opinion Polls in 1872
The illustrated British weekly The Graphic published these two fascinating images of U.S. election technologies in 1872. Explanations from the publication follow.
“The Electoral Magic Lantern” aka Broadcasting Results (top)
“Mammoth stereopticon”, at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-Second Street. “By means of a stereoscopic apparatus and magic lantern, the telegrams [of election results] are rapidly copied on a glass plate, and then put in the apparatus. Large crowds assemble till early in the morning, to watch the returns, which are shown on the wall of some building, covered with a large white sheet."–from source periodical.
“Taking Votes in a Railway Car” aka Polling Voter Intentions (bottom)
“It is a common thing to take votes in the railway carriages during election campaigns, though strictly speaking, it is not so much taking a vote as ascertaining approximately which candidate will have the best chance. Each passenger enters the name of his choice on a piece of paper, and a gentleman, generally a politician, takes his hat and collects the votes. Bets are offered and taken, and after the scrutiny animated discussions arise, each man endeavouring to persuade his opponents."–from source periodical.
Source: Wood engravings by Paul Frenzeny (artist) and Francis Sylvester Walker (delineator), The Graphic, November 30, 1872, via The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (Higher resolutions available.)
"Susan B. Anthony to the women of today: 'Everything but the vote is still to be won'" by Nina Allender (1872–1957) for the Women's National Party, Equal Rights: Official Weekly Organ of the National Woman's Party, February 24, 1923, via Library of Congress.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
– Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, November 3, 2024.
“Confessions of a Republican” (LBJ 1964 Presidential campaign commercial) https://youtu.be/LiG0AE8zdTU 🗳️
Had to put on a winter jacket this evening. First time since April. 🧊
Am still bringing in very old posts, but have stopped noting which blog I originally posted these on. Should that ever matter, it’s covered in a new colophon entry on my About page: the Wayback Machine and the names and links to the archived blogs.
I’m daring to hope that pollsters are gonna have some ‘splaining to do after Harris whups Trump’s ass on Tuesday. 🥊
DC Residents Still Have No Vote in Congress
For more than 25 years, I had no representation in Congress because I lived in DC. That’s changed because of my caregiving responsibilities, so it will be bittersweet on Tuesday when I cast a straight Democratic ballot in Conway, NH. Yes, I have representation now, but that doesn’t change anything for my wife, friends, and former colleagues and neighbors in DC. A territory in the United States with more than 700,000 residents,1 DC has more people than Vermont and Wyoming. That’s why its license plates read “Taxation without Representation.” Other DC PR work has included these 2006 posters.2
Rubbing DC residents' noses in it, representatives sent by the rest of the country interfere in the city’s local life.3 In particular, Republicans who don’t approve of local measures or have a social experiment in mind can interfere with local policies. I remember school vouchers and condoms for high school students. Democrats are not immune to such behavior either, however, as this 2023 tweet by President Biden demonstrates.4
I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule—but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections—such as lowering penalties for carjackings.
If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did—I’ll sign it.
This evening, I watched two short films from The Kyiv Independent’s YouTube channel about people in uniform. In The Witches of Butcha, we meet a woman’s unit tasked with shooting down Shahed drones. The other introduces Ukrainian prisoners training to fight as infantrymen: “I want to come home not as some ex-convict, but a hero."
What Are We to Do with Our Democracy?
American billionaires who intervened in their newspapers' endorsements know that the orange guy is a vindictive prat, unlike Harris. Nonetheless, their actions and Musk’s murder of Twitter ought to lead to legislation that limits or undercuts the concentration of media ownership, regardless of who the owners support. We cannot become another oligarchy à la Autocracy, Inc.
I suspect, though, that this is a fight for another day, if ever. The electorate needs Harris to come through on important bread-and-butter issues first; Harris will need to work coalitions in Congress to increase pressure on Russia’s terrorist regime; and on and on.
It seems as if there is always a big and urgent need. So how do we address the fundamentals, including not only media concentration but also campaign finance, gerrymandering, Supreme Court oversight, the Electoral College, a primary system that favors ideological purity over substance, minority rule by those who win only a plurality of votes, and statehood for DC and for any other territories who desire it? Where do we start?
If Republicans were really concerned about media bias, that could form a basis for bipartisan work on media concentration. The past decade or so has shown, however, that they do not want free and fair discussions. Recently, “free speech” absolutists have given the lie to that notion with Twitter’s metamorphosis into X(itter), which followed on the heels of “alternative facts” and a cultural shift that privileges personal belief over all forms of evidence. Consider, too, the pressure to ban books and not teach darker chapters of our history.
So where or how do we start? Republicans' singular focus on attaining power in the states, in the judiciary, and in the federal government paid off, at least in the short term. They ended Roe; they’ve come close to establishing presidential immunity; and they have big plans to blow up most of our remaining institutions. They’ve also enabled the blossoming of unregulated militias with freely available assault rifles.
My hope is that enough Americans see through the orange one’s grift to put an end to his ambitions for a second term once and for all. I would then like to see Harris appointees hold the worst of the conspiring putschists and domestic terrorists to account in timely fashion so as to delegitimize that kind of opposition. But how do we get from there to a culture that rewards candidates who respect the Constitution and their fellow human beings enough to get the people’s work done?
Via Stephen West (@stephenwest.bsky.social) comes news that businesses and offices near the White House are boarding up their windows. The pictures resemble hurricane preparations, but this is about possible riots and would-be insurrectionists.
Telling myself that we often take the hard way, but eventually we get things right. Hoping we’re nearing the inflection point toward the latter now.
The past is being whitewashed at the National Archives museum.
The changes to the new exhibits are remarkable. A photo of King was replaced with one of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley. A “proposed exhibit exploring changes to the Constitution since 1787,” including “amendments abolishing slavery and expanding the right to vote,” was reduced in size, and employees were told that “focusing on the amendments portrayed the Founding Fathers in a negative light.” Shogan “told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees” and her aides “also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational material.” An exhibit on coal communities “cut references to the environmental hazards caused by the mining industry.” Shogan’s aides “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” A photo of Betty Ford wearing an Equal Rights Amendment pin was removed from a video, and in an exhibit of “patents that changed the world,” the birth control pill was replaced with, of all things, the bump stock.
Nathan J. Robinson, “It’s Going to Take a Constant Fight to Preserve the Historical Record,” Current Affairs, October 31, 2024.
It’s striking how many candidates for state office in New Hampshire don’t make their party affiliation obvious in their campaign mailers and ads. Was it always like this? Is it a side effect of our contentious national politics? Or is it due to the orange candidate’s problems?
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
'Welcome to All' (1880 Cartoon)
This Puck cartoon from 1880 portrayed immigration in positive terms.1 Uncle Sam stands at the entrance to a wooden “U.S. Ark of Refuge,” a U.S. flag to the side. The image offers a strong contrast to the ramparts Uncle Sam stands at in 1903 and behind in 1916. Beside him is a list of “free” things offered by “U.S.”
FREE EDUCATION
FREE LAND
FREE SPEECH
FREE BALLOT
FREE LUNCH.
U.S.
The meaning of “free” varies here. Sometimes it has to do with “liberty” (free speech and the secret ballot), and other times “no cost.” If public (“free”) education is an achievement some in our own time wish to destroy, its existence was bound up with both senses of “free.” No tuition was required, sure, but it was also a precondition for a free people and for making Americans. “Free land” in this list would have meant federal lands according to the terms of the various Homestead Acts. But “free lunch”? What was that about?
This last item was initially a head scratcher for me. I thought it might be a comment or joke about immigrant expectations, but it seems the saying “no such thing as a free lunch” only gained currency during the middle decades of the twentieth-century. In fact, American saloons were offering free lunches at the time of this cartoon, so there really was such a thing for those who liked their beer and whiskey. Given the loads of correspondence and rumors between Europe and the United States, this kind of knowledge would have filtered through, too.
Because saloons are the context of these lunches, it is tempting to gender these free lunches “masculine” and assume the existence of a social critique of intemperate immigrant men. The image, however, shows heterosexual couples in the prime of life, suggesting that such gendered moralizing was not part of the artist’s intention. Moreover, Puck had begun its life as a German-language publication in the previous decade, and the artist-publisher Joseph-Keppler had immigrated from Austria.2
Highlighting the list of attractions on the door is the metaphorically clear sky over the “ark.” Behind the migrants, to the east, are dark storm clouds with black carrion-seeking scavengers in them. The clouds themselves are monsters labeled “WAR” and “DISTRESS.” War entailed not only destruction but also mandatory military service of varying terms. Distress, in this context, probably meant economic distress. Europe was in the middle of a long depression, while it was continuing to experience great socio-economic changes in the course of its ongoing industrialization.
Adding more economic and political arguments to the mix, more liberty, a sign in the middle advertises more benefits to life in the United States:
NO OPPRESSIVE TAXES
NO EXPENSIVE KINGS
NO COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
NO KNOUTS [OR] DUNGEONS.
The cartoon’s pairing of dark and light, of the prospects of distress or prosperity, represented what migration discourse in our own time refers to as push and pull factors. Beneath the cartoon is a quote from the N.Y. Statistical Review that highlights the cartoonist’s main interest: “We may safely say that the present influx of immigration to the United States is something unprecedented in our generation.” The detailed cartoon offered a context for this rise.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, @resonanteye.bsky.social reminded me of the Page Act of 1875, which excluded Chinese women. That made me think of the two single men at the end of the line in this cartoon because one of them appears to be Chinese. It is likely that this represented an acknowledgement of the Page Act. It also seems possible that the inclusion of this figure amounted to a critique of it. Here's our exchange—unfortunately, her settings require one to be logged in to see her posts.
If you’re gonna put people on the phone to urge residents to support your candidate, you better make sure they know more than their hastily read script. They should also make clear what organization they’re working for, not just what candidate they’re supporting. I say “working”, because I’d expect a volunteer to be better informed than the caller was, and the caller sounded more Mid-Atlantic than New England. I guess scaling this kind of effort is never easy. Besides, I only answered because I was curious what local pitch I might hear, but this wasn’t that.
Election Refusal as Career
Highly recommended reading: “David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal” by Anna Bower and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, October 31, 2024.
The phenomenon described is worrying, but the telling is engaging, even entertaining—maybe because it feels so American to me.
The bright colors were largely gone on my walk in Whitaker Woods yesterday, and the sky was gray, so I turned my eyes to moss.
Okay, I’ve made it this far into my day without coffee because there was none. That’s changed, so time to put the moka pot to work. ☕️
Brought my mother to the town hall so she could drop off her absentee ballot and show her ID in person. No crowds, no fear of getting knocked over.