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.

I am a sucker for old school public art where they try to express some local civic value by putting up a sort of giant greeting card. Anyone recognize this one?

The blogger Atrios likes to highlight articles about the incongruities between urban life (with its walkability and density) and automobile culture (which demands curb cuts, parking spaces, fast-moving highways, and suburban developments). He’s especially giddy when drivers are driven mad by cities–because suburbanites perceive them to be unsuitable as places to live, yet they still want to visit urban attractions (or work their urban jobs).  So when they can’t find a place to park, their frustration is palpable (particularly on internet comment boards).  For an urban planner, the only solutions seem to be: a) destroy your city, or b) resist the suburbanites’ car-centric frustration, possibly by coming up with transportation alternatives.

Atrios highlighted an article on the parking shortage in Newport, RI, particularly this quote:

Though a modern streetcar system may seem out-of-place with the city’s colonial appeal, officials say it could actually be a throwback to the early 20th century, when trolleys operated in the city. Plus, Bronk said, there’s nothing quaint about the city’s traffic.

“Does four lanes of automobile congestion, is that in keeping with the colonial period? It’s not,” he said. “Is a highway downtown in keeping with the colonial era? It’s not.”

Of all the cities I discussed in Rebels Rising, Newport is the best place to discern a surviving colonial landscape and surviving colonial buildings.  After that, I’d rank them as follows, from best to worst: Charleston (SC), Philadelphia (where Atrios lives), Boston, and New York City.  (Obviously there were other cities at the time, but those are the five that got the most attention in my book.)  Of those five, Newport has grown the least, economically and demographically, over the years, so it’s not so surprising that more of its colonial landscape survives.  The other cities have also struggled with transportation access in a lot of ways, and I’m sure visitors to all these cities (and to all cities, really) can call to mind the highways that lead into these cities, the neighborhoods that have been blighted by modern highway construction, and the public transportation alternatives that exist (or don’t exist) in these places.

All this is making me very grateful that my fellow fellow at the John Carter Brown Library used to offer me a parking space at his father’s office whenever I was driving down to Newport for dissertation research.

UPDATE: Why preserve historic buildings?  Because sometimes the findings are really cool.

Some may be aware that one of St. Louis’s nicknames is “Mound City.” This moniker developed because of the many Indian mounds of different shapes and sizes that were found in the area when the Usonians started moving in approximately 200 years ago. Many of these were quite sizable, though none were as impressive as the Monk’s Mound over at Cahokia on the Illinois side of the river. (Now it is an archaeological site. Not that long before the French and Spanish hit the Mississippi Valley, Cahokia had the been the great metropolis of northern North America, such as it was.)

The early U.S. arrivals had lots of fanciful theories about the mysterious cultures that created the mounds, but that did not stop them from becoming popular spots on which to build your farm, home, or “entertainment complex.” Then, as the city grew, it became even more popular to flatten the mounds and use the dirt for other purposes. Today there are barely any hills at all in most of St. Louis, much less anything that would justify the appellation “Mound City.” Slightly-Raised-Above-the-Riverbed City would be more like it. (A few miles inland, there is The Hill, the Little Italy of St. Louis where Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, and Early Republic historian Rosemarie Zagarri were all raised. The singular article form of the name is a significant clue to the local topography.)

The ex-mounds of Mound City are in the news today because what is thought to be the last remaining St. Louis Indian mound, or the remaining half of it, is up for sale. Located in south St. Louis along the Mississippi, it is locally known as Sugar Loaf Mound and features an elderly couple’s house right on top. Supposedly the house has a nice view of the river, and it must have awesome freeway access — part of the mound was used as fill for I-55 next door. The Budweiser brewery and downtown STL are just minutes away.  Get your bid in now, because the Osage Nation is looking at buying the property to preserve it. The Osage would be buttressing what I gather is a somewhat disputed ancestral link between the historical Osage people and the Mississippian mound builders.
—————-
Now playing: Ramsay Midwood – Mohawk River

The Washington Post published an article about Martha Washington’s wedding shoes being displayed at Mount Vernon this month.  The subtitle was “Less First Frump, More Foxy Lady.”  (Gosh, that just makes you want to break out Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, doesn’t it?)  The shoes didn’t much interest the Guardian, which entitled its piece “Martha Washington – a Hot First Lady?”

The reason is this picture: a computerized “age-regression portrait” by Michael Deas that purports to show what Martha Washington looked like in her twenties.  (Could The Sun be far behind in picking up this story?)

Jeff will probably hate me for posting this: it’s Founders Chic run amok!  Why do we care how attractive past first ladies were, anyway?

On the other hand, something tells me that age-regression portraits could be a big business, if it makes everyone look THAT good.  I want them to make one of me when I was in middle school.

(Hat tip Ralph Luker and IBM.)

The St. Louis newspaper reported over the weekend that the state of Illinois is closing three interesting but not very well known French colonial historic sites in “Les Pays des Illinois” along the east side of the Mississippi. Partly this is being done so that no Abraham Lincoln shrine can be left unvisited during Lincoln’s bicentennial next year. French Colonial America has long needed a new agent, especially for the French presence here in the Midwest, but this also strikes me as another case of a modern cultural institution abandoning its duty to make it possible for citizens to discover something they might not have known about, in favor of providing even more about an already popular subject that automatically generates high visitation numbers. (This is related to the phenomenon of public libraries clearing their shelves of world literary classics and non-fiction on relatively obscure topics so as to have more current bestsellers and self-help books on hand, the same ones prominently displayed at the local Target, Barnes & Noble, etc.) Nothing against Honest Abe — far from it — but it is always sad to see Famous Presidents and Their Smallest Doings crowding out other forms of history.

STLtoday – Illinois will close five area historic sites

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency will close the Cahokia Courthouse in Cahokia, Fort de Chartres near Prairie du Rocher, the Vandalia Statehouse in Vandalia, and Fort Kaskaskia and the Pierre Menard Home, both near Ellis Grove. Those sites are currently open five days a week. Some may open on a limited basis for special events after Oct. 1.

The Cahokia Mounds and Lewis and Clark sites will continue to be open Wednesdays through Sundays, as they have since 2002.

Statewide, 13 historic sites and 11 state parks will be closed to accommodate $1.4 billion in budget cuts made by Gov. Rod Blagojevich after the Legislature passed an unbalanced budget. None of the affected parks are in the Metro East area or Southern Illinois.

Four Abraham Lincoln-related state historic sites — Lincoln’s New Salem near Petersburg and the Lincoln Tomb, Old State Capitol and Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, all in Springfield — will resume seven-day-per-week schedules next spring, the Historic Preservation Agency has announced. All are currently open five days a week.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and the expanded hours will be made possible by funding from the Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

I was amused by the  New York Times story last weekend about Alexander Hamilton’s country house, The Grange, getting moved “from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street.” Andy Robertson and I visited that lonely site (in terms of tourists) a few years ago. The house was indeed challenging to find, crammed in behind an Episcopal Church and surrounded by other buildings.  (In the picture above, you can see the portico of the Richardsonian-style church on the upper right.) We were the only people there except for one ranger, but we thought that the old site was actually rather appropriate. The Founder most devoted to economic development and high finance got his house completely overshadowed by the growth of exactly the sort of city he sought to foster, with all the sensitivity to the small, rural, and outmoded that such cities usually show. I am sure it is true that the new location will more closely replicate the house’s original setting, back when Harlem was a country village, but the old one sent a more accurate message about the what the historical figure stood for. Of course, the fact that Hamilton’s Monticello-like hilltop shrine will be created at public expense seems pretty Hamiltonian.

Back to history (mostly), and back to blogging a little more regularly as I try to stay in the writing habit. Unfortunately, most of my bloggable thoughts are still back on the GeoBee trip.

Game-show hosts turned out to be one of the surprise sub-themes of the trip. We knew about Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! hosting the finals of the National Geographic Bee, but we were not expecting Isaac to get that far, nor that the finals would actually be a sort of game show, with a giant two-tiered set, desks with lights on the front, and the whole nine yards. From the looks of the set, I was worried that there might be buzzers and wrong answer sound effects, too, but luckily National Geographic did not take things quite that far. Alex Trebek seemed exactly like what you see on Jeopardy!, and very good with the kids. I haven’t watched his show since sometime in the 90s, but as TV personalities go Alex seems like a credit to the culture. Canadian culture, perhaps, but a credit, a figure who honors knowledge and intelligence and a modest pride in one’s accomplishments rather than exhibitionism, ruthlessness, and stupidity like 90% of the rest of TV.

The other game-show host came as more of a surprise. Karen and the boys had never been out to Presidential Shrine #1, a.k.a. Mount Vernon, so we spent the afternoon there on the way out to Karen’s uncle’s house out in suburbs. I had not been to Washington’s pad in quite a while, and the place was much changed. The house was the same, but there is now a glitzy complex of ancillary museums (The Ford Orientation Center and Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center) that seem to be the result of a massive infusion of right-wing money, or at least money from rich people and corporations with quite conservative notions about patriotism and history.

In the new orientation center, visitors are ushered into a giant movie theater for a double-feature. First up, a cheery overview of the grounds featuring . . . Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, in colonial costume! I must admit I did not see this coming. It is hard to imagine a less 18th-century or Washingtonian figure than Pat Sajak, especially when he takes off the tri-corner hat to reveal his trademark, blow-dried 1970s ‘do. Even some of the other tourists chuckled a bit at the incongruousness of starting off their visit to a national shrine with a few words from the the guy on Wheel of Fortune. Pat’s major qualification for the job would seem to be status as a token Hollywood conservative, as noted on this roster of “Patriotic Actors” from a conservative web site. Apparently Pat has contributed more than his hairdo and cheerful demeanor to the right-wing cause; on another conservative site, he enlightens us at some length on “The Disconnect Between Hollywood and America.”

Pat’s participation in conservative Hollywood-bashing is interesting considering that his Mount Vernon intro is followed by a very Hollywood-esque “action-adventure movie” on Washington called We Fight To Be Free. Written by token conservative screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd (author of the celebratory George W. Bush docudrama DC 9/11: Time of Crisis), the film turns Washington’s life into a collection of near-cover versions of scenes from recent popular historical dramas.  I suspect many non-historian visitors must get a little confused by the way preparations for the Battle of Trenton (complete with Washington giving a Bush-ian patriotic speech) are intercut with scenes from Braddock’s Defeat that seem to exist so that a Last of the Mohicans-style battle scene could be included, complete with scalpings and dramatic rescues. It was George Washington, King of the Wild Frontier.

Reading a student master’s thesis draft, I learned of a crazy piece of giant historical sculpture that I have somehow missed out on seeing. As a fan of such things, though a properly appalled one, I invite anyone travelling through the Ronald Reagan Country of north central Illinois to stop by the town of Oregon, Illinois, and take in the 48-foot cement statue overlooking the Rock River. I will get there someday.

Completed by the awesomely-named sculptor Lorado Taft in 1911, the monument was entitled “The Eternal Indian” and purports to depict the Sauk war leader and popular culture hero Black Hawk, looking more generically “Indian” than Sauk or Black Hawk-like to my eyes. He is, however, very big, “the largest stand alone cement statue in the United States,” according to the local who took the modern photo at the bottom of the post. It may not be a very good likeness, but at least Black Hawk can have the satisfaction of knowing that his hated rival, the accomodationist chief Keokuk, has a much more embarrassing statue: only a fourth as high and dressed up in a highly inappropriate Plains Indian war bonnet that makes him look like the chief on F-Troop.

I was skeptical when contacted by the creators, but this webcam on top of the Calhoun Mansion in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, is really quite neat. Every historic district should have one. (If only Lincoln or Jackson or Denmark Vesey had had the Calhoun Mansion wired up like this, with sound!) You can watch the ships go by, swivel the thing around, get Ft. Sumter in your sights, watch the sunrise (I imagine), and see everything on the skyline in detail. I was a little afraid of seeing a close-up of a rooftop palmetto bug, but that’s probably just the Tallahassee flashbacks talking.