Haplocanthosaurus, where it belongs. Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Here is an example from Wisconsin in 1905 of a law banning corporate influence on public policy:¹⁰

No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.

Penalty: Any officer, employe, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate [this act] shall be punished upon conviction by a fine of not less than one hundred nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years, or by both … and if the corporation shall be subject to a penalty then by forfeiture in double the amount of any fine so imposed … and if a domestic corporation, it may be dissolved, … and if a foreign or nonresident corporation, its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.

Similar Ohio Law, 1908

Section 1, That no corporation doing business in this state shall directly or indirectly pay, use or offer, consent or agree to pay or use, any of its money or property for, or in aid, of any political party, committee or organization, or for, or in aid of, any candidate for political office or for nomination for any such office, or in any manner use any of its money or property for any political purpose whatever, or for the reimbursement or indemnification of any person or persons for moneys or property so used.

Section 3. Every corporation which violates section 1 of this act shall be punished by a fine of not more than five thousand nor less than five hundred dollars… Any officer, stockholder, attorney, or agent of any corporations which violates section 1 of this act who participates in, aids, or advises any such violation, and any person who solicits or knowingly receives any money or property in violation of this act shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or both at the discretion of the court.¹¹

Other Wisconsin Laws

From research by Jane Anne Morris:¹

• corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.
• corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).
• the state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter for a particular reason, or for no reason at all.
• the act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.
• as a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents could be held criminally liable for violating the law.
• state (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.
• directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders.
• corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.
• corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, like 20 or 30 years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice.)
• corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations in order to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.
• corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s).
• corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.
• corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.
• state legislatures set the rates that corporations could charge for their products or services.
• all corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.

All of these provisions were once law in the state of Wisconsin. And similar ones were on the books in most other states.

Sources

¹ ‘Fixing Corporations: The Legacy of the Founding Parents’ by Jane Anne Morris, Madison, Wisc.

² ‘Some Like It Hot’ By Chris Mooney, Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. …

…

[W]ith the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.

Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” …

Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. …

³ ‘Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank’ Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million [from 2000 to 2003] into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe.

⁴ ‘Medicare for All: The Only Sound Solution to Our Healthcare Crisis’ By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet, January 16, 2007.

The United States has the most expensive healthcare system on the planet. Even including the 47 million uninsured, the U.S. healthcare system costs almost double per capita what single-payer systems in Europe, Japan and Canada cost; in the United States, healthcare costs were $5,635 per person in 2005.

⁵ Bill Moyers Journal, July 10, 2009

The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that the major private health insurers had rescinded the policies of approximately 20,000 people in a five year period, to avoid paying out approximately $300 million in benefit claims.

⁶ ‘Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying Firms Are Enlisting Ex-Lawmakers, Aides’ by Dan Eggen and Kimberly Kindy, July 7, 2009, The Washington Post

The nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

…

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. …

The push has reunited many who worked together in government on health-care reform, but are now employed as advocates for pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

⁷ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁸ ‘Capital City’ by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2010

let’s take a virtual stroll down K Street and see what everyone is spending on the world’s second-oldest profession. It’s all laid out for us by OpenSecrets.org. The defense lobby? Pikers. They contributed $24 million to individuals and PACs during the last election cycle. The farm lobby? $65 million. Health care? We’re getting warmer. Health care was the No. 2 industry, at $167 million.

And the finance lobby? They’re No. 1, with a very, very big bullet. They contributed an astonishing $475 million during the 2008 election cycle. That’s up from $60 million almost two decades ago.

⁹ ‘Don’t Reinflate the Old Bubbles’ By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, October 14, 2009

What we’re witnessing here is pretty simple: another bubble in financial assets. All that “liquidity” created by the Federal Reserve and other central banks has accomplished its task and prevented a global financial meltdown. But unless they move now to begin sopping up that liquidity, the central bankers run a serious risk of reinflating many of the same bubbles that got us into this mess in the first place.

…

The problem is that because we didn’t get into this recession in the normal way, the normal analysis and remedies are not appropriate. Slow growth and high unemployment are indeed going to be a big problem over the next several years, but they aren’t going to be solved by pumping out lots of cheap money that is used to speculate in stocks, bonds and commodities rather than be invested in the real economy. And if all this speculation has the effect of driving up the price of commodities and driving down the value of the dollars we use for imports, then it is perfectly possible to wind up with high inflation and high unemployment at the same time — as happened in the late 1970s.

The right policy response is for the Fed to begin withdrawing some of this extraordinary monetary stimulus even as the rest of the government steps up its effort to stimulate the real economy. That means more money for extended unemployment benefits; more aid to the states so that they can maintain the most vital public services; and more money to expand mass transit, state college and university systems, efficient energy production and basic scientific research. The economist Paul Krugman estimates that for every dollar in extra debt that will be required to finance this fiscal stimulus, about 40 cents will be repaid almost immediately in the form of tax revenues from higher short-term economic growth. And if the money is invested wisely in quality projects with high returns, the other 60 cents could wind up being a boon to future generations, rather than a burden.

¹⁰ ‘Wisconsin statutes. 1919: embracing all general statutes in force …, Volume 2, section 4479a’ edited by Lyman Junius Nash, Arthur Frederick Belitz

¹¹ ‘DEMOCRACY FOR SALE: How Ohioans Kept Corporations out of Politics; How and When They Re-entered’ — American Friends Service Committee

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

For a terse telling of the Flint sit-down strike story, click this link: Flint Workers Sat Down and U.S. Middle Class Rose Up.

Sources

⁶⁰ Flint Workers Sat Down and U.S. Middle Class Rose Up

⁶¹ ‘Union Membership Trends in the U.S. Private Sector’ – Political Calculations, 2006-03-20

Sources: Union Sourcebook 1947-1983; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compiled by Labor Research Association.

⁶² ‘The American Dream died in February 1973’ Realitybase 2009-03-10

The income line since 1973 is roughly flat, but should actually be going down, because the Consumer Price Index has understated inflation since the early 1980’s. (See the next note.) — QH

Update: The Bureau of Labor Statistics answers the claims from the next note that it has understated inflation.

⁶³ ‘Consumer Price Index’ – John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics, 2006-10-01

The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1980s. In recent decades, however, the reporting system increasingly succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.

In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise. …

…

In the early 1990s, press reports began surfacing as to how the CPI really was significantly overstating inflation. If only the CPI inflation rate could be reduced, it was argued, then entitlements, such as social security, would not increase as much each year, and that would help to bring the budget deficit under control. Behind this movement were financial luminaries Michael Boskin, then chief economist to the first Bush Administration, and Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

…

Up until the Boskin/Greenspan agendum surfaced, the CPI was measured using the costs of a fixed basket of goods, a fairly simple and straightforward concept. The identical basket of goods would be priced at prevailing market costs for each period, and the period-to-period change in the cost of that market basket represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a constant standard of living.

The Boskin/Greenspan argument was that when steak got too expensive, the consumer would substitute hamburger for the steak, and that the inflation measure should reflect the costs tied to buying hamburger versus steak, instead of steak versus steak

…

Aside from the changed weighting, the average person also tends to sense higher inflation than is reported by the BLS, because of hedonics, as in hedonism. Hedonics adjusts the prices of goods for the increased pleasure the consumer derives from them. That new washing machine you bought did not cost you 20% more than it would have cost you last year, because you got an offsetting 20% increase in the pleasure you derive from pushing its new electronic control buttons instead of turning that old noisy dial, according to the BLS.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵

• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

• Bush, in his “Global War on Terror”, pursued torture of captives and dragged the nation’s honor into the muck, but he was just bringing home the policy of Reagan, who supported torture by Latin American regimes fighting leftist rebellions.⁴⁹⁵⁰

• Bush broke laws with programs such as his domestic warrantless wiretapping, just like Reagan, with programs such as the Iran-Contra caper, which secretly bypassed Congress’s ban against aiding the brutal Contra rebels against the people of Nicaragua.⁵¹⁵²

• Bush pushed corporate deregulation and slowed anti-fraud enforcement during a time of massive Wall Street fraud, which helped bring about the Bush Economic Crash — putting millions out of work and causing trillions in bank bailouts, but he was riding out the deregulation wave started by Reagan, who signed the deregulation law that brought about the huge Savings and Loan Crash in the 80’s.^53545556

• Bush fiddled for eight years while global warming climate change mindlessly marched ahead, and, like Reagan, ignored and cut enforcement of environmental standards.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Now, President Obama has just signed a law to plan remembrances for Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth (on Feb 6, 2011).⁵⁹ Let’s take the occasion to do more than honor Reagan with a postage stamp — let’s honor our country by teaching a factual history of his regime and its effects to our children.

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘‘Bush’ sewage plant proposal makes ballot’ – AP, July 18, 2008

A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush’s years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.

…

“We think that it’s important to remember our leaders in the right historical context,” said McConnell, a member of the group that was formed after friends came up with the renaming idea.

“In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. “The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

⁴¹ ‘The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis’ By Robert Parry, August 11, 2006

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. On Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA sent analysts to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to Suskind’s book.

Then, ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

⁴² ‘Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?’ By Robert Parry, June 3, 2009

[The Afghanistan] war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

⁴³ ‘Pakistan and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’‘ by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 8, 2008

In December 1984, the Sharia Law (Islamic jurisprudence) was established in Pakistan following a rigged referendum launched by President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Barely a few months later, in March 1985, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which authorized “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well a support to religious indoctrination.

…

“ … the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, …” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

⁴⁴ ‘Bush’s Belated Accountability Moment’ By Nat Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 12, 2006

In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.

⁴⁵ ‘Prodigal Sun’ – Mother Jones, March 2000

The [DOE’s Solar Energy Research Institute] study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation’s leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2000. The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded — the same research funding and tax credits provided to other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. … [Reagan’s] Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record.

… The budget for the solar institute — which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation — was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute — later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — marked the start of Reagan’s campaign against solar power. By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded. The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up,” says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day.

⁴⁶ ‘Pentagon Officer Created Phony Intel on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link’ By Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t, Friday 06 April 2007

Newly released documents confirm that a Pentagon unit knowingly cooked up intelligence claiming a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.

A report prepared by the Defense Department’s Inspector General for Carl Levin, the Democratic Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, explicitly shows how former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith used his Defense Department position to cook intelligence claiming a connection between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

…

But according to the IG’s declassified report, “a Senior Intelligence Analyst working in the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) countered point-by-point, each instance of an alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida …”

⁴⁷ ‘Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’‘ – By Robert Parry, June 30, 2008

That chapter — which we are publishing here for the first time — was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

…

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt — to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

⁴⁸ ‘GOP & KAL-007: ‘The Key Is to Lie First’‘ By Robert Parry

One of the baldest — and now admitted — lies was the case of Korean Air Lines flight 007. On the night of Aug. 30, 1983, the KAL 747 jumbo jet strayed hundreds of miles off-course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive air space, by flying over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.

Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots apparently did not see the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity — a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier — Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.

The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which Reagan explained as an “understandable accident”).

But in 1983, the truth about KAL-007 didn’t fit Washington’s propaganda needs. The Reagan administration wanted to portray the Soviets as wanton murderers, so it brushed aside the judgment of the intelligence analysts. The administration then chose to release only snippets of the taped intercepts packaged in a way to suggest that the slaughter was intentional.

⁴⁹ ‘Report: Torture started with Bush’ By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive (interrogation) techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” That is one of the raw conclusions of a two-year Senate investigation into torture.

…

According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques.

⁵⁰ ‘Lost History: ‘Project X’ & School of Assassins’ By Robert Parry © 1996

For years, human rights activists have accused the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas of teaching torture and assassination techniques to military officers from around the Western Hemisphere. For just as long, the Pentagon has denied the charge.

Then, late on Friday afternoon, Sept. 20, the Pentagon released a report admitting that some of those concerns were well-founded. From 1982-91, the School of the Americas used seven U.S. Army intelligence training manuals, written in Spanish, which advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion, including the kidnapping of a target’s family members.

…

… In winning the election in 1980, President Reagan had publicly renounced President Carter’s strong emphasis on human rights.

In the months immediately after Reagan’s election, right-wing Salvadoran “death squads” went on a rampage of political slaughter, including the rape-murder of four American churchwomen. In 1981-82, the “death squads,” often consisting of plain-clothes soldiers, butchered thousands of perceived leftists with little criticism from a White House that was drawing a line against communism. In December 1981, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran battalion swept through the remote village of El Mozote and massacred about 800 men, women and children.

The Reagan administration also warmed up to the Guatemalan army as it launched extermination campaigns against suspected leftist strongholds among that country’s Indian population. Most controversial of all, the CIA began organizing the Nicaraguan contra rebel army to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. The contras, too, gained a quick reputation for human rights atrocities during raids into northern Nicaragua.

⁵¹ ‘Spying on the Nation’ – Frontline, PBS

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.

⁵² ‘Weinberger, Bushes & Iran-Contra’ By Robert Parry, March 29, 2006

In the early-to-mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sought to avoid a head-on clash with Congress by taking his foreign policy underground, using cutouts like Israel to ship missiles to Iran and White House aide Oliver North to funnel supplies to the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

After those operations were exposed in 1986, Congress also tried to avert a constitutional showdown by papering over the illegal presidential actions and accepting the cover story that top officials, such as Reagan and Bush, were mostly out of the loop.

But those unresolved constitutional questions exploded back to the surface after Sept. 11, 2001, when George W. Bush asserted virtually unlimited presidential authority to override or ignore federal law as Commander in Chief. In effect, the younger George Bush was staking out power openly that Reagan and the elder George Bush had exercised only in secret.

⁵³ ‘Bush and Ken Lay: Slip Slidin’ Away’ By Sam Parry, February 6, 2002

Other parts of the Bush energy plan tracked closely to recommendations from Enron officials. Seventeen of the energy plan’s proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which limits the activities of utilities and hindered Enron’s potential for acquisitions.

⁵⁴ ‘Bush II Slowed SEC During Financial Fraud Fury’ – The Paragraph, June 18th, 2009

⁵⁵ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁵⁶ ‘Reagan Did It’ By PAUL KRUGMAN, May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

…

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

⁵⁷ ‘The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days’ by Joseph Romm, Grist, 21 Jan 2009

… For eight years [the Bush administration] have avoided their statutory obligation to detail the impacts of climate change on this country. And they have systematically muzzled government climate scientists from discussing those impacts with the public or the media.

It was easier to find people in the Bush administration to talk about torture or warrantless wiretaps, than it was to get someone to speak on (or off) the record on the likely impact of Bush’s policy of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on Americans.

On Friday January 16, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program actually released four major Synthesis and Assessment reports. You may remember the last report the CCSP released — U.S. Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050. I was told by scientists knowledgeable about the CCSP process that all of the major impact reports were slowed down in the review process to make sure they came out after the election.

…

These are all substantive and comprehensive studies, almost on a par with the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.

⁵⁸ ‘A look back at Reagan’s environmental record’ Grist, 10 Jun 2004

“The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands — more than any other administration in history, including the current one [Bush II],” said the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan’s track record, it’s worth recalling his infamous public statement that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and that if “you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all.” This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.

…

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current [Bush II] administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took Congress two years to defeat,” according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan’s legacy. “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. “The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal,” he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs “set solar back a decade,” said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: “The enforcement slowdown was staggering,” said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration’s enforcement of environmental laws during the early ’80s. “In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice.”

⁵⁹ ‘Obama designates day for Reagan’ By Michael Collins June 2, 2009

… [Nancy Reagan] stood with her hand on Obama’s shoulder as he signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law.

The bill will create an 11-member panel that will recommend and carry out plans to celebrate Reagan’s 100th birthday, such as special stamps or commemorative coins. No federal money can be spent on the commission or its activities.

Sewage pipe image found HERE.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

George Washington warned against internal enemies who would try to separate one group of citizens from another, and the people from their government:

The unity of Government, which constitutes you one people, … is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But … it is easy to foresee, that … much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed …x⁸⁵

Thomas Jefferson foresaw fraudulent banking:

[L]iable as [a bank’s] cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.x⁸⁶

Abraham Lincoln believed that government “for the people” should include protecting workers’ wages:

[I]t has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government. x⁸⁷

Theodore Roosevelt warned of corporate bosses undermining government for the people:

The big trust magnates …, the big politicians of the old boss type …, stand against the people. They object to the government, to government being used primarily in the interest of the people themselves. Naturally, they will do all they can to breakdown the only real enemies that they have and the only real champions, the only real and efficient champions of popular right, and economic, social, and industrial justice.x⁸⁸

Now there is liberal talk — though not nearly on every radio dial. But where it exists, it serves to beat back the right-wing barrage, and to broadcast words like those from the Rushmore wind.

Liberal Talk Radio Links

XM 167 – America Left

Sirius 146 – Sirius Left

Ohio Majority Radio Listen (online only).

WCPT 820AM Chicago Listen.

WDTW 1310AM Detroit Listen.

KPOJ 620AM Portland Listen.

WWRL 1600AM New York City – Listen

KTLK 1150AM Los Angeles Listen.

Air America – Listen

Democracy Now! Listen and watch. (Hard news.)

LTR Has many more liberal talk radio links.

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘The US Media & Democracy in Crisis’ by Robert Parry, February 19, 2009

In the latter part of the 1970s, angry Republicans and right-wing ideologues began to team up under the leadership of Nixon’s former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, who used his control of the Olin Foundation to pull together like-minded foundations (Smith-Richardson, Scaife, etc.) to inject money into a right-wing media infrastructure and anti-journalism attack groups.

This initiative gained momentum with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and ad man who surrounded himself with media savvy advisers. They, in turn, began collaborating with CIA propaganda experts in devising “perception management” tactics that could be directed against the American people as well as at troublesome mainstream journalists.

To get around legal prohibitions on the CIA influencing U.S. politics, CIA Director William Casey transferred Walter Raymond Jr., one of the CIA’s top propagandists, to Reagan’s National Security Council where Raymond headed up a government-wide task force on “public diplomacy.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

The right-wing media infrastructure continued to grow with the influx of mysterious money from the likes of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean theocrat who launched the Washington Times in 1982. Later, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch got into the act with purchases of U.S. newspapers and eventually the founding of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and right-wing Fox News.

By the late years of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, right-wing talk radio was taking off with Rush Limbaugh and other angry white men filling the AM dial with venomous attacks on liberals. When Bill Clinton managed to eke out a victory in 1992, he immediately came under sustained attack from this potent right-wing media machine.

Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, generally conservative (or neoconservative) owners began cracking down on independent-minded journalists as early as the mid-1970s. But that trend grew stronger in the 1980s when journalists found it harder and harder to challenge the propaganda and cover-ups of the Reagan administration.

As journalists with integrity were weeded out – and as the American Left largely stayed disengaged and silent – the MSM survivors came to understand that their livelihoods required them to tilt their stories right-ward. By the Clinton years, it made perfect sense to join the Right’s media in piling on regarding the trivial “Clinton scandals.”

After years of getting pounded as “liberal,” the MSM was determined to shed the liberal label by being tougher on a Democrat than on any Republican. That tilt contributed to the Republican Revolution of 1994 and eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 (though he managed to survive a Senate trial)

⁷¹ ‘Limbaugh wrong on minimum wage — again’ – Media Matters, 2004-08-13

LIMBAUGH: The minimum wage has gotten so high that it’s paying people that are not skilled to do anything. … It’s — whatever it is, six and a quarter, seven bucks an hour, an hour, going to be there soon. … No, thank you. I don’t want to be imprisoned by minimum wage. … Here, take the minimum wage. Vote for us, we’ll raise it in a couple years, as long as the rascally Republicans don’t stand in our way. They hate you. But we love you. Now go ahead, eat your rice.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the value of the $5.15 minimum wage in real dollars was lower in 2003 than in all but three years since 1960 …

… Limbaugh claimed that “75 percent of the people earning minimum wage” are teenagers; in reality, only 32 percent are.

⁷² ‘Obama Plans to Implement FDR’s Socialist Second Bill of Rights’ – Rush Limbaugh Show transcript, October 29, 2008

How many are happy with your Social Security? How many of you think it’s what you thought it was going to be? Where is that second home down in the Bahamas that Social Security and FDR was going to get for you? Where is all this plentiful retirement and security? Where is all this freedom from economic insecurity that FDR promised you with Social Security? Every time I talk to a Social Security recipient and that’s all they’ve got, they don’t have any security about anything. They’re worried to hell it’s going to be cut. (Limbaugh is mocking Social Security, but to me it sounds like an argument for boosting benefits. – QH)

⁷³ ‘McCain Neck-Deep in K Street Sewer’ – The Paragraph 2008-08-23 Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) pushed through the “Enron loophole”, and the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act” creating “the shadow banking system”.

⁷⁴ ‘The 2000 Campaign’ – Consortiumnews.com

⁷⁵ ‘Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says’ By EDMUND L. ANDREWS, The New York Times, January 8, 2007 “Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional [Budget Office] study.”

⁷⁶ ‘Let’s Have a Hanging Party’ by Jesse Eisinger, Slate.com, March 2, 2009

There were two kinds of governmental failure in the past several decades: One was active financial deregulation; the other was the purposeful malignant neglect of government’s regulatory role in overseeing the markets. Regulators were defanged.

I’ll mention just two examples. The first is when Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, blocked Fed Gov. Ed Gramlich’s efforts to have the chief banking regulatory arm of the country take a more active role in subprime lending. The second is the SEC’s decision, which Obama’s new chairman, Mary Schapiro, is repealing, to require enforcement lawyers to get the OK from commissioners before moving on cases: This was an intentional roadblock to securities enforcement erected by ideologues and cronies in the Bush administration. After all, the first SEC chairman appointed by Bush was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who had a long career defending companies from accusations by the SEC.

⁷⁷ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, 2008-12-26

⁸⁵ ‘Washington’s Farewell Address’ – George Washington, 1796

⁸⁶ Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813

⁸⁷ ‘Fragments of a Tariff Discussion’ – 1846 or 1847, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

⁸⁸ ‘Why The Trusts And Bosses Oppose The Progressive Party’ – Theodore Roosevelt, Emporia, Kansas, September 22, 1912

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In that statement we find six goals, with each relying on others:

• Union: A society of persons striving together towards the other five goals.

• Justice: Equal application of law and equal access to the commonwealth, regardless of one’s office or monetary wealth.

• Tranquility: Peace, which follows justice and welfare.

• Defense: Standing guard against forces that would harm the Constitution and the pursuit of the other five goals.

• Welfare: The people’s well-being, which is advanced by the commonwealth: the land (national parks, environmental protection, …), infrastructure (highways, railways, water lines, postal service, airwaves, communications satellites, Internet, …), public education, libraries, Medicare, the social safety net (minimum wage, Social Security, …), …

• Liberty: Freedom to do what one will without treading on another’s. That freedom needs the space given by tranquility (freedom from strife) and welfare (freedom from want of basic needs).

Now, as the first five goals all lead to the last, and as the present generation leads to next, we might venture an ultimate answer to our question: The purpose of the United States is to secure the blessings of liberty to its children.

Sources

The U.S. Constitution

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

One thing which Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they seldom took time out to notice when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and he would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?“

Several years ago, an interviewer asked Vonnegut to recount the story where he told his wife he was going out to buy an envelope:

[S]he says … why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.

Vonnegut told a story about a fellow famous author, Joseph Heller (1923-1999), who wrote Catch-22:

We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?”

Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”

I said, “What’s that, Joe?”

And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.“

Vonnegut followed another famous author, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Asimov wrote hundreds of books covering nine of the ten Dewey Decimal categories. Though he preferred writing non-fiction, Asimov is best known for writing science fiction, such as the epic Foundation Trilogy. One time an interviewer asked him about his autobiography:

Southwest Airlines Magazine: I understand that at one time you said that you would let your work serve as your biography, and yet In Memory, Yet Green, your autobiography, has just come out. Why did you change your mind?

Asimov: Well, my 200th book was coming up and Doubleday wanted something they could plug, so they said they wanted an autobiography. I tried to resist, but they overcame me.

SWA: How long did it take to complete?

Asimov: Ten months. I started on March 9, 1977, and I finished on December 31, 1977 because I promised I would have it finished by the end of the year. It was rough going, too. The book is over 640,000 words long, which is more than three times as long as The Foundation Trilogy.

SWA: Have you really done that much?

Asimov: In my life? I’ve done nothing in my life. You would be surprised how shrewdly I had to write it to obscure that fact.

Vonnegut and a fellow famous author, Studs Terkel (1912-2008), each supported the scrappy, pro-democracy newsmagazine, In These Times. Terkel wrote books, such as Working and Hard Times, consisting of his interviews with common Americans, and constantly fought for them, and against ignorance of their history. He told a little story that occurred one day in his Chicago neighborhood:

You know I walk to the bus. Bus number 146. They know me in the neighborhood. They know I’m a writer. They know me as the old guy who’s garrulous. I talk to myself. [Laughs.]

So one day there’s this one couple, they ignore me completely. So my ego is hurt. And I say, “The bus is late.” And I say, to make conversation, “Labor Day’s coming up.” And the man just turns and looks at me — Brooks Brothers, under his arm, the latest Wall Street Journal. And she’s a beauty. Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s. She’s got Vanity Fair in her hand. And he turns, looks at me, and says, “We despise unions.” And then he turns away.

And I said, “You what?” And the bus hasn’t come yet. “Do you know that in 1886, ‘87, four guys got hanged? How many hours a day do you work?”

He says, “Eight,” reflexively. I said, “How come you don’t work 18 hours a day? Four guys got hanged for you. Did you know that?”

They think I’m crazy. They’re scared. [Laughs.]

Now I’ve got him pinned against the mailbox. He can’t get away. “So how many weeks do you work?” No bus yet.

So finally they get onto the bus, and she looks out the window, and he says, “Is that guy nuts?” And that was the last I saw of them. This is Uptown — the haves and have-nots. I’ll bet they live in a condominium. Maybe the 15th floor.

Last year, an interviewer asked the 94-year-old Terkel:

In These Times: What do you want your tombstone to say Studs?

Terkel: On my tombstone? Because of my curiosity, my tombstone is very simple: “Curiosity could not kill this cat.“ That’s it. And I think we’ve come to the end of the course. For me, I think so.

ITT: No more books?

Terkel: No. You sound like my publisher. That’s it!

Sources

²⁰ RICE UNIVERSITY GRADUATION ADDRESS, May 9, 1998

²¹ Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, transcript – NOW, PBS, 2005-10-05

²² ‘A Man without a Country’ by Kurt Vonnegut, 2005, p. 80

²³ ‘An Interview with Isaac Asimov’ – by Phil Konstantin, Southwest Airlines Magazine, 1979

²⁴ In These Times – Kurt Vonnegut | In These Times – Studs Terkel

²⁵ ‘Curiosity and a Cat Named Studs’ by Laura S. Washington, In These Times, May 15, 2007

²⁶ Encyclopedia of Chicago — Haymarket and May Day

On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. …

At the McCormick reaper plant, a long-simmering strike erupted in violence on May 3, and police fired at strikers, killing at least two. Anarchists called a protest meeting at the West Randolph Street Haymarket, advertising it in inflammatory leaflets, one of which called for “Revenge!”

The crowd gathered on the evening of May 4 on Des Plaines Street, just north of Randolph, was peaceful, and Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who attended, instructed police not to disturb the meeting. But when one speaker urged the dwindling crowd to “throttle” the law, 176 officers under Inspector John Bonfield marched to the meeting and ordered it to disperse.

Then someone hurled a bomb at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police drew guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded.

…

Police arrested hundreds of people, but never determined the identity of the bomb thrower. Amidst public clamor for revenge, however, eight anarchists, including prominent speakers and writers, were tried for murder. The partisan Judge Joseph E. Gary conducted the trial, and all 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants. Lacking credible evidence that the defendants threw the bomb or organized the bomb throwing, prosecutors focused on their writings and speeches. The jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight. Seven were sentenced to death. The trial is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history.

Many Americans were outraged at the verdicts, but legal appeals failed. Two death sentences were commuted, but on November 11, 1887, four defendants were hanged in the Cook County jail; one committed suicide. Hundreds of thousands turned out for the funeral procession of the five dead men. In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld granted the three imprisoned defendants absolute pardon, citing the lack of evidence against them and the unfairness of the trial.

²⁷ FAQ for alt.books.isaac-asimov

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action against a corporate monopoly that led to the birth of the United States. The raiders of the Tea Party pledged silence for 50 years. One of them, George R. T. Hewes, lived that long and got his story published. He tells how the British government tried to give the East India Company, the biggest corporation of the day, a monopoly on tea, the biggest drug of the day:x⁷⁰

The [East India] Company … received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America … Hence it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be landed, and amassed in suitable magazines.

The East India Company sent big loads of tea to American cities:

Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course …

Philadelphia and New York sent the tea back:

At Philadelphia, those to whom the teas of the [East India] Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.

At New-York, Captain Sears and McDougal, daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty. Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed, and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.

Among the pamphlets circulating was The Alarm by Rusticus, which warned that the American colonies could meet a fate like that of Bengal, which underwent famine while the East India Company had a monopoly on grain trade:x⁷¹

Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. … Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

The public felt the moment of truth was near:

In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm. Why do we wait? they exclaimed; soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. Hundreds of years may roll away before the ministers can have perpetrated as many violations of our rights, as they have committed within a few years. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage, or be disgraced with our brethren of the other colonies, who have their eyes fixed upon us, and will be prompt in their succor if we show ourselves faithful and firm.

On November 28th, 1773, the first of the tea-bearing ships docked in Boston Harbor, and the morning after, as Hewes recounts, a notice was published:

Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbour. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.”

Unlike in Philadelphia and New York, the governor and receiving agents in Boston would not send the tea back. So the Bostonians placed guards to watch the ships, and send an alarm should they start to unload.

The factors who were to be the consignees of the tea, were urged to renounce their agency, but they refused and took refuge in the fortress. A guard was placed on Griffin’s wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. It was agreed that a strict watch should be kept; that if any insult should be offered, the bell should be immediately rung; and some persons always ready to bear intelligence of what might happen, to the neighbouring towns, and to call in the assistance of the country people.”

After some days, the ship commanders declared that on December 17th they would unload the tea by force if needed:x⁷²

The tea … was contained in three ships, lying near each other at what was called at that time Griffin’s wharf, and were surrounded by armed ships of war, the commanders of which had publicly declared that if the rebels, as they were pleased to style the Bostonians, should not withdraw their opposition to the landing of the tea before a certain day, the 17th day of December, 1773, they should on that day force it on shore, under the cover of their cannon’s mouth.

On the day before the threatened day, a throng gathered — riled and ready to dump tea:

Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly … was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present.

… the public mind [was] already wrought up to a degree of desperation, and ready to break out into acts of violence, on every trivial occasion of offence….

Finding no measures were likely to be taken, either by the governor, or the commanders, or owners of the ships, to return their cargoes or prevent the landing of them, at 5 o’clock a vote was called for the dissolution of the meeting and obtained.

But cooler members got the crowd to stay and further consider the gravity of such action. One of them, Josiah Quiney, gave this warning:

… Greatly will he deceive himself, who shall think, that with cries, with exclamations, with popular resolutions, we can hope to triumph in the conflict, and vanquish our inveterate foes. Their malignity is implacable, their thirst for vengeance insatiable. They have their allies, their accomplices, even in the midst of us – even in the bosom of this innocent country; and who is ignorant of the power of those who have conspired our ruin? Who knows not their artifices? Imagine not therefore, that you can bring this controversy to a happy conclusion without the most strenuous, the most arduous, the most terrible conflict; consider attentively the difficulty of the enterprise, and the uncertainty of the issue. Reflict [sic] and ponder, even ponder well, before you embrace the measures, which are to involve this country in the most perilous enterprise the world has witnessed.

The crowd gave the governor one more chance, then ended the meeting and headed for the docks:

The question was then immediately put whether the landing of the tea should be opposed and carried in the affirmative unanimously. Rotch [a local tea seller], to whom the cargo of tea had been consigned, was then requested to demand of the governor to permit to pass the castle [return the ships to England]. The latter answered haughtily, that for the honor of the laws, and from duty towards the king, he could not grant the permit, until the vessel was regularly cleared. A violent commotion immediately ensued; and … a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and … the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin’s wharf.

The raiders went in disguise:

It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea. When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.

The boarding parties acted deliberately, and did no damage except to the cargo:

We were immediately ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed. The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board the ship appointed me boatswain, and ordered me to go to the captain and demand of him the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles. I made the demand accordingly, and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.

We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water.

In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.

The raiders resolved that all of the tea be destroyed, and none be used:

… there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of [tea] for their family use. …

One … came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf nine each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.

The raiders kept their identities secret, even among themselves:

We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates; nor do I recollect of our having had the knowledge of the name of a single individual concerned in that affair, except … the commander of my division … There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.

The Boston Tea Party led to the British blockade of Boston Harbor, the battles of Lexington & Concord, the American Revolutionary War, and the U.S. Constitution.x⁷³ Shortly after the Constitution was adopted in 1787, Thomas Jefferson tried to amend it to add a declaration of rights:x⁷⁴

By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies.

Jefferson got all but two of those into the Bill of Rights. One of the missing rights was the “freedom of commerce against monopolies” — the one that could today dampen the need for further “tea parties”.

(Boston Tea Party Historical Society)

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘America’s First Anti-Globalization Protest – The Boston Tea Party’ excerpt from Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

⁷¹ ‘Bengal famine of 1770’ – Wikipedia

About 10 million people, approximately one third of the population of the affected area, are estimated to have died in the famine. …

Fault for the famine is now often ascribed to the British East India Company policies in Bengal. According to others, however, the famine was not a direct fault of the British regime, but was only exacerbated by its policies. …

As lands came under company control, the land tax was typically raised by 5 times what it had been – from 10% to up to 50% of the value of the agricultural produce. … As the famine approached its height, in April of 1770, the Company announced that land tax for the following year was to be increased by a further 10%.

The company is also criticised for forbidding the “hoarding” of rice. This prevented traders and dealers from laying in reserves that in other times would have tided the population over lean periods, as well as ordering the farmers to plant indigo instead of rice.

By the time of the famine, monopolies in grain trading had been established by the Company and its agents. The Company had no plan for dealing with the grain shortage, and actions were only taken insofar as they affected the mercantile and trading classes. …

⁷² ‘Eyewitness Account by George Hewes’ – Boston Tea Party Historical Society

⁷³ ‘Timeline of Events Preceeding the Boston Tea Party’ – Boston Tea Party Historical Society

⁷⁴ ‘Jefferson’s Dream: The Bill of Rights’ – excerpt from Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves. Under the shade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft white feathery down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Adodarhoh, and your cousin Lords.

… there beneath the shade of the spreading branches … shall you sit and watch the Council Fire of the Confederacy of the Five Nations, and all the affairs of the Five Nations shall be transacted at this place before you … by the Confederate Lords of the Five Nations.

Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is Peace and Strength.

If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace …, they may trace the Roots to the Tree and … they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.

We place at the top of the Tree of the Long Leaves an Eagle who is able to see afar. If he sees in the distance any evil approaching or any danger threatening he will at once warn the people of the Confederacy.

The people of the five nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca — handed the Great Law of Peace down through the generations by reading it aloud from wampum belts. They made the wampum belts with strings of beads formed from lake shells. The beads formed symbols and relations that conveyed meaning to the reader, and lit his memory so that he could tell the law fully and rightly. Knowledge of the Great Law of Peace lasted into the 20th century, when in 1915, Arthur C. Parker, Archaeologist of the State Museum in New York, wrote much of it down into the document we use here.

The Five Nations wampum belt

The Iroquois were one of several tribal confederacies that lived up and down the eastern seaboard.x² The Founders and Framers of the United States knew their neighbors’ form of government — self-ruled nations united under a common law, where the authority to govern came from the people. And the Founders and Framers soon adopted that form — federal democracy. At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they gave a delegation of 21 Iroquois a floor of Independence Hall to stay in, and seats at the discussions about American independence and government.x³ And the Onondaga leader gave John Hancock, the president of the congress, an Indian name — Great Tree. As the old tribal democracy lived its last days, the world’s first modern liberal democracy was born. Here are some features of the Iroquois Confederacy’s constitution that you might like to compare — for the better or worse — with those of your own national government:

The Confederate Council

Government officials take an oath to uphold the constitution:

When a candidate Lord (council member – QH) is to be installed he shall furnish four strings of [wampum] … Such will constitute the evidence of his pledge to the Confederate Lords that he will live according to the constitution of the Great Peace and exercise justice in all affairs. (Great Law of Peace article 28)

Two houses of the Confederate Council decide issues, and a third group ratifies — all unanimously:

… when the Mohawk and Seneca Lords have unanimously agreed upon a question, they shall report their decision to the Cayuga and Oneida Lords who shall deliberate upon the question and report a unanimous decision to … The Firekeepers (Onondaga Lords – QH), who shall render a decision as they see fit in case of a disagreement by the two bodies, or confirm the decisions of the two bodies if they are identical. (10)

… the Firekeepers may veto a decision, but the veto can be overriden:

If through any misunderstanding or obstinacy on the part of the Fire Keepers, they render a decision at variance with that of the Two Sides, the Two Sides shall reconsider the matter and if their decisions are jointly the same as before they shall report to the Fire Keepers who are then compelled to confirm their joint decision. (11)

The groups are further divided into smaller councils, which hand decisions up. While two sides discuss an issue, a judge watches to ensure that a decision follows the law:

The Council of the Mohawk shall be divided into three parties … The third party is to listen only to the discussion of the first and second parties and if an error is made or the proceeding is irregular they are to call attention to it, and when the case is right and properly decided by the two parties they shall confirm the decision of the two parties … (5)

Elections

Each nation of the Iroquois Confederacy is composed of the same clans, which are composed of families, which follow the female blood line:

The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother. (44)

The women of certain families hold the titles to choose members of the Confederate Council, who serve for life:

When a Lordship title becomes vacant through death or other cause (impeachment – QH), the Royaneh (title-holding – QH) women of the clan in which the title is hereditary shall hold a council and shall choose one from among their sons to fill the office made vacant. … (54)

… and the men, sister clans and council confirm the choice:

If the choice is unanimous the name is referred to the men relatives of the clan. If they should disapprove [they] shall … select a candidate from among their own number. If then the men and women are unable to decide [between] the two …, then … the Confederate Lords in the Clan … shall decide … If the men and the women agree to a candidate his name shall be referred to the sister clans for confirmation. If the sister clans confirm the choice, they shall refer their action to their Confederate Lords who shall ratify the choice and present it to their cousin Lords, and if the cousin Lords confirm the name then the candidate shall be installed … (54)

A Lord must put the people’s welfare, and that of future generations, ahead of his own:

“We now do crown you with the sacred emblem of the deer’s antlers, the emblem of your Lordship. You shall now become a mentor of the people of the Five Nations. The thickness of your skin shall be seven spans — which is to say that you shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Your heart shall be filled with peace and good will and your mind filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy. … In all of your deliberations in the Confederate Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self interest shall be cast into oblivion. Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also … those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground — the unborn of the future Nation.” (28)

Petitioning the Government

For each nation there is a War Chief (elected in the same way as a Lord), whose duty is to bring the people’s issues to that nation’s Lords:

There shall be one War Chief for each Nation and their duties shall be to carry messages for their Lords and to take up the arms of war in case of emergency. … in case of an erroneous action by a Lord they shall receive the complaints of the people and convey the warnings of the women to him. The people who wish to convey messages to the Lords in the Confederate Council shall do so through the War Chief of their Nation. It shall ever be his duty to lay the cases, questions and propositions of the people before the Confederate Council. (37)

Any man can become a Pine Tree Chief — an advisor to the Confederate Council:

Should any man of the Nation assist with special ability or show great interest in the affairs of the Nation, if he proves himself wise, honest and worthy of confidence, the Confederate Lords may elect him … and he may sit in the Confederate Council. He shall be proclaimed a ‘Pine Tree sprung up for the Nation’ …

… and title-holding women may also attend the Confederate Council:

The Royaneh women … shall, should it be necessary, correct and admonish the holders of their titles [when those women] attend the Council … (52)

On a matter of great consequence, the Confederate Council must hear and follow the voice of the people:

Whenever a … matter affects the entire body of the Five Nations, threatening their utter ruin, then the Lords of the Confederacy must submit the matter to the decision of their people [which] shall affect the decision of the Confederate Council. This decision shall be a confirmation of the voice of the people. (93)

Within each nation clan councils decide issues to be brought to the Confederate Council:

The women of every clan of the Five Nations shall have a Council Fire ever burning in readiness for a council of the clan. When in their opinion it seems necessary for the interest of the people they shall hold a council and their decisions and recommendations shall be introduced before the Council of the Lords by the War Chief for its consideration. (95)

~ ~ ~

The men of every clan of the Five Nations shall have a Council Fire ever burning … This council shall have the same rights as the council of the women. (94)

Clan councils may unite into a national council or a five-nation council.

All the Clan council fires of a nation or of the Five Nations may unite into one general council fire, or delegates from all the council fires may be appointed to unite in a general council for discussing the interests of the people. (96)

The people have the right to a voice at council:

The people shall have the right to make appointments and to delegate their power to others of their number. When their council shall have come to a conclusion on any matter, their decision shall be reported to the Council of the Nation or to the Confederate Council (as the case may require) by the War Chief or the War Chiefs. (96.)

Rights of the People

Each person has the right to make contracts:

Any of the people of the Five Nations may use wampum as the record of a pledge, contract or an agreement entered into and the same shall be binding as soon as shell strings shall have been exchanged by both parties. (23)

… and the right to privacy:

A certain sign shall be known to all the people of the Five Nations which shall denote that the owner or occupant of a house is absent. A stick or pole in a slanting or leaning position shall be the sign. Every person not entitled to enter the house by right of living within it upon seeing such a sign shall not approach the house either by day or by night but shall keep as far away as his business will permit. (107)

The Great Law of Peace ensures religious freedom to each nation:

The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men. (99)

A More Perfect Union

The Great Law of Peace calls for periodic renewal of the union, and it has never been dissolved:

Every five years the Five Nations Confederate Lords and the people shall assemble together and shall ask one another if their minds are still in the same spirit of unity for the Great Binding Law and if any of the Five Nations shall not pledge continuance and steadfastness to the pledge of unity then the Great Binding Law shall dissolve. (55)

The Great Law of Peace discourages aristocracy by mixing the clans:

People of the Five Nations members of a certain clan shall recognize every other member of that clan, irrespective of the Nation, as relatives. Men and women, therefore, members of the same clan are forbidden to marry. (43)

… and allows adoption between families and nations:

Should any member of the Five Nations, a family or person belonging to a foreign nation submit a proposal for adoption into a clan …, he or they shall furnish a string of shells … as a pledge to the clan into which he or they wish to be adopted. The Lords of the nation shall then consider the proposal and submit a decision. (68)

Any member of the Five Nations who through esteem or other feeling wishes to adopt an individual, a family or number of families may offer adoption to him or them and if accepted the matter shall be brought to the attention of the Lords [who] must confirm adoption. (69)

… “Now you of our nation, be informed that such a person … [has buried] their birth nation’s name … in the depths of the earth. Henceforth let no one of our nation ever mention the original name or nation of their birth. …” (70)

It allows for emigration:

When any person or family belonging to the Five Nations desires to abandon their birth nation and the territory of the Five Nations, … the Confederate Council of the Five Nations shall take cognizance of it. (71)

… and immigration (which the Tuscarora did around 1715 to become the sixth nation):

When any alien nation or individual is admitted into the Five Nations the admission shall be understood only to be a temporary one. Should the person or nation create loss, do wrong or cause suffering of any kind to endanger the peace of the Confederacy, the Confederate Lords shall order one of their war chiefs to reprimand him or them and if a similar offence is again committed the offending party or parties shall be expelled from the territory of the Five United Nations. (74)

When a member of an alien nation comes to the territory of the Five Nations and seeks refuge and permanent residence, the Lords of the Nation to which he comes shall extend hospitality and make him a member of the nation. Then shall he be accorded equal rights and privileges in all matters except [he shall not be chosen for Council]. (75)

The Great Law of Peace restricts lobbying:

No individual or foreign nation interested in a case, question or proposition shall have any voice in the Confederate Council except to answer a question put to him or them by the speaker for the Lords. (15)

…

… It shall be a serious wrong for anyone to lead a Lord into trivial affairs, for the people must ever hold their Lords high in estimation out of respect to their honorable positions. (27)

… and allows for change with amendments:

If the conditions which shall arise at any future time call for an addition to or change of this law, the case shall be carefully considered and if a new beam seems necessary or beneficial, the proposed change shall be voted upon and if adopted it shall be called, “Added to the Rafters”. (16)

… and lists nine national holidays:

The recognized festivals of Thanksgiving shall be the Midwinter Thanksgiving, the Maple … Thanksgiving, the Raspberry Thanksgiving, the Strawberry Thanksgiving, the Cornplanting Thanksgiving, the Corn Hoeing Thanksgiving, the Little Festival of Green Corn, the Great Festival of Ripe Corn and the complete Thanksgiving for the Harvest.

Peace & War

The Iroquois Confederacy was founded on peace:

I, Dekanawida, and the Union Lords, now uproot the tallest pine tree and into the cavity thereby made we cast all weapons of war. Into the depths of the earth, down into the deep underearth currents of water flowing to unknown regions we cast all the weapons of strife. We bury them from sight and we plant again the tree. (65)

The Great Law of Peace notes that all men are created equal and are entitled to their land:

The soil of the earth from one end of the land to the other is the property of the people who inhabit it.

…

The Great Creator has made us of the one blood and of the same soil he made us and as only different tongues constitute different nations he established different hunting grounds and territories and made boundary lines between them. (73)

The power to declare war rests with the Confederate Council:

When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves … Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation. (80)

… but talks must first occur:

When the proposition to establish the Great Peace is made to a foreign nation it shall be done in mutual council. The foreign nation is to be persuaded by reason and urged to come into the Great Peace. If the Five Nations fail to obtain the consent of the nation at the first council a second council shall be held and upon a second failure a third council shall be held and this third council shall end the peaceful methods of persuasion. At the third council the War Chief of the Five nations shall address the Chief of the foreign nation and request him three times to accept the Great Peace. If refusal steadfastly follows the War Chief shall let the bunch of white lake shells drop from his outstretched hand to the ground and shall bound quickly forward and club the offending chief to death. War shall thereby be declared and the War Chief shall have his warriors at his back to meet any emergency. War must continue until the contest is won by the Five Nations. (88)

… and any nation at any time can accept the Great Peace and live peacefully with the Iroquois Confederacy:

Whenever a foreign nation is conquered or has by their own will accepted the Great Peace their own system of internal government may continue, but they must cease all warfare against other nations.

One of the Confederate Council seats also carries the role of commander-in-chief:

Skanawatih shall be vested with a double office, duty and with double authority. One-half of his being shall hold the Lordship title and the other half shall hold the title of War Chief. In the event of war he shall notify the five War Chiefs of the Confederacy and command them to prepare for war and have their men ready at the appointed time and place for engagement with the enemy of the Great Peace. (79)

Impeachment

A citizen may ask for correction of an official’s errant behavior:

If either a nephew or a niece see an irregularity in the performance of the functions of the Great Peace and its laws, in the Confederate Council or in the conferring of Lordship titles in an improper way, through their War Chief they may demand that such actions become subject to correction and that the matter conform to the ways prescribed by the laws of the Great Peace. (98)

… after which the case goes to the general council of women, then to the men:

This string of wampum vests the people with the right to correct their erring Lords. In case a part or all the Lords pursue a course not vouched for by the people and heed not the third warning of their women relatives, then the matter shall be taken to the General Council of the women of the Five Nations. If the Lords notified and warned three times fail to heed, then the case falls into the hands of the men of the Five Nations.

… who purge the official, one way or the other:

Should it happen that the Lords refuse to heed the third warning, then two courses are open: either the men may decide in their council to depose the Lord or Lords or to club them to death with war clubs.

…

Should the men in their council adopt the second course, the War Chief shall order his men to enter the council, to take positions beside the Lords, sitting between them wherever possible. [Then] the War Chief holding in his outstretched hand a bunch of black wampum strings shall say to the erring Lords: “So now, Lords of the Five United Nations, harken to these last words from your men. … Since you are determined to resist and to withhold justice from your people there is only one course for us to adopt.” At this point the War Chief shall let drop the bunch of black wampum and the men shall spring to their feet and club the erring Lords to death. Any erring Lord may submit before the War Chief lets fall the black wampum. Then his execution is withheld. (59)

The Onondaga leader gave John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, an Indian name — Great Tree. Illustration by John Kahionhes Fadden.

Sources

¹ ‘The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy’ as written by Arthur C. Parker, with introduction by Gerald Murphy

² ‘Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy’ By Donald A. Grinde, Jr., Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History, University of California at Riverside, and Bruce E. Johansen, Associate Professor of Communication University of Nebraska at Omaha; Chapter 2

All along the Seaboard, Indian nations had formed confederacies by the time they encountered European immigrants, from the Seminoles in what is now Florida (Crevecouer called them “a federated republic”), to the Cherokees and Choctaws in the Carolinas, to the Iroquois and their allies, the Hurons in the Saint Lawrence Valley, and the Penacook federation of New England, among many others. Wallace found that “Ethnic confederacies were common among all the Indian tribes of the Northeast.

³ ibid, Chapter 8

In the midst of this debate on government and independence, twenty-one Iroquois Indians came to meet with the Continental Congress in May of 1776. At the Albany Conference of 1775, the Iroquois had expressed concern about the nature of the executive in the Continental Congress. For over a month, the Iroquois would observe the operations of the Continental Congress and its president, John Hancock, as they lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House (later called Independence Hall), just above the chambers of the Continental Congress. On May 27, 1776, Richard Henry Lee reported that the American army had a parade of two to three thousand men to impress the Iroquois with the strength of the United States. “4 tribes of the Six Nations” viewed the parade, and Lee hoped “to secure the friendship of these people.” Newspaper accounts stated that Generals Washington, Gates and Mifflin, “the Members of Congress . . . and . . . the Indians . . . on business with the Congress” reviewed the troops.

On June 11, 1776 while the question of independence was being debated, the visiting Iroquois chiefs were formally invited into the meeting hall of the Continental Congress. There a speech was delivered, in which they were addressed as “Brothers” and told of the delegates’ wish that the “friendship” between them would “continue as long as the sun shall shine” and the “waters run.” The speech also expressed the hope that the new Americans and the Iroquois act “as one people, and have but one heart.” After this speech, an Onondaga chief requested permission to give Hancock an Indian name. The Congress graciously consented, and so the president was renamed “Karanduawn, or the Great Tree.” With the Iroquois chiefs inside the halls of Congress on the eve of American Independence, the impact of Iroquois ideas on the founders is unmistakable. History is indebted to Charles Thomson, an adopted Delaware, whose knowledge of and respect for American Indians is reflected in the attention that he gave to this ceremony in the records of the Continental Congress.

On Saturday the 8th the ore boat Charles S. Price shoved off at Ashtabula, Ohio, into Lake Erie with a load of coal and without its first assistant engineer. Milton Smith had chosen to skip the last voyage of the 1913 season — and any early November gale that might arise — and had taken the train home to his wife and children in Port Huron, Michigan. After midnight on Sunday morning, as the Price steamed up the St. Clair River and past Smith’s house into Lake Huron, a gale was blowing in from the northwest. That afternoon sailors on the downbound (south-going) H.A. Hawgood saw the Price fighting its way upbound as it passed. The Hawgood had been heading into the storm north of Saginaw Bay, when it turned around to seek safety at the St. Clair River and let the gale blow itself out. But, instead of blowing out, the gale became the White Hurricane. By dark the snow “got so thick we couldn’t see the smokestack”, reported the Hawgood‘s captain. “The seas went right over the pilothouse.” Later, the Hawgood ran up on a beach at the southern end of the lake, and its crew survived. Likely the Price also turned and headed back toward the foot of Lake Huron, where it would have had to turn again to avoid running aground. On that final turn, the Price may have gotten caught sideways in a deep trough between the waves, and rolled. Its upturned hull floated for several days, and the papers speculated on the identity of “the mystery ship”, until a diver went down to read its name. On Tuesday the 11th, after the storm had quieted, seven bodies of sailors from the Price washed ashore in Ontario near Port Franks. On Thursday, a week and a day after leaving the Price, Milton Smith boarded the train in Sarnia, and headed for the makeshift morgue to identify the bodies of his shipmates.

Another ore boat upbound on Lake Huron that Sunday, when the White Hurricane raged, was the George C. Crawford. The boat fought the waves to north of Point Aux Barques with winds “blowing great guns”, according to Captain Walter C Iler. Waves rushed over the deck and boilerhouse through a broken skylight into the engine room, smashed the ship’s galley and drenched the crew’s sleeping rooms. So, like the captains of the Hawgood and the Price, Captain Iler decided to turn his boat around to seek calmer waters. While heading back down, Iler could make out the passing upbound ore boat Argus through the snow and waves. He later recalled what he saw just after the boat passed by. “The Argus seemed to crumple like an eggshell,” he said. “Then, she was gone.” Bearing that horrible image, the crew of the Crawford had to tend their boat as it ran fast with the wind and the mountainous waves towards the foot of Lake Huron. “It snowed for a solid twenty-six hours,” Iler later recalled. “We hadn’t seen a thing, but were guided by the sounding machine. It gave us excellent service.” Not being able to see to find the St. Clair River, Iler decided to turn around before running out of lake and ripping into the shoals. But the boat got stuck in a trough and could not climb out, so the captain ordered the anchors thrown. The anchors grabbed and the ship came around, but soon the anchor chains snapped, and once again the storm pushed the Crawford towards the shore. Around 2 A.M. Monday a lull in the wind allowed the boat to turn, and it once again battled upbound on its original course towards the Soo Locks. On Tuesday the battered boat reached the St. Marys River that leads to the Soo. In the calm, the crew wielded steam hoses to melt the thick ice off the deck, and found something stunning. Hundreds of rivets were missing, and cracks ran across several of the inch-thick steel deck plates. The crew might have pictured then how their own boat could have crumpled like the Argus. Records show that the Crawford did not finish its last voyage of 1913, but turned back to Toledo for repair. And in the spring of 1914 it set out again.

The Detroit News, November 13, 1913

the upturned bow of the 504 ft (154 m) Charles S. Price

Source: ‘White Hurricane: A Great Lakes November Gale and America’s Deadliest Maritime Disaster’ by David G. Brown, 2002, International Marine / McGraw-Hill

After the press of westward settlement, and the U.S. Army, drove out the Indians, the government fashioned a road through the Great Black Swamp to the land of milk and honey beyond. “A bank of muck and mud twenty feet wide and about three feet high was build mostly by Ox Power,” wrote a dweller, C. H. Opperman, of the Maumee and Western Reserve Road (now US 20)x⁵⁷. “Nearly all … who took the swamp route regretted their unwise decision, for many of them had ox teams to draw their high-wheeled covered wagons. Often the Oxen would sink to their bellys and the wheels to the hubbs and in many cases made only a mile or two of progress in a day.” So 31 inns rose to stand along the 31 miles of road and aid the slow moving pioneers⁵⁸. Some men would claim a mud hole and charge money to pull wagons out of it. One traveling pioneer spent his life savings of $100 on getting pulled out of mud holes. So he stopped and staked out his own mud hole, and made his money back before he carried on.

After settlers claimed the land around the Great Black Swamp, later settlers turned their sights inside it. “No night was too dark or precinct too sacred for [the mosquitoes] to get in their work,” wrote J. R. Tracy of living on the 80 acres his father bought on a sand ridge in the heart of the Great Black Swamp (where Bowling Green now stands)x⁵⁹. “Many a meal was eaten with a smudge under the table and many a would be sleeper owed what rest he secured to the smoke that overspread his bed and compelled his bloodthirsty assailants to retire.” The mosquitoes also brought malaria to swamp dwellers. Tracy described his bout with it: “If there is anything in this world that will stay by a fellow when it has found him it is the ague. My! How it will snuggle up to him, and hug him, and squeeze him, and shake him, and freeze him, and then bake him and fry him, until it would seem every drop of moisture is out of him …” After receding, the fever would sometimes return with double strength in a day or two: “And so the round went on, week by week, month by month, sometimes year by year (Brother Isaac was held two years, didn’t go to school or do a day’s work in that time).” Another swamp settler, Robert Fenton, also lived the hardship of malaria, as well as slow travel, dangerous animals, and the lack of a local mill to grind the grain⁶⁰. But he looked back on it like this: “We were happy, since we all were on about a common level and the exigencies of the situation made us alert, active and energetic. We had to be up and doing and we rather seemed to enjoy it.”

In 1840 the Great Black Swamp stood at its last years of full glory. From then on more settlers came in and cut down trees, and some dug ditches to drain water off their land – often on to their neighbor’s⁶¹. After a big outbreak of the waterborne disease cholera, the Ohio government in 1859 gave counties the power to seize land for more effective ditching. When farmers found that surface ditching left their land still too soggy, some tried underground drains of loose stone, or of pairs of planks nailed into a “V” and laid open end down. These underground drains did not work nearly as well as clay tile, but it was too costly to bring clay tile in. Then in the 1860’s, after someone discovered the bed of clay under the topsoil, many drainage tile factories arose. The factories’ kilns were fed by the swamp’s clay and fired by the swamp’s trees. And by 1900 the kilns’ product had drained and dried the Great Black Swamp. In its place lay fine farmland, with crops growing on a 10,000 year-old compost heap.

The Great Black Swamp (Maumee Valley Historical Society)

The Everglades (USGS)
The Everglades historic boundary is marked here by the yellow line. It includes the area of sheet water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the sea, and excludes some adjacent wetlands.

Black Swamp Conservation and Restoration Area
A 110 acre tract in Wood County, Ohio

Sources

⁵⁰ ‘Lost Ohio’ by Randy McNutt, 2006, Kent State University Press, P.114

⁵¹ ‘Wetlands – Did you know?’ – Ohio EPA

The Great Black Swamp was Ohio’s largest wetland. The swamp was once 120 miles long and about 40 miles wide. In 1859, the “ditch law” was passed to allow the installation of pipes to drain the swamp for agriculture and development. Today, only five percent remains in scattered areas throughout northwestern Ohio.

⁵² ‘Background of the Entire Everglades/Florida Bay Ecosystem’ – South Florida Water Management District

The present Everglades has been subdivided by the construction of canals, levees, roads and other facilities and has resulted in the loss of connections between the central Everglades and adjacent transitional wetlands. …

… the historical Everglades that once extended over an area approximately 40 miles wide by 100 miles long, from the south shore of Lake Okeechobee to the mangrove estuaries of Florida Bay.

⁵³ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf

For thousands of years much of northwest Ohio lay covered by a vast, luxuriant swamp. According to early observers parts of it were watery meadows, veritable seas of living, moving green that would undulate beautifully in a summer breeze. Other parts of it were majestic and untouched forests, cathedralesque stands of oak, sycamore and hickory trees that soared skyward and blocked out the sun. Still other parts of it were thick, impenetrable brush and wild growth. Its thousands of square miles spread over all or parts of 12 counties stretching east to west from Sandusky, Ohio to near Fort Wayne, Indiana and north to south from the Maumee River valley to near Findlay, Ohio.

⁵⁴ ‘THE HISTORY OF LAKE ERIE’ by Michael C. Hansen

Fertile clays deposited on the lake bottom during high-water stages and the wetland areas that remained when lake levels dropped form one of the richest agricultural regions of the state. The beaches which formed along the shorelines of these higher lake stages are preserved as ridges elevated above the nearly flat former lake beds. …

…

The sandy beach deposits rising above the nearly flat lake plains, especially in the region called the Black Swamp, in northwestern Ohio, captured the attention of Native Americans and European explorers and settlers because the ridges provided dry passage through the swamps formed on the former lake beds.

⁵⁵ ‘Frontier Fauna – Ohio’s Wild Heritage’ – OHIO STATE PARKS MAGAZINE, FALL/WINTER 2005/2006

As Ohio’s frontier days came to a close, the impenetrable woods of the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio became a last refuge for elk, wolves and lynx. …

⁵⁶ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, P.37

… For the Indian, “the Maumee River was a delightful homne and a secure retreat,” one unknown early writer recorded. “Its banks were studded with their villages, its rich bottomlands covered with their corn, while their light canoes glided over a beautiful current which was at once a convenient highway and an exhaustless reservoir of food. Forest, stream and prarie produced, spontaneously, and in superabundance, game fish, fruits, nuts, – all things necessary to supply their simple wants.”

⁵⁷ Ibid, P.114

⁵⁸ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 1999 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, P.41

⁵⁹ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.49-52

⁶⁰ ‘The Great Black Swamp’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 1999 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.24-25

⁶¹ ‘The Great Black Swamp II’ by Jim Mollenkopf, © 2000 Lake of the Cat Publishing, Toledo, Ohio, pp.59-62