Land Ordinance of 1785

Today marks a significant date in U.S.and in surveying history:

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was adopted by the United States Congress on May 20, 1785. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress did not have the power to raise revenue by direct taxation of the inhabitants of the United States. Therefore, the immediate goal of the ordinance was to raise money through the sale of land in the largely unmapped territory west of the original states acquired at the 1783 (Treaty of Paris) after the end of the Revolutionary War. Over three-fourths of the area of the continental United States ultimately came under the rectangular survey. This was important because it provided easily recognized land descriptions, which in turn contributed enormously to the orderly and largely peaceful occupation of the land. The rectangular survey also provided the units within which economic, political, and social development took place.
The Ordinance of 1784 was a resolution written by Thomas Jefferson (delegate from Virginia) calling for Congress to take action. The land west of the Appalachian Mountains, north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River was to be divided into ten separate states. However, the 1784 resolution did not define the mechanism by which the land would become states, or how the territories would be governed or settled before they became states. The Ordinance of 1785 put the 1784 resolution in operation by providing a mechanism for selling and settling the land, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 addressed political needs.
The 1785 ordinance laid the foundations of land policy until passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Land Ordinance established the basis for the Public Land Survey System. The initial surveying was performed by Thomas Hutchins. After he died in 1789, responsibility for surveying was transferred to the Surveyor General. Land was to be systematically surveyed into square townships, six miles (9.656 km) on a side. Each of these townships were sub-divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile (2.59 km²) or 640 acres. These sections could then be further subdivided for re-sale by settlers and land speculators.
The ordinance was also significant for establishing a mechanism for funding public education. Section 16 in each township was reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Many schools today are still located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for public education. In later States, section 36 of each township was also designated as a "school section".
Knepper notes: “Sections number 8, 11, 26, and 29 in every township were reserved for future sale by the federal government when, it was hoped, they would bring higher prices because of developed land around them. Congress also reserved one third part of all gold, silver, lead, and copper mines to its own use, a bit of wishful thinking as regards Ohio lands.” The ordinance also said “That three townships adjacent to Lake Erie be reserved, to be hereafter disposed of by Congress, for the use of the officers, men, and others, refugees from Canada, and the refugees from Nova Scotia, who are or may be entitled to grants of land under resolutions of Congress now existing.“ This was not possible, as the area next to Lake Erie was property of Connecticut, so the Canadians had to wait until the establishment of the Refugee Tract in 1798.
The Point of Beginning for the 1785 survey was where Ohio (as the easternmost part of the Northwest Territory), Pennsylvania and Virginia (now West Virginia) met, on the north shore of the Ohio River near East Liverpool, Ohio. There is a historical marker just north of the site, at the state line where Ohio State Route 39 becomes Pennsylvania Route 68.

Thanks to this Act, plane passengers can look down at the nearly perfect one mile squares which cover the nation's landscape.  It set up the 6 mile by 6 mile survey township. It also gave us the Section, Township, Range system of identifying every parcel of property in the Public Land Survey System.  It also greatly simplified the complex and nearly indefinable system of metes and bounds descriptions, which allowed surveyors to separate out the best land for themselves and their favored clients.  Later, the Act of May 18, 1796 altered the numbering system for sections in townships, and only two surveys in Ohio were conducted under the numbering system of 1785:

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785, allowed for the subdivision of government lands, and the subsequent sale of those lands which brought about the largest number of freeholders of property in the history of the world.  It is one of the greatest legacies of the United States.

Atchafalaya

James Fallows notes:

The New Yorker has brought out from its paywall archives John McPhee's wonderful 1987 piece "Atchafalaya." This is about the very stretch of the lower Mississippi River in the news today because of the pending decision to open the Morganza Spillway and flood parts of Cajun Country, so as to spare Baton Rouge and New Orleans from being flooded instead.

McPhee's piece, in addition to its narrative and descriptive power, explains the basic forces of nature against which the US Army Corps of Engineers, and much of modern development, have worked. For instance:

>>The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand--frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions.<<

Update: Halfway through the article, it is all geology, hydrology and hydraulics, in other words, awesome.  I was wrong previously today, the Morganza Spillway is downstream from the Old River Control, where the Army Corps fights to keep the Atchafalaya from taking the water of the Mississippi.

Nostalgia and Politics

E.D. Kain takes a look at Paul Krugman's and his own politics, and how each's nostalgia shapes his views:

At some point you become your own special interest group. You suddenly see the public library as a symbol of everything that has been lost or that you imagine has been lost. You want to retake or protect what is valuable to you, and what you believe is valuable to others. The key question that needs to be asked is this: do these things you value inhibit the freedoms of others? Is your nostalgia inadvertently causing someone harm?
Krugman’s vision of the 1950’s really is a vision of an insulated world, locked precariously in amber. Can it ever really come back? Did it rely too much on the plight of the disadvantaged – women, minorities, post-war Europe? I cannot help but think that the 1950’s never really happened. That my childhood in 1980’s Montana never really happened.
So maybe we should look forward toward a new vision of the good life. If we do, in some ways it will require us to look back at freedoms lost, and that will require some level of nostalgia. But it will also require us to recall that coercion and oppression exist on many levels, that the state is often just the arm of our culture, enforcing whatever freedom-quashing cultural trend exists at the moment – whether that is a long history of women as second-class-citizens or the relatively new (and far more benign) tendency to ban smoking in restaurants and bars.
Krugman talks about an era when kids were free to go out and play in the streets all day, unsupervised and pretty much safe. I’m not thirty yet and I remember that freedom myself.

I think it is interesting that most (white) Americans, including myself, seem to idealize the '50's, and look upon the time as a time to get back to. I think that tends to hold across Republicans and Democrats.  And yet, when it comes to civil and women's rights, Democrats tend to, rightly, look askance at the decade.  Meanwhile, actual Republican policies are more tied to the 1920's or 1890's, as opposed to the 1950's.  Very few people recognize that the U.S. wouldn't have reached such an economically dominant position without the destruction of World War II unleashed on the U.S.S.R., western Europe, Great Britain and Japan.  That position can never be reattained.  The nostalgia is extremely powerful, but misleading.  We now need to determine what sort of a state we want to live in, and how we can afford that.  None of that is fun, but all of that is necessary.

More on the Morganza Spillway

The Morganza Spillway, shown while open during the 1973 flood. 

From Wikipedia:

The Morganza Spillway is a flood-control structure in Louisiana along the western bank of the Mississippi River at river mile 280, about three miles northeast of Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish. The spillway stands between the Mississippi and the Morganza Floodway, which leads to the Atchafalaya Basin and the Atchafalaya River in south-central Louisiana. Its purpose is to divert water from the Mississippi River during major flood events by flooding the Atchafalaya Basin, including the Atchafalaya River and the Atchafalaya Swamp. The spillway and adjacent levees also help prevent the Mississippi from changing its present course through the major port cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, to a new course directly down the Atchafalaya to the Gulf of Mexico. The Morganza Spillway is operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Its gates have been opened only twice, during major Mississippi River floods in 1973 and 2011.

I think it is very important to note the part about how the Morganza Spillway prevents the Mississippi River from changing course, running through the Atchafalaya Basin and leaving New Orleans and Baton Rouge on a back channel.  Also, as is noted at Wikipedia, all of the levees and structures used to relieve levees along the river were put in place after the 1927 flood:

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States,^[6] in large part due to the Mississippi River swelling to 80 miles wide in spots.^[7] To provide protection against river flood and prevent a repeat of the Great Flood of 1927, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928 to authorize the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build the Bonnet Carre Spillway (located 33 miles above New Orleans and completed in 1931^[8]), the Birds Point floodway in Missouri, and the the Morganza Floodway as part of the 1928 Mississippi River and Tributaries Project.^[7] The Morganza control structure portion of the project was completed in 1954^[7] and subsequently became incorporated into the Mississippi River Commission's 1956 Project Design Flood,^[9] which added the Old River Control Structure in 1963 to the protections used to prevent Mississippi River flood.^[10] The Flood Control Act of 1965 provided further regulation over the Morganza Spillway's role in Mississippi River flood prevention. A concrete pit called a stilling basin was added at the Morganza Spillway in 1977 "to provide erosion protection after the velocity of water pouring through the open bays during a 1973 flood caused severe scouring, or gouging out, of the land behind the bays."^[11]

The blowing of the Birds Point levee, while dramatic, has been part of established plan since 1928.  The landowners in the area, while obviously dejected, knew that this is a possibility every year.  As for the Atchafalaya, it is very interesting that without the Corps, the Mississippi River would shift and flow through that basin.

The Tea Party and Liberals Each Misrepresent the Founding Fathers

William Hogeland looks at the economic roots of the American Revolution and how various factions have appropriated what they want to support their causes, even if it is incorrect (h/t Yves Smith):

Yet despite constant appeals to founding values by politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, a perennial American eagerness to avoid framing our founding period in economic terms can make it strangely difficult to keep those all-important 18th-century finance issues in historical focus. The Tea Party movement, for example, has laid its claim on the founding period, and to a great extent that claim is indeed an economic and financial one. Casting the modern welfare state as a form of tyranny, in large part because of what they see as its excessive taxation, Tea Partiers invoke the famous American resistance to Parliament’s efforts to raise a revenue in the colonies without the consent traditionally given by representation. Seeing founding-generation American patriots as unified against British taxation (and frequently misrepresenting the politics even of the elites they invoke), the Tea Party defines its own anti-government, anti-tax values as essential to American identity.
The Tea Party thus edits out an alternative view of government that prevailed among the ordinary 18th-century Americans who were all-important to achieving independence. Those Americans opposed elites epitomized by the Boston merchant class, which the Tea Party, perhaps appropriately enough, so strongly identifies with. The internal struggle for American equality was as important to the founding as the high-Whig resistance to England, but the Tea Party can’t deal with the populist leaders and militia rank-and-file who wrote the socially radical 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution, or the Shaysites of Massachusetts who marched on the state armory, or the so-called whiskey rebels who inspired federal occupation of western Pennsylvania. American Revolutionary patriots all, those democratic-finance leaders had ideas about government’s role in ensuring economic equality that prefigured programs of the 19th-century Populists and the 20th-century New Dealers, the very programs the Tea Party wants to dismantle. Tea Party history therefore has to expunge the welfare state’s roots in America’s founding.
Liberals, too, can have a problem with the economic conflicts of the founding period. Alexander Hamilton’s national finance program, which Madison and Jefferson opposed with such intensity, was economically regressive. Under the influence of the founding financier Robert Morris, Hamilton made a stunningly successful effort to yoke American wealth to great national projects by beating down the popular-finance movement and promoting the interest (in both senses!) of the high-finance elites. Yet when some of today’s liberals look to Madison for support in critiquing Hamiltonian finance, they come up empty. Madison’s attacks on central banking represented anything but an argument for democracy and economic equality.

There is a lot more interesting stuff there, especially when it comes to the New Dealers claiming Jefferson's heritage in their reforms.  I've been struck by the irony of Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln, the savior of the Union, emancipator of slaves and supporter of federal grants for the transcontinental railroad and the Land Grant Universities, even though the party is now a states rights party, anti-civil rights, opposed to federal involvement in the economy, and with it base located in the former Confederacy.  Likewise, the Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, even though each would be anathema in today's Democratic Party. 

My favorite more recent example of a party claiming history it now has no business claiming is when Republicans claim that they are the party of civil rights, because liberal Northern (especially Northeastern) Republicans (find me a liberal Republican today) joined with LBJ to pass the Civil Rights Act over the opposition of segregationist Southern Democrats.  I've actually heard Rush Limbaugh make that claim.  He neglects to mention that most of those Southern Democrats became Republicans when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964 on throwing out the Civil Rights Act, and the national Republican party froze out the liberals in the Northeast, who became Democrats.  That is an amazing example of appropriating history which doesn't match reality.

VE Day

66 years ago today, the war in Europe ended.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: McClatchy: How bin Laden died: PsyOps in Action?.  This is straight out of the Republican playbook:

White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan provided the gripping detail Monday, when he told reporters that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield during the raid. The account gave the perfect hook for story after story after story after story. Every story, of course, furthered the fatal final image of the coward Osama bin Laden, cowering in fear. As Slate's estimable David Weigle put it:

"So, the admirer of bin Laden has to reckon with the idea that he spent his last moments hiding behind his wife."

Perfect! One couldn't ask for a better image!
Now, it turns out this vivid detail is, well, false. So maybe Brennan erred in the heat  of battle, right?
Or, maybe he did his job: planting in the public's mind the notion of bin Laden dying a coward's death, like James Cagney in that movie about the gangster going to the electric chair. It's always the first impression that lasts, so the after-the-fact corrections really won't unsettle what the public already "knows" about the event.
Bin Laden=coward, for all time.
Undermining the manhood of one's enemy is standard practice in the psychological operations playbook; witness, e.g., rumors that Panama's Manuel Noriega was fleeing U.S. forces while dressed as a woman, way back in the day. Assignment: come up with other examples of how Iraqi and Al Qaeda leaders have been belittled at their moment of capture or death.
Or, maybe it's more complicated than manipulation. Maybe the error really a case of what they say about war -- the first reports are always wrong -- combined with the juiciness of the details that matched what Brrennan wanted to believe. 

The example of that in the Iraq War:  Saddam Hussein's massive underground complex and dozens of body doubles.  We got television graphics of the underground bunker he would supposedly be hiding in, but after the troops got to town, we saw a lot of palaces, but I never was able to find actual photos of this massive bunker.  Likewise with the body doubles.  Supposedly there were dozens, but I never heard of an instance where we ever found one or interviewed one.  I believed then and still believe it was all propaganda to convince the American peopel he was a coward.

Correction:  Saddam's bunker.  Not exactly the bunker built at the Greenbriar.

Also, Yves highlights this:

U.S. Regulators Face Budget Pinch as Mandates Widen New York Times. This is pathetic:

On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor, a group of employees from the commodities watchdog [CFTC] rode Mega Bus both ways, arriving late to their meeting despite a 5:30 a.m. departure. The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.

No wonder businesses rob this country blind, Republicans want them to.

More on Blowing Up Levees

The Army Corps does this more often than I thought:

Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh — the man ultimately responsible for the decision to go through with the plan- has indicated that he may not stop there if blasting open the levee doesn't do the trick. In recent days, Walsh has said he might also make use of other downstream "floodways" — basins surrounded by levees that can intentionally be blown open to divert floodwaters.

Among those that could be tapped are the 58-year-old Morganza floodway near Morgan City, La., and the Bonnet Carre floodway about 30 miles north of New Orleans. The Morganza has been pressed into service just once, in 1973. The Bonnet Carre, which was christened in 1932 has been opened up nine times since 1937, the most recent in 2008.

"Making this decision is not easy or hard," Walsh said. "It's simply grave — because the decision leads to loss of property and livelihood, either in a floodway or in an area that was not designed to flood."

Officials in Louisiana and Mississippi are warning that the river could bring a surge of water unseen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The corps has said about 241 miles of levees along the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the Gulf of Mexico need to be made taller or strengthened.


George Sills, a former Army Corps engineer and levee expert in Vicksburg, Miss., said the volume of water moving down the river would test the levee system south of Memphis into Louisiana.

"It's been a long time since we've seen a major flood down the Mississippi River," Sills said. "This is the highest river in Vicksburg, Miss., since 1927. There will be water coming by here that most people have never seen in their lifetime."

The 1927 flood is featured in the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.  It features a lot of history of New Orleans and Mardi Gras, a lot about hydraulics and hydrology of the Mississippi River, a lot about the history of the Army Corps and levees, and a good bit about race relations in the Mississippi Delta.  Herbert Hoover makes an appearance, and a levee is blown up to save New Orleans.  It is a great book, and I highly recommend it.

Bin Laden Is Dead

Awesome NYT photograph, via Balloon Juice:

Update:  James Fallows, scoring the President's speech last night, highlights what will hopefully be the best outcome of the killing of Osama Bin Laden:

5) The potential significance: an end to the distortions of the GWOT? For years anti-terrorism experts have stressed the decentralized, self-sustaining nature of al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations around the world. The elimination of the celebrated symbol and inspiration of the movement will certainly not mean the end of terrorist threats, and in the short run could trigger revenge attacks. (I will be leaving from LAX tomorrow morning; will be interesting to see whether the security drill is different in any way.)

But here is potentially the greatest significance of this news, apart from the "bringing justice to our enemies" satisfaction: it holds the potential of marking an end to the otherwise un-endable "Global War or Terror."

Signifying an end to a "global war" does not mean the end of a threat. America faces a daily threat from crime; for the foreseeable future Americans and others will face a continuing threat of terrorist attack; the entire world faces a threat that the thousands of nuclear warheads still in existence could destroy millions, through accidental or deliberate misuse. But we classify all those as threats, requiring our continued vigilance and best efforts to prevent them. Rather than as ongoing, open-ended wars with the consequent distortions that wars can impose on our values, institutions, and public lives.

 As long as the "Global War on Terror" was defined as eliminating all threat of terrorist activity, it could never be ended. That threat -- like other threats -- will never completely go away. But if this admittedly symbolic victory in the "war" can be taken as closing a loop opened ten years ago (and earlier, with previous OBL-inspired attacks), perhaps it could free us to continue the vigilance while beginning to correct the decade-long warping of our values. That is another gift the commandos who carried out this mission may have given America. We will see whether Obama is willing to lead that way, and others are willing to follow.

I agreed with Fallows when he called for Declaring Victory in the War on Terror, and I also hope that we can use this as an opening to back off on all the crazy actions taken in the name of the War on Terror.  

City Council Befuddled By Request to Rename Street for Negro

First off, my use of Negro is in no way intended to be insulting or offensive to African-Americans.  It is expressly intended to be insulting to the members of the Troy, Ohio City Council.  Council rejected adding a secondary name to a street in Troy to honor early Troy civil rights activist Lucille Wheat.  Here is the story:

A city council committee on Thursday unanimously declined to recommend council authorize adding a secondary name for Elm Street. The action effectively rejects a request by Wheat's son, Sidney Wheat, to rename the 2-1/2 block section of South Elm Street between West Main Street and McKaig Road for his mother.

Lucille Wheat is recognized as a key civil rights figure in Troy during the 1950s through the early 1980s. She founded and chaired the Troy Community Action Committee, headed the Troy NAACP in 1966 and co-authored with Lois Davies a seminal book on race relations Troy title, "Some Self-Evident Truths."

Sidney Wheat made the request in January to Troy mayor Michael L. Beamish, saying it was a way to recognize Lucille Wheat for her efforts. The Wheat's family home was located on South Elm Street, near the corner of West Main Street.

In early February, Beamish made an alternate suggestion: adding an secondary name in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the entire stretch of Elm Street from McKaig Road to the northern city limits. The Buildings, Streets and Sidewalks Committee agreed and made a positive recommendation on Beamish's alternate suggestion.

But in the face of questions from Wheat and others, the item was pulled from the Feb. 7 council agenda and sent back to committee, where it has languished until Thursday. Committee chairman Jarrod Harrah blamed scheduling conflicts for the three-month delay in bringing the item back to committee.

Thursday, Harrah and fellow committee members Bobby Phillips and Tom Kendall said they could not back naming South Elm Street for either King or Wheat.

Harrah said streets are usually reserved for persons of note and also said developers of residential areas name the streets. He also suggested renaming a street was insufficient to honor Wheat and that a plaque, perhaps on the commercial building that now occupies the site of the former Wheat home, should be added instead.

"I just don't think a street does her justice," Harrah said.

Phillips noted that Wheat has already been enshrined in the Troy Hall of Fame (in 1984). "I question how many awards a person should have," he said.

Kendall said he has "never been a big proponent of renaming streets," at least partly because it could potentially open the city up to receiving a flood of similar requests.

"At this point, I think we should leave it as it is," Kendall said.

Wheat, 73, a life-long Troy resident, appeared at the meeting with his wife and expressed disappointment in the committee's position.

I have to agree with Mr. Wheat's quote at the end of the story:

"I had hoped for a better outcome, and more sincerity, than I'm hearing," Wheat said

I was not familiar with Ms. Wheat's work in Troy prior to this newspaper article.  I will look for her book at the library when I get a chance.  Apparently, she rubbed some people in Troy the wrong way.  I find it entertaining that instead of honoring a local person, the mayor suggested naming a street after Martin Luther King.  It is also entertaining that they took two months to review and rewrite the city's street naming policy, but they failed to come up with any worthwhile excuses for why they would reject the street renaming request.  This wasn't a case where the street name would change and force people to change their address, it was for adding a secondary sign with Ms. Wheat's name on it.  In neighboring Tipp City, they added a secondary sign to honor George W. Bush because his bus went down the street on the way to giving a political speech at an invitation-only event at the high school.

The changes in the street renaming policy:

After a line-by-line review of the new policy, which included several new sections, the committee made several minor changes.

New to the policy is a section saying that consideration for renaming will not be given to anyone who has already been recognized with an honor or award. Another addition to the policy states that individuals or groups requesting the renaming "shall bear all renaming costs."

Both of those issues were cited by committee members Thursday as factors in rejecting Wheat's request.

I tell you what, if the city is concerned about the cost of the signs, I will pay for them.

It is notable that the portion of street for which the secondary name was requested is in the historically black portion of Troy.  South Elm Street and North Elm Street were referred to as Slabtown and Hollywood.  I don't remember which portion was which, I only remember being told those were the names by my grandparents.  Anyway, I thought a city council in a city which has historical markers seemingly every 20 feet in honor of Clayton Bruckner and the WACO Aircraft Company would be interested in honoring a local civil rights activist.  I would assume that Clayton Bruckner didn't make certain white folks uncomfortable about their latent racism when he was alive.

In a side note, WACO went out of business in 1947, but the city is proud of their association with the company.  The company made some very neat aircraft in the 20's and 30's prior to making the "flying coffin" gliders used in airborne operations in WWII in Sicily, in Normandy and in Operation Market Garden.  As a veteran of the Airborne in World War II told me, "We lost a lot of good boys in those gliders."  He had no fond memories of the gliders.

Update:  I would also like to propose renaming Dye Mill Road in the vicinity of the city wastewater treatment plant after the Mayor and Council.  That area generally smells the same as this Council decision.  I will also pay for those signs.

Was the Civil War a Tragedy?

TNC and J.L Wall are discussing the Civil War.  TNC makes the case that the war is not a tragedy because it ended slavery.  Wall reflects on Shelby Foote's trilogy:

And yet, I read Foote’s history and find, with his narrator, tragedy.  This is not the tragedy of an avoidable war; recall that, for Foote’s narrator, the war’s opening is not tragic but exhilarating.  The narrator is more interested (on the surface, at least) in the military narrative of the war than in its causes, results, or the question of moral justification, so it is an exhilaration borne of generalship and a sense of the heroic more than from history’s greater narrative propelling the nation toward the end of slavery.  Though that last, too, is present, if in such a way that becomes more apparent as the Narrative progresses.
By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy.  Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father.  The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).  Longstreet, perhaps, has a measure of redemption in him—but while he, shaking his head at Gettysburg, is the only one who can see the reality of their military efforts, he is merely resigned by honor of some sort to stick around for the ride.  Davis is compared from the outset to Lucifer; the image reappears near the end of Volume II as the Rebellion itself, for a moment, takes on the trappings of that angel’s against God.
The comparison is introduced through a letter written by William Tecumseh Sherman, himself a brutal warrior once relieved of duty on account of questionable sanity.  Yet he comes in (so far, at least; his march to the sea is not for some hundreds of pages) for less condemnation than his colleagues on the Southern side.  The reason is tied to the type of tragedy the narrator sees in the war at this point—and, I think, to the kind most who read of it sense: not that it had to be fought at all, but that it continues without an end at hand while terrain, technology, and the incompetence and “honor”* of the so-called great-men lead to increasing casualty rolls.  Sherman’s goal, clearly stated, is a faster end to the war; the narrator knows he will help to bring it.

I would agree with TNC that in spite of the war's costs, the benefit of ridding a nation, which was supposedly founded on freedom, of slavery, was well worth the cost.  There is definitely much tragedy to be found in this war, and its aftereffects today.  But a nation without slavery is worth it.

I think Wall's analysis of the narrative arc of the trilogy is quite interesting. Nothing bothers me more than talking to Southern partisans today, and hearing them defend the Confederacy's actions throughout the war.  It really galls me when they say that slavery was not the root cause of the war.  They don't seem to be able to appreciate the tragedy Wall is identifying in Foote's trilogy.  It makes arguing with a Republican about politics seem easy.  Of course, often when arguing with a Confederate apologist, you are arguing with a Republican.  The paradox that the party of Lincoln is now the party of the Confederacy is one of history's great ironies.  Read both TNC and Wall's posts, they are excellent.

A Populism History Lesson

Joseph Thorndike, via Mark Thoma:

Tax avoidance is legal and tax evasion is not. Simple distinction, but not always relevant, at least not in politics. Consider the recent burst of outrage over corporate tax avoidance generally and General Electric's tax bill in particular. In some years, GE's tax schemes might have escaped public notice. But in other years -- especially hard ones -- they get plenty of attention. And it was ever thus.

Consider the lessons of 1933. Wall Street investigator Ferdinand Pecora hauled J.P. Morgan, Jr. before the Senate banking committee. Pecora had been charged with uncovering malfeasance on Wall Street, but he focused much of his attention on tax issues. In particular, he forced Morgan to acknowledge from the witness chair that he had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932.
Morgan provided a reasonable explanation: stock trading losses in the great market crash had wiped out his other sources of taxable income (such losses were fully deductible in those days). But the revelation still shocked the nation, and Morgan's explanation carried little weight with Pecora -- and pretty much none with the general public.

"The country, in 1933, was in no mood for nice distinctions between tax 'evasion' and tax 'avoidance,' " Pecora later recalled. "Approved by the existing tax authorities or not, the public could not see the justice or equity of financial giants paying nothing, while Tom, Dick, and Harry scraped the bottom of their modest purses to meet their tax obligations to the Government.” (Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street under Oath; the Story of Our Modern Money Changers,1939).

The Pecora investigation sparked a powerful drive to clamp down on tax avoidance, producing (among other things), new limits on the deductibility of capital losses. More generally, it kicked off a decade of high-profile campaigns to boost effective tax rates on the rich, including a remarkably ambitious effort to revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.

I think we could use some serious adjustments to the tax code, which would boost effective tax rates on the rich and revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.  Too bad one party is too cowardly to pursue this, while the other is too stupid and bought and paid for.

Cod-Napping

The Sacred Cod

I missed this item yesterday, but on April 26, 1933, the Sacred Cod of the Massachusetts House of Representatives was stolen by members of the Harvard Lampoon:

On April 26, 1933, members of the Harvard Lampoon magazine stole the Sacred Cod as a practical joke in an event that came to be known as "The Cod-napping".
Three members of the Lampoon staff pretending to be tourists, sneaked a pair of wire cutters into the State House and, when no one was looking, cut the cords suspending the cod. They hid the cod in a flower box that they had brought for that purpose and left the State House with it. An anonymous call tipped off State House officials that the cod was missing. The theft was considered a major one, with the House of Representatives declaring that it would not legislate without the cod present. The Harvard Crimson investigated the theft themselves and determined that the Lampoon was behind it. On April 27, the Crimson gave the staff of the Lampoon an ultimatum to give the Sacred Cod, by midnight, to them and allow the Crimson to take credit for returning it or they would go public with their findings. After not receiving a reply from the Lampoon, the details of theft were printed in the next morning's edition of the Crimson.
The Massachusetts State Police were called in to assist with the search for the cod. They went so far as to dredge the Charles River, in hopes of recovering the Sacred Cod.  The authorities also found out that a member of the Lampoon staff was on board a plane heading to Newark, New Jersey. They searched Logan International Airport and wired the authorities in Newark to search the plane the student was on when it arrived, but the cod was still not recovered.  The office of the mayor of Boston also received a call saying to "tell the Mayor that when the Sacred Cod is returned it will be wrapped in the municipal flag, now flying in front of City Hall" and to "Try and catch us when we cop the flag."
Two days after the Sacred Cod was stolen, the Harvard University Police Department received an anonymous phone call informing them on how to get the Sacred Cod back. This led to the Harvard University Police following a car without a license plate in West Roxbury. After 20 minutes, two men, dressed in collared shirts with the collars turned up and hats pulled down, jumped out of the car and handed the cod to the police before speeding away. The cod was not wrapped in the municipal flag as threatened.
On April 28, the Sacred Cod was again hung in the rear of the House Chamber, over the public gallery, only this time it was hung 6 inches (150 mm) higher to prevent future thefts. No charges have ever been filed against anyone for the "Cod-napping", and the details on the whereabouts of the cod, during the 50 hours it was missing, never surfaced.
The next threat to the Sacred Cod came in 1941, when the Aluminum-for-defense Collection Drive in Massachusetts was mistakenly informed that the Cod was made of aluminum, and asked that it be donated to the war effort. Christian Herter, the Speaker of the House at the time, informed the drive that the Cod was created 43 years before aluminum was discovered. Herter passed the request along to the Massachusetts State Senate where another fish emblem is displayed.
In 1968 the Sacred Cod disappeared for a second time. it was found three days later behind a door in the House chamber.

I can tell you from experience that folks at the Massachusetts State House are pretty serious about that thing.  They really bragged it up on a tour of the State House.  I'm sure glad they got it back.  And now you can continue your day.

The Lager Beer Riot

Another example of German immigrants' love of beer, and how it shaped U.S. history:

The Lager Beer Riot occurred in Chicago, Illinois in 1855 after Mayor Levi Boone, great-nephew of Daniel Boone, renewed enforcement of an old local ordinance mandating that taverns be closed on Sundays and led the city council to raise the cost of a liquor license from $50 per year to $300 per year, renewable quarterly. This move was seen as targeting German immigrants. On April 21, after several tavern owners were arrested for selling beer on Sunday, protesters clashed with police near the Cook County Court House. Waves of angry immigrants stormed the downtown area and the mayor ordered the swing bridges opened to stop further waves of protestors from crossing the river. This left some trapped on the bridges, police then fired shots at protesters stuck on the Clark Street Bridge over the Chicago River. A police captain from Hyde Park lost an arm in the riot. Rumors flew throughout the city that some of the protesters were killed, although there is no evidence to support this. Loaded cannons set on the public square contributed to these rumors. The following year, after Boone was turned out of office, the prohibition was repealed. This riot concluded in one death and sixty arrests.

Chicago's rapid growth in the 1840s and 50s was due in large part to German and Irish Catholic immigrants. These immigrants settled in their own neighborhoods, German immigrants congregating mainly on the North Side, across the Chicago River from City Hall and the older, Protestant part of the city. The German settlers worked a six-day week, leaving Sunday as their primary day to socialize; much of this socialization took place in the small taverns that dotted the North Side. German-language newspapers, the Turners, and German craft unions gave the German population of Chicago a high degree of political cohesiveness; the Forty-Eighters among them were used to demonstrations as a political tool.
As in much of the rest of the country, distrust of Catholic influence produced a backlash in the form of the “Know-Nothing” movement. In the election of 1855, the American Party (the party of the Know Nothings) gained control of Chicago's government, with Levi Boone as mayor. Boone, a Baptist and temperance advocate, believed that the Sabbath was profaned by having drinking establishments open on Sunday. Boone's actions were in anticipation of Illinois enacting by referendum a Maine law that would prohibit the sale of alcohol for recreational purposes. The referendum failed in June 1855, by a statewide vote of 54% to 46%.

German immigrants and their love for beer also became a target of the Prohibition cause during World War I:

National prohibition was advocated as a wartime measure after the US declared war on Germany in April 1917 and the prohibition amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification late in 1917. The wartime prohibition act was passed in 1918 at the very end of the war; but the Lever Act August 1917 had already banned distilled spirits production for the remainder of the war and reserved supplies of grain for food production, and by 1919, just before the Volstead Act went into effect nationally, 27 states had enacted full prohibition laws. Anti-German sentiment worked in the interests of extending prohibition in wartime because most of the breweries had been founded in the 19th century by German immigrants to the US, and retained German names. Thus wartime hostility toward Germans helped the rise of prohibition. But more fundamentally, the movement drew upon an anti-alcohol culture long instilled among middle-class people in city suburbs and small towns, the Protestant churches and their allies in the rural population in the south and west, and some urban progressives who saw alcohol as a source of inefficiency, poverty and social disputation in American life. The war simply gave these disparate groups an opportunity to align their movement with wartime nationalism and its crusading spirit of self-sacrifice.

The Anti-Saloon League, which, unfortunately, was founded in Ohio to try to end the German and other mostly Catholic or Lutheran immigrants' embrace of saloon and beer garden culture, took the demonization of U.S. citizens of German extraction who enjoyed their beer to a new level:

National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew."

This bigotry and religious zealotry helped kick off the most widespread era of law-breaking and organized crime in U.S. history, until sense was restored in 1933.  Lesson learned: don't get between a man and his beer.

The Founding Father for a Strong Federal Government

William Hogeland on Alexander Hamilton, the original conservative who is the tea party's nemesis:

So as we stand on long lines at the post office hoping to avoid the midnight axe, we might spare a moment to consider the father of federal taxes, Alexander Hamilton. Our first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton is celebrated by both establishment liberals and establishment conservatives: The Hamilton Project is an economic effort of the liberal Brookings Institution, and former Obama budget director Peter Orszag hung a Hamilton portrait in his office; on the right, the writer David Brooks and former Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are two of Hamilton’s biggest fans. It’s not surprising. Hamilton is rightly said to have put the new nation on sound financial footing and secured its creditworthiness. He gave us our first comprehensive national finance policy.

That policy depended on exercising certain economic powers that finance nationalists like Hamilton and his mentor the rich financier Robert Morris, as well as planter nationalists like James Madison, had been striving to achieve for the federal government throughout the 1780’s, and which came to fruition at the Constitutional convention in 1787. While Hamilton and Madison would arrive at dire odds over whether the Constitution gives the federal government the right to form a central bank (Hamilton yes, Madison no), all nationalists had long agreed that a national government, unlike a confederation of states, would have a right to tax its citizens directly, throughout the states. And unlike what they saw as state governments’ susceptibility to the American popular-finance movement’s riot and noncompliance, a national government, nationalists hoped, would have both the will and the police resources to enforce and collect taxes.

So whereas Tea Partiers sometimes associate their objections to federal taxes with a desire to “get back to the Constitution,” federal taxation is one of the Constitution’s central purposes. And we can thank the wunderkind Alexander Hamilton for proposing the legislation by which the first U.S. Congress imposed the first federal tax ever on an American product.

The whole thing is worth a read, but I also found this very interesting:

Hamilton wasn’t messing around. Empowered by the new government to do what he and Morris had long been frustrated in trying to do, the young, charismatic, brilliant, diligent Secretary worked up a full-blown plan for connecting national wealth, and even more importantly national credit, to ambitious national aims. Like Morris, though to a far more sophisticated degree, Hamilton wanted the United States to become an economic powerhouse and financial empire to compete with England. And he’d been tireless in figuring out how to do it.

The key, as Morris had always suggested, was to combine a big public debt with vigorously enforced taxes earmarked for funding that debt. That is: sell U.S. bonds to the small, rich merchant lending class and, as Morris had put it, “open the purses of the people,” collecting taxes from the American people, in metal, not paper, and earmarking revenues for paying the bondholders their 6% interest in hard, cold cash — 6% untaxed interest, that is. Federal power would thus shift national wealth upward and consolidate it. Yoking national credit to national interest, government would serve as an economic pivot between the creditors and the people and thus be in a position to finance roads, canals, wars, and other national projects. (emphasis mine)

It is interesting that the purpose as laid out was to make the rich richer, and to use the government to build the infrastructure to do it.  Since the Great Depression, the government has taken the role of moderating the differences between the haves and the have nots, while building the infrastructure and schools to make further prosperity more likely.  Today's tea party is opposed to the government income-leveling process, opposed to the national debt and opposed to government spending on infrastructure and education.  They only seem interested in helping the rich get richer, usually at their own expense.  But they feel like they are ideologically pure, like their mythical portrayal of the Founding Fathers.

Happy Patriots' Day

Statue of the Lexington Minuteman on the Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts

It's Patriots' Day, the Red Sox play Toronto at 11:05 and the Boston Marathon kicks off soon.  The commemoration at Lexington Green already went off, and they are about ready to have the reenactment at the Old North Bridge in Concord.  Tomorrow is the 236th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and "the Shot Heard 'Round the World" that didn't involve Bobby Thomson.





The first of four engravings by Amos Doolittle from 1775. Doolittle visited the battle sites and interviewed soldiers and witnesses. Contains controversial elements, possibly inaccuracies. Fire from the militia may have occurred but is not depicted.



The third of four engravings by Amos Doolittle from 1775, depicting the engagement at the North Bridge



 

A National Park Service map showing the routes of the initial Patriot messengers and of the British expedition

Note to Michele Bachmann: This occurred in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: 'Pantheist Lincoln would be unelectable today, at the Independent:

A three-page letter highlighting the 16th president's unconventional relationship with the Almighty has just been put on sale. It offers a possible insight into why he was never baptised, did not attend a church and, in defiance of political protocol of the era, would refuse to publicly discuss his spiritual beliefs. Such was his reluctance to embrace piety that, if he were standing for office today, there is a good chance he would be unelectable.

The letter was written by William Herndon, a legal partner and close friend of "Honest Abe" in 1866, a year after Lincoln had been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. And while the letter is at pains to stress that Lincoln did believe in "a God" at the time of his death, it reveals that he took a long time getting to that point. "Mr Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow even a shadow of a doubt; he is, or was, a Theist and a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary, supernatural inspiration or revelation," it reads, before detailing the president's spiritual evolution in the years after Herndon met him in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1840s.

"At one time in his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force. Subsequent to this, he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the change he ever underwent. I speak knowing what I say. He was a noble man – a good great man for all this."

The idea that Lincoln could be elected then, but not today, is thought-provoking.  There are several other great links, including a story about natural gas fracking chemicals injected into gas wells, a story about drones being allowed to fly in U.S. air space, and a story about Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's emergency financial manager has suspended the government of Benton Harbor.  Lots of interesting stuff to read there.

The German Triangle and U.S. Beer History

The German Triangle, between the cities of Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati, was the destination of a large percentage of German immigrants in the middle and late 19th century.  When they came, they brought with them their love for beer, especially lager beer. 

Map of German Population in 1900

 So it is not an accident that two of the three cities would become home to the largest breweries in the United States.  All three have a rich brewing history.  Besides being the home of Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis was also home to William J. Lemp Brewery, which brewed Falstaff.  At one time, there were 40 breweries in St. Louis.  Also, Belleville, Illinois, outside of St. Louis was home to Stag Brewery.

Milwaukee was home to Miller, Schlitz, Pabst and Blatz.  At one time they were four of the largest ten breweries in the world.  Over the years, more than 40 breweries operated in Milwaukee. 

Cincinnati was home to Christian Moerlein, Hudepohl, Red Top, Schoenling, Burger and Wiedemann, among dozens of breweries over the years. In 1860, Cincinnati had 36 breweries.Cincinnati also had a prodigious saloon culture:

Taverns-Bars-Saloons-Beer Gardens-Cafes, call them what you will Cincinnati and beer were synonymous with each other in the 1800's and early 1900's. In 1840 Cincinnati had 8 breweries to satisfy a population of 46,000 people. By 1860 there were 36 breweries for 200,000 people. Beer production in 1870 was 354,000 barrels. Ten years later it rose to 656,000 barrels and in another ten years it had soared to 1,115,000 barrels. This equates to a staggering total of  35,700,000 gallons of beer of which a little less than 1/2 was exported. The rest was consumed locally. The per capita consumption of beer nationally in 1893 was 16 gallons. In Cincinnati an incredible 40 Gallons for every man woman and child was consumed. In 1887 there were an amazing 1,837 saloons for a population of 225,000. In 1890 it dropped to only 1,810 for a population of 297,000. This meant since only adult males used saloons there were, in 1890, ONE SALOON FOR EVERY 37 MEN. In 1890 there were 34 saloons on Court St., 41 on Liberty St., 55 on both Walnut and Main Sts. Central Ave. had 100 saloons, but the all time high was Vine St. with 136. On Fifth St. between Main & Sycamore Sts. (1 block) 20 saloons flourished. A corner location was preferred because it gave the bar the most exposure to potential costumers, and if it were illegally selling beer on Sunday, it was easier to spot the police.
  Carrie Nation arrived in Cincinnati in 1901 with her famous hatchet to wage battle with demon alcohol. Most tavern owners knowing Carrie's propensity for taking her ax to glass windows, ordered new glass ahead of her visit. Carrie was asked later why she had not broken any windows was heard to say: "My goodness, child, if I had undertaken to break all the windows of all the saloons on your Vine Street I would have dropped from exhaustion before I had gone a block". Before leaving the Atlantic Garden, a woman lush laid her head on Carrie's shoulder and cried. She then left promising  the temperance leader she would mend her ways and lead a better life. Ten minutes later Carrie noticed that her earrings were missing. Carrie forgave the woman for lifting them.

Unfortunately, today Anheuser-Busch is merged with InBev. Miller is owned by SAB. Hudepohl, Schoenling, Burger and Christian Moerlein are trying to carve out a regional niche, and Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz are shadows of their former glory in a combined Pabst Brewing Company amongst a large number of formerly well-known brands, including Falstaff and Stag.

Free Trade and the Near Extinction of the Buffalo

A pile of American bison skulls in tht mid-1870s (Image via Wikipedia)

Olaf Storbeck on an interesting study from M. Scott Taylor about the extinction of the American Bison:

Never before in the history of mankind had humans destroyed so much nature in such a brief period of time. Over about 15 years, the American bison was hunted to extinction. Up to 1870, 10 to 15 million bison had been living in the American West. Less then two decades later, about 100 animals remained.
For more than 100 years academics have been looking at the causes of this tragedy. Until now, most researchers blamed the American army, the failure of the federal government and the triumph of the railway.
However, all these explanations fall short, as M. Scott Taylor, an economics professor affiliated with the University of Calgary, shows in a fascinating paper.
According to Taylor, the most important driver of the extinction of the American bison was technical innovation, globalisation and unfettered capitalism.

Yet one more example of the effects of unregulated capitalism run amok in the second half of the 19th century in the United States.  Republicans seem to consider this the golden age of America, but I think we are better off with a regulated economy, provided the regulations aren't routinely undermined.

Still Fighting the Civil War

Via Yglesias and others, a CNN poll:

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Tuesday, roughly one in four Americans said they sympathize more with the Confederacy than the Union, a figure that rises to nearly four in ten among white Southerners.

When asked the reason behind the Civil War, whether it was fought over slavery or states' rights, 52 percent of all Americas said the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to keep slavery legal in their state, but a sizeable 42 percent minority said slavery was not the main reason why those states seceded.
"The results of that question show that there are still racial, political and geographic divisions over the Civil War that still exists a century and a half later," CNN Polling Director Holland Keating said.
When broken down by political party, most Democrats said southern states seceded over slavery, independents were split and most Republicans said slavery was not the main reason that Confederate states left the Union.
Republicans were also most likely to say they admired the leaders of the southern states during the Civil War, with eight in 10 Republicans expressing admiration for the leaders in the South, virtually identical to the 79 percent of Republicans who admired the northern leaders during the Civil War.

Slavery was not the main reason the Confederate states left the Union? Bullshit.  Ok, I guess maybe it was states' rights.  The states' rights to consider people property!  The GOP is an embarrassment.