#ulysses “little fellow” grant

[grants-blue-eyed-stare]

The more I read about Grant the more I think "wow so demure and mindful"

[grants-blue-eyed-stare]

he (Johnson) when he doesn't get a second term and needs a scapegoat

"You know very well, sir, for you were familiar with my views while I was President, what my estimate of [Ulysses S.] Grant was, and I don't know anything that has since occurred that has caused me to change my mind the slightest. I know Grant thoroughly. I had ample opportunity to study him when I was President, and I am convinced he is the greatest farce that was ever thrust upon a people. Why, the little fellow -- excuse me for using the expression, but I can't help pitying him -- the little fellow has nothing in him. He hasn't a single idea. He has no policy, no conception of what the country requires. He doesn't understand the philosophy of a single great question, and is completely lost in trying to understand his situation. He is mendacious, cunning and treacherous. He lied to me flagrantly, by God, and I convicted him by my whole Cabinet; but that even would have been tolerable were it the only instance, but it was not. He lied on many other occasions.

I tell you, sir, Grant is nothing more than a bundle of petty spites, jealousies and resentments. And yet they say Grant is a second Washington. Only think of it, when you compare him with Washington or Jefferson where is he? Why he is so small you must put your finger on him. He, a little upstart, a coward, physically and intellectually, to be compared to George Washington! Why, it makes me laugh. I have more pity for the man than contempt, for I have no spite against him. But I fear for the country when such a man is likened to the father of his country. Why, just look at the inaugural of Washington. He speaks about his fear and trembling in accepting the Presidency, even after all his experience and success. But this little fellow Grant, an upstart, a mere accident of the war, a creature without the ability to comprehend the philosophy of a single great question, says in his inaugural, 'I know the responsibility is great, but I accept it without fear.' Is that like Washington or Jefferson? Pshaw! It's monstrous to think of.

Grant, I tell you, sir has no ideas, no policy. Why, Washington considered that a man's greatness was measured by his morality, by the standard of his soul. And I have always considered that the more soul a man had, the more developed the soul or intellect within him, the more Godlike he became. But, sir, Grant has nothing. Physically and mentally and morally he is a nonentity. Why, sir, his soul is so small that you could put it within the periphery of a hazel nutshell and it might float about for a thousands years without knocking against the walls of the shell. That's the size of his soul.

Just look at the man sitting at a Cabinet council. He has no idea, no policy, no standard, no creed, not faith. How can he guide the people? How can he impress any great improvements or moral ideas upon the nation? He has no object to look forward to, no leading aim to draw the people towards any particular end. He sits there with his Cabinet. One member has bought him a house in Philadelphia, another has given him $65,000, another has given him a carriage, and so on. It is degrading to the office of President of the United States to have such a man there.

They talk about his generalship. Well, he was a mere incident of the war. Men and arms were supplied in abundance, and his forces were so massive that they simply crushed out the rebellion. It would have been done had Grant never been born. Therefore he was a mere incident. But the little fellow has come to think he is somebody really. I can't help pitying him when I think how well I know him and what an infinitesimal creature he really is."

-- Former President Andrew Johnson, delivering a scathing attack on President Ulysses S. Grant, shortly after Johnson left the White House, during an interview with a correspondent from the New York Herald, June 27, 1869

[angels-in-the-electric-chair]

infodump about your favorite historical figures

AAAAAA YES OKAY!!! :DD

One of my favorite historical figures would have to be Wilfred Owen, a poet who fought in World War I and used his poetry to highlight to horrors of war(my favorites would have to be The Last Laugh, Dulce Et Decorum Est, and The Parable of The Old Man and the Young). He’s probably my favorite poet, and had a short but very interesting life.

Owen would enlist in the army in 1915 and sent to France, which he initially viewed as heroic and gallant, but would eventually grow disillusioned with the war and its misery.

He would be hospitalized for shell shock in 1917, and would meet fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon there, who also used his poetry to expose the horrors of war. Both of them were kind of gay for each other. A letter Owen would write to Sassoon has this banger quote:

“… I held you as my Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile. What’s that mathematically? In effect it is this: that I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least.”

The two would eventually part and return to fighting, but upon their parting, Sassoon would give Owen the address to Robert Ross, an editor in London…. And one of Oscar Wilde’s *best friends*

Unfortunately, Owen would be killed in action on October 4, 1918- only a few days before the war ended.

I’ve also got a really bad Ulysses S Grant obsession……. Inexplicably. I don’t know how that happened (an APUSH project I took too seriously)

Anyway, America’s 18th president really liked horses!!! During the Mexican-American War, he rode on one sideways to avoid getting hit by bullets, like this:

While he was at in the military academy at West Point, there was a horse named York that only he and one other person could ride, and he was the only one who could actually do it well. Ulysses S Grant was a horse girl.

He was also kind of a notoriously sloppy dresser. But he still slayed!

Anyway! Some dead people I’m obsessed with!! Thank you for asking me to talk about them, because this was really fun, and I’m so sorry if this is absolutely incoherent!!!!

[whitepolaris]

The Secret Life of John Wilkes Booth

The date was April 14, 1865. The War Between the States was nearly at an end, with Robert E. Lee having formally surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant just five days earlier. President Abraham Lincoln, who was in good spirits, celebrated the excellent news by accepting an invitation to a play.

Of course, anyone who's made it through fifth-grade social studies knows what happened next. John Wilkes Booth, actor and Confederate sympathizer, made his way into Lincoln's theater box and shot the president in the back of the head with a single-shot Deringer pistol.

Booth had counted on a quick getaway, but had trouble when he leaped from the box and clumsily caught his riding spur on a U.S. Treasury Guards flag, tumbling to the stage and breaking his leg. Nevertheless, after shouting that infamous cry, "Sic semper tyrannis!-the Virginia state motto meaning "Thus always to tyrants"-Booth ran outside, mounted the horse that was waiting for him, and rendezvoused with fellow conspirator David Herold in Maryland.

After staying that night with acquaintance Dr. Samuel Mudd, who reset Booth's broken leg, Booth and Herold fled for Virginia, where they were discovered several days later hiding out in a barn. Surrounded by Union soldiers in the early morning hours. Herold surrendered, but Booth stood his ground. As the soldiers began setting fire to the barn, a sergeant named Boston Corbett spotted Booth through a gap in the wall and fire at him, striking him in the back of the neck. Booth succumbed to his wounds a few hours later and was eventually buried in the family plot in Baltimore, Maryland. (Cue the suspenseful music.) Or was he?

Thirty-eight years later, a man by the name of David E. George would raise doubt concerning the fate of Lincoln's assassin. In January 1903, in a long narrow room on an upstairs floor of the Grand Venue Hotel in Enid, Oklahoma, Georgia made a settling confession. He was dying, and although a doctor had been called to his bedside, there was nothing the physician could do; George had ingested a fatal dose of strychnine. As the dying man drew his last breath, he confessed that David George was just an alias. His real name was John Wilkes Booth, and he had killed Abraham Lincoln.

None of the locals really seemed to know that much about George. He was a self-professed house painter and devoted barfly, that much they could say-though he was fond of quoting Shakespeare, which he did at length when he was on the drink, which raised speculation that he may have once been very familiar with the stage. Was it possible that he was who he claimed to be?

The evidence began to pile up. Upon examination of George's body, doctors noticed scars that matched those Booth would have had. He had also suffered a broken leg sometime in the past, just above the ankle, as Booth had when he leaped to the stage at Ford's Theatre. Plus, he shared Booth's height and features, and was the proper age. Moreover, a minister by the name of E. D. Harper revealed that, during a previous suicide attempt, George had confessed once before to being Booth.

Still, nothing came of the matter. And since no one came forward to claim the body, the local mortician mummified George, dressed him up and set him on display in the front window of his funeral parlor/furniture store. Despite George's supposedly astonishing revelation, he remained little more than a minor curiosity.

The mystery grew, however, when Finis L. Bates, a lawyer from Memphis, heard about George's claim, traveled to Enid to see the corpse for himself and identified it as the man he once knew as John St. Helen. St. Helen, he said, had been a friend of his back when he worked in Granbury, Texas, in the 1870s. Furthermore, at a time when St. Helen was gravely ill and believed he was lying on his deathbed, he confessed to Bates that he was the man who killed Lincoln and proceeded to described the whole affair in detail. St. Helen recovered, however, and left town, supposedly for Oklahoma. Bates who spent years investigating the claim, tried to bring the incident to the attention of the U.S. War Department, but he was dismissed.

Since then, more than a handful of theorists have concluded that it's plausible, if not entirely likely, that John Wilkes Booth actually escaped following the assassination of America's sixteenth president. Many believe Booth was involved in a conspiracy with the U.S. government to have Lincoln killed and was allowed, even helped, by the military to make his getaway. The man who was killed that night in the Virginia barn was either a patsy or someone shot by mistake. Oddly enough, there have been some clues, although yet unsubstantiated, that Boston Corbett, the man credited as Booth's killer, also lived out his final days in Enid, which raises some interesting questions about a possible association between him and David George. In recent years, a group of researchers, joined by several members of the surviving Booth family, petitioned to disinter the man buried in John Wilkes Booth's unmarked plot in Maryland to prove whether or not he's really the man he's supposed to be. Unfortunately, their request was denied. So, the mystery, at least to many, is still unsolved.

As for David George's mummy, Finis Bates acquired it from the funeral parlor in Enid and toured the country with it, putting it on display and renting it out to carnivals. It even made an appearance at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Following Bates's death, the mummy changed hands several times and was eventually lost.

The hotel in which David George made his confession, however, still stands in Enid at 205 S. Grand Avenue. Today it's the site of Garfield Furniture.

[aceofthyme]

okay okay I’m finally getting around to posting this

At Grant’s home in Galena, they have a lil gift shop in the kitchen (not a bad place for a gift shop imo). When I was there, I had a very small amount of cash on me—but it was enough for the booklet I got about Grant’s life, and I had a bit left over. I was rather interested in some of the other items they had, and—me being me—when our guide told us that this one in particular had a certificate of authenticity I just about threw my money at him. One day I’ll go back and apologize to that poor fellow. Anyways:

Was it something I needed to buy? Probably not (but my heart says yes). Was it worth the money? …Yes. It was $10. Don’t trust me with your cash, y’all, I’ll buy something like this.

This is the included certificate; the full statement reads:

This unique and historic piece of history is certified genuine and guaranteed to be from the previous copper roof of the home of Ulysses S. Grant. This piece of copper was part of the roof that was on the home for nearly 100 years.

There’s also a little information sheet inside about Grant and the home, in addition to the copper piece and the certificate. I was mildly afraid to open it, for no decent reason, but I did eventually after I took these pictures lol

Anyways. There you have it, I own part of the roof of Grant’s Galena home!

[songsofprotestpeacerevolution]

President Trump continues to use inflammatory language as many Americans protest the unlawful death of George Floyd and the unjust treatment of black Americans by our justice system. As the protests have grown, so has the intensity of the president’s rhetoric. He has gone so far as to make a shocking promise: to send active-duty members of the U.S. military to “dominate” protesters in cities throughout the country — with or without the consent of local mayors or state governors. On Monday, the president previewed his approach on the streets of Washington. He had 1,600 troops from around the country transported to the D.C. area, and placed them on alert, as an unnamed Pentagon official put it, “to ensure faster employment if necessary.” As part of the show of force that Trump demanded, military helicopters made low-level passes over peaceful protesters — a military tactic sometimes used to disperse enemy combatants — scattering debris and broken glass among the crowd. He also had a force, including members of the National Guard and federal officers, that used flash-bang grenades, pepper spray and, according to eyewitness accounts, rubber bullets to drive lawful protesters, as well as members of the media and clergy, away from the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. All so he could hold a politically motivated photo op there with members of his team, including, inappropriately, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Looting and violence are unacceptable acts, and perpetrators should be arrested and duly tried under the law. But as Monday’s actions near the White House demonstrated, those committing such acts are largely on the margins of the vast majority of predominantly peaceful protests. While several past presidents have called on our armed services to provide additional aid to law enforcement in times of national crisis — among them Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — these presidents used the military to protect the rights of Americans, not to violate them. As former leaders in the Defense Department — civilian and military, Republican, Democrat and independent — we all took an oath upon assuming office “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” as did the president and all members of the military, a fact that Gen. Milley pointed out in a recent memorandum to members of the armed forces. We are alarmed at how the president is betraying this oath by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans. President Trump has given governors a stark choice: either end the protests that continue to demand equal justice under our laws, or expect that he will send active-duty military units into their states. While the Insurrection Act gives the president the legal authority to do so, this authority has been invoked only in the most extreme conditions when state or local authorities were overwhelmed and were unable to safeguard the rule of law. Historically, as Secretary Esper has pointed out, it has rightly been seen as a tool of last resort. Beyond being unnecessary, using our military to quell protests across the country would also be unwise. This is not the mission our armed forces signed up for: They signed up to fight our nation’s enemies and to secure — not infringe upon — the rights and freedoms of their fellow Americans. In addition, putting our servicemen and women in the middle of politically charged domestic unrest risks undermining the apolitical nature of the military that is so essential to our democracy. It also risks diminishing Americans’ trust in our military — and thus America’s security — for years to come. As defense leaders who share a deep commitment to the Constitution, to freedom and justice for all Americans, and to the extraordinary men and women who volunteer to serve and protect our nation, we call on the president to immediately end his plans to send active-duty military personnel into cities as agents of law enforcement, or to employ them or any another military or police forces in ways that undermine the constitutional rights of Americans. The members of our military are always ready to serve in our nation’s defense. But they must never be used to violate the rights of those they are sworn to protect.

89 former Defense officials: The military must never be used to violate constitutional rights

Leon E. Panetta, former defense secretary

Chuck Hagel, former defense secretary

Ashton B. Carter, former defense secretary

William S. Cohen, former defense secretary

Sasha Baker, former deputy chief of staff to the defense secretary

Donna Barbisch, retired major general in the U.S. Army

Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to the defense secretary

Jeffrey P. Bialos, former deputy under secretary of defense for industrial affairs

Susanna V. Blume, former deputy chief of staff to the deputy defense secretary

Ian Brzezinski, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Europe and NATO

Gabe Camarillo, former assistant secretary of the Air Force

Kurt M. Campbell, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Asia and the Pacific

Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia

Rebecca Bill Chavez, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Western hemisphere affairs

Derek Chollet, former assistant defense secretary for international security affairs

Dan Christman, retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and former assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

James Clapper, former under secretary of defense for intelligence and director of national intelligence

Eliot A. Cohen, former member of planning staff for the defense department and former member of the Defense Policy Board

Erin Conaton, former under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness

John Conger, former principal deputy under secretary of defense

Peter S. Cooke, retired major general of the U.S. Army Reserve

Richard Danzig, former secretary of the U.S. Navy

Janine Davidson, former under secretary of the U.S. Navy

Robert L. Deitz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency

Abraham M. Denmark, former deputy assistant defense secretary for East Asia

Michael B. Donley, former secretary of the U.S. Air Force

John W. Douglass, retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force and former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy

Raymond F. DuBois, former acting under secretary of the U.S. Army

Eric Edelman, former under secretary of defense for policy

Eric Fanning, former secretary of the U.S. Army

Evelyn N. Farkas, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia

Michèle A. Flournoy, former under secretary of defense for policy

Nelson M. Ford, former under secretary of the U.S. Army

Alice Friend, former principal director for African affairs in the office of the under defense secretary for policy

John A. Gans Jr., former speechwriter for the defense secretary

Sherri Goodman, former deputy under secretary of defense for environmental security

André Gudger, former deputy assistant defense secretary for manufacturing and industrial base policy

Robert Hale, former under secretary of defense and Defense Department comptroller

Michael V. Hayden, retired general in the U.S. Air Force and former director of the National Security Agency and CIA

Mark Hertling, retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe

Kathleen H. Hicks, former principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy

Deborah Lee James, former secretary of the U.S. Air Force

John P. Jumper, retired general of the U.S. Air Force and former chief of staff of the Air Force

Colin H. Kahl, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Middle East policy

Mara E. Karlin, former deputy assistant defense secretary for strategy and force development

Frank Kendall, former under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics

Susan Koch, former deputy assistant defense secretary for threat-reduction policy

Ken Krieg, former under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics

J. William Leonard, former deputy assistant defense secretary for security and information operations

Steven J. Lepper, retired major general of the U.S. Air Force

George Little, former Pentagon press secretary

William J. Lynn III, former deputy defense secretary

Ray Mabus, former secretary of the U.S. Navy and former governor of Mississippi

Kelly Magsamen, former principal deputy assistant defense secretary for Asian and Pacific security affairs

Carlos E. Martinez, retired brigadier general of the U.S. Air Force Reserve

Michael McCord, former under secretary of defense and Defense Department comptroller

Chris Mellon, former deputy assistant defense secretary for intelligence

James N. Miller, former under secretary of defense for policy

Edward T. Morehouse Jr., former principal deputy assistant defense secretary and former acting assistant defense secretary for operational energy plans and programs

Jamie Morin, former director of cost assessment and program evaluation at the Defense Department and former acting under secretary of the U.S. Air Force

Jennifer M. O’Connor, former general counsel of the Defense Department

Sean O’Keefe, former secretary of the U.S. Navy

Dave Oliver, former principal deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics

Robert B. Pirie, former under secretary of the U.S. Navy

John Plumb, former acting deputy assistant defense secretary for space policy

Eric Rosenbach, former assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and global security

Deborah Rosenblum, former acting deputy assistant defense secretary for counternarcotics

Todd Rosenblum, acting assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and Americas’ security affairs

Tommy Ross, former deputy assistant defense secretary for security cooperation

Henry J. Schweiter, former deputy assistant defense secretary

David B. Shear, former assistant defense secretary for Asian and Pacific security affairs

Amy E. Searight, former deputy assistant defense secretary for South and Southeast Asia

Vikram J. Singh, former deputy assistant defense secretary for South and Southeast Asia

Julianne Smith, former deputy national security adviser to the vice president and former principal director for Europe and NATO policy

Paula Thornhill, retired brigadier general of the Air Force and former principal director for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs

Jim Townsend, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Europe and NATO policy

Sandy Vershbow, former assistant defense secretary for international security affairs

Michael Vickers, former under secretary of defense for intelligence

Celeste Wallander, former deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia

Andrew Weber, former assistant defense secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs

William F. Wechsler, former deputy assistant defense secretary for special operations and combating terrorism

Doug Wilson, former assistant defense secretary for public affairs

Anne A. Witkowsky, former deputy assistant defense secretary for stability and humanitarian affairs

Douglas Wise, former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

Daniel P. Woodward, retired brigadier general of the U.S. Air Force

Margaret H. Woodward, retired major general of the U.S. Air Force

Carl Woog, former deputy assistant to the defense secretary for communications

Robert O. Work, former deputy defense secretary

Dov S. Zakheim, former under secretary of defense and Defense Department comptroller

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/05/89-former-defense-officials-military-must-never-be-used-violate-constitutional-rights/

[prometheanglory]

Leyna (twisted wonderland oc): Hey there everyone, My name is Leyna and I love to spend time with friends and planning parties *took out her party canon and pulled the sting and confetti came out of it* How would your twst wonderland cast get along with me? Thank you for your time Sensei *gives you a polite bow with a smile before handing you a plate of your favorite dessert* (The oc Leyna for twisted wonderland belongs to Kaiyahna Meeks).

guts: ah. yeah, thanks. er... have fun, leyna.

he’ll eat the dessert, but he’s not much of a party person. he’s pretty flattered, but just give him some time to get used to things. he’s an adaptable guy, but he’s also a little bit of a lone wolf type, just be persistent enough and he’ll be sure to welcome her into what he considers his ‘circle’! she seems like a very sweet girl, so there’s no doubt that he’d take care as to not hurt her feelings unintentionally, especially considering his rather... blunt and aloof demeanor sometimes. he'll come to the parties, mainly just to make sure things don’t go haywire. consider him something like the big-brother type friend!

lola: woah, seriously? i love you already! i seriously gotta show you around, i know the best places for this stuff, no kidding!

lola loves party people and she loves food — she’d definitely get along well with leyna! she’s happy to hang out with a fellow party girl! leyna seems like a very polite girl, so it'd definitely be interesting to see the two running about! lola will definitely encourage any antics that leyna may be planning, be it parties, surprise party cannons, and more! lola is incredibly extroverted and sociable, so expect for her to go hunting for leyna often when she wants to have fun!

nik: eek! h-hu, uh... t-thank you for the food, leyna...

he’s very skittish by nature, confetti party cannons are bound to startle him... and parties... and surprise deserts, everything startles him. give him some time to come out of his shell, he’ll come around! especially if she's offering him a treat, he’s very easy to convince sometimes. after that, it’ll be a very sweet friendship! she doesn’t seem to be too forceful or overbearing, so nik will definitely learn to like her, even if he can’t really go to parties.

penn: woah woah, don’t set that off inside? ah, wait— wait, sorry. thank you for the um... the food, i appreciate it a lot.

he’s quite shy and cautious — but he appreciates her gestures! he’s not much of a party person either, but he’s happy to chat with her if there’s not too many people around! it takes him some time to warm up to her, he's a little weary to his own concerns, such as, 'am i being bribed...?' you’re not, penn. that there is friendship! he’s a little too reclusive to go to parties or spend extensive amounts of time with other people, but he appreciated leyna’s friendliness very much!

sarge: oh, that was quite the display — hehe, i’m flattered... consider me thoroughly impressed, care to show me more?

he loves the attention and he loves the party, and he’s quite fond of the desert too! he’s been won over. unfortunately he’s still a flirt, so don’t expect to be safe from that. ‘i can show you a party trick’ don’t let him show you the party trick. nonetheless, he may be eccentric but he’s not a bad friend, he’ll definitely make sure she always has a fun time! he’s a bit of a bad influence, despite his politeness and his... princeliness. be careful with him! he likes to spend time with friends too, however he does have the tendency to vanish out of nowhere — just be patient, he’ll be back soon enough! he’s like a cat, really.

ulysses: ueh, what? oh. you. listen, i ain’t— what? cake...?! ....guh, fine.

he’s a jerk that needs... a lot of warming up to do. granted! leyna has definitey won him over some with the cake! afterwards (give or take, a few hours, days, or even weeks later) it’ll be a tsundere-extravaganza with him, he’s a fiercely loyal friend in his own special ulysses way, even if they didn’t get along spectacularly well at first. he doesn’t like parties but he'll come for leyna if she really wanted it. maybe. (he’ll be tsundere and huffy about it).

vinh: oh, thank you. that’s very thoughtful of you, miss leyna.

vinh is a very polite person, so these two would probably get along on sheer virtue of business like formality, it sounds impersonal, but that’s just how vinh is — but leyna's fondness of parties and her earnesty would most definitely earn her some warmth from vinh! she does appreciate the dessert, even if it seems like she’s just saying it out of formality. she most definitely would instinctively take leyna under her wing, vinh would be an incredibly reliable friend who would be happy to help her with planning any of her parties, even if she’s not really one for events! leyna’s politeness reminds vinh of some of her younger sisters, so she’d definitely also become a bit of a big sister friend for leyna!

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Spider-Man 2099 v3 #13-16 Thoughts

This was mostly great fun!

I must admit when hearing about this arc and even approaching my re-reading of it, I was not looking forward to it. Typically event crossovers derail the ongoing plot in a big way, and for PAD’s Spidey work and for his 2010s Spidey 2099 work in particular it was a problem.

Plus I despise both the original Civil War 2006 and as this arc was originally released was in the midst of despising Civil War II.

I don’t know if it was the fact that I’d forgotten most of the plot points, the fact that I binged the whole arc or if the tie-in nature of the story lowered my expectations but regardless, I wound up really enjoying this arc, much like the last one.

In fact comparisons to the last arc are very apt as they’re almost going in for the same thing.

It’s an adventure in the altered 2099 future depicting futuristic versions of characters and groups we’re (in theory) familiar with, utilizing a fair amount of older 2099 continuity.

The difference is that whilst the Sinister Six arc was more Spider-Man centric, this arc is more concerned with the wider 2099 universe.

Just off the top of my head this story features:*

·         Spider-Man 2099

·         Captain America 2099

·         Strange 2099

·         Hawkeye 2099

·         Black Widow 2099

·         Hercules

·         Hulk 2099

·         The X-Men2099

·         ‘The Power Pack’

·         Punisher 2099

·         Iron Fist 2099

·         Deadpool 2099

·         Daredevil 2099

·         Moon Knight 2099

·         Sub-Mariner 2099

·         Ghost Rider 2099

·         Nik Fury, granddaughter of the original Nick Fury

·         And Ravage 2099 (although he’s an original character debuting in the 2099 line anyway)

 Now featuring this many characters is a double edged sword, much like the last arc.

On the one hand a lot of them have little development, little substance to them. They show up with cool looks, cool abilities and the novelty factor of seeing futuristic versions of familiar characters.

Some of them are pre-established people too, like Daredevil 2099 and Moon Knight 2099. So there is fanservice to be found there, but if you really liked those characters you didn’t get that much out of seeing them briefly back in action.

On the other hand I think considering this was a mere four issues and with this many characters, giving them all depth and distinction is difficult. More importantly I think it would detract from the fact that this is ultimately Spider-Man’s book. It’s about him and his ‘world’, of which these figures are definitely a part of, but also definitely not the point.

The fact is PAD does the best he can with what he has. More than this, I think it’s an example of PAD making the lemonade out of lemons and making the tie-in nature of the issues work for him  as opposed to making his series work for the tie-ins.

For starters he uses Ulysses lightly but effectively. He gets the ball rolling on the plot and beyond that has little involvement. In fact the entire story has little to do directly with the events of Civil War II, which is a plus given how shite the crossover is.

Rather PAD uses the tie-ins as an excuse to essentially present his own story with the general gist of Civil War, which you could say is true of every 2099 spin on the classic characters.

So in practice this arc is less a Civil War II tie-in and more Civil War 2099. It actually has more in common with the original 2006 Civil War story except you know, it isn’t dogshit.

There is an anti-superhuman legal act in force. Superhumans work directly for the government to round up their fellows. Those opposed to the law fight back. Hell Skrulls are even the root of the problem, which was initially the implication during Civil War 2006 and Secret Invasion.

PAD also demonstrates how massive crossovers and events like this should ideally be played. If I were being blunt, there isn’t much substance to this, there isn’t much character exploration.

With so many characters who draw from so many genres that simply don’t really go together (Greek myth side by side with sci-fi monsters, arcane magic and crime noir), going for something simple, superficial and yet fun (with at best a singular central character who shoulders whatever substance there is to be found) is the most logical approach to such events.

It’s why Infinity Gauntlet and Secret Wars 1984 are still fun reads decades later but hot trash like Civil War II has been forgotten about. The former know they’re trying to have fun and at best place one or two characters as the heart of the stories, the latter try to include everyone, be about everyone, and also strive for substance in stories that can’t support that.

Getting back to the specific heroes vs. heroes nature of the series, if there is one major failing in the set up its that the two sides don’t feel evenly matched.

The rebel superhumans have heavy hitters like Hercules, Cerebra, Hulk, Sub-Mariner and Strange, whilst the government forces...well, don’t have anyone in the same league. They’re also outnumbered by the rebels.

The pro-government side is also a clever use of subversion as they are comprised of the Punisher, the X-men and the Power Pack. Now I know little of the Power Pack so I did feel a little lost with them, and know equally little about the X-men 2099. But what little I do know makes their choice of sides unexpected but toally logical. The reasons given are that mutants were deemed not responsible for their powers as they were born with them and thus granted amnesty from the anti-super human laws provided they work for the government. Essentially mutants were given their best chance for rights and protection from persecution BY discriminatory laws. Ironic, but as the comic points out, mutants accepting this deal makes sense given their history.

Now we need to talk about Jameson and the Skrulls.

On the one hand it was a good twist. It had sufficient set up and you genuinely didn’t see it coming. It also made for neat and effective explanations of Jameson and Power Pack’s surviving into the distant future along with their questionable histories (like marrying Liz Allan or JJJ running Alchemax).

But I must admit, I was a little bummed by the Skrull reveal as I found the prospect of Jameson as the actual villain behind this fascinating. I’ve noticed that Peter David’s Spider-Man work, whilst not painting Jameson as a villain per se, has painted him often less flatteringly than he’s usually been played since the 1980s. In the 1960s-1970s, Jameson was one step away from practically being a super villain, his bufoonishness often offset his more unethical practices in the eyes of readers.

In PAD’s stories he still does unethical stuff and so the idea he could go down a road where he’s essentially happy to persecute super humans is frighteningly believable.

The Skrull reveal undermined this, and undermined the great twist halfway through the story that Jameson was behind everything. I thought it was Tyler Stone so the subversion really worked!

It also wrapped things up a little too neatly, in the sense that the heroes could get along just fine because the heroes on the opposite side were fake anyway. Maybe that was a subtle dig at the original Civil War, that they should’ve done something like this instead of commit to the schism in the superhuman community. But at the same time since we’re dealing with a version of the Marvel Universe that doesn’t need to last long term that’s kind of unnecessary.

One small criticism I have, and this is a nitpick. I felt that the part where Spidey was holding Punisher hostage before the issue ends wa not properly resolved at the start of the next one. The X-men have simply retreated, the heroes have gone back to their bases. It’s like if you smashcut in the middle of a hostage situation to the aftermath when everything is fine.

Over all a great way to do a tie-in and deliver a fun time for old time 2099 fans. I’m not one of them and even i had fun with this.

 *Note, whenever I don’t put ‘2099’ after a character’s name it means we’re dealing with, at least supposedly, an older version of the 616 characters, rather than new characters adopting their mantles.

[nomadicism]

Be careful about having high expectations for Gen Lock. The series is created by Rooster Teeth Productions, who tend be to hit and miss. They created great series like Camp Camp, but they also created RWBY, which has a rep for having terrible writing in the later seasons. Characters are unlikable or Mary Sues; the plot is poorly structured and it made a lot of questionable choices. At this point, it could be either or. Only time will tell if it's the next Camp Camp or RWBY.

and

“I would be careful about having high expectations for Gen Lock if I were you. Gen Lock is created by Roaster Teeth Productions, who are also the creators of RWBY. That series went down hill after the 3rd season. Granted some of it had to do with the creator dying, but the writing dipped in quality. After watching the first and second ep, it reminds me a lot of VLD, including the humour. Reviewers said it didn’t dive into character motivation or any of the world building by the 5 ep point.”

Hi Anon, thank you for the Asks!

Given the wording of both of these, I assume they are both from you.

I’m going to try to reign in my salt here, but you happened to hit more than a few buttons with your Ask. Gonna keep this as brief as I can to focus on the core of my answer. I promise I’m not grumpy.

The opening sentence in both of these Asks does not come across well. I can give the benefit of the doubt b/c this is the Internet, but uh…yeah.

RWBY continues to enjoy great popularity and comes up frequently on my dash. I’ve never seen it, it’s definitely not my thing, but it’s still selling to someone, and my VLD mutuals that love it are still talking it up so I’m glad that they have another show to entertain them. I see merch everywhere, it’s got a Japanese dub and a manga adaptation and that’s pretty damn good for a web cartoon that came out of the U.S. Must not be that terrible as whole to merit all of that.

“Mary Sue” is a phrase that means absolutely nothing because everyone overuses it to mean any number of things about competent and powerful female characters, and most of them are incredibly subjective, and rarely ever applied to male characters who meet the same kinds of subjective goal-post shifting criteria.

Perhaps gen:LOCK will simply be the “first gen:LOCK” and not the “next anything.”

I didn’t find the humor in gen:LOCK to be like VLD at all.

Reviewers can eat my asshole.

And on that note:

Not every story benefits from a deep dive, or even a superficial exploration of character motivation or world-building.

Such things are very genre and plot dependent, and the perception of such is subjective.

Some of the greatest short stories, or even long-form novels don’t even bother with much of either if they are not necessary to advance the plot. Not everything needs to be Lord of the Rings or Ulysses.

Who had better “character motivation”, Frodo Baggins from the LotR trilogy or Ripely from Alien? What would “better” even mean for either of those genres? LotR and Alien are worlds apart, and yet, at the end of the day, the protagonists are fighting for survival against an unspeakable horror. The “journey” of their survival differs greatly, and those journeys are the point, the character motivations are really minimal and don’t require a lot of exploration.

Frodo’s character motivation can be summed up as: “save the fucking Shire by destroying a cursed evil ring” and a little bit of “Uncle Bilbo ruined me for the simple Hobbit life with his crazy stories.” While Ripley’s motivation is: “kill the xenomorphs before they kill me and my cat.” That’s it. Don’t even need in-character exposition or a flashback to describe Ripley’s. The genre hands it to you on a blood-soaked silver platter.

I don’t know what those reviewers were watching but the “character motivation” of the main characters that I saw in the pilot episode alone was pretty fucking obvious: HOLD THE LINE in a dystopian world were “freedom” hangs by a thread. They are trying to survive. That’s all it needs to be.

I don’t care why they joined the Vanguard. I have plenty of friends and family within various armed forces and their motivations range from complex to simple, but most of them are a variation on “I want to serve my country and my people.” That’s it, and that’s okay.

Additionally, Julian Chase’s backstory and motivation was made clear in the first 10 minutes through the positioning of him before the wall with his dead father’s memorial flag, and the conversation between the three most important people in his life: mother, sister, and fellow comrade-soldier/girlfriend (Miranda, great symbolism by the way in that name).

That pilot episode is Julian’s “super hero/science fiction origin story”. His Big Damn Hero moment is fueled by his “character motivation” to protect his loved ones, and inspired by the verses from his dead hero father’s favorite song: “Let the Good Times Roll.”

Any hyper-critical reviewer that missed that is full of shit.

And those verses?

“You only live once / But when you’re dead you’re gone / So let the good times roll”

That was clever and poignant foreshadowing, b/c GENRE. It also wasn’t super deep…and it didn’t have to be. It only needed to connect the threads of Julian’s introduction, who he is, something special that he shares with his mother, father, and girlfriend, and what his role will be in the show, and the nature of his being from here on out.

At the bare minimum, someone in the writers’ room is aware (even if only in passing) of the some of the most enduring questions that science-fiction (especially cyberpunk) has asked and navel-gazed over regarding the role of technology in extending human life, and what exactly defines “life” when one has left the meat-space. I’m not expecting gen:LOCK to be an exploration into the ethics and details of transhumanism/post-humanism/singularity philosophies and futurist dreams for humanity. It doesn’t have to be. They’ve already touched on the concepts and anyone who loves that sort of thing will notice.

My expectations for gen:LOCK are that—at worst—it will be as entertaining and to-the-point as the GI Joe cartoon in the 80s. I enjoyed GI Joe (pro-military propaganda aside), it was a regular thing for me to make the effort to watch. I didn’t love it like I did The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, or Robotech, or Voltron DotU, or Silverhawks, or Jem and the Holograms, but it was still fun and entertaining and it still is.

GI Joe didn’t waste time with a full exploration of Cobra Commander’s backstory or his motivations, nor did it do so with most of the Joes. The basics were all that was needed. GI Joe wasn’t about complexity and it didn’t need to be in order to tell an entertaining story while selling toys. Yes, sometimes you’d get some really interesting episodes that added dimension in between the more obvious filler. Shit, it took like 50+ episodes to get to a Destro-focused episode. I certainly wasn’t watching GI Joe for character motivations and world-building. I was watching because nearly every character had an interesting design and they all did unique things, and Cobra Commander was hilarious. I watched to see what they would come up with next.

Did I really need a compelling story behind Zartan, Zandar, and Zarana? Nope. They were fun villains that gave the heroes hell and spoke with shitty Australian accents. In the 80s, the Aussie accent was all the rage for edgy characters (oh Stingray…).

Do people remember anything about Scarlett other than she was the hot redhead?

I loved Scarlett, she was my She-Ra, and one of the main reasons why I watched GI Joe. But only the most hardcore GI Joe fans remember her stats and abilities. She was actually one of the most highly qualified and skilled Joes. From Scarlett’s Wikipedia article:

“Her primary specialty for the team is counter intelligence. Scarlett is additionally skilled in martial arts and acrobatics. She started training at age 9 with her father and three brothers, who were all instructors, and she earned her first black belt at age 15. Scarlett also graduated summa cum laude, and passed her Bar Exams to practice law, before moving into the military. She graduated from Advanced Infantry Training and Ranger School, and received special education in Covert Ops School, Marine Sniper School, Special Air Service School, and Marine Tae Kwon Do Symposium. Although she is as adept with standard weapons as any of her comrades, her weapon of choice is the XK-1 power crossbow, which fires various bolts with specialized functions. Scarlett is also a qualified expert with the M-14, M-16, M1911A1 Auto Pistol, M79 grenade launcher, M-3A1, M-700 Remington sniper rifle, MAC-10, throwing stars, garotte and KA-BAR (Combat Knife)”

Wow. Beautiful and striking appearance. High intelligence. Great martial prowess. Top shelf military training.What a goddamned Mary Sue.

So, if you’re still with me Anon, my point is that if gen:LOCK can be a “good enough” futuristic-cyberpunk-ish version of GI Joe that gives me fun and interesting-but-not-complex characters in command of infantry mechs, configurable jets, and a color coordinated team of save-the-day-big-damn-hero-style mecha who fight against a sinister force that has weaponized nanotech and colossal mechas that look like War of the Worlds meets Eldritch Horrors then I’ll be pretty fucking happy with it. The bar ain’t exactly high here.

[taraross-1787]

This Day in History: Future First Lady Julia Dent Grant is born

On this day in 1826, future First Lady Julia Dent Grant is born. Her love story with Ulysses S. Grant is not well known, but “they shared one of the great, romantic, beautiful loves of all American history,” historian Bruce Catton concludes.

Julia met Ulysses just as she was finishing boarding school. Her older brother was then at West Point, and he wanted his little sister to meet his roommate. Ulysses, he said, was “pure gold.”

The two hit it off immediately, riding horses and reading poetry together. When Julia’s pet canary died, Ulysses made a small yellow coffin and got his fellow officers to help with a small funeral.

Clearly, Ulysses was smitten. Before leaving to serve with the Army, he gave Julia his West Point ring and declared his love. For her part, Julia was more hesitant. She was young—only 18—and not ready to be married. But she consented to a secret engagement.

Ulysses was a faithful correspondent during these years, pouring out his love on paper. “When I lay down I think of Julia until I fall asleep hoping that before I wake I may see her in my dreams,” he wrote.

Julia was older and more certain of herself when Ulysses finally returned in 1848. They got married—but they had to do it without his family. The older Grants didn’t approve of Julia’s slave-owning parents..

How did things change during the Civil War? The story concludes at the link in the comments.

[blackfreethinkers]

Robert bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

The pogrom in Pittsburgh, occurring just days before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, seemed fundamentally un-American to many. Sessions’s denunciation spoke to the reality that most Jews have found a welcome home in the United States. His message also echoed what has become an insistent refrain in the Donald Trump era. Americans want to believe that the surge in white-supremacist violence and recruitment—the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the hate crimes whose perpetrators invoke the president’s name as a battle cry—has no roots in U.S. soil, that it is racist zealotry with a foreign pedigree and marginal allure.

The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated. Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

Madison grant came from old money. Born in Manhattan seven months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, he attended Yale and then Columbia Law School. He was an outdoorsman and a conservationist, knowledgeable about wildlife and interested in the dangers of extinction, expertise that he soon became intent on applying to humanity. When he opened a law practice on Wall Street in the early 1890s, the wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was nearing its height. “As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian bootblacks, and Jewish carp vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government,” Spiro writes in his biography.

Jews troubled Grant the most. “The man of the old stock,” he later wrote in The Passing of the Great Race, is being “driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.” But as the title of his 1916 work indicated, Grant’s fear of dispossession ran wide and deep:

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race. Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

Grant blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. But it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers, subscribing to a belief that has proved durable. The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.” In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging. He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness. Grant gleefully challenged foundational ideas:

We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo. His thesis found eager converts among the American elite, thanks in no small part to his extensive social connections. The New York Times and The Nation were among the many media outlets that echoed Grant’s reasoning. Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.” In a major speech in Alabama in 1921, President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”

Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.

The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

Endorsing Grant’s idea that true Americans are of Nordic stock, Coolidge also took up his idea that intermarriage between whites of different “races,” not just between whites and nonwhites, degrades that stock.

Perhaps the most important of Grant’s elite admirers were to be found among members of Congress. Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.

A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Grant found a congressional ally and champion in Albert Johnson, a Republican representative from Washington. A nativist and union buster, he contacted Grant after reading The Passing of the Great Race. The duo embarked on an ambitious restrictionist agenda.

As the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants. When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Johnson found a patrician ally in Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate. A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)

Grant’s slippery pseudoscience also met with significant resistance. The anthropologist Franz Boas, himself of German Jewish descent, led the way in poking holes in Grantian notions of Nordic superiority, writing in The New Republic in 1917 that “the supposed scientific data on which the author’s conclusions are based are dogmatic assumptions which cannot endure criticism.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.

As the Immigration Act of 1924 neared passage, some in the restrictionist camp played up Grant’s signature Nordic theme more stridently than others. Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.” Johnson was prepared to be coy in the face of opposition from other legislators—mostly those from districts with large numbers of non-northern European immigrants—who railed against the Nordic-race doctrine. “The fact that it is camouflaged in a maze of statistics,” protested Representative Meyer Jacobstein, a Democrat from New York, “will not protect this Nation from the evil consequences of such an unscientific, un-American, and wicked philosophy.”

“A fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” exists between the races, President Harding publicly declared. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.” On the House floor in April 1924, Johnson cagily—but only temporarily—distanced himself from Grant. “As regards the charge … that this committee has started out deliberately to establish a blond race … let me say that such a charge is all in your eye. Your committee is not the author of any of these books on the so-called Nordic race,” he declared. “I insist, my friends, there is neither malice nor hatred in this bill.”

Once passage of the act was assured, however, motives no longer needed disguising. Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”

“It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission.

In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on—as one of Grant’s key accomplices was proud to acknowledge. According to Spiro, Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”

He wasn’t, but some of the American eugenicists whose work helped pave the way for the racist immigration laws of the 1920s received recognition in Germany. The Nazis gave Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who had written the introduction to The Passing of the Great Race, received one from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in 1934. Leon Whitney, another of Grant’s fellow travelers, evidently received a personal thank-you letter from Hitler after sending the führer a copy of his 1934 book, The Case for Sterilization. In 1939, even after World War II began, Spiro writes, Lothrop Stoddard, whom President Harding had praised in his 1921 diatribe against race-mixing, visited Nazi Germany and later wrote that the Third Reich was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”

The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.” At the same time, Heinrich Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.

Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that

the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.

Grant’s final project, Spiro writes, was an effort to organize a hunting expedition with Hermann Goering, the commander in chief of the Nazi air force who went on to become Hitler’s chosen successor. Grant died in May 1937, before the outing was to take place. A year and a half later, Kristallnacht signaled the official beginning of the Holocaust.

America has always grappled with, in the words of the immigration historian John Higham, two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.

People of both political persuasions like to tell a too-simple story about the course of this battle: World War II showed Americans the evil of racism, which was vanquished in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act brought nonwhites into the American polity for good. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 forever banished the racial definition of American identity embodied in the 1924 immigration bill, forged by Johnson and Reed in their crusade to save Nordic Americans from “race suicide.”

The truth is that the rivalry never ended, and Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy. As the Columbia historian Ira Katznelson writes in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.

“It was America that taught us that a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Hitler told The New York Times. The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it. Their valor helped defeat first the Nazis, and then the American laws that the Nazis had so admired. What the Nazis saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength, and it destroyed them.

Yet historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.

The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.

In the corridors of American power, Grant’s legacy is evident. Jeff Sessions heartily praised the 1924 immigration law during an interview with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chief. Bannon regularly invokes what has become a cult text among white nationalists, the 1973 dystopian French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which the “white world” is annihilated by mass immigration. Stephen Miller, a former Senate aide to Sessions and now among the president’s top policy advisers, spent years warning from his perch in Sessions’s office that immigration from Muslim countries was a greater threat than immigration from European countries. The president’s stated preference for Scandinavian immigrants over those from Latin America or Africa, and his expressed disdain for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, are Grantism paraphrased.

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.

[deadpresidents]

"Well, I hardly know what to think of him. He's the quietest little fellow you ever saw...He makes the least fuss of any man you ever saw. I believe two or three times he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. It's about so all around. The only evidence that you have that he's in any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is, things move!"

-- President Abraham Lincoln, in response to William Stoddard's question about what he thought of General Ulysses S. Grant

[trevaleyn]

A Callout/Open Letter to an Abuser and the Abused

This is a long post. Please be patient with it. To start, I am in no way trying to demonize or slander any of the mentioned parties. I am trying to be entirely and thoroughly honest and to hold all parties accountable for their actions and create a desire for change and more personal accountability across the server. I will be identifying patterns of abuse in a specific player and hopefully he will respond accordingly and embrace this as an opportunity to make some positive changes. At its most basic, this is a statement about a player and several of his fellow guild members who crossed the line.

As my close roleplay friends on Wyrmrest Accord have noticed, I have been absent from the server for some time now. While I have several reasons (an illness in the family, work getting more intense, dedicating more time to other passions) I would like to mention one of the chief reasons I’ve been absent from the server: The House of Crows. Specifically, Isato also known as Demetrius Deveraux. Now I know if you’ve read this far based on your personal interactions, you might already be ready to defend him and discount what I am going to say, and I know some of you have experienced exactly what I am revealing in this letter.This post isn’t to start a flame war, this isn’t one butthurt roleplayer crying to the community because things didn’t go his way. I would ask of you, the reader, to withhold your judgement until you have read this whole post. If after you’ve heard me out you still feel the same way, at least you heard me out, that’s all I can ask for.

Anyway.

I’m going to start by laying out patterns of abuse. I will be using a very famous and well renowned book titled, “Why Does He Do That?” written by Lundy Bancroft. I highly recommend reading it, as it helped me identify abusive behaviors both in others and in myself and fight to correct them. Below is an excerpt from the book.

“The qualities that make up an abusive man are like the ingredients in a recipe: The basics are always present, but the relative amounts vary greatly. One man may be so severely controlling that his partner can’t make a move without checking with him first, and yet, oddly, he contributes substantially to the domestic work and child care. Another man may allow his partner to come and go as she pleases, even accepting her friendships with men, but there is hell to pay if she fails to wait on him hand and foot, or if she makes the mistake of asking him to clean up after himself... Each woman who is involved with an abusive or controlling man has to deal with his unique blend of tactics and attitudes, his particular rhythm of good times and bad times, and his specific way of presenting himself to the outside world. No one should ever tell an abused woman, “I know just what you’re going through,” because the experience of each woman is different.

Viewed from another angle, however, abuse doesn’t vary that much. One man uses a little more of one ingredient and a little less of the other, but the overall flavor of the mistreatment has core similarities: assaults on the woman’s self-esteem, controlling behavior, undermining her independence, disrespect. Each abused woman has times of feeling that a riptide is dragging her under the sea, and she struggles for air. Confusion has been part of the experience of almost every one of the hundreds of abused women I have spoken with.” (Lundy 220-222)

This story starts well before my introduction into it. I won’t make any claims of anything I don’t know or don’t have receipts for or was not privy to in person myself. I will also add that a lot of this stuff happened 2+ years ago for me, but some of it is still currently on-going. For me that started when I met one of my good friends on the server, Pleo. We met through an ongoing plot line where our character’s clashed and then interacted, she was in the guild at the time and I was not. Now through several roleplay sessions we got it in our heads that we would continue to roleplay, and that my character Ulysses, since he was already locked in street brawls and conflict with the House of Crows as a whole, would make an excellent heel to this evil/crime themed guild. This would make it easy to write some more internal stories with an in-house heel and make for much easier dialogue and communication, or so we thought. I had a talk with the guild master Isato in voice chat that was meant to set clear goals, expectations, and boundaries of what we were comfortable roleplaying. After this talk I joined the guild with great enthusiasm and confidence.

Unfortunately, that confidence was short-lived. In the coming weeks and months, plots that had been thoroughly discussed among myself, Pleo, Isato, and other guild members were entirely ignored, altered, or outright stolen by Isato. The chief example I will use is a plot-line I wished to write that was about my character possessing a power ring. The gist was my character was going to generate a power ring that was a new source of energy outside of any currently existing in the world that would augment his current strengths. This would provide both an explanation as to how one man was able to consistently fight an entire guild and also a goal for those within the guild to strive for; fighting my character and taking the ring for themselves. Alternatively, they had the option to side with my character and be granted a small taste of power.

That is not how the story went. Almost immediately, my character was isolated and my chief connection, Pleo, was barred from events that involved my character. Any roleplay battles were always slated to end in the defeat of my character despite our previous agreements. This would cause me to get quite upset--I’m all for organic and spontaneous roleplay, but when a plan is created with a promise of a storyline, then altered, then it’s disingenuous to a person’s roleplay partners and in this case the guild as a whole.

I was isolated within the guild. Whether it was intentionally done or otherwise, that simply is what happened. I would plan events with Isato he would say “Talk to me later and we’ll set it up”. A week would go by. I would ask again. Get the same response. This went on for over a month on two separate occasions, despite the careful planning of myself and Pleo, as well as others within the guild. Many events that members tried to create would be promised to be addressed then ignored. In creating a backlog of events, this created an atmosphere of craving Isato’s approval. When your “turn for interaction” came (for lack of a better term), you took it because the player had been wanting to do this event so badly, no matter how much Isato interfered, altered, or redirected the event. This is the first controlling and manipulative behavior I saw that really stuck out to me, and it wasn’t just happening to me, it was happening to many of my fellow guild members.

Basically to sum up the first pattern in a nutshell, it’s this: guild members craving events and roleplay are isolated and made to wait, creating an atmosphere of poor communication generating confusion and desperation for said roleplay event. This creates leverage in playing the event how the manipulator wants said event to go.

In my case, this abusive pattern was used to take my storyline and redirect it for Isato’s personal use, despite the hours of careful planning and writing that I had done for it, something I consider to be tantamount to plagiarism or theft of someone else's storyline, and I know I’m not the only person who experienced this within the guild.

The second incident was more blatant; an outright infringement of boundaries previously set.

Fast forward to a month after the first event. I was quite livid that my storyline had been usurped and I was trying to work with this guild and Isato to redirect things In a healthy direction. This would come in the form of my character attacking the guild’s established fronts and headquarters. This was planned with Isato and other members in chat, and after a few revisions a conclusion was agreed upon. However, before this plot could be enacted, a guild meeting was held. The purpose of this meeting was to establish that as a villain guild, House of Crows would be adopting the practices of slavery again. Naturally my character’s reaction was less than favorable, but let's go back to those boundaries set.

I will roleplay most things, provided the other parties roleplaying them are comfortable with it, but two thing I won’t roleplay are rape and the murder of someone's character. Now you can roleplay whatever you like so long as it’s consensual in my book, however it needs to be just that. I’ll remind the reader that at the beginning of all of this before I joined the guild there was a voice chat with Isato as well as several other guild members. Among other things discussed were the boundaries of what I would be okay with happening to my character, and I said, something along the lines of, “You can do whatever you want, so long as you don’t kill my character or rape my character. I can write bloody torture scenes or mindfuckery all you like.”

Here I was, two, maybe three months in, and one of two guidelines set was being broken at this event, as during it they tried to humiliate my character by turning him from male to female with the intent to have him be raped and become a sex slave for other guild members. Not. Cool. You can see how this would be classified as undermining my independence, disrespectful, and controlling behavior.

Another instance of abuse given to me was by an ex-officer of the guild who would prefer to remain nameless, I’ll refer to them as Lee. Lee was an officer within the House of Crows who decided to leave the guild along with a few other friends, for character development reasons. This split was meant to be amicable. It was agreed upon between Lee, their friends, and Isato through several chats that they would phase out of the guild over the course of two weeks. Within twenty four hours after this was decided, Isato called a guild meeting to publicly announce that they were leaving the guild and proceeded to force them out before they were ready. This caught Lee and their friends by surprise as the time frame they had established was not observed, nor was the split remaining amicable as planned. It robbed these leaving members the chance to continue roleplay with members still within the guild after the split. By outing them in this manner, Isato had once again undermined these players’ independence and corrupted their public image to serve himself. These players had formed their own guild and were trying to move on in spite of these events and would still regularly interact with the House of Crows. that changed when a member of House of Crows spied on them under the guise of friendship, entering their voice chats and relaying information back to the House of Crows who then used this information against them. You can see how this behavior is a clear breach of respect and trust. This breach went deeper and came to a head when Lee was called out as being abusive to one of her long time roleplay friends:

http://wyrmrestaccordsecrets.tumblr.com/post/150294095492/foxes-who-think-they-are-wolves-are-talking

The link above is a WRA secrets post made by a House of Crows member alluding to said abuse, however I have since spoken to both parties, Lee and their friend, who assured me this was a fabrication created by the House of Crows to smear this ex-officer publicly and cause further rifts to form. You can see how this is is doubly problematic as this sort of behavior is not only an attempt to corrupt someone else's public image but also a blatant lie and manipulation tactic generating the kind of confusion Lundy Bancroft wrote about.

Finally, more widely known instance of abuse (though I think has some confusion around it) involves someone who wants to remain anonymous. For my purposes, I will refer to her as “Debbie”. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the House of Crows, they are an 18+/adult themed guild. Debbie is not 18. Debbie explained to me that during her tenure within the House of Crows, it was known among most members that she was a minor. The best case scenario is negligence on Isato’s part and the worst case scenario is his feigned ignorance of Debbie’s age. The House of Crows and its guildmaster either knowingly permitted a minor to join their guild and participate in adult content, some of which went beyond established boundaries, or did not know at first and refused to take responsibility after the fact. I know anyone can go on the internet and see just about anything, but when you set a standard you need to keep it.

(CW: Violence, nudity)  http://bubblesteaart.tumblr.com/post/158413069096

The link above is from an event staged by the House of Crows in Stormwind. Debbie’s character was beaten, stripped naked, paraded through the streets, tied to a cross and burned alive. Gruesome stuff. However, the devil lies in the details; Debbie wasn’t playing her character. The avatar you see in the images in the link above are not Debbie’s character, nor was the art featured commissioned by her (it was actually commissioned by someone else within the guild behind her back). Debbie originally was participating in the event. She voiced her disapproval when her character was beaten in the House of Crows’ RP hub, stating, “Do whatever you want, I’m done.” Whatever followed, she had not consented to. She then proceeded to log off, logically assuming that would be the end of it, as I think most people would.

However, rather than speak to Debbie once she had cooled off, the participating guild members created a faux simile of her character and proceeded to strip her naked, parade her through the streets, and burn her alive with the expectation that Debbie as a player would be totally accepting of this. Now I don’t know about you, but when someone tries to kill off my character without me even being present for it I would reject that notion and so did Debbie.

So, with no resolution in sight, Debbie decided to leave the House of Crows guild, which resulted in her harassment. This harassment escalated so much that Debbie felt there was no other recourse but to leave the server entirely. Even that didn’t end all of the harassment she received. This is a complete refusal to acknowledge someone's independence and agency over their own story and character. It’s putting his own desires for an outcome to a story that is supposed to be a collaborative effort by all parties involved.

Given these three detailed examples of abuse and the seven other unwritten stories I heard, I felt the need to address this to hopefully inspire a positive change towards accountability and observing consent. I would much prefer no one else have to go through this and I would much prefer the perpetrators see their errors and learn from them, but this won’t happen unless we all hold the parties involved accountable for their actions. I know some of you might discount or question the validity of these accounts, and to those of you who do, I implore you to investigate further. If any errors or inaccuracies are found, please detail them to me.

Out of nine people I spoke with, ten including myself, only two other people allowed me to use their stories, provided I protect their identities. So of 10 people who experienced this behavior, 3 of us felt comfortable enough to speak out, the rest of these people were too afraid to speak out due to fear of harassment. Two of these other eight were so badly harassed that they left the server and have not returned since. Three people speaking up out of 10 is 30 percent. If 70 percent of people you have previously interacted with are so fearful of retaliation from you, that speaks volumes to the kind of person that you are and the behavior you exhibit.

Yeah, we all pay our 15 dollars a month but this doesn’t entitle us to overstep our bounds in favor of our own desires. There came a point when their in-character behaviors bled into their out-of-character actions, and this crossed the line. Behind every computer, behind every character, there is a real person with the right to the same respects we give ourselves. With that said, I will take a moment to reiterate that this is not a call to harass, slander, or otherwise do things of ill intent or nature to the House of Crows members. We can only precipitate change when we as a community hold ourselves accountable and that means doing the right thing. It’s okay to stick up for yourself and  call out the toxic and abusive behaviors you see in others, it’s not okay to repeat them. Uphold the standards you set for yourself and uphold the standards you agree upon with others. The only person’s behavior that you can control is your own, when we lift ourselves up we lift everyone up. I can’t tell you how to deal with toxic behavior but moving forward, we all must deal with this with respect and decorum. Otherwise, we’re not any better than those we condemn.

[smugpuffin]

Ok, but the assassination of President Garfield is one of the least talked about, but strangest assassinations of all time.

The man who assassinated Garfield was Charles Guiteau, and boy was he a strange fellow.

First, he was an absolute raving narcissist. He thought himself the smartest man in the room despite not being much of the sort. He failed all his entrance exams and dropped out of the one program he did get into before completing it.

Then he joined a utopian religious community called the Oneida community. Like many cult like religions, the community used shame to keep people in line. They would viciously attack anyone for any little flaw in an attempt to keep everyone living as sin free as possible.

Why Charles, a raving narcissist, joined a community where his every little imperfection would be called out and mocked is anyone's guess. Now, the viciousness was not just customary for Charles. They went to calling him Charles Gitout to express how much they did not want him in their community.

You may be wondering, how did a weird religious narcissist end up assassinating the president of the United States? Well, Charles saw himself as quite the politician you see. Here is a direct quote from his wiki page:

"He supported Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican and Democratic candidate for president against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant. Guiteau prepared a disorganized speech in support of Greeley, which he delivered once. Greeley was badly defeated, but during the campaign Guiteau became convinced that if Greeley won, he would appoint Guiteau as Minister to Chile."

After this Charles went onto support the would be President Garfield. He wrote yet another speech! Which was delivered "at most twice" then passed out as a print copy at the 1880 RNC.

Once Garfield became president, Charles was convinced that his nonsensical speech was responsible for his success and demanded he be appointed consulship in Vienna, before deciding he'd like Paris better.

He wrote letter, after letter, after letter to the President, Vice President and Secretary of State about this consulship. When he cornered the Secretary of State in person he snapped at Charles, "Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live!" After that he decided to assassinate the President.

He went out and bought a pistol with a borrowed $15. He had the choice between a wood or ivory grip, and he chose ivory because he thought it would look better in a museum.

On July 2, 1881 he shot Garfield at a train station. Garfield died 11 weeks later after multiple infections. Charles later tried to claim it was malpractice that killed him by saying, "the doctors killed Garfield. I just shot him."

He was sentenced to death and while in prison wrote a long poem about God telling him to do it and making aligations about different officials wants to being different in wars. It largely made little sense.

He was going to read the poem as his final statement at his execution.

He requested a full orchestra be there to score the piece.

They denied that request.

There's so much other weird stuff about him. Thats just the basics. Why we never learned about him ill never understand.

garfield be like

[cappucino-commie]

In celebration of St. Patrick’s day...

  Let’s talk about St. Patrick's Battalion! They’re an oft forgotten piece of American history. 

   First, some background. In 1845, a president you may or may not remember from history class, James K. Polk approached the Mexican congress with an offer to buy all Mexican land north of the modern day border. Wait- they had land north of the modern border? Yea, before the Mexican-American war, the United States looked like this: 

  Yea, so if you didn’t know, quite a bit of the US’s current land used to belong to Mexico. So how did we get it? The answer is Polk. When he was turned down by the Mexican congress, he ordered General Zachary Taylor to march troops into the disputed land and basically pester the Mexican forces until they fired on US troops. Which, of course, happened (known as the Thornton Affair).

   Polk’s Tonkin-Bay-esque motive secured, he pushed a massive invasion down through Mexico towards the capital.  It was a long and bloody campaign that drew sharp criticism by US politicians due to heavy soldier casualties (more due to Gonorrhea & other such things than anything else). The war took place between 1846 and 1848, and ended with the US annexation of everything down to the modern day border. 

  Now, if you paid attention in history class, you’ll know that in the period from 1846-1848, something else was happening- the Great Irish Potato Famine (which had surprisingly little to do with potatoes, but that’s another post). So oodles of Irish immigrants were coming to the US to escape starvation and support their families. Some of them, to secure a stable existence, signed up for the army.  

   So our story begins with a man named John Riley (original spelling Seán Ó Raghailligh), who immigrated to the US before the war and joined the army. When he caught wind of the nature of the war, he deserted and joined the Mexican side- refusing to fight a rich man’s war for a country that hated Irish people. He became a rallying figure for several hundred immigrant defectors from the US army (not all of them Irish- some accounts say that a significant portion of his battalion consisted of escaped slaves from the South who wanted freedom in Mexico). 

  Riley, and St. Patrick’s Battalion fought in 5 major battles, and were considered extremely strategically important, as they served as the only Mexican countermeasure to US horse artillery. In Churubusco, their last battle (and the last major battle of the war), General Ulysses S. Grant said that the battle was “the severest fought in the valley of Mexico.”. 

   After Churubusco, the San Patricios were captured, and court martialed as US defectors. In total, 50 were exectued, in the largest mass execution in US history (the conclusion of the Dakota War of 1862 saw the largest amount of hangings in a single event, but the San Patricios are still considered the largest mass execution). 20 were executed before the final conquest of Mexico City, and 30 were hung during the battle. That last bit is subject to a bit of folklore- 

   As the story goes, the San Patricios were to be hung as the American flag was raised over the citadel Chapultepec. A member of the Niños Héroes (teenage cadets who joined the war), Juan Escutia, wrapped himself in Chapultepec’s flag and threw himself from the battlements to deny US forces the symbolic victory of capturing it. 

   According to several historic accounts, the San Patricios  cheered the Mexican flag and sang Mexican patriotic songs standing on the gallows, in a final act of defiance. 

   John Riley (Seán Ó Raghailligh) was not executed with his battalion. Since he technically defected before the official declaration of war, he was let off with the standard punishment for defection- branding. He was branded with a large D on his face, and turned free. He rejoined the Mexican forces and eventually retired in 1850. No one is really sure when he died or where he’s buried. 

   The legacy of the San Patricios lives on in Mexico, were they’re hailed as heroes who fought back against their unjust government (seriously, go read up on the war crimes committed during the Mexican-American war, I won’t go into them here but they were uh. Pretty bad) and a symbol of solidarity between oppressed peoples. There’s even a song about them. 

  US history education rarely mentions traitors in a positive light, the people we would consider today to be heroes. They may have lost, but it’s important to remember them- the people who, against all odds, fought for the rights of their fellow man. So take a moment today to consider the legacy of Seán Ó Raghailligh, and the San Patricios, and honor their sacrifice in the name of freedom. 

[patriotsnet]

Why Did Radical Republicans Impeach Johnson

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-did-radical-republicans-impeach-johnson/

Why Did Radical Republicans Impeach Johnson

Impeachment Trial Of Andrew Johnson Begins

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

For the first time in U.S. history, the impeachment trial of an American president gets underway in the U.S. Senate. President Andrew Johnson, reviled by the Republican-dominated Congress for his views on Reconstruction, stood accused of having violated the controversial Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress over his veto in 1867.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Johnson, a U.S. senator from Tennessee, was the only senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union. Johnsons political career was built on his defense of the interests of poor white Southerners against the landed classes; of his decision to oppose secession, he said, Damn the negroes; I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters. For his loyalty, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee in 1862, and in 1864 Johnson was elected vice president of the United States.

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In 1875, after two failed bids, Johnson won reelection to Congress as a U.S. senator from Tennessee. He died less than four months after taking office at the age of 66. Fifty-one years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional in its ruling in Myers v. United States.

Why Were Radical Republicans Angry Over Lincoln And Johnson’s Reconstruction Plans

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The key difference between the Radical Republicans and President Andrew Johnson’s plan over Reconstruction is that Johnson wanted a lenient plan, but the Radicals wanted a harsh plan.

Also, what was the Radical Republicans plan for reconstruction? The Radical Republicans‘ reconstruction offered all kinds of new opportunities to African Americans, including the vote , property ownership, education, legal rights, and even the possibility of holding political office. By the beginning of 1868, about 700,000 African Americans were registered voters.

Just so, how did the radical Republicans respond to Johnson’s policies?

They believed the South should be punished for the war. How did radical republicans respond to Johnson’s policies? They passed the Civil Rights Bill which gave african americans citizenship. After Johnson vetoed, the republicans tried to get it written into the constitution as the 14th amendment, and congress approved.

What were the 3 major issues of reconstruction?

Reconstruction encompassed three major initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves.

Early Life And Education

Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont on April 4, 1792. He was the second of four children, all boys, and was named to honor the Polish general who served in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kociuszko. His parents were Baptists who had emigrated from Massachusetts around 1786. Thaddeus was born with a club foot which, at the time, was seen as a judgment from God for secret parental sin. His older brother was born with the same condition in both feet. The boys father, Joshua Stevens, was a farmer and cobbler who struggled to make a living in Vermont. After fathering two more sons , Joshua abandoned the children and his wife Sarah . The circumstances of his departure and his subsequent fate are uncertain; he may have died at the Battle of Oswego during the War of 1812.

Sarah Stevens struggled to make a living from the farm even with the increasing aid of her sons. She was determined that her sons improve themselves, and in 1807 moved the family to the neighboring town of Peacham, Vermont, where she enrolled young Thaddeus in the Caledonia Grammar School . He suffered much from the taunts of his classmates for his disability. Later accounts describe him as wilful, headstrong with an overwhelming burning desire to secure an education.

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The End Of The Movement

The Radical movement was coming to an end, its agenda superseded by concerns about the economy, which had been hit by recession in 1873.

In the Congressional elections of 1874, the Democrats took control. Southern State legislatures gradually reverted to the Democrats as well, and the reforms of the Radical Republicans began to be rolled back.

In the highly controversial 1876 presidential election, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes managed to win power despite losing the popular vote, when he promised Southern States that all federal troops would be withdrawn.

After this, civil rights were no longer enforced in the South, and the former Confederate states brought in the so-called Jim Crow laws.

These laws allowed the segregation of white and black people, and although they did not explicitly state that black people could not vote, the conditions that had to be met in order to vote were disproportionately unfavourable to African-Americans. The inequality imposed by the Jim Crow laws persisted for almost a century.

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Road To The Presidency

At the Republican presidential convention the same year in Chicago, the delegates were divided into three principal camps: the Stalwarts , who backed former president Ulysses S. Grant; the Half-Breed supporters of Maine Sen. James G. Blaine; and those committed to Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman. Tall, bearded, affable, and eloquent, Garfield steered fellow Ohioan Shermans campaign and impressed so many with his largely extemporaneous nominating speech that he, not the candidate, became the focus of attention. As the chairman of the Ohio delegation, Garfield also led a coalition of anti-Grant delegates who succeeded in rescinding the unit rule, by which a majority of delegates from a state could cast the states entire vote. This victory added to Garfields prominence and doomed Grants candidacy. Grant led all other candidates for 35 ballots but failed to command a majority. On the 36th ballot the nomination went to a dark horse, Garfield, who was still trying to remove his name from nomination as the bandwagon gathered speed.

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Why Were The Radical Republicans So Powerful

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People Also Asked, What did the radical republicans do?

The Radical Republicans were a faction of the Republican Party during the American Civil War. They were distinguished by their fierce advocacy for the abolition of slavery, enfranchisement of black citizens, and holding the Southern states financially and morally culpable for the war.

Also know, how did the radical Republicans differ from the Republican majority? ? Moderate Republicans, and the majority of the Republican Party, wanted assurance that slavery and treason were dead. Radical Republicans, on the other hand, hoped that reconstruction could achieve black equality, free land distribution to former slaves, and voting rights for African Americans.

Contents

11 Why was President Johnson impeached?

Railroad Subsidies And Payoffs

Every Southern state subsidized railroads, which modernizers believed could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. Millions of dollars in bonds and subsidies were fraudulently pocketed. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions of state dollars for its railroads. Instead of building new track, however, it used the funds to speculate in bonds, reward friends with extravagant fees, and enjoy lavish trips to Europe. Taxes were quadrupled across the South to pay off the railroad bonds and the school costs.

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How Did Lincoln And Johnson Approach Reconstruction Differently

How did Lincoln and Johnson approach Reconstruction differently? Lincoln and Johnson both supported the Ten Percent Plan, which allowed each rebellious state to return to the Union as soon as 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery.

One Of The Worst Us Presidents

Old School Radical Republicans Would Have IMPEACHED Trump

While Kennedy called the decision to vote to acquit Johnson a profile in courage, the larger narrative of Johnsons presidency is not a good one. He made it easier for Southern states to reenter the Union and pardoned the Vice President of the Confederacy, perhaps helping to sew the nation back together but doing little to address the plight of African Americans in the South. He was a racist who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and blocked efforts to help Southern blacks find their footing post-slavery.

He utterly failed to make a satisfying and just peace because of his racist views, his gross incompetence in federal office, and his incredible miscalculation of public support for his policies, wrote Elizabeth Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia. He tried to preempt and then undermine Congressional Reconstruction by deeming the Republican experiment in black citizenship a failure, and by portraying former Confederates as victims of Republican misrule.

It was also an unhappy decision for the seven Republicans who voted to acquit him. They might have saved the powerful executive system, but they lost their jobs. None were reelected to the Senate and they faced personal repercussions as well. According to a Senate history, Ross was ostracized and his family fell into poverty when they returned to Kansas.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Civil War was not yet over when Lincoln was re-elected.

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What Did The Radical Republicans Want

Radical Republicans believed that African Americans deserved immediate freedom from bondage and should receive the same rights as whites. Radical Republicans favored granting civil rights to African Americans for various reasons. Some radicals truly believed that African Americans were equals to the whites.

Attacks Against Native Americans In California And Oregon Country

Taking 16 men, Frémont split his party again, arriving at Sutters Fort in the on December 9. Frémont promptly sought to stir up patriotic enthusiasm among the American settlers there. He promised that if war with Mexico started, his military force would protect the settlers. Frémont went to , to talk with the American consul, , and Mexican commandant, under the pretext of gaining fuller supplies. In February 1846, Frémont reunited with 45 men of his expedition party near , giving the United States a formidable military army in California. Castro and Mexican officials were suspicious of Frémont and he was ordered to leave the country. Frémont and his men withdrew and camped near the summit of what is now named . Headstrong and with much audacity, Frémont raised the United States Flag in defiance of Mexican authority.

Playing for time, after a four-day standoff and Castro having a superior number of Mexican troops, Frémont and his men went north to Oregon, executing the along the way. Estimates of the casualties vary. Expedition members Thomas E. Breckenridge and Thomas S. Martin claim the number of Native Americans killed as 120150 and over 175 respectively, but the eyewitness Tustin claimed that at least 600700 Native Americans were killed on land, with another 200 or more dying in the water. There are no records of any expedition members being killed or even wounded in the massacre., one of the mounted attackers, later stated, It was a perfect butchery.

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Answer To Review Question

The Fifteenth Amendment granted the vote to all black men, giving freed slaves and free blacks greater political power than they had ever had in the United States. Blacks in former Confederate states elected a handful of black U.S. congressmen and a great many black local and state leaders who instituted ambitious reform and modernization projects in the South. However, the Fifteenth Amendment continued to exclude women from voting. Women continued to fight for suffrage through the NWSA and AWSA.

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The Radical Republicans After The Death Of Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868. After lying in the state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, he was buried in a cemetery in Pennsylvania he had chosen as it allowed burials of both White and Black people.

The faction of Congress he had led continued, though without his fiery temperament much of the fury of the Radical Republicans subsided. Plus, they tended to support the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who took office in March 1869.

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Why Did The Presidential Reconstruction Fail

However, Reconstruction failed by most other measures: Radical Republican legislation ultimately failed to protect former slaves from white persecution and failed to engender fundamental changes to the social fabric of the South. Reconstruction thus came to a close with many of its goals left unaccomplished.

Why Did President Johnson And The Radical Republicans Fought So Fiercely Over Reconstruction

The Radical Republicans opposed Lincolns plan because they thought it too lenient toward the South. Radical Republicans believed that Lincolns plan for Reconstruction was not harsh enough because, from their point of view, the South was guilty of starting the war and deserved to be punished as such.

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Andrew Johnsons Impeachment And The Legacy Of The Civil War

He started as a hero and ended as the impersonation of the tyrannical slave power.

On April 15, six weeks after Andrew Johnson was sworn in as vice president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Had the assassin’s plot gone as planned, Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Secretary of State William Seward would have also been killed. As it turned out, co-conspirator George Atzerodt, who had stalked the vice president, lost his nerve at the last minute.

A few hours after Lincoln’s death, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore Johnson in as President of the United States. Republicans were relieved that Johnson had not been killed and could provide continuity; they thought that he would be putty in their hands and would follow the dictates of Republican congressional leaders. They were mistaken. And the resulting conflict between president and Congress led to the first presidential impeachment in American history.

In Johnson’s mind, the issue of what to do with the defeated Southern states was simple: impose conditions upon their return to full standing, such as the irrevocable abolition of slavery but do not impose black suffrage as a condition of readmission.

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Many Senate Republicans had decided to make it a close vote but not a conviction.

Republican Party Presidential Candidate

Why Republicans are whitewashing Andrew Johnson’s racism

In 1856, Frémont was the first presidential candidate of the new . The Republicans, whose party had formed in 1854, were united in their opposition to the Pierce Administration and the spread of slavery into the West. Initially, Frémont was asked to be the Democratic candidate by former Virginia Governor and the powerful Preston family. Frémont announced that he was for Free Soil Kansas and was against the enforcement of the 1850 . Republican leaders , , and were able to get Frémont to join their political party. Seeking a united front and a fresh face for the party, the Republicans nominated Frémont for president over other candidates, and conservative of New Jersey, for vice president, at their June 1856 convention held in Philadelphia. The Republican campaign used the slogan Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont to crusade for free farms and against the . Frémont, popularly known as The Pathfinder, however, had voter appeal and remained the symbol of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party nominated .

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Why Did Radical Republicans Disagree With This Proclamation

The Radical Republicans opposed Lincolns plan because they thought it too lenient toward the South. Radical Republicans believed that Lincolns plan for Reconstruction was not harsh enough because, from their point of view, the South was guilty of starting the war and deserved to be punished as such.

President Andrew Johnson Impeached

The U.S. House of Representatives votes 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson, nine of which cite Johnsons removal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The House vote made President Johnson the first president to be impeached in U.S. history.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Andrew Johnson, a senator from Tennessee, was the only U.S. senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864 he was elected vice president of the United States. Sworn in as president after Lincolns assassination in April 1865, President Johnson enacted a lenient Reconstruction policy for the defeated South, including almost total amnesty to ex-Confederates, a program of rapid restoration of U.S.-state status for the seceded states, and the approval of new, local Southern governments, which were able to legislate Black Codes that preserved the system of slavery in all but its name.

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Did The Radical Republicans In Congress Repeatedly Try To Impeach President Andrew Johnson

Who are the experts?Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team.

The Radical Republicans did try to impeach President Johnson. The Radical Republicans believed that President Johnson was blocking attempts to help former slaves as they adjusted to being freed. They were upset that President Johnson had vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that gave full citizenship to African Americans….

What Did Lincolns 10 Percent Plan For Reconstruction Require States To Do

What did Lincolns 10 Percent Plan for Reconstruction require states to do? Write a constitution that abolished slavery and provided for black education. They wanted to make sure that southern states could only be readmitted into the Union when black rights were protected. You just studied 37 terms!

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