The view from the dental chair last week:

Possibly there is a good Lockean idea in there somewhere, but this bit of modern School of Education dogma — learning only occurs through games or craft projects — did not sound like Ben Franklin to me.  He was all about learning by reading about things, as well doing them.  He started one of the world’s great libraries, the old-fashioned kind full of papery things! (The phraseology did not very 18th-century either, like having Franklin mention his learning curve.)  The speedy search feature of the online Franklin Papers revealed nothing close, and apparently even fans of this quotation have some doubts about whether anyone historical actually wrote it. They think maybe it is ancient Chinese proverb, no fooling. Like “Stay thirsty, my friend!” But perhaps I sell the proverbists short.

As a non-New Yorker, I do not have a very well-formed opinion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but his recent speech defending the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” contains one of least impeachable arguments I have seen a public figure make in favor of church-state separation under the U.S. Constitution. Rather than positing a general founding secularism that is just inaccurate enough to give Christianists a foothold for their mythologizing, Bloomberg grounded the mosque’ s right to exist firmly on individual rights, especially private property rights:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

It is hard to see how anyone with real conservative principles could take much issue with that private property argument. Not that I assume most of the criticism has come from principle — fear and fear-mongering are easier on the brain, and get a lot more attention.

Of course, Bloomberg’s speech was not free of historical mythology, especially about New York as the birthplace of religious toleration. (His cited basis for this claim is the locally semi-famous “Flushing Remonstrance” of 1657, in which officials in the titular Queens village begged Director General Peter Stuyvesant to permit a Quaker meeting. In response, Stuyvesant jailed the officials and abolished the town government, so it was not really a big win for religious freedom.) This site’s esteemed co-founder painted early New York as something completely other than an island of peaceful pluralism, and even Bloomberg himself covers the fact that New York did not in fact have religious toleration until after the Revolution: the Catholic Church was not allowed to open its doors until the 1780s.

All of which points up the problem with most claims that the United States was “founded on” any particular modern idea we might choose to advocate. There were multiple moments of founding, and all of those were the product of political processes that participants could and did ascribe many different meanings to. One does not have spend much time reading the founding generation’s constitutional debates and newspaper essays to realize that they never fully agreed themselves what the nation they were founding was being “founded on.”

As a for instance: the principle Bloomberg cites is certainly present in Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) and Madison’s first amendment to the Constitution, but many of the Founders (especially those who identified with the Federalist party) continued to believe that government needed to embrace and employ Protestant Christianity. It also seems safe to say that at least some founding lids would have flipped if someone had tried to open a mosque next door to Federal Hall in 1789.  On the other hand, some might not have. The early presidents were all aware that the U.S. would be contact with cultures around the globe, and took occasion to single out Muslims as a group that Americans were not set against, at least in theory. Either way, it is not clear that the Founders and their colonial forebears really have much guidance to offer us. We in this century have to make these decisions for ourselves.

Outbreaks of popular resistance against expert medical advice are a long Anglo-American tradition, and preventative measures like inoculation and vaccination have been recurring targets for us freemen. It will always be a little counter-intuitive to expose a healthy person to potentially harmful substances to keep them from getting a disease they don’t seem to have. It seemed even worse in the case of early inoculation, which involved giving someone a disease like smallpox on purpose in hopes they would get it in a less virulent form and develop some immunity.  Sometimes the patient  just got sick and died of the “cure.”

One of the most famous populist crusades against the modern medicine of its time was in 1721 when young Ben Franklin and his older brother James went after the smallpox inoculation policy favored by colonial Boston’s ministerial elite. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent online presentation about the controversy, including images of Ben’s pseudonymous essays from the New England Courant. (Historians help me with some less well-known examples).

But historical context only goes so far, and just because some Founder did it, does not necessarily make it right in every case. So quite likely Dr. Andrew Wakefield really did need to be drummed out of the medical profession [original link to AP story no longer works]:

LONDON — The doctor whose research linking autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella influenced millions of parents to refuse the shot for their children was banned Monday from practicing medicine in his native Britain.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study was discredited — but vaccination rates have never fully recovered and he continues to enjoy a vocal following, helped in the U.S. by endorsements from celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy

Wakefield was the first researcher to publish a peer-reviewed study suggesting a connection between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. Legions of parents abandoned the vaccine, leading to a resurgence of measles in Western countries where it had been mostly stamped out. There are outbreaks across Europe every year and sporadic outbreaks in the U.S.

“That is Andrew Wakefield’s legacy,” said Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The hospitalizations and deaths of children from measles who could have easily avoided the disease.”

Wakefield’s discredited theories had a tremendous impact in the U.S., Offit said, adding: “He gave heft to the notion that vaccines in general cause autism.”

In Britain, Wakefield’s research led to a huge decline in the number of children receiving the MMR vaccine: from 95 percent in 1995 — enough to prevent measles outbreaks — to 50 percent in parts of London in the early 2000s. Rates have begun to recover, though not enough to prevent outbreaks. In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person to die from measles in Britain in 14 years.

“The false suggestion of a link between autism and the MMR vaccine has done untold damage to the UK vaccination program,” said Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that it is safe.”

Unfortunately, even when the British totally discredit you, there is always Texas, as Brian Deer of the London Times explains.

Jefferson gets to be a left-wing hero again! It’s been awhile, but Ho Chi Minh and I always knew he had a comeback in him. Actually, the whole cause of right-wing historical revisionism may suffer some blowback from this ill-advised shot at Mr. Jefferson. They have gone a Founder there. There are lots of relatively conservative Americans out there who still revere the Founders. They hear a few stories like this and they may just conclude that guys like Dental Commissar McElroy are a little too sketchy to be allowed to control their children’s lives.

"George Washington" collecting signatures for the Mount Vernon Statement

After months of non-stop, often costumed stalking by the hysterical far right,  the Founders finally caught a break this week, thanks to the  Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. It seems that the keepers of George Washington’s estate did not let the conservative promoters of the so-called “Mount Vernon Statement” hold their big media event on the premises mentioned in its title. The far right has long enjoyed projecting its obsessions on the Founders, of course, but the Tea Parties have made the phenomenon a full-on reactionary fad lately. No conservative gathering or press release seems complete unless dressed up in Ye Olde Colonial drag. The substance of the statement is only historical in the sense of being rooted in the politics of the late 20th century, rather than the 21st or the 18th. The real point of bringing poor George Washington into this vague farrago of conservative pieties would seem to be keeping longtime Beltway rightists relevant in the Tea Party era.

There have a number of enjoyable stories on the MVS debacle, but the best headlined has to be the Christian Science Monitor‘s  “A fake Hitler outdid conservatives.” That’s only the middle of the headline, actually, but that phrase is what jumped out at me from Google.
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Now playing: The Young Republic – She’s Not Waiting Here This Time

I hardly get to read the now-venerable H-Net email lists any more, but this morning I did catch a good post from H-LAW and H-SHEAR patiently explaining to the lawyers and right-wingers who swarm those lists on certain topics that the Constitution should not be read the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible, as an “inerrant” text every word of which is divinely inspired. The author of the following is constitutional historian R.B. Bernstein, and he was responding to a post asking somewhat bitterly whether the last five words in Article I, Section 6, Clause 2 of the Constitution  “are anything but a complete nullity,” as though it was news that there was some not eternally-applicable language in there:

I also think that the question, as it stands with its note of suppressed dismay and outrage at language that might be a nullity, targets a constitutional straw-man, a general assumption about the Constitution’s text that we ought to discard once and for all — that the text is not only authoritative but somehow transcendantly so, clear and dispositive far beyond the powers of mortal men.

The framers of the Constitution were human beings, working under very difficult conditions that sometimes meant that they did not write — or “frame” — with the focused, unwavering attention to clarity and guidance for posterity that posterity has too often attributed to them.  One example, memorably elucidated by Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, now distinguished university professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, is the arrangement for who would preside in the case of a Senate impeachment trial of the Vice President.  The constitutional text, read with care, indicates only one possible answer: the Vice President.  The explanation is that the framers added the Vice Presidency to the Constitution at a very late stage of the game, and they may have meant to modify the language governing presiding officers in Senate impeachment trials to have the Chief Justice preside over the impeachment trial of a President or a Vice President, but they didn’t do a thorough enough mark-up.

Further, the reverence for the text of the Constitution that suffuses today’s constitutional and legal culture may not have been present at its creation, and for very good reason.  The framers and their contemporaries lived in an era of rapid constitutional change, in which they all lived through three or even four forms of American constitutional governance (British empire to 1775 or 1776, Continental Congress from 1775-1776 to 1781, Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789, and Constitution from 1789 on); they also each lived through at least two and sometimes three different versions of state constitutional arrangements — charter or other colonial organization to 1775-1776, provision or first constitution in 1776, with at least one and sometimes two later constitutions, depending on the state. (The only exception is Rhode Island, which marked up its colonial charter to remove references to the British Crown and then did not do anything to revise or replace that reworked charter until the Dorr Rebellion in the late 1830s and early 1840s.) When Jefferson referred to the Articles of Confederation in late 1787 as a venerable fabric, he was not writing with the sarcasm that some later scholars have attributed to him. Given that rapid succession of constitutional frameworks on both state and national levels, it’s unlikely at best that the framers of the Constitution or their contemporaries thought that the Constitution proposed in 1787, ratified in 1788, and put into effect in 1789 would last more than a generation.

It may be true, as James Madison argued in an essay for the NATIONAL GAZETTE on 19 January 1792, that “every word [of the Constitution] decides a question between power and liberty,” but that is a description of the Constitution’s purposes and functions, not of its consistent literary excellence, and we would do well to recognize this fact.

Not my thoughts exactly — much more judicious — but perhaps this is the sort of cool reason that ahistorical abusers of the Constitution and the Founders might be able to heed? Probably not, but they should.

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Now playing: Los Campesinos! – Don’t Tell Me To Do The Math(s)
via FoxyTunes

. . . lived in Missouri, apparently. From local newspaper columinist T.J. Greaney, one more reason the Founders really should wonder about the quality of the p.r. representation they have been receiving. Apparently one of their recently-deceased modern legatees liked to spread his message on bathroom stalls:

In the 1960s if you entered a restroom or a phone booth, there’s a chance you might have noticed a three-inch-square sticker at eye level. A closer look might show the image of a rifle crosshairs superimposed over a menacing text:

“See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?” the sticker read. “He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure. … Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.”

The author of this screed is Robert Bolivar DePugh, and his goal was terror. For more than a decade, DePugh led a shadowy militia group known as the Minutemen. Their stated purpose was to use guerilla warfare to repel the Communist invasion they always believed was at hand. Later, they vowed to root out Communist spies they swore were entrenched in the U.S. government. War, in their minds, was always imminent, and a group of armed patriots was the last best hope for the Republic.

“He saw himself as the Paul Revere of the 20th century, that he was going to save the United States from Communism,” said Eric Beckemeier, who grew up in DePugh’s adopted hometown of Norborne and wrote a book in 2007 chronicling his movement. “It was delusions of grandeur, almost.”

Almost? Anyway, the whole piece is well worth reading. Not exactly a heart-warming local human interest story, but also not exactly not.

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Now playing: Graham Parker & The Rumour – Stupefaction
via FoxyTunes

I am driving off to the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) annual meeting in beautiful downtown Springfield, Illinois, this morning. Worthwhile national history conferences in easy ground transportation range of mid-Missouri are something of a rarity, so I would not miss it. Perhaps I will “live blog” some of the proceedings. Also, perhaps I won’t.

Just one brief item before I go: Dan Mandell of Truman State called my attention to a Wall Street Journal article discussing the latest target for Texas shootin’ irons in the educational culture wars: our own field of U.S. history. This kind of history standards debate is not new, of course — we can say a little prayer of thanks that Lynne Cheney never got her own CIA hit squad, or whatever Dick’s most recently revealed scheme turns out to have been. Yet back in the day, it was usually conservatives complaining about what was left out of the National History Standards; in present-day Texas, they are looking to put a tendentiously right-wing Christian view of American history into the public schools. The agenda seems to go considerably beyond LCheney-like complaints about the insufficient love given to George Washington. I will supply some key passages for myself or others to take up in the comments or later. The whole thing is worth reading, if you are feeling calm:

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith, and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp. . . .

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

Colonial historians, would you like to take a guess about what figure some of the Texas reviewers wanted removed from the curriculum, apparently as part of this biblical program? From the specific suggestions listed at the end of the story:

• Delete Anne Hutchinson from a list of colonial leaders

Students learn about colonial history in the fifth grade, and three reviewers suggested that the standards not include Anne Hutchinson, a 17th century figure, among a list of significant leaders. Ms. Hutchinson was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for teaching religious views at odds with the officially sanctioned faith.

So rebellious female Christians just don’t count when it comes to America’s biblical principles, and/or Puritan orthodoxy is alive and well deep in the heart of Texas. I don’t think that’s what Bob Wills intended, do you?

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Now playing: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys – Cotton Eyed Joe
via FoxyTunes

I am hoping the title of this post is only a pun. Here in America’s sixth freest state, the Fourth is something of a free-fire zone, and my boys and I are not immune to the charms of “blowing stuff up” (as Owen likes to put it). We almost always attend a public fireworks show in Weston, MO (my parents’ place of residence), where the big stuff is detonated literally on the other side of a high school football field from the place you sit. It’s all pretty awesome, until someone gets hurt, so wish us luck.

The Paine of the title refers to what appears to be the new, inadvertent Common-Place tradition of celebrating American Independence by bringing up perhaps the only true revolutionary among the front-line Founders, Thomas Paine. (One of the things I like about Paine is that he was far too dodgy a character to ever have the term “Founding Father” comfortably applied to him. Paternal he was not.) A little bit less than a year ago, I did a a post about unwelcome interventions in presidential elections that included a discussion and the text of Paine’s infamous open letter dissing George Washington. Now I see that the just-released July issue of Common-Place proper features a most welcome forum on Paine. In addition to an article by the great J.M. (Jason) Opal of McGill University, the forum includes two other articles from presenters at the conference on Paine that immediate past C-P editor Ed Gray and I attended in Milan last October: Matteo Battistini out of University of Bologna and Nathalie Caron, coeditor of one of France’s leading scholarly journals on American history and culture, the Revue française d’études américaines.The whole forum is well worth the time of any reader who wants something more substantive than Founder-worship and gunpowder for their Fourth of July delectation.

The Paine forum also seems like the opportune moment to foist upon the nets my own contribution to the Milan conference, entitled “Thomas Paine and the U.S. Election of 1796: In which it is discovered that George Washington was more popular than Jesus”. Some of this material will doubtless end up in the book I am writing on that first contested presidential election, but given space considerations and the high time-benefit ratio that would be involved in making a full journal article of this piece, I am going to present it here in only slightly revised form, just enough to fill a couple of gaps and make it flow better in written form. There are footnotes, but light by my standards, and just to take advantage of the digital medium, I have included a couple of primary sources in the .pdf. My hope is that readers in the comfort of their own web-surfing spots will get more out of it than I suspect the room full of Italian undergraduates did in Milan that day.

Readers should feel free to comment on my article or the Paine forum more generally in this post’s comment thread.
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Now playing: Bob Dylan – Tombstone Blues
via FoxyTunes

Perhaps this is a bit Founderesque, but Common-place readers are always in search of new ways of conveying history, and so you may appreciate this op-art essay in the New York Times online by Maria Kalman called “Time Wastes Too Fast.”  Using documents, photographs, archaeology, primary sources, and her own illustrations (many based on contemporary portraits), Kalman spins a travelogue, history and biography, and a life lesson from a trip to Monticello.  Perhaps the essay will inspire you to redeem more of your summertime, or perhaps it will send you spinning into an envious funk.  Or maybe you’ll just be inspired to go for a walk.