#Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln

[davidpotash]

Young Lincoln, Political Operative

“Leadership is situational” It makes sense, for it is mighty difficult to think of leadership outside of a context, a challenge, a before and an after. But if leadership is contingent, dependent upon the who, where, when and what, how do we understand leaders? What makes them, shapes them, and makes them tick? What is successful leadership all about? Without a doubt one of America’s greatest…

[deadpresidents]

On the cliffs of Normandy, in a small holding area, the President of the United States was looking out at the English Channel. It was only six weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and President Biden had just finished his remarks at the American cemetery atop Omaha Beach. Guests had been congratulating him on the speech, but he didn't want to talk about himself. The moment was not about him; it was about the men who had fought and died there. "Today feels so large," he told me. "This may sound strange -- and I don't mean it to -- but when I was out there, I felt the honor of it, the sanctity of it. To speak for the American people, to speak over those graves, it's a profound thing." He turned from the view over the beaches and gestured back toward the war dead. "You want to do right by them, by the country."

Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his campaign for re-election. His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington who also stepped away from the presidency. To put something ahead of one's immediate desires -- to give, rather than to try to take -- is perhaps the most difficult thing for any human being to do. And Mr. Biden has done just that.

To be clear: Mr. Biden is my friend, and it has been a privilege to help him when I can. Not because I am a Democrat -- I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans -- but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced. Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump's presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate -- and he respected the American people.

It is, of course, an incredibly difficult moment. Highs and lows, victories and defeats, joy and pain: It has been ever thus for Mr. Biden. In the distant autumn of 1972, he experienced the most exhilarating of hours -- election to the United States Senate at the age of 29. He was no scion; he earned it. The darkness fell: His wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident that seriously injured his two sons, Beau and Hunter. But he endured, found purpose in the pain, became deeper, wiser, more empathetic. Through the decades, two presidential campaigns imploded, and in 2015 his son Beau, a lawyer and wonderfully promising young political figure, died of brain cancer after serving in Iraq.

Such tragedy would have broken many lesser men. Mr. Biden, however, never gave up, never gave in, never surrendered the hope that a fallen, frail and fallible world could be made better, stronger and more whole if people could summon just enough goodness and enough courage to build rather than tear down. Character, as the Greeks first taught us, is destiny, and Mr. Biden's character is both a mirror and a maker of his nation's. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, he is optimistic, resilient and kind, a steward of American greatness, a love of the great game of politics and, at heart, a hopeless romantic about the country that has given him so much.

Nothing bears out this point as well as his decision to let history happen in the 2024 election. Not matter how much people say that this was inevitable after the debate in Atlanta last month, there was nothing foreordained about an American President ending his political career for the sake of his country and his party. By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.

Now the question comes to the rest of us. What will we the people do? We face the most significant of choices. Mr. Roosevelt framed the war whose dead Mr. Biden commemorated at Normandy in June as a battle between democracy and dictatorship. It is not too much to say that we, too, have what Mr. Roosevelt called a "rendezvous with destiny" at home and abroad. Mr. Biden has put country above self, the Constitution above personal ambition, the future of democracy above temporal gain. It is up to us to follow his lead.

-- "Joe Biden, My Friend and an American Hero" by Jon Meacham, New York Times, July 22, 2024.

[burningthrucelluloid]

Christmas Carol-cember Day 9

It’s kind of wild to me that for as long as film has been around and cinema has evolved since the days of pointing a camera at a moving train, television has had half that life span but made just as many leaps and bounds.

The 1950s saw the arrival of television in the home market that would become a major competitor to the film industry, become a leading force for influencing public opinion and less than a decade after, television would broadcast in color. I have to wonder what a young person today would think if you told them there was a time period where you had to choose whether to pay for a TV that only aired in black and white or could broadcast color images. My point is, television has evolved but every evolutionary step requires something to prompt that leap forward. In this case: the first hour-long TV special and the first animated Christmas short ever made for television. While the Rankin/Bass Christmas shorts or Charlie Brown Christmas are staples of television, there wasn’t really any demand for cartoons set at Christmas time even when there was clearly an audience for it.

"Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol" was the answer to that demand, airing on December 18, 1962 on NBC and becoming a pioneer for Christmas television specials as other networks would invest in production companies to create animated specials for their networks. So as a pioneer, does this special hold up as well as the Rankin/Bass specials?

Mr Magoo, Jim Backus, is a near-sighted senile old man heading to Broadway to perform the lead role of Ebenezer Scrooge. Hijinks ensue up until the show starts and goes through the usual plot of the Charles Dickens story, albeit shortened and with music numbers strewn in all while the show’s director is beaten up and injured thanks to Mr Magoo’s bad eyesight or inability to know where he is. This version pulls a fast one by starting with Scrooge being haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Present first before he is haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past. I don’t quite know if that makes it better or worse but it does introduce Tiny Tim sooner, which does make a connection for Scrooge to see this crippled child and then see his child self all alone in a corner to break his cold exterior and feel sympathy. Also, there’s no Fred in this version so the subplot tied to his family loss is never touched upon. Meh. I’m honestly use to it at this point.

The voice work is a slew of who’s who for TV actors and familiar voices from other Christmas shorts. Paul Frees’ voice is super familiar to anyone who grew up on Rankin/Bass shorts, Royal Dano is best known for providing the voice of Abraham Lincoln for Disney’s Hall of Presidents, and Jack Cassidy should be no stranger to fans of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” They really deliver solid vocal performances, which is a polite way of me saying it makes up for the rather jerky animation that takes shortcuts with the way people move; recycling animation loops or just holding on an animation cell longer than it needs to be. This special was produced by the defunct United Productions of America, an animation studio that was created in 1941 after the Walt Disney Company experienced an animator strike that resulted in many staffers leaving to form their own studio. They kept themselves afloat thanks to working on propaganda cartoons all while aiming to expand the realm of animation that they felt Disney wasn’t doing, leading to the creation of Mr Magoo and their other flagship character, Gerald McBoing-Boing. But while Mr Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing was keeping the studio out of the red, they strived for experimenting on different styles and background on other shorts like their 1953 adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” as well as working on the animation for 1962’s “Gay Purr-ee." However, as the 1950s rolled on, their priorities shifted from theatrical shorts to television, which resulted in cutting down on animation budgets and having to employ these animation shortcuts to avoid going over budget. As a result, the ambition the studio built itself on fell behind as other big name studios like Warner Bros, MGM and The Walt Disney Company were taking bigger risks in experimenting with animation.

So in a way, “Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol” was the studio having a splash of inspiration to try and break the rut it found itself in by agreeing to create this special for NBC. You can certainly see that spark of creativity UPA was built upon, from the designs of the ghosts to the musical montage sequences in “The Lord’s Bright Blessing” and “Winter Was Warm.” I also really like the creative interpretation for the Ghost of Christmas Future, opting to make this ghost bright red rather than coated in black. It arrives like a smoke that floats from the ground rather than just appearing from the shadows like other versions. It’s probably the rare time I was actually creeped out by the Ghost of the Future and it makes me want to see more attempts to see interpretations like this.

But shoddy animation can be forgiven if the music is memorable. The music was composed and written by “Funny Girl” composers and lyricists Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, the duo responsible for “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window?,” “If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake,” and “Mambo Italiano.” But perhaps the most iconic song created by the two was “Let It Snow,” a Christmas staple. But I suspect they gave UPA their B material cause even writing this after having watched the special, I’m struggling to remember the melodies or lyrics. Though I will give credit that the songs themselves don’t take up too much of the run time and the performers put their hearts into singing the songs. I liked the gentle calm of “The Lord’s Light Blessing,” even though I suspect they were too confident in using "razzleberry dressing" for an iffy rhyme scheme. I think the way the songs would reprise themselves in different means was smart, notably “Ringle Ringle” which is a loud proclamation of how great money is but when used again later in the special, it’s performed to demonstrate how it brings people together rather than being hoarded.

Overall, I think this special has aged like a steel works erector playlet from the 1950s. But I have to recognize that, for the time, nobody had done this before. Christmas cartoons were not something TV networks did, even when cartoons were aired, they were mostly theatrical shorts just put on TV but condensed for the smaller screens. While the choppy animation is off-putting, the voice work and the music elevates those short-comings and set a standard for the nature of Christmas specials that we come to expect. A pioneer is, after all, someone going into foreign lands and setting a trail that others would come to blaze after your time. “Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol” shows its age, but there’s something humble about that. I don’t plan on seeing this special again, but if you were lucky enough to see it when it aired on TV back in the 60s and you're feeling nostalgic, give it a chance and see how far we’ve come.

One final caveat: what happened to United Productions of America? The special was a big hit for NBC that they would re-air it every December up until 1969 when UPA’s contract with them expired and Columbia acquired the rights to the special. UPA, sadly, would never make another special that saw the same success due to their cost-saving measures. Eventually, the limited animation and recycled backgrounds would soon become the standard for animated television shows when Hanna-Barbera Productions adopted the same cost-cutting measures and pitched their shows solely for children rather than all ages like UPA intended. UPA floated through the 1960s solely through producer Henry Saperstein keeping them functioning, as well as royalties from their Mr Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts and specials until the animation department was ultimately shut down by 1970 and the company became a distributor for Toho’s Kaiju movies for America. So if you saw those Godzilla movies that made its way to Mystery Science Theater 3000, UPA is to thank for that.

When Saperstein died in 1998, there was no one left willing to go to bat for this shell of a studio and it ultimately shut down in 2000, with assets going to Dreamworks Animation. Meaning that Mr Magoo is owned by Dreamworks, along with the rest of their library of cartoons, though Shout Factory seems to be the only distributors of their works.

“Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol” is available for rent on YouTube, AppleTV and Amazon Prime. But if you don’t feel like spending money, you can also find it on Dailymotion.com.

Next time, we’re gonna go back a few years and take a look at a Christmas Carol from an anthology series that, for the longest time, was thought to have been gone forever. Heck, this one even got a remake by Rankin/Bass.

[dog-day-morning]

The word of God tells us we shall suffer for the cause of Christ, he who seeks a greater reward must attain a greater faith. Unto whom much is given that much more is required. You wanna eat that whole caramel cake, you crave that sweet tea, you pursue that woman in a nightclub hoping to get her in a compromised position, face down tail up because face it, we're not willing to bow down to the will of God, but we’re so happy, and ready to give in to that round mound of doo doo brown. The 3 Hebrew boys Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego went into the fiery furnace defying Nebuchadnezzar's declaration to worship him. These men had the inspiration, strength, and courage to say, even if He doesn't deliver us, we know that He can. That kind of faith is called perfected faith. We can be lazy because we refuse to work with what God gave us before the day of calamity comes to devour us. Tribulation is kicking into high gear, and many of God’s people are none the wiser. There are people who were working 3 jobs before, and after this pandemic became a global concern who know what is on the horizon. You don't need an Issachar spirit to discern the times; read the Bible. He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming.’ And so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? The gov't has pulled back on unemployment benefits forcing many to find a job. The 2 righteous servants in the parable of the 3 servants increased the wealth of their employer who trusted 3 men with different amounts of talents [money], and the 1 who didn't work diligently for his master inherited weeping, and gnashing of teeth. God invested in us, and He expected a greater return from this major investment. Jesus was the greatest financial venture ever made. The Father placed His faith in His Son who in turn gave Him many more sons that walk amongst us waiting for the Day of Judgment. This investment which supersedes all, but are intertwined will never decrease, and forever increase. The 144,000 isn't a spiritually inspired interpretation based on mine, and Mima getting the Holy Ghost or having an encounter with the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues. Sit down grandma, your Depends are leaking brown stuff that reeks of formaldehyde, and raw chitlins. God is looking for a righteous Nation to worship Him not themselves. These men, and boys who represent the 12 tribes of Israel have never been defiled by women, and hopefully not by men either. You lucky mother You can take the word literally or as a misinterpretation. Those who don't believe in the written word who believe that God's word isn't infallible aren't all to blame for this heresy. Those who originally interpreted the King James Bible added to, and took from are suffering for a misleading interpretation. The prophetic which God didn't let man corrupt altogether has pretty much played out verbatim. We may be dying to a world that is trying to kill our faith that God has no intention of doing until He finds His true worshippers, and He’ll never destroy one's faith in Him. Winter is coming and you and I must be prepared. We must live like today is our last without being caught up in fear. I'm suffering from a form of laziness called jackass. God shall supply all your needs, but faith without works is dead. The ant has the intuition to work throughout the Summer knowing that Winter is coming. A lot of these drones won't live to see the finished product. Ant mounds look like the Pyramids of Giza that secure the Queen, but where is the King? They serve the one who gives life that sustains the colony, she is their goddess, but what happens if the Queen dies? There's more than one Queen serving the colony who can breed an entire colony independent of one other. fulfilling their role while working together in unison with the others who all serve a greater purpose. This

is a major element that drives the Kingdome of heaven. Christ is just like His Father In the Kingdome that includes the Holy Spirit which they will pour upon all flesh again soon. There are no cowards or sinners in the Kingdome. The angels are not as drones, they are blessed warriors.

Revelation 21:8

8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

1 Corinthians 6:8-10

8 Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.

9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Alkebulan we need to wake up and get right. Black American's of the tribes of Judah, Gad, Reuben, and Issachar you need to aim at my forehead, and scatter my scatter brained grey matter all over the pavement. When Joe Biden told a radio podcaster if you don't vote for me you're not Black, he must be color blind. This vaccine that suspiciously looks like the Mark of Whodunnit. They can plant a microchip in your arm that can track your every move, financial transaction, and possibly your dreams while you sleep. Some Walmart stores are refusing to take cash when you check out; they only take debit, and credit cards. These are signs that we’re living in the End Times. The Last Days. I'm looking at this as a sign to get the hell outta this city, and decompose. What in God's name am I afraid of? Jesus took a beat down like a man on a mission.. You're not weak or simping if you gave your life for a people you fed, healed, gave sight to, preached to, taught them a new way to live, pray, love, told them about a Kingdome greater than Jerusalem, and you didn't kill anybody in the process knowing what they were going to do to your physical body in an almost retarded like bid to destroy their salvation. I've done none of that; my bad. Stop looking for men, especially zaddy to deliver us. “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” Some of us foolheartedly called Bill Clinton the first Black president when he's not, never can, or will be to me in any sense, Barack wasn't either. Thomas Jefferson, the third elected president, who served two terms between 1801 and 1809 was described as the “son of a half-breed Indian squaw (Black) and a Virginia mulatto father (Black).” Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, served between 1861, and 1865. Lincoln had very dark skin, and coarse hair and his mother allegedly came from an Ethiopian tribe. His heritage fueled so much controversy that Lincoln was nicknamed “Abraham Africanus the First” by his presidential opponents and cartoons were drawn depicting him as a Negro. Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight David Eisenhower, and the scourge of the South Andrew Jackson were all n**gahs. I’ll see you come Hanukkah you self-hating black, Uncle Ruckus’s. I don't celebrate Thanksgiving, why should I be overjoyed about the genocide, and enslavement of God's people? Christmas is what it is. Hopefully you will celebrate this holiday season together fulfilling God's prophetic word. I can't unless you kill me. The Christmas holiday is as pagan as Joel Osteen is at scamming. David Duke, you might wanna go to ancestry.com, and take a DNA test. You might be 30% Swahili. By the looks of those big, gorilla nostrals you had before that rhinoplasty. You, and Bull Connor may be related to Idi Amin. Your biggest shame is your greatest blessing. Personally you can kiss the skid marks in the middle of my skid marks after I take a fresh dump. Conservative, political pundits, and wannabes whose names I won't mention, but one in particular who looks like he smoked 23 blunts in 15min. with no filter. Please keep him in California, and let him drown with his zaddy, and pancaked tail, bowed hipped women. Use your lips as a floatation device dude. These people are ashamed of the God who has blessed many, and plenty. These people suffer, hopefully not always, from the white savior or white zaddy complex. The truth isn't in any of them, that's why they're so adept at lying when making bold-faced statements before the public that opposes their previous opinion like people don’t have YouTube or google. I’ll Bing a factoid or Yahoo that mother to get the truth I may even pay for it, gimme a dollar. My inability to walk amongst men as a man has stagnated my propensity to live That's BS, my Apostle said something this past Sunday that's stuck on my forehead. YOU'RE LAZY!!! I am what I am, a pain in the rear end. This has gone on way too long. Sometimes

I feel as though God wants me to kill myself because the PO PO won’t. I would feel better if my natural family would stab me in the neck, not my back, with a piece of diseased, pork, spare rib from a boar hog, and let me die from a rare form of trichinosis. The people have spoken while I’m playing Jay, and Silent Bob. Father, get me outta here. Elohim, 9/16/2021

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Packing the court

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mitch McConnell's cynical reversal of his Obama-era prohibition on confirming a new Supreme Court justice in the waning days of an administration has kicked off a lot of interest in the possibility of "packing the court."

The number of Supreme Court justices is not spelled out in the Constitution: rather, it is the subject of federal law, and a new Congress, Senate and President could in theory pass a new law, expanding or contracting the number of judges - we could have a 21-seat bench!

How this could play out is complicated. Henry Farrell's history of FDR's threat to pack the court rebuts the idea that court-packing undermines democratic norms, arguing that the threat itself tamed the court and made it pliable to the New Deal.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/19/the-supreme-court-and-normcore/

The court's power comes from its legitimacy; even the alleged "textualists" (who say their only job is to strictly hew to the text of the Constitution) are secretly consequentialist (ruling on the basis of how their judgments will be perceived by the public).

To rule without regard to consequence is to undermine the court's legitimacy and thus its power.

Farrell: "Norm maintenance requires not just that political actors worry about the chaos that will ensue if the norms stop working. It also relies on the fear of punishment – that if one side deviates from the political bargain implicit in the norm, the other side will retaliate, likely by breaking the norm in future situations in ways that are to their own particular advantage."

More explicitly: "Norms don’t just rely on the willingness of the relevant actors to adhere to them. They also rely on the willingness of actors to violate them under the right circumstances. If one side violates, then the other side has to be prepared to punish. If one side threatens a violation, then the other side has to threaten in turn, to make it clear that deviating from the norm will be costly."

This view is not unique to Farrell. Writing in the LA Times,  Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley Law, concurs: "The threat of increasing the size of the court to 13 might be enough to discourage Republicans from their dirty tricks. But if they do it anyway, and the November election produces a Democratic win in the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate, Congress would be totally justified in increasing the size of the court."

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-18/op-ed-democrats-have-a-secret-weapon-to-thwart-a-rapid-ginsburg-replacement-they-should-use-it

But FDR isn't the only president who bypassed the Supreme Court. Lincoln faced down a court packed with pro-slavery justices - the bench that denied Dred Scott standing on the basis that Black Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Writing in Jacobin, Matt Karp describes how Lincoln tamed the court by delegitimizing it, with New York papers declaring that the Supreme Court was a "a self-disgraced tribunal."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/abraham-lincoln-supreme-court-slavery

Lincoln-supporting legislators like William Seward introduced legislation to weaken the court's power: "Let the court recede. Whether it recede or not, we shall reorganize the court, and thus reform its political sentiments and practices."

Though the law was doomed, it was part of a normative exercise in delegitimizing the court. Lincoln allies mocked their opponents for "superstitious worship" of the court, made fun of the justices' appearance, and rejected the idea of "judicial review" of constitutionality.

This crept into mainstream discourse. Maine senator (and Lincoln's future VP) Hannibal Hamlin wrote, "We make the laws, they interpret them; but it is not for them to tell us what is a political constitutional right of this body. Of all the despotisms on earth, a judicial despotism is the worst. It is a life estate."

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas attacked Lincoln for undermining the court's legitimacy. Far from rebutting this claim, Lincoln made it a campaign promise.

"We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule. We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject."

Lincoln won the election, and in his inaugural address, he said, "[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court. The instant they are made the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

Lincoln DID pack the court, adding one more justice, but he also just bypassed them, ignoring their precedents and passing new antislavery laws that contravened them. SCOTUS was sidelined for a decade, including during Reconstruction.

Karp: "Drawing direct lessons from the past is a fool’s errand, but this history should remind us that judicial power — however grandly it may be imagined by friends and foes alike — is critically dependent on political currents. The Right’s resort to judicial supremacy is not a sign of strength, but an admission of weakness: a beleaguered regime calls upon the authority of the court only to achieve what it cannot accomplish through electoral politics."

[rigmarolling]

Five Things Abe Lincoln Did That Prove He Was A BAMF

I love Lincoln. You probably know this if you’ve listened to me talk for more than two seconds. I have a literal entire bookshelf filled with Lincoln stuff. I teared up in Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland. I cried so hard when I watched Lincoln (2012), that I almost started dry-heaving. I was Lincoln (sort of) for Halloween.

Is it a problem? No. It isn’t a problem, Mom. Because Lincoln was a 100% USDA-certified badass.

Don’t believe me? Here are ten things Abe did to prove he was absolutely a BAMF.

1. That time he jumped out a window to prevent a vote.

In 1840, the Illinois legislature was voting on whether or not to fund the state bank. Lincoln was a member of the Whig party, which did not require members to wear wigs, contrary to what the name suggests, but which did support saving the state bank. The opposing party, the Democrats (different political beliefs from modern-day democrats, do NOT come at me, Reddit dudebros) wanted to shut the State bank down.

It all came down to a vote...and it looked like the anti-state bank democrats were going to win. Abraham Lincoln, then a 31-year-old legislator who looked like the pioneer version of a Tim Burton character, was getting nervous. 

Above: Jack Skellington, 1840.

“Shit,” he thought, probably, “We Whigs are screwed if we lose this vote. And we don’t even get to wear wigs.”

The bank-hating democrats scheduled a vote to adjourn the session, which would effectively be the nail in the state bank’s coffin. Abe was panicking. He was the de facto leader of the Whigs; he had to do something. 

“Prove your mettle, boy,” he probably thought to himself in a folksy, backwoods kinda way. “Show ‘em you ain’t gonna give up.”

So Abe did what any self-respecting legislator would do when stuck between a rock and a hard place:

He jumped out the window of the legislature to stop the vote.

To be fair, Lincoln wasn’t the only one to opt for a morning act of defenestration: a bunch of the other Whigs joined in, too. The rationale was, essentially, this:

Which is peak Internet comedy, but unfortunately, it was 1840 and the Internet didn’t exist yet, so nobody appreciated the gesture and the democrats eventually wound up closing the bank, anyway. 

But at least Abe showed the entire state that he appreciated Looney Tunes-esque escape tactics.

2. That time he roasted a guy during a debate with good-old self-deprecating humor.

You ever rely on self-deprecating humor to beat people to the “yes, I KNOW I am offensive” punch?

So did our 16th president, Abraham Nicole Lincoln.

(Not his real middle name.)

When Lincoln was campaigning, his biggest rival was Stephen Douglas, the Democratic contender who was nicknamed “the little giant” because he was short but a heavy hitter in politics, and also because he looks like the kind of guy that just wouldn’t shut up at parties:

Above: “Actually, I’m not racist, BUT--”

In 1858, Lincoln and Douglas held a series of seven famous political debates called, brilliantly, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, coming to you LIVE at Rockefeller Center, with performances by the Rockettes, Anna and Elsa on Ice, AND with special guest, Seal!

These debates were THE go-to political show of the season. If you were super into who would be elected to the Illinois Senate in the mid-19th century, then holy shit, you have got to watch these two men go at each other, man, it’s like watching a tree and an angry little dog slap each other across the stage.

During the debates, Lincoln quickly became famous for his one-liners, and also because no one had ever seen a talking tree in a suit before.

In one of the debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced. Without missing a beat, Lincoln, who had been mocked his entire life for his ungainly, scarecrow-like appearance in the same way that I just mocked him a few sentences ago, whoops...

ANYWAY.

Lincoln turned to Douglas and went, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” 

And then the audience did this:

And then Lincoln was like:

Check. Mate. 

3. That time he was so strong and such a good wrestler that nobody messed with him.

When I say “wrestler,” what do you think of?

Is it this?

Maybe this?

What about this?

Huh? What’s that you say? “What the hell is...is that Lincoln? What...what the hell is Lincoln doing in a list of wrestlers?

“Um,” I answer, “Being a wrestler.”

Because Abraham Lincoln, 6′ 4″ and all of 150-something pounds, was, in fact, an incredibly talented wrestler.

So talented, in fact, that when it came to wrestling matches, he went undefeated for most of his life.

See, Lincoln grew up in the middle of butt crack-nowhere, out in the sticks of the American frontier. Ain’t no room for sissies out on the frontier. This here’s hard-scrabble country, see, rough-livin’; you gotta spit to live; you gotta live to spit; Neosporin? I think you mean weak-ass bitch cream.

So how did rootin’ tootin’ frontier folk blow off steam? Well, when they weren’t dying of dysentery or tuberculosis or minor infections that could today be cured by steady application of Neosporin, they were wrasslin’. And when it came to the act of picking someone up and throwing them back down, nobody wrestled like 21-year-old Abraham Justine Lincoln.

(Not his real middle name.)

One look at the guy and people were like, “The hell? What’s this ancient Egyptian mummy doing in the ring?”

But the second he got going, everyone shut up. Because this guy was nuts. He was a berserker. He could defeat a guy three times his size in seconds. He could bench the Rock, probably, and not even break a sweat.

He was the nicest guy in town. But nobody--and I mean nobody--messed with Abraham Ashley Lincoln.

(Not his real middle name).

One time, Jack Armstrong, the local heavyweight champion who was the Big Bad in town and undefeated in the wrestling and “I’m a giant asshole who smashes my way through problems” arena, challenged Lincoln to a match. 

“Uh oh,” everyone in the little town of New Salem, Illinois thought, “That’s it for ol’ Twig Legs Abe. He might be good, but there’s no way he can defeat Jack Armstrong. Nice knowing you, kid; it’s a shame, because you might have made a solid president.”

But Lincoln, who knew no fear and ate chains forged in the heart of a dwarven cavern for breakfast, was like, “Bring it on, bitch.”

Above: Playin’ with the boys.

Jack and Abe started sparring and Jack threw insult after insult Abe’s way. I don’t know exactly what Jack said, but it was probably the 19th century equivalent of, “You may have 2,300 Facebook friends but nobody cares about the pictures of your homemade Shake ‘N Bake chicken that you post, eggwad.”

Abe didn’t relent. 

See, he was getting angry.

Really angry.

So angry, in fact, that in one fell swoop, he suddenly slammed big Jack Armstrong to the ground so hard that Armstrong passed out, cold.

Abe had won. Everyone stared at the panting, growling, 6′4″ pine tree man in reverent awe. 

A fun epilogue to this story: after Jack Armstrong recovered from getting his ass handed to him by a guy who looked like an extra in a movie about the Amish, he and Abe remained steadfast buddies for the rest of their lives. 

Jack just never ever insulted Abraham Jessica Lincoln again.

(Not his real middle name.)

4. The (many) times he went off into long, rambling stories during Cabinet meetings to illustrate a point.

You know how grandma and grandpa sometimes go off on tangents and you’re like, “okay, okay, get to the point.”

But grandma and grandpa don’t even respond and just keep talking about that one time in 1953 that Anne-Marie told George that no, she hadn’t gone to the corner store, why do you keep asking, George? And then I said to George, I said, George, you need to listen to Anne-Marie because she knows that the corner store is the only one in town that sells fresh-laid eggs and Butterick circle skirt patterns, but did he listen? Did he listen to me? No, he didn’t, so I went to---

You get it.

So did every single member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Because Lincoln was a consummate storyteller, for better or for worse. 

(Sometimes for worse, depending on who you asked.)

Above: “One time, at band camp...”

Lincoln would interrupt important meetings about, you know, saving the Union and the soul of the country itself with anecdotes that started something like this:

Lincoln: You know, Sec. Stanton, that reminds me of a fur-trapper I knew back in Illinois--

Stanton: Great, except, Mr. President, everyone is dying--

Lincoln: Now this here fur trapper was the best fur trapper in the entire state. Not the entire country, mind you, on account of we didn’t really have a way of measuring fur-trapping skills nationwide--

Stanton: *neck turning purple* Mr. President--

Lincoln:--but definitely the best fur trapper in Illinois. Now one day, this fur trapper set out to do what he did best: shoot some raccoons, or maybe a bear, or a wolf if he was lucky, or a deer, or some moose, or a beaver, or a mongoose, or maybe a possum--

Stanton: OH MY GOD--

Lincoln:--or a cat, if times were desperate, but not a dog, never a dog, because this here fur trapper loved dogs; had six of ‘em himself, all hound dogs, loyal to a fault, see, because this here fur trapper--

Stanton: JUST STOP--

Lincoln: --this here fur trapper could be short-sighted. See, he set his sights one day on shooting the biggest bear in the mountains--and this bear, why, this here bear was a Goliath of a bear, the biggest bear anyone ever did see, the biggest bear in the state; not the biggest bear in the country, mind you, on account of we didn’t have a way of comparing bear sizes nationwide, but--

You get the gist.

Above: “So I’m sitting there, barbecue sauce on my tiddies--”

Eventually, Lincoln would get to the point of his story; in this example, for...um, example...maybe the moral was, “Don’t get so focused on one goal (shooting that big bear) that you loose sight of other objectives in the war (getting rid of the wolf pack killing all the sheep or whatever).”

I would like to explain to you why telling long, rambling grandpa stories was such a power move:

Abe Lincoln was the president. 

So his whole Cabinet had to listen.

And Abe Lincoln knew it.

They had to listen to this backwoods guy go on and on about how that one time the local long boatsman fell into the river actually serves as a metaphor for Gen. McClellan’s inability to take control of the troops; or how the rabid raccoon that lived in the local blacksmith’s shop can serve as a metaphor for acting too hastily when trying to take down the South. 

Or, like, whatever.

Above: “All here in favor of me performing the entirety of Les Mis starring me as everyone, raise your hands.”

Apparently, Lincoln was also the kind of storyteller who, if there was a funny punchline at the end, took forever to get to the punch line because he’d start laughing hysterically at his own joke, and while many people thought it was incredibly endearing, others were like, “Boy, I wonder what it would be like if I dumped this entire fucking bottle of ink over the president’s head to get him to shut the fuck up.”

Spoiler alert: Lincoln did not, in fact, shut the fuck up. He was determined to teach folks a lesson through the the power of storytelling and also to help break the tension of a legitimately horrible war with the power of laughter.

Monopolizing the conversation to prove a point with anecdotes about frontier living that no one can escape?

Power. Move.

5. Those times he let his kids run amok in the White House and thought it was hilarious.

Lincoln had a four kids, all boys, who moved into the White House after he was elected president.

And these boys were little terrors.

To be fair, a vast majority of boys are terrors. Kids are terrors. They are small harbingers of chaos and discord with little regard for their fellow humans, which means they fit right in in the White House EYYYY POLITICAL COMMENTARY.

But Lincoln’s kids, apparently, were especially out of control.

Above: “Alright, enough pussy-footin’ around, Pops, fork over the dough and no one gets a kick in the nuts.”

Lincoln adored his boys, partly because he was a good dad and partly because he’d already had one child die tragically, so understandably, he was like, “Life is short and antibiotics haven’t been invented yet so we’re all going to die from getting paper cuts, probably; I’m just gonna let my boys do whatever the hell they want.”

And he kind of...did.

Willie and Tad Lincoln, his two youngest, brought tons of pets into the White House. Dogs, cats, birds...when people objected, Lincoln just sort of shrugged. He, too, was a huge animal lover and didn’t really care if ponies were clomping around the Oval Office. “My White House, my rules, my indoor ponies.”

The two Lincoln boys would dress up in military uniforms and have fake military drills and stage fake (LOUD) battles all over the White House, including when Dad was in a Cabinet meeting.

What did Dad do, you ask?

Laugh his head off.

While his kids would burst into Cabinet meetings, crawl under the table and kick important Senators’ legs and feet, generally causing a grade-A ruckus, Abe would try and fail to stifle his laughter.

Which, you know. Objectively isn’t the best parenting, but for Pete’s sake, they were at war, can’t they have a little fun? Jesus, lighten up, folks, they’re kids.

The Lincoln boys particularly irritated Sec. of War Edwin Stanton, but to be fair, almost everything irritated Sec. of War Edwin Stanton.

Above: “I have never had fun once, ever, in my life.”

Once again, Lincoln’s rationale was, “Life is fragile, one of my children already died, the country is at war, and kids make me laugh, so if they want to punch Sec. Stanton in the balls under the table, who am I to stop them?”

Also, Lincoln was the president, so nobody thought it was appropriate to go, “Um, hey? Mr.--Mr. President? Maybe you could tell your sons to, you know...not crawl under the table and interrupt, um...important...war strategy meetings?”

ALSO, Lincoln once wrestled a man twice his size to the ground without batting an eyelash, so you go tell him to make his kids behave. I dare you.

[nyc-uws]

Friends

My new old friend. An odd formulation. And yet….

The Hedgehog Review Wilfred M. McClay

I hadn’t ever considered the matter until a few years ago, when I heard a dreamy little number by the jazz pianist Alan Pasqua called “My New Old Friend.” It’s a strictly instrumental affair, a subdued and contemplative piano trio, full of subtle unresolved suspensions and wafting dissonances, conveying a late-night mood of solitary and slightly bittersweet remembrance—one of those moments of quiet grace when the passage of time slows to a crawl, past and present seem to intermingle, and joy and sorrow become hard to tell apart.

But it was the song’s title that captured my attention, even more than the music itself. My new old friend. An odd formulation. But one I’d been looking for, without even knowing it.

It’s not obvious to me why I should have been looking. In a different moment, I would have been far more likely to react against the phrase, striking it down with a reflex of indignant linguistic puritanism. After all, the noble term friend has already been so diluted and cheapened in our times, like so many of our most important words of personal and social connection, that it has become like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. Such cheapening has occurred not only in our personal usage but in public discourse. When Abraham Lincoln concluded his First Inaugural Address with a heartfelt plea to the seceding Southern states to recall that “we are not enemies, but friends,” the word had great emotive power, describing the very bonds of public affection that were being sundered. Such earnest usage has all but disappeared. Friend as we now use it embraces a particularly large portfolio of evasions and line-blurring maneuvers, especially useful in the hands of diffident teenagers, as in this familiar exchange: Mother: “Who was that on the phone?” Daughter: “A friend.”

As this example illustrates, friend can designate anything from a mysterious or otherwise uncategorizable love interest to a study-group classmate to a business associate to a helpful neighbor to the “friends” who accumulate on people’s social media accounts, where they are as plentiful and enduring as the daily harvest of low-tide sea shells on a beach. The television series Friends (1994–2004) became one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history by depicting a collection of very attractive twenty- and thirtysomethings “hanging out” together as a kind of quasi-family, a light and frothy fantasy that transposed the social life of the college dorm to not-quite-adult life in implausibly toney Manhattan apartments. For its characters, friendship was that relatively flexible and easygoing state of social relations before the hardening categories of adulthood come along.

This resonated with American audiences, including aging boomers who were nostalgic for the friendships of their college days. But when we’re confronted with the far profounder ideas about friendship put forward by Aristotle, the greatest of all writers on the subject, or by C.S. Lewis in his splendid account in The Four Loves, we tend to be nonplussed. Such heights seem beyond us. For Lewis, Friends would have to be considered a show about companions, not friends, since friendship is something weightier and inherently exclusive. In this, Lewis was in tune with the earlier observations of Aristotle: “Great friendship too can only be felt towards a few people…. One cannot have with many people the friendship based on virtue and on the character of our friends themselves, and we must be content if we find even a few such.” Far from being something breezy and easy, like a glass of sparkling spring wine, friendship in the fullest sense is a rare and precious thing, much more like an old single-malt Scotch.

As I’ve said, the Platte River principle has come to apply to many of our words of human connection, perhaps partly reflecting the automatic generosity of the democratic spirit, and also the way we employ the language of false personalization in our speech, routinely appropriating the most charged words in doing so. Some of this is vaguely sinister, as when corporate bosses try to persuade us to think of ourselves as part of “the Sprocket Corporation family,” especially at times when the budget needs cutting. Community is a word that comes in for similar abuse, and has been almost emptied of meaning in this respect, standing for any aggregation that it is politically or financially useful to treat as an aggregate. Here, as in the use of the language of family and almost any other affective term, Silicon Valley has led the way to perdition.

So you can see why I would be initially averse to the idea of “new old friends,” which might sound at first like more linguistic inflation, the equivalent of preripped jeans or “distressed” furniture, something new that is made out to look old, and thus is doubly phony. To make matters worse, as my old friends can readily confirm, I have for years been prone to saying, in an earnest imitation of Shakespeare’s Polonius, that “you can always make new friends, but you can never make new old friends.” And it’s true. There is something irreplaceably special about the people who have been down the road with you—those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried—and whose friendship has endured through the sheer passage of years, through the steady artillery of time, even if such friendships lack the lively intensity of newer ones. People who “knew you when” can never be replaced, and a wise person will not seek to do so.

But such friendships have their limitations. For one thing, it’s not always helpful to be reminded constantly of who you were “then.” Life does move on. And there is also something very true in the Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends,” about the two men who “Sat on their park bench like bookends…. / Winter companions… / Lost in their overcoats / Waiting for the sunset…. / Memory brushes the same years / Silently sharing the same fear.” There is a bond being described, if an unutterably sad and resigned one. It is an existential bond of the deepest and most universal sort. But there are some respects in which this “old friendship” falls short of the fullness of friendship as Aristotle and Lewis describe it.

And here I come to the heart of the matter: There is no denying the phenomenon of a new old friend. I have acquired a couple of them in recent years, people with whom I have found a near-instant bond whose depth is hard to explain, whose friendship feels as old and rooted as an ancient sequoia, even though I know it is as new as a sapling. Moving about in such friendships, I’m wary at first, thinking they may be too good to be true, fearing to trust too much in the sensation of oldness, fearing, much as one fears when living in a foreign culture, that my habitual ways of being will suddenly be misperceived or strike the wrong note. There is something deeply mysterious about such friendships, and mystery induces caution, as well as awe.

But perhaps the mystery has to do with the mystery of friendship itself. Lewis remarks that what finally hold us together as friends are not the “unconcerning things,” facts of biography and shared experiences. Of course, one brings the residue of all such things to the activity of friendship. But the friendship itself stands apart from such things. It concerns itself, Lewis argues, with nothing less than a shared quest for the truth about things. In the very act of sharing in this one thing, friends gain access to an astonishing degree of freedom. “In a circle of true Friends,” Lewis insists, “each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself”:

That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections.

Friendship represents a rare kind of freedom, an “exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility,” as Lewis puts it, precisely because it liberates us into a way of being fully human that rises above all the desiderata and conditioning factors that otherwise impinge upon us, the very factors that form what we are now accustomed to call our “identity.” But why shouldn’t an entirely new friendship have that power, as much as an old one has? Or perhaps…even more, since it is no longer the facts, but rather the search, the quest, that the new old friends share?

Lewis was not alone in connecting the disinterested love of truth and goodness with the highest forms of friendship. “The real community of man,” wrote Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, “in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know.” Bloom, too, understood that the quest for truth is what unites us most deeply and most reliably. The greatness of the Great Books, in his view, was their ability to lift our minds and thoughts out of the realm of contingency and “fact,” into a realm higher and more essential, more conducive to the flourishing of friendship—not as a goal of the quest, but as a byproduct of it.

Maybe this way of phrasing it will sound too specific to the academic world. And not everyone has the time or inclination to reread Plato’s Republic every few months (preferably in Greek). But the larger truth, that the deepest friendship can take root in the sparsest biographical soil if some high and shared animating spirit is present, seems right. I’m guessing that’s how we make new old friends. Though in the end, it is a mystery.

Wilfred M. McClay is G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty and director of the Center for the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. His latest book is Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (2019).

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/friends

[astrology-with-charu]

May 2020 - A Preview of 2021

======================

So this April would not quit - quiet like these non stop school zoom sessions. Goodbye goodbye already! This Laurel & Hardy goodbye clip sums it up for me

https://youtu.be/wlVu7Y5m5JQ

It’s leaving us with Uranus in Taurus meeting Mercury. Uranus in Taurus was also key aspect embedded in the Taurus new moon of 22 April which we will continue to feel in May. Uranus in Taurus is all about breaking out of the fixity of life - actions taken for freedom & individuality, a break from tradition, a break far from tradition. Uranus creates volatility & surprise - bring sudden changes - changes that bring us closer to our authentic self. Uranus is our brilliance - the lightening that zaps us & sets us free as well as gives us the brilliant brainwave.

But inherently Uranus in Taurus has a conflict - Taurus archetype in our chart represents our place of safety, security, stability, fixity, tradition, persistence, stubbornness. Yes it’s a textbook sign of “fall” for Uranus - “fall” the word I despise so much in astrology - cause there is no fall just a failure to leverage it well. Uranus in Taurus is here to bring innovation in all the things this archetype represents - Finance, money, assets, ways of making money, ways of using our natural resources, arts, music, creativity, sex, food, taste, our physical strength & stamina, stock market, earth. At an individual basis basis we would strive for independence & innovation and experience sudden shifts in our financial situation, attitude to money & resources, need for material security, sense of worth, values, usage of our resources - mental physical - our personal energy, sexual freedom.

Taurus gifts us determination & this fixity of purpose and in Uranus we can use that to complete change our worth, ego, values, assets & ways to achieve them or release them. This is long term transit all the way to April 2026. Why we are talking of this now is because this April just won’t quit without another dramatic aspect.

Every month Moon meets Uranus in Taurus - whenever that happens a wave of water chips away an edge off our rock - slight loss of old behavioural pattern happens opening us to new possibilities. But once a year Uranus meets Sun, Venus & Mercury in Taurus when a tangible shift which is outer manifestation of this slow monthly inner chipping away shows up in our physical existence - through shifts in job, relationships, communication. This aides this quest for material freedom we are all on - an idea suddenly comes, a discussion suddenly happens, an old device suddenly cracks cause it’s outdated for your new expansive endeavour - you ask for more & more is delivered through a crack in the floor beneath our feet. Not all of us experience the earthquake but if you are at 6° or early degree of fixed signs (Scorpio, Leo, Taurus, Aquarius) you are probably experiencing a shock wave - that’s last ten days of the month if you are looking at your sun sign.

Separating wheat from the chaff as unnecessary this additional restlessness & commotion feels to all of us, it’s the most significant economic event that happens to most of us in the year. Shakes up our talents, resources, stock market, body - it feels like beating the mattress to get the dust out kind of situation. But then from that comes a brainwave when Mercury meets Uranus like tonight - weird bazarre ahead of time , alien landing on our rooftop kind of ideas come. You see those AI beams running on your face into your brain - it just lights all your bulbs. Many of us dismiss it but what if we don’t - if someone told Abraham Lincoln you would be tweeting shutting down your economy or a bunch of algos will loose or gain majority of financial markets in a day - you would have been institutionalised but here we are.

The thing with “fall” of Uranus In Taurus is that you fall cause you aren’t walking - much like the concept of inertia - proactive shifts planning in that area of our life can help prevent a lot of that fall. Though Uranus is a wild card much like existence of Kim Jong-un.

So if you want to take one thing from April, which won’t quit, take this dogged determination to shift things in this area of your life where Uranus is chipping away your rock

“We only discover what supports us, when everything else we thought supported us doesn’t support is anymore” ~ Jung

Jung saw this moment like he saw most of the universal truths - this has become my mantra for Taurus season now instead of “I Have” cause Uranus transit changes the whole existence of that sign forever - Aries know what I am talking about. Taurus is our ego, our distinct identity & if we are labelling our sense of “I” through any external object / status / person - Uranus releases that cause it wants us to create “Independent Worth”

The degree of Uranus currently being activated is of immense importance - why - cause that’s where Uranus went retrograde in August 2019. Remember 2019 - Hong Kong protests, Amazon fires, Epstein died, Peso crashed, India floods, Nuclear accident in Russia, India revoked Article 370 ... I can go on but you get the picture - volatile times. Second contact of Uranus isn’t that dramatic - especially in transit (it’s not turn retrograde or direct right now).

But it will be standing still exactly where it stands now in Jan/Feb 2021. Uranus will turn direct on 1 Feb 2021 standing exactly at this point and it would be squaring Saturn starting a new 14 years cycle which is the key theme of 2021. Infant in Jan 2021 there will be 5 planets, yes 5! Squaring Uranus in Taurus which is a recipe for perfect political & weather storm. This is tremendous tremendous conflict - I referred to it in my eclipse note cause this is in direct interaction with the US country chart. Uranus in such aspects normally stimulates the collective to revolt through a catalyst to create radical change in existing bureaucracy, to free those suppressed or held in bondage. There is normally a rude collective awakening - in Taurus it will have financial underpinnings too - people no longer acquiesce to entrapment of our current financial system where resources are manipulated by a few. Higher manifestation of it is stimulation of new discoveries & tech that supports people to function in a new way.

Harnessed correctly Saturn Uranus cycles help us manifest our creative & inventive ideas into substantial achievements cause we are given the discipline to bring our intuition home. Give form or structure to our uniqueness in a productive way like Rihanna or Barbara Streisand do - we can harness our inner tension into a passion. There is tremendous tension in this aspect but it’s an endless source of spontaneous energy, creativity & freshness but you can use it or misuse it. George Eliot & Thomas Hardy are Saturn square Uranus as are Putin & Harvey Weinstein - I mean you get my drift.

So in May we don’t need to look at a oracle to see future of 2021 - it will be playing out in front of us - the preview of what’s coming in 2021. The innovation in field of finance, money, food, art, creatives , our value system. As well as our need for freedom from tradition & fixity (Uranus in Taurus) clashing with suppression of air in Saturn in Aquarius. All tangible strides in evolution of our civilisation has come through Saturn Uranus cycles and you are watching a live preview of that as Saturn stands still about to go retrograde on 11th standing in loose square to Uranus right now & playing out through their aspects to Sun, Mercury & Venus.

In this tension, these two parts of us at war - the people who will create solutions blending the best of the old world with the best of the new will thrive. That’s why with nodes in mutable sign - the road to success is adaptability - as always it’s not the survival of the fittest but of the one who can evolve. New skills, sources of income, diet, physical upkeep, new concept of “fixed” assets - Uranus in Taurus & by square to Saturn in Aquarius - necessary compulsory evolution in tech, social media, tech in your industry, new way to network, new supply chains, pooling resources - “shared/preloved” economy.

Importance of cyber security will go immensely up - the first computer virus was uncovered during the last Saturn Uranus conjunction in 1988 - the Internet worm. Things that were birthed in the cycle will come to question like the EU / Euro. WHO also came to focus at the time with eradication of polio. NASA Scientists testified first time to US Senate that man made global warming has begun. Abortion drugs were launched & it was opposed though inline with ideology of sexual freedom it was launched. Topic of gun control which never went away since the unfortunate Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 during Saturn Uranus square will take on more speed. Topics essentially that are clearly dividing forces in society will play out & those who can mesh the two conflicting forces win 2021.

Right now with the preview - I am warning you people in 40s having both your Uranus opposition & your Saturn oppositions - they are getting triggered by both Saturn & Uranus. In large scale despite the economic crisis or may be due to it - we would see dramatic shifts in careers / home / relationships.

Uranus in Scorpio generation is getting their Uranus opposition if you are 1975/76 born to be exact - Saturn & Mars in Aquarius are making T-Square to your Uranus opposition pushing you to make a structural shift. Saturn being the apex you know what change you have to make but you are evaluating the cost of it all - is it worth it ? Taurus season is best to figure it out - cause this aspect will on,y become stronger in Jan/Feb 2021.

The 1976/77 born are having their Saturn opposition forming t square to Uranus - so wherever Taurus falls in your chart - you are ready to break free - this is much more dynamic & dramatic though it’s not exact yet, it will be in 2021.

In my view, during the transit of Saturn in Aquarius as a society we create what we can hold onto in face of volatility - we are all just starting to create that now. And we have to develop a purpose which permits our wacky innovative unique ways to be a participant in a larger expression - else we will feel lost like any Saturn in 11th house or Saturn in Aquarius person.

On a lighter note in May we have a few fabulous days like 9/10/15/17 May when Sun and Mercury form a positive aspect with Jupiter & Pluto - a gift of growth and focus in volatile times - I’ll take it! Good dates for ideas, negotiations & financial ventures.

In part 2 of this post I will cover May 2020 by sign.

[blackfreethinkers]

A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

[lincolncollection]

Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man Through Literature

What is a self-made man? The term was first coined in 1832 by Henry Clay, attorney and lawyer. He represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for over 10 years. He used the phrase “self-made man” to describe individuals of whose success lay within the person themselves, not with outside conditions. One of the most prominent men in history who represented this concept was Benjamin Franklin. He went from a poor, candle maker’s son to a successful businessman and one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers. So, where does Lincoln come in?

Abraham Lincoln was also a self-made man who acknowledged Clay as his “political hero.” He read an abundance of Clay’s political speeches and was greatly influenced by them. Lincoln started reading at a young age and read so much that his parents saw him as “lazy” (Lincoln grew up in a time where working class sons were expected to be working, not leisurely reading. He did go to a local school for brief periods at a time, but he mostly had to stay home and support his family).

Through reading and writing, Lincoln taught himself law and became a lawyer in 1836. His reputation as a lawyer grew and, when he was running for office, his “Honest Abe” persona grew.

A watercolor illustration of what Abe might have looked like at a young age living in Indiana.

Over the course of his lifetime, Abraham Lincoln read over 268 literary works including Shakespeare’s plays, Arabian Nights, Poems by Robert Burns, Journal and Debates of the Federal Constitution by Jonathan Elliot. Many of his own speeches and debates show comments and quotes from other prestigious writers. You can see a full list of what Lincoln read throughout his life as well as more information about the type of literature he enjoyed published through the University of Michigan Library.

Lincoln was known for being an avid reader and most artists liked to represent him as such. One such example of this is in the print by Warren Sallman, Kriebel & Bates. 

Did you know? While Lincoln was in office from the years 1861-1865, 350 literary works were published in America within that time span including books, poems, plays, and essays. 

Pictures of Abraham Lincoln almost always include him holding a book or an important document that he had been working on or reading. The picture below shows the capital building in the background as Lincoln is holding an important document.

 Abraham Lincoln advocated himself as a self-made man, and literature aided him on his journey to becoming a lawyer as well as one of our greatest presidents in American history. 

-K. Mundon, Lincoln Collection Intern

[jy4life]

Rocka My Soul

Rocka My Soul

“Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” is a song about being close to and in the comfort of God.  It is primarily sung in African-American churches, but on the night of December 12th, 1981, the majority of the 76,000 plus fans at Rice Stadium, black and white, were standing, singing the song in unison. They were singing to inspire on the Jack Yates High School Lions, who were seeking to become the first all African-American football team to make it to the Texas state championship since high school sports were desegregated in 1969.  

If you were fortunate enough to be at Rice Stadium that night, you just knew that it was more than a football game – it was a celebration of a transformative journey. The energy in the stadium was powerful in the most beautiful of ways - it hit you in your heart and in your soul. It emanated love, passion, resilience, redemption, and the power of community

Background

John Henry “Jack” Yates, for whom Jack Yates High School was named, was a leader, educator, a community builder, and man of vision. Born into slavery on July 11th, 1828 in Gloucester County, Virginia, Jack Yates taught himself to read and write, and also mastered carpentry. When Texas became the last state to end slavery on June 19th, 1865, Jack Yates and his wife Harriet moved to Houston. He became the first minister of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, the center of political, cultural, social and educational life for the flourishing community of free black men and women. Deeply committed to building community and to empowering that community through education, Reverend Yates founded the Baptist Academy (the forerunner to Texas Southern University), which focused on preparing students for careers in business and the ministry. Jack Yates Colored High School opened its doors in 1926. In the early 1980s, the school was at the center of a vibrant, engaged ecosystem of teachers, students, parents, alumni and the broader community. And the bonds that were the basis of the Jack Yates community in the 1980s are as strong now as they were back then. There is a frequently used expression “JY4Life” which captures the essence of what it meant and still means to be part of the Jack Yates community. It is hard to overstate the pride and deep sense of connection that Yates alumni still feel towards the school and towards one another.

Lori Dee Mack, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, was a cheerleader and editor of the yearbook at Jack Yates in 1981.  “Yates just had a special vibe to it, we were the cool school,” Ms. Mack said. “Part of what made it so special was the involvement of the community. We were expected to make something positive out of our lives, and those expectations were reinforced by our  community.” Jackie Clark was a senior and the majorette on the acclaimed Jack Yates marching band in 1981. “Our parents and our teachers knew one another, expected a lot from us, and they worked together to ensure that we performed in the classroom and were good representatives of our community,” Ms. Clark stated.

The Yates sports teams were the focal point for community engagement, football in particular. From the beginning, the school was successful in football, wining four Prairie View Interscholastic Negro League state titles. Since the end of segregation, however, only once had the Lions advanced past the first round in the playoffs.

In spite of the playoff history, expectations were high going into the 1981 season. Several starters at key positions returned from a team that went undefeated during the 1980 regular season  - quarterback Thomas LeDet, offensive linemen Rodney Henry and John Simmons, wide receivers Jeffrey Fields and Keith Burnett, middle linebacker Sebastian Harris (who made All-City his junior year), defensive linemen Stephen Baker and kicker/safety Lemuel Moton. That core group would be bolstered by several key additions, including defensive lineman Eddie Gilmore (who had to sit out his junior season after transferring from Sterling High School) and running back/wide receiver Randolph Wilburn, who transferred from Lincoln High School which closed in the spring of 1981. Preparation for the 1981 season began in May with spring training, and continued throughout the summer. LeDet, who came into his own at the end of the 1980 season, wanted to make sure that he and his teammates were fully prepared going into the 1981 season.  He organized practices with his receiving corps that summer. “I wanted for us to get comfortable working with one another and to get our timing down,” LeDet stated. High school teammates working out together during the summer is now routine in Texas, but in the early 1980s it was not common. Little did LeDet or his teammates know how prescient these self-organized summer sessions would turn out to be.

The Season

The season began as expected, with a win over Worthing High School. The following week the Lions suffered a stunning and crushing defeat at the hands of Smiley High School.  That loss, however, would prove to be the turning point of the season. “We needed that loss,” John Simmons stated. “It made us realize that we were not as good as we thought we were, and that we need to get focused if we were going to accomplish our goal, which was to win the state championship.” In that game, Smiley RB John Stewart ran roughshod over the Lions defense. To this day Sebastian Harris is livid about the loss to Smiley. Harris is a smart, thoughtful, proud man who still looks like he could level an NFL running back. “We were out hit that game,” he says, with both surprise and disappointment. John just ran all over us, we had never experienced a running back with such speed, power and determination. The gentlemen just set the tone and had his way the entire game.”

The next week in practice 2nd year linebacker coach Coger Coverson, a former Washington Redskins offensive guard and Yates alum, declared that every position on defense was open. Practice started with the intense and savage bullring drill (this is the drill where one player is in the middle of a ring and takes on other players in rapid sequence). It was perhaps the most intense week of practice during our time at Yates.”  That week set the tone for the rest of the season, as the Harris, Stephen Baker and Eddie Gilmore led defense would pitch 5 shutouts on the way to allowing just over 10 points per game the rest of the season. Offensively, Smiley had stacked the line of scrimmage, daring the Lions to beat them with the passing game. Yates was historically a power running team, and Coach Luther Booker was loath to abandon the run. The Lions finally began passing in the 4th quarter, but by then it was too late. Yet Booker saw enough that game to convince him to let LeDet and the passing game become the focal point of the offense.  “We discovered that we had good quarterback that game,” John Simmons said. The investment LeDet and his receivers made that summer was about to pay-off in a profound way. Under LeDet’s leadership the offense exploded, averaging almost 30 points per game the remainder of the season. In an era where the running game was focal point of most offenses, the Lions wide-open and vertical passing game was novel and exciting. In addition to Fields, Burnett and Wilburn (who had moved from running back to wide receiver), LeDet had wide receiver Rayfield Gee and powerful tight ends in Sylvester Morgan and Leonard Moon. LeDet would go on to have the sixth most productive passing season in Houston high school football history. As the season progressed and the Lions advanced in the playoffs, the city of Houston began to take notice. The Lions explosive offense, dominating defense and high-flying marching band were a weekly show that was hard to beat. “As we started winning everyone wanted to be associated with us,” Harris said. “Radio stations, newspaper reports, television stations – they were around us all of the time.” From a purely entertainment perspective, the highlight of the season came when the Lions went head to head with the famous “Who Shot JR” episode of Dallas, which at the time was the highest viewed television show in US history.  “I remember Saturday November 21st - that was the night that the “Who Shot JR” episode aired, Mack said. “We were playing Booker T Washington in bi-district at the Astrodome and the stadium was packed. We went head to head with one of the most watched television shows of all time and won,” she said laughingly. Blacks and whites lived in separate worlds during those days in Houston. When their worlds intersected, it was often confrontational. There was a clear lack of trust and understanding between the two communities.  Yet somehow the Lions performance was able to transcend race and bring those two worlds together, at least for a period of time. “When I was a teenager, I did encounter some forms of subtle prejudice, Thomas LeDet said. “However, I learned to ignore it. But for many of my teammates and friends, racism was hard to ignore. The stares we encountered when we entered a sporting goods store, personnel following you around, etc. But that changed when we beat Aldine in the quarterfinals.” “ I remember walking into Foleys’ department store with my teammates Jeffrey Fields and Kenneth Wiley after we beat Aldine in the quarterfinals. We were wearing our letterman jackets. As we entered the store, we noticed a distinct change on the part of the personnel - instead of suspicious and concerned faces there were smiles accompanied by quick service and people asking us if they could help us. Shortly after entering the store, a middle age white woman hurried over to my side and pointed to a Volkswagen size photo on the upper banister right in the entrance of the store. It was a picture of the entire team and staff of the 1981/82 Jack Yates football team!  Needless to say, we stood speechless for a moment and then were elated. We knew at that moment that we were something special not just to the black community, but also to the entire city. “ “I remember during the playoffs a very popular white radio station (104 KRBE) was broadcasting live from the Jack Yates School of Communications.  Quite a few students told me as I walked towards the lunchroom that the DJ was looking for me. As I approached, he announced, "Here he comes the man of the hour.... Mr. Thomas LeDet, the quarterback for Jack Yates High School.  He began to ask me questions about our season and if I thought we were going to go all the way. It was exciting and fun, and at the end, the DJ asked me, what was my favorite radio station.  As we both chuckled.... I said, as of today, KRBE is one of my favorites.  And then the DJ playfully asked me if I had ever heard of 104 KRBE.  We both laughed and I said no.  At that point, he presented me with a trophy of a giant #1 symbol with the radio station call letters and “Congratulations on a Great Season” engraved. He went on to say that the radio station and the entire City of Houston were cheering for us in the upcoming regional championship.  I was left with a feeling of joy and the sense that our team meant more to the city than just football.”

The Breakthrough

The Lions marched through the playoffs, defeating Booker T. Washington in bi-district, Houston Madison in the regional finals and Aldine in the quarterfinals. Next up? Perennial power San Antonio Churchill in the state semi-finals

The Chargers, who were led by quarterback Cody Carlson (Carlson would go on to star at Baylor University and play seven years in the NFL) and had a glorious history of advancing deep in the state playoffs, including winning the championship in 1976.  They were heavily favored to defeat the Lions and advance to the state championship.

Fittingly, Rice Stadium was chosen as the site for the game. On September 12th, 1962, President Kennedy delivered his famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice Stadium, a vision which was realized with the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.  Now, 19 plus years later, the stadium was again the site for another potential pivotal moment – if Yates could defy the odds and beat Churchill, they would become the first all African-American team to make it to the state championship.

The week leading up to the game was frenetic. “The whole community rallied behind the guys,” said Nanette “Nettie” Simmons, a cheerleader in 1981. “And it continued to and throughout the game. It was a cold and wet night, but I remember the stadium overflowing and people sitting on the grassy hill outside the stadium to watch the game.”

Churchill jumped out to a 14-0 lead, thanks to some great running by Doug Hodo, pinpoint passing by Cody Carlson, good play calling, and a bit of luck – the headsets on the Yates side were not working until the second quarter so Yates was not able to make defensive adjustments to counter the Chargers. Sebastian Harris rallied the defense, the Lions made adjustments and held Churchill scoreless the second quarter. Thomas LeDet and the offense got untracked, with LeDet throwing touchdown passes to Rayfield Gee and Keith Burnett. Churchill scored a safety to make the game 16-14 at halftime.

The week before Yates had trailed Aldine 14-0 before exploding for 42 straight points in a 42-14 win. But this game had a much different feel to it. “We knew we were in a fight. Those guys – Churchill – were tough and would not quit,” said both running back Artie Mitchell and punter Ronald Davis.

The second half was like a classic heavyweight boxing match, a la Rocky Balboa vs. Apollo Creed, with Yates ironically playing the role of Rocky. Churchill scored to go up 23-14 and looked to be on the verge of blowing the game open, when Harris rallied the defense and LeDet the offense. LeDet hit Keith Burnett with a 69-yard touchdown pass, ran for a score, and Harris forced a fumble which led to a Moton field goal. Suddenly Yates was up 31-23 with under 5 minutes left and it looked like they had all of the momentum.

Carlson and Churchill responded by driving to mid-field. Harris and the defense forced a 4th and 10 and a time-out was called by the officials to confirm the game statistics. In those days there was no overtime, in the event of a tie the team with the most 20-yard line penetrations and first downs advanced. Churchill was ahead in both.

On 4th and 10 Carlson completed a 47-yard pass to Harold Huggins. Three plays later Churchill scored to trail 31-29. Churchill then made a 2-point conversion on a tipped pass, and the score was 31-31. Less than 2 minutes remained.

LeDet led the offense to the 45-yard line, where three straight long passes to Burnett and Fields were incomplete. It was now 4th and 10, and arguably the most important play in the history of not only Yates football but perhaps for inner-city schools across the state of Texas was forthcoming.  Since segregation in Texas high school sports ended in 1969, a widely held perception was that an all African-American football team lacked the intellect, discipline, mental toughness and adaptability to advance far in the playoffs. The Lions had been shattering that myth all year, winning by playing smart, disciplined football and adapting at key points during the season. Fittingly, for them to advance to the championship, they would once again have to call on these traits to convert, score and then hold Churchill in check.

“I told Thomas and Coach Booker that I was open underneath all game long,” said Randolph Wilburn. “Thomas and I convinced Coach Booker that Churchill would double cover Keith (Burnett) and Jeffrey (Fields), and to pass to me on an underneath route. We were confident that we could get the 10 yards and convert.”

Everyone was on their feet as LeDet approached the line of scrimmage. LeDet dropped back, avoided the Churchill rush and made a perfect throw to Wilburn, who caught the ball at the Churchill 45-yard line. Wilburn then put his running back skill to use, and thanks to blocking from Jeffrey Fields advanced the ball to the Churchill 20-yard line.

The Lions were well within kicker Lemuel Moton’s range, but this game was about making history, and they were not going to let a field goal determine their fate. “We had momentum and believed we could run the ball to victory,” said John Simmons. Behind crushing blocks from Simmons, Rodney Henry, Byron Strain, Phillip James, James Jackson and Sylvester Morgan, the Lions ran the ball 4 straight times, with LeDet scoring to put the Lions up 38-31.

However, there were 40 seconds left on the clock. And Churchill & Carlson had countered Yates all night long with big plays of their own.

As Ronald Davis lined-up to kick-off, the energy in the stadium as frenetic. There was no way that these fans and the spirits of the African-American men and women who paved the way for this moment were going to let the Lions falter. Reserve linemen Tracy Sandles pinned Churchill inside their own 10-yard line on the kick-off. On the ensuing play, Carlson never had time to get off a pass –Gilmore, Baker, and the passion and energy of the city of Houston sacked him in the end zone for a safety. Yates 40 Churchill 31!

As LeDet ran out the clock, students, teachers, alumni, and fans – black and white - from across the city of Houston poured onto the field to celebrate with the team. Rice Stadium was again the setting for a historical moment. It was not just that Yates become the first all African-American team to advance to the championship, it was how they did it. They shattered long-held racist myths about African-American teams lacking the intellect, character and discipline to advance.

LeDet was also a terrific role model for a new generation of African-American quarterbacks. Historically, when African-Americans were allowed to play quarterback it was as an option quarterback, not a pro-style quarterback. Barry Switzer at Oklahoma and Bill Yeoman at Houston were pioneers in allowing African-Americans to play quarterback, but those were in running offenses where the quarterback was essentially a running back. It seems hard to believe but the perception that African-Americans could not lead a pro-style offense (where the quarterback was responsible for making all key decisions – passing and running) delayed Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon’s entry to the NFL by 6 years.

The Aftermath and the Present Day

The Lions would go on to lose the state championship 19-6 to Richardson Lake Highlands the following week. The Lions had 8 turnovers and offensively were in a funk all game long. The Harris-led defense dominated Lake Highlands, effectively hold them to 12 points on 4 field goals. But it was just not meant to be.

However, the victory of breaking through and making it to state in the way they did had a powerful impact, one that went beyond the football field.

The relationship between educational attainment and Texas high school football is more often than not negatively correlated. However, the 81 team, in the spirit of Reverend Yates, helped reversed this relationship by helping awaken their community to educational possibilities.

“At first colleges sent athletic recruiters to Yates because of the success of the football team,” Lori Dee Mack said. “They quickly followed by sending academic recruiters, and all of a sudden we started to hear about schools like TCU, which we did not know existed.  At the time we thought the only college options were local schools Texas Southern and the University of Houston. All of sudden were aware of all of these other schools – this just would not have been possible had the team not done so well and attracted the attention it did…” “I wound-up going to TCU with 3 of my girlfriends, and other friends went to the University of Texas, Texas A&M, etc. It was really incredible how the team’s success opened doors for us students, “Mack stated. “It was also very comforting knowing that people from our community (Thomas LeDet and Keith Burnett went to TCU with Mack and her friends) were going to these schools.”

And the football team also set an example for the students. “I remember Coach Booker saying that 90% of the players he coached went-on to college,” Randolph Wilburn noted. In 1985 the Lions would go undefeated and win the state championship, becoming the first all African-American football team to win a state championship in Texas post segregation. That team, which was led by running back Johnny Bailey, is widely considered to be the best team in the history of Texas high school football. The path for the 85 team had been paved 4 years earlier by a remarkable group of young men. “The players on the 81 team had a sense of humility about them,” Mack said. “They didn’t let the attention go to their heads, and you just knew that they were going to do something positive with their lives.”

The magic of the 81 team’s journey continues to resonate to this day.  Stella Hall, a cheerleader in 1981, currently works at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She was recently at a conference in Wisconsin and was speaking with a man who, when he found out she went to Jack Yates, asked her if she knew Thomas LeDet, Sebastian Harris and Jeffrey Fields. “He somehow knew about our school, the 81 team and the key guys on that team,” Stella said, shaking her head in disbelief.

Thomas LeDet was recently approached on two separate occasions – one by a former Yates student who graduated in the 1990s, the other by a former cafeteria worker from the University of Houston (LeDet worked at the University of Houston cafeteria while in school, serving the likes of Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler). Both individuals wanted to tell LeDet how much the 81-team inspired them. “At times it just seems incredible, he says, reflecting on the impact of the 81 team. We were just focused on winning on the field. It is really special to know that we inspired people.”

[deadpresidents]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN •Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Trilogy by Sidney Blumenthal: -A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 1809-1849 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856 (BOOK | KINDLE) -All the Powers of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, 1856-1860 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

ANDREW JOHNSON •Andrew Johnson: A Biography by Hans L. Trefousse (BOOK) •Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •High Crimes & Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Gene Smith (BOOK)

ULYSSES S. GRANT •Grant by Ron Chernow (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year by Charles Bracelen Flood (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition by Ulysses S. Grant, Edited by John F. Marszalek (BOOK | KINDLE)

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES •Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President by Ari Hoogenboom (BOOK) •Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr. (BOOK | KINDLE)

JAMES GARFIELD •President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman (BOOK | KINDLE) •Garfield by Allan Peskin (BOOK | KINDLE)

CHESTER A. ARTHUR •The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves (BOOK | KINDLE) •Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President by John M. Pafford (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[admiralbell]

The following is a transcript of William Bell’s acceptance speech after being nominated as the Republican candidate for President of the United States, delivered July 2, 2020.

Co-chairs, delegates, friends, and fellow Americans - I gratefully and humbly accept your nomination for President of the United States.

[cheers and applause]

I stand before you tonight as a man who understands and appreciates the immensity of what lies ahead of us. I say us, because from the very start, this campaign was never about me. It took on this challenge, well over a year ago, because I believed that Americans needed a representative in our nation’s highest office who would lead, but would not dominate. Would not purport to think that his own decisions would stand above scrutiny. I believed that America needed a President who remembered a world, a way of living, that was not clouded by the haze of years in dirty politics - where self-centered wheeling and dealing stand above the needs of the people.

I believe that this country deserves someone who will put its people first.

I come from a long tradition of men and women who understand the nature of sacrifice. Of men and women who stand up where others will not, because to them, the defense of freedom and the American way of life are more important than anything else. 

Our nation is able to be what it is today because of that bravery - that selflessness. I chose a life in the Navy because I believed in those ideals above everything else. I would gladly have died for them - in 2007, I nearly did. If given the chance, I would volunteer to do it again. And again. Because America - this great country, this community - is and will always be worth it.

In the same spirit, I will use the opportunity that has been given to me tonight, by all of you here and by the American people, to defend these ideals from the highest office, where they have too long been neglected by short-sighted politicians, who put self and party and their agendas first.

America is at a crossroads. Last year, we weathered a moment of immense tragedy. Theresa Wright was our commander-in-chief, and a woman who I always regarded with the utmost respect, despite our many differing views. Respect is a value which transcends all boundaries - parties and politics. Her death was a profound shock to me, and, indeed, to all of us.

What shocked me further was the seeming eagerness of the current administration to take this tragedy and use it as a tool to strike directly at the heart of the rights and values which make this country what it is. It seemed no time at all had passed before this administration jumped at the chance to politicize the event and use it to further a short-sighted agenda against the second amendment, despite the fact that Americans stood against such a choice. 

This, more than anything, assured me that what America needs now is someone who will place the rights guaranteed to us by our Founders above everything else - something that the President of the United States swears to do from the first moment he or she takes office.

Tonight, I promise you that I will take that oath seriously - just as seriously as I took the oath when I joined our nation’s Navy more than 30 years ago.

America deserves better. That is the belief that brought me to this stage tonight. America deserves better than what it has received for so many years. It deserves better than a White House that turns its back on personal and national security by striking out at our most valued rights, while at the same time ignoring crime. Ignoring that right now, there are people coming into this country with the intention of causing harm to its citizens. Real harm is caused every day by these policies, and it is time that someone stands up to prevent it.

It is shameful. It makes America look weak. We cannot and should not tolerate a country that looks weak - not when there is so much good in it worth fighting for. Since our founding, America has served as a beacon of freedom, of strength. If we abandon that responsibility now, what will we be left with?

As someone who has always been proud to be a member of our military, to be a leader in our nation’s military, I can tell you this - the current administration does not understand what real leadership looks like. The sacrifices and triumphs. The work and thought that goes into every decision, because you know what is at stake if you make the wrong choice. The struggle that comes with being the one to make those calls.

Let me share with you all a story which I have not shared before - what made me decide to pursue this office. In my time spent at the Pentagon, I had the privilege to serve beside a number of extraordinary men and women. One was a young man named Andrew. When I met him in 2015, Andrew was just 34 years old. He had served for several tours in Iraq, and Afghanistan. He had a family - a wife and three children, like me. He was a good husband, father, and friend, and an even better soldier. 

[A long pause here; this is difficult]

But Andrew struggled, and he didn’t get the help that he needed. And so in the fall of 2016, Andrew took his own life. I attended his funeral, as I have attended all too many similar funerals. I realized that day, and have never forgotten since, that we can do so much better. We, as a country, failed that young man - and we have been failing ourselves, in a broader sense. It’s time that we change that. I will do everything in my power to change that - for Andrew. For all the men and women who have similarly suffered. For all Americans.

To somewhat paraphrase the  immortal words of the great Republican, Abraham Lincoln: ‘It is for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced. That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, he showed that he understood the core of what America is, and what lengths the men and women of this country would go to protect its values.

I am honored to accept this nomination, so that together, we can begin to work toward making America what it can and should be - a government for the people. 

To the American people, let me say this - I stand with you. I stand for you. Unlike so many, I have not forgotten what it is like to be one of you.

I was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the greatest cities in this nation’s heartland. My father worked in a factory, a laborer. I don’t claim to be anything more than what I am - a man who came from one of the most typical of American experiences. I swore never to forget my roots, and I have carried that attitude with me for all of my life.

I would not be where I am today without the strength and support of my family. 

My parents, who gave me so much from the start. They taught me the value of respect, of hard work, of standing for others before yourself. They taught me to be humble. To stand up for what I believed in.

My sisters - my companions from childhood, who showed me love even when it was hardest.

My wife, who is standing with me tonight, just like she does every night. She has truly been my rock, the person who keeps my grounded, who shares every joy and every hurt with me. I am unbelievably lucky to have her supporting me, and the mission in front of me, with every step she takes, and to have her love as my guiding light.

My children. I can’t begin to explain how deeply proud of them I am, as I have always been. They are grown, now, leading their own lives, participating in their own communities, and I could not love them more. 

I am grateful, too, for everyone who supported and believed in this campaign from the start. Every staffer and every donor and every person in this country who took their chance and supported this mission with their time and energy, with their voices and their votes. I will do my absolute best to make you proud, and to carry the torch for all of us.

My fellow Americans, my mission is far from over. Tonight is only the beginning. I vow to you all, right here and right now, that I will do everything within my power to see this through to the end - to fight for this campaign, to fight for this country, and to fight for all of you, every American.

I will use every last bit of my energy to fight for a stronger America. Now, and always.

From the bottom of my heart - thank you, and God bless you. 

God bless this great country. 

Let’s get to work! Good night.

[cincinnatusvirtue]

Martin Luther King (1929-1968): America’s best known activist in the African-American Civil Rights struggle.

Martin Luther King was born January 15th, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia born as Martin J. King Jr.  His father Martin Sr. was a Baptist minister in Georgia and his mother Alberta Williams King was a minister’s daughter herself.  King was born into the midst of what was known as the Jim Crow South, the post Civil War era set of laws in the Southern United States that legalized segregation of citizens along racial grounds and effectively disenfranchised African-Americans.  These laws continued the discrimination and legacy of racism that most African-Americans had experienced since slavery had been introduced on the American continent centuries before.  The laws were passed by Democratic majorities in the South and while initially in the aftermath of the Civil War in the Reconstruction era, members of the Republican party that dominated the Northern states tried to pass laws that would have limited Jim Crow’s effects, the combination of divisions within the moderate and radical wings of the Republican Party, voter intimidation, Northern racism, political corruption and a sort of national desire to “move on” effectively allowed the Jim Crow laws to take hold and exist for the following century.

King grew up with white friends until the start of elementary school when segregation in schools separated them.  Segregation and second-class citizenry in the American South was a daily reality for King and most African-Americans.  African-Americans had to attend separate schools, churches, could not vote unless certain standards such as literacy tests were met and had to use alternate entrances in places of public accommodation, ride buses in segregated fashion and couldn’t even drink from the same water fountains in some instances.  Jim Crow took on various forms in depending where one lived in the South and discrimination and racist tension was prevalent in the North as well.  The 1896 US Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” for many government institutions effectively legalizing segregation.

King though occasionally physically disciplined by his father did come to admire his father’s standing up to segregation and was an inspiration on King growing up.  King himself admitted to feelings of resentment towards whites as a teenager.  Despite King’s own occasional doubts about religion and a lifelong struggle with self-doubt and depression, he like his father would go to seminary school in the hopes of becoming a Baptist minister as he saw the church as the way to answer what he called an “inner urge to serve humanity.”   King was known in high school as great orator early as part of the debate team, he also was a student with good enough grades to skip 9th and 12th grades.  In college he attended first Morehouse College in Atlanta, a traditionally black male college and later the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania from which he would graduate in 1951.

While at Crozer, King was briefly romantically linked to a cafeteria worker from Germany and even contemplated marrying her.  However, he was discouraged by family and friends on the grounds that an interracial marriage, especially in the South would upset both whites and blacks.  As a result of these pressures, King called off the relationship, though he was reportedly quite depressed over it.  Later, King would meet his future wife, Coretta Scott.  Coretta was from Alabama, the daughter of the descendants of former slaves.  Her father was a business owner police man at various times.  Her mother helped in the family business of running a general store and a lumber mill but also worked as a school bus driver and pianist in the local church.  Coretta herself had aspirations of a being a musician and was attending school at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when through a mutual friend she met King.  She was initially hesitant to date him but continued after his persistence in pursuing her, they would marry in 1953.  She initially had wanted a career in music but largely sacrificed it to help her husband pursue his own career in the ministry and to raise their family and the subsequent Civil Rights cause that was to become the main cause of their lives together. 

September 1st, 1954 saw King become the new minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  In 1955 the Kings had their first child, a daughter, Yolanda.  They would go on to have 3 more, Dexter, Martin Luther III and Bernice.  1955 also saw two incidents that would help spur the Civil Rights movement.  In Montgomery, public buses allowed bus drivers the authority to assign seating and since all drivers were white that meant black citizens effectively either had to ride in the back of the bus or give up their seat to a white citizen upon request, to refuse would risk a fine and and/or arrest.  The buses at the time had 75% usage by black citizens of the city.  In March of that year a teenager by the name of Claudette Colvin was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to make room for a white woman on the bus.  The incident was largely kept under wraps.  In December, most famously NAACP secretary Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and was arrested and fined.

King was made a local leader in the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which was founded by local black ministers.  Upon taking up the cause of Rosa Parks case a boycott of Montgomery buses was launched.  A combination of refusal to ride buses and instead provide taxi and carpool services for the African-American community ultimately lead to economic hardship for the city.  The boycott worked and de-segregation of the buses and the hiring of black bus drivers was allowed.  This helped raise awareness of the Civil Rights movement in general and made Martin Luther King the best known name for the Civil Rights movement henceforth.  Though there were signs of a backlash and the violence that was to shadow King’s life thereafter.  A shotgun was fired through the front door of the King home, a fellow minister’s home was bombed, black teenagers were beaten in a number of instances and even white Montgomery citizens who sided with the MIA and Rosa Parks had their own homes bombed.  Furthermore, the city in some other ways reinforced segregation and Rosa Parks ultimately had to leave the city due to death threats.  By the early 60′s blacks were still de-facto having to ride in the back of buses even if the law didn’t require it.  However, King’s resolve to undertake the cause of Civil Rights was not undone and only increased as a result of these setbacks.

1957 saw King along with other ministers form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  King was to lead this organization until his death and it would become central in the subsequent Civil Rights movement.  He befriended white evangelist preacher, Billy Graham and took inspiration from Graham’s evangelical “crusades”.  King sought to use the SCLC to push forth a message of nonviolent protest in the service of advancing African-American Civil Rights.  King was further inspired by the success of India’s independence movement and its commitment to nonviolence, namely through its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, he even later visited India to seek inspiration from this source..  King began giving sermons and placing them in written form to push this message of nonviolence coupled with advancement of Civil Rights.  Gradually, his sermons namely “What is Man?” caught the attention of the nation and the world at large.  King began to take on many individual cases as ways to highlight the need for changes to legislation in federal law to overcome Jim Crow’s legal power.

King continued to make speeches and organize marches in the coming years, he was notably involved in the Albany movement to desegregate Albany, Georgia in 1961 and famously the Birmingham, Alabama and Selma, Alabama campaigns of 1963 and 1964 to desegregate and assist in gaining African-Americans their legal voting rights.  During this time, King and other black leadership in the country tried to work with then newly elected President John F. Kennedy to author what many called a “Second Emancipation Proclamation” in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Executive Order declaring slaves in Confederate states freed during the Civil War.  Kennedy for his part appeared sympathetic if not particularly activist on the issue of Civil Rights.  King was also during this time the focus of FBI surveillance under the direction of then US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother.  King’s movements were detailed and phone calls wiretapped.  He also was sent threatening letters, not officially from the government but later linked to.  The supposed motive for monitoring King was his association with known and suspected Communists who maybe using the Civil Rights movement as a front for pushing forth Communist agendas in the middle of the Cold War which the the government saw as undermining America’s domestic and foreign policy, namely his association with the former Communist and openly homosexual Bayard Rustin was problematic and King agreed to distance himself from Rustin publicly.  King continued to earn a reputation as man of overall conviction notably following his arrests for violating the laws of Birmingham, Alabama during the 1963 desegregation campaign there.  His famous Letter from Birmingham Jail written on April 16, 1963 showed this commitment in eloquent form, something that was to become a signature of King’s persona.  King felt his acts of civil disobedience and that of the nonviolent Civil Rights movement were in accordance with American ideals, namely the Boston Tea Party and other acts of the American Revolution.  Citing them as necessary acts to deliver freedom even if they were illegal in the eyes of unjust laws.  King also demonstrated a belief in racial unity, stating that failure to come together against Jim Crow laws would not only legally segregate white and black Americans but lead to national disharmony and permanent segregation of Americans on communal and national lines.

King’s perhaps most memorable moment came on August 28, 1963 in the now famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  Here King in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument in Washington DC gave what many regard as not only his most eloquent and passionate speech but one of America’s most eloquent oratories ever, the so called “I Have a Dream Speech” where King lashed out at racism and the injustice that Americans experienced solely for the color of their skin.  The speech not only listed the grievances of African-American community but envisioned optimistically that America would one day live up to its founding and often espoused ideals of a welcoming community and freedom of individuality.  As a place that transcended racial bigotry where notably he stated:

“ I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.”

The speech and march had massive press coverage and helped put the Civil Rights movement near the top of the legislative agenda.  In November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas but his successor Lyndon B. Johnson continued with Kennedy’s hope of passing new legislation.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 essentially in law achieved the effective end of much of Jim Crow laws throughout the American South and in someways achieved what many considered the high watermark of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960′s.  Though these laws initially had weak enforcement, they were great symbolic victories for the movement and subsequently would practically reinforced through subsequent laws being passed.  King however knew work was still to be done, poverty among African-Americans and racial discrimination were still in effect going into the mid and late 1960′s and King made these ongoing issues of importance in his mission.  He also began to gradually speak out against the war in Vietnam which was ongoing.  His arguments against the war were largely that it took an unfair burden on impoverished black soldiers who signed up to help their country and saw them disproportionately killed in action and their communities suffering economic hardship.  His criticism of the war earned him the ire of President Johnson who was overseeing its ongoing development and ramping up.  It also cost some support for him among union organizers and the press he was even called by some a “demagogue” .  King additionally was facing ongoing death threats from white racists at home such as the Ku Klux Klan and facing criticism from black nationalists, notably the Nation of Islam, both white and black nationalists refused to believe in racial integration and harmony and actively sought to segregate America and Americans.

Despite King’s many struggles and in many ways the deepening political divides in the country, King stayed steadfast committed to the cause of nonviolence. 1968 saw King take up the cause of African-American sanitation workers’ rights for better pay and working conditions in Memphis, Tennessee.  On April 3, 1968 he gave what would be his final speech, the so called “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address.  In reference to a recent bomb threat it was laced with almost prophetic language:

“And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

At 6:01 PM on April 4, 1968 as King was standing out on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis discussing plans for a event later that night he was struck with a single bullet in the right cheek fired from across the street at a boarding house.  The bullet hit King in the cheek and lodged in his spinal cord.  He was dead within the hour, aged 39.  King’s assassin turned out to be James Earl Ray, a white supremacist with a history of crime.  Ray fled the country and was later arrested in England on a false passport, he was returned the US for trial and convicted of King’s murder.  In time, controversy over whether Ray was actually the assassin or whether it was part of a US government conspiracy to silence King for his ongoing activism against US foreign policy and advocacy for positions viewed as undermining domestic policy by some has arisen.  There are numerous conspiracy theories abounded to this day, even at least one of King’s children forgave Ray and came to believe he was not guilty.  Ray for his part changed his story to say he was coerced into confessing to the murder.  A civil case later found a conspiracy against King to have been acted upon, though the official criminal record remains unchanged stating Ray was the assassin and acted alone, motivated by his personal enmity towards King and African-Americans, he would eventually die in prison in 1998 of liver failure.

In the immediate aftermath of the King’s death many riots among the African-American community broke out across the country.  A notable exception was in Indianapolis, Indiana where former Attorney General and then US Senator from New York Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech to the African-American community on the back of a flat bed truck.  Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination for President that year.  The very man who once authorized King’s FBI surveillance was now delivering an impromptu eulogy on his behalf.  Kennedy appealed to the crowd, stating any feelings of anger they may have was understandable but he also appealed to them with empathy through the assassination of his own brother, President Kennedy 5 years earlier.  Kennedy’s speech ultimately called for African-Americans to make the choice, seek peace, nonviolence and continue to push for a unified country as King had advocated for or give into intense feelings of rage and turn to violence.  The crowd though upset largely listened to Kennedy and no riots took place in Indianapolis that night.  Robert Kennedy for his part was assassinated by a Palestinian gunman two months later in California, citing his hatred over Kennedy’s support for the state of Israel in the wake of the Six Days War of 1967 as motivation.

King’s legacy of nonviolence and advocacy for Civil Rights was continued by many afterwards and taken in many directions henceforth.  Namely, his wife Coretta and later their children, Coretta would die in 2006 and his buried next to husband at their home in Atlanta, Georgia.  In the year’s since King’s death, he has been made into an icon for civil rights movements the world over.  People of various political persuasions and movements have co-opted his words to fit their perception of his take on their cause.  It’s ultimately speculation as to what King would have gone on to do and how he would view the world and his country in particular in the modern era.  King’s legacy overall remains strong in America’s memory even if it is viewed by some as out of touch or overly optimistic.  His memory is celebrated in part with Martin Luther King Jr. day held annually in the US on the third Monday in January.  This is celebrated as federal holiday as well as at the state and local level, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 and first observed federally in January 1986.  All 50 states now honor it as a paid holiday for state workers, with South Carolina being the last to do so in 2000.

Whatever King could have gone onto to do and despite the various attempts to co-opt his name, words and legacy to various movements the world over.  I think one undeniable aspect his memory does retain and should retain is the symbolism and idealism his eloquent words held.  The hope for racial equality before the law and in social order within the United States and elsewhere is cause worth believing in and striving for, especially with a commitment to nonviolence.  In America in this day and age there is a temptation to look at its history as solely one of imperialism, violence, subjugation and supremacy, namely in the form of white supremacy.  There is another tendency to view America as having these unfortunate and terrible stains on its legacy but that the promise of American ideals of individual freedom were fundamentally good and sound ideas at their core.  Really, this discussion of two opposing views of America was an issue in King’s time and remains unresolved and in some ways is the central debate in the present American body politic.  Anybody in the present is guilty of co-opting King’s views to support their own just as much as anyone else, myself included.  Without going into much detail on my own views on the matter which for the purposes of a highlighted biography blog post aren’t particularly relevant.  I do think King’s life and his words are at the very least worth truly reflecting upon with serious and deep study if one is looking to see his own view of America in all its complexity and not just clipping a few phrases out of context for one’s benefit.   At the very least it’s what one can do to honor King and his legacy, unquestionably being given to nonviolence in search of domestic political change but also really assessing what was at the core of his beliefs and hopes for America too.

[dazzledbybooks]

From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln, the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a sparky, marriageable Mary Todd and Lincoln’s best friend, Joshua Speed. When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he’s a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. “I can only hope,” she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, “that his waters being so very still, they also run deep.”It’s not long, though, before she sees the Lincoln that Speed knows: a man who, despite his awkwardness, is amiable and profound, with a gentle wit to match his genius and a respect for her keen political mind. But as her relationship with Lincoln deepens, she must confront his inseparable friendship with Speed, who has taught his roommate how to dance, dress, and navigate the polite society of Springfield.Told in the alternating voices of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, and rich with historical detail, Courting Mr. Lincoln creates a sympathetic and complex portrait of Mary unlike any that has come before; a moving portrayal of the deep and very real connection between the two men; and most of all, an evocation of the unformed man who would grow into one of the nation’s most beloved presidents.Louis Bayard, a master storyteller at the height of his powers, delivers here a page-turning tale of love, longing, and forbidden possibilities. Praise for COURTING MR. LINCOLN By Louis Bayard AN INDIE NEXT PICK AN APPLE BOOKS BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH   A PEOPLE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK  “An exquisite historical reimagining of a love acknowledged—and a longing denied.” —People (Book of the Week) “Bayard has written eight other novels, and he’s extraordinarily gifted at blending provocative fiction with history. The details of [Mary Todd and Lincoln’s] courtship are lovely to read, but Lincoln’s time with Speed is much more riveting. At book’s end, who’s courting Lincoln remains an enticing mystery.” —Washington Post “A house divided against itself cannot stand, Abraham Lincoln warned us. But a book divided against itself stands up quite nicely in Louis Bayard’s wonderful Courting Mr. Lincoln. …suspenseful and revealing…it’s a tribute to Bayard’s entertaining novel that he has imagined a love story for Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln that embroiders the truth but that also fits perfectly with what we know about these very famous figures.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “A miracle; an exquisite story exquisitely told. This glorious novel, big-hearted and clear-eyed, features the most uncanny incarnation of our sixteenth president since Daniel Day-Lewis strode onscreen in Lincoln. If you love Jane Austen, or Hamilton, or fiction—of any era—that transports and transforms in equal measure, look no further.” —A.J. Finn, bestselling author of The Woman in the Window “Courting Mr. Lincoln is a fascinating (and partly fictional) exploration of not only the 16th president, but those enamored by him.” —Advocate.com “A rich, fascinating and romantic union of fact and imagination about young Lincoln, the woman he would marry and his beloved best friend. Bayard’s compelling take on this question is not academic, nor is it a polemic; Courting Mr. Lincoln is intimate, warm and, above all, compassionate. Bayard is concerned with the possibilities of the human heart, and he presents an enigmatic Lincoln seen — and loved — from two other points of a romantic triangle. …the greatest triumph of Courting Mr. Lincoln is how effectively Bayard creates suspense, even when we know how the story ends. Love is love is love, after all, and he invests us deeply in the moving journey of three extraordinary people.” —Newsday “With wit and charm that only Louis Bayard can deliver, Courting Mr. Lincoln transports readers to 19th-century Springfield, Ill…Those familiar with Bayard's work will appreciate his sterling dialogue and ingenious humor. Bayard's masterful command of language enchants and thrills; his meticulous, almost otherworldly, understanding of his historical subject awes and inspires. When that all comes together, Courting Mr. Lincoln is Bayard at his absolute best. He offers more reasons to love one of the most admired presidents in U.S. history and proves yet again why he himself is one of the nation's greatest literary gems.” —Shelf Awareness (Starred Review) “A wildly clever imagining of Honest Abe's complicated personal life. In Courting Mr. Lincoln, Louis Bayard, an accomplished historical novelist, breathes life into the massive cultural icon whom we know so well, but really don’t have much of a clue about. Read the book. You’ll thank me.” —Washington Independent Review of Books “…thoroughly researched and thrillingly plotted…Filled with rich historical detail and compulsively readable... Fans of historical fiction will be up late into the night to uncover the next chapter of this fascinating time in history.” —NY Journal of Books “A gripping historical thriller … an entertaining novel by a gifted storyteller.” —The Washington Book Review “[An] acute and passionate portrait…[I]n Bayard's skilled hands, three complicated people groping toward a new phase in their lives is all the plot you need.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Bayard does an exceptional job of keeping readers engrossed as he weaves fact and fiction in this intriguing tale of intimacy between Lincoln and his two closest confidantes.” —BookPage “ What Bayard has accomplished is to take popular figures in U.S. history and not only make them more real --- if that is possible --- but humanize them to a level where we all can relate to them. Courting Mr. Lincoln is engaging because Bayard has such a fine way with words. The result is a triumph of a novel and an unforgettable read that is a true page turner.” —Bookreporter.com “Was Abraham Lincoln gay? The question, not a new one, is delicately and touchingly presented in Courting Mr. Lincoln … tenderly told.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “An exquisite novel about how Lincoln’s courtship of the brilliant, complicated Mary Todd intersected with his long and very (possibly VERY) close friendship with Joshua Speed. Courting Mr. Lincoln is so subtle and human and heartbreaking, infused with sly wit. I loved every word of it, and the end is note perfect. My heart broke for both Joshua and Mary, and at the same time, they were the lenses that let me think about my favorite president in new ways.”  —Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Never Have I Ever “[W]ith a richly imagined setting and complex characters…a worthy addition to the fiction about-Lincoln bookshelf.” —Booklist “Bayard fictionalizes the early days of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln’s relationship in this delightful embellishment of American history. This charming love story delicately reveals the emotional roller coaster of two inexperienced adults traversing the unknown realm of love while trying to meet the demands and expectations of society.” —Publishers Weekly “In this sparkling tale of strategy and desire, Louis Bayard renders the origin story of the Lincoln-Todd marriage with a wit worthy of Jane Austen and the keen political insight of the best presidential biographers. When it comes to bringing our most revered historical figures to vivid life—and returning to them their full humanity—Louis Bayard has no peer. He is, quite simply, a master of the storytelling art.” —Liza Mundy, bestselling author of Code Girls “In exquisite detail and luminous prose, Louis Bayard has taken what might have been a footnote in the history of Abraham Lincoln and made it the story.  It is as if there was a secret door in Lincoln's life and Bayard has opened it and walked inside. Suddenly all the pieces fit. Utterly fascinating and brilliantly convincing, this is a terrific book that people will be talking about for a long time.” —Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon “Superb, witty, gorgeously written. For the length of this dazzling, subversive novel, I was plunged so deeply into the sitting rooms and muddy streets of mid-19th-century Springfield, Illinois, that I too had fallen in love with and had my heart broken by the awkward, young lawyer from Kentucky. Courting Mr. Lincoln is an essential read: it makes the past a human place.” —Christopher Bollen, author of The Destroyers “Courting Mr. Lincoln gives us a young Abe Lincoln as we've never imagined him. It’s a moving portrait, told with cutting wit and intimately drawn detail, of three friends struggling to find their own identities against the weight of social expectations.” —Thomas Mullen, author of Darktown and Lightning Men “Louis Bayard is a writer of remarkable gifts: for language, for imagination, for that mysterious admixture of audacity and craftsmanship.” —Joyce Carol Oates About the Author: Louis Bayard is a New York Times Notable Book author and has been shortlisted for both the Edgar and Dagger awards for his historical thrillers, which include The Pale Blue Eye and Mr. Timothy. His most recent novel was the critically acclaimed young-adult title Lucky Strikes. He lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at George Washington University. Visit him online at www.louisbayard.com.

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