'Lock her up!' unites GOP -- July 21, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have loved this week’s Republican National Convention.

Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter had a throw pillow in her sitting room embroidered with the line: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

Republicans in Cleveland richly rewarded viewers who wanted to hear nothing good about Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t just the wrong choice for president; she’s a criminal, they charged.

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” delegates at Quicken Loans Arena shouted, leaping to their feet and shaking their fists. And when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, indicted Clinton’s performance and character in his speech Tuesday night, the crowd bellowed “Guilty!” after each new charge.

Republicans will see how it feels starting Monday, when the Democratic National Convention opens in Philadelphia and attempts to turn Republican Donald J. Trump’s into Public Enemy No. 1.

Character assassination has a long, colorful history in presidential politics. A newspaper editor who supported Thomas Jefferson in the bitter election of 1800 wrote of John Adams that he had “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force nor firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” 

But the sustained attacks on Clinton were a new level of mudslinging.

 

“She lied about her emails, she lied about her server, she lied about Benghazi, she lied about sniper fire – why she even lied about why her parents named her Hillary,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared.

The name claim stems from 1995 when the then-first lady said her mother always told her she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to conquer Mount Everest. But Clinton was born in 1947; Sir Edmund made the climb in 1953. Her presidential campaign conceded in 2006 it was just a “sweet family story.”

 

The GOP convention also showed rare disunity among the party faithful. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a former presidential contender, refused to attend, as did other Republican leaders. Some conservative delegates erupted in anger after party leaders stifled a rules change that would have permitted delegates to vote for candidates other than Trump.

On the convention’s first day, the chairman of the Virginia delegation and former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Ted Cruz supporter, threw his credentials on the floor and marched out.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who boarded the Trump train late, sounded plaintive as he tried to unify Republicans. Only with Trump and his running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence “do we have a chance for a better way,” he said. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

“Let the other party go on and on with its constant dividing up of people, always playing one group against the other, as if group identity were everything,” said Ryan, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012. “In America, aren’t we all supposed to be and see beyond class, see beyond ethnicity and all those other lines drawn to set us apart and lock us into groups?”

Cruz infuriated some delegates when he used his time at the podium Wednesday night not to endorse Trump but to give what sounded like his first presidential campaign speech of 2020. Delegates booed Cruz and shouted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as the presidential nominee walked in.

The most peculiar knock on Clinton came from former GOP presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson, who said one of Clinton’s heroes in college and the subject of her senior thesis was radical organizer Saul Alinsky. In the forward to one of his later books, Alinsky acknowledged Lucifer as the first radical organizer.

“So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?” Carson said. “Think about that.”

Clinton, perhaps previewing her attacks next week, insisted that Trump has nothing to offer the American people so he had to attack her. Trump’s “business model is basically fraud and abuse,” she said. “He talks about America First but his own products are made in a lot of countries that aren’t named America.”

At their convention, Republicans found one thing on which to agree: Hillary Clinton is their enemy. Democrats also agree on something: Trump is theirs.

Even before he endorsed Clinton, rival Bernie Sanders said he would work to defeat Trump. And when he finally did endorse her, Sanders said he wanted to make one thing clear: “I intend to do everything I can to make certain she is the next president.”

© 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Change the Constitution? Don't count on it -- March 17, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s spring break in America, so swarms of school kids are visiting the nation’s capital, texting and snapping selfies. Sometimes, they even glance up and learn something.

They aren’t the only ones.

Grumpy about the low tone of the presidential campaign, I went to the National Archives to see “Amending America,” a new exhibit about how we amend the U.S. Constitution.

That sounds dry, but it’s fascinating to see politics in historical perspective. Politicians are forever waving the Constitution in our faces, promising to repeal this or add that. Fortunately, it’s not that easy.

As the exhibit reminds us, a beauty of our system is that it runs on consensus. While it’s always possible to amend the Constitution, it’s never probable.

Members of Congress have proposed more than 11,000 constitutional amendments since the Constitution was written in 1787, but only 27 have been ratified. The exhibit celebrates the 225^th anniversary of the first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791 and on permanent display in the Archives Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom.

Jostling for space, I leaned over the cases in the dim Rotunda light and looked at the ancient documents. Watching the kids lean in, too, brought unbidden tears to my eyes. We are all de facto heirs of those long-ago patriots.

President Thomas Jefferson recognized in 1803 that the Constitution was a work in progress.

“Let us go on perfecting the Constitution by adding, by way of amendment, those forms which time and trial show are still wanting,” he wrote.

Most proposed amendments fade away. Some were serious attempts to solve problems, others intended only to score points.

Shall we have a constitutional amendment requiring everyone to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – or face 20 years of hard labor? Shall we outlaw divorce? Or public drunkenness? How about we choose the president by lottery? No, no, no and no.

The process of “perfecting” the Constitution was laborious by design. To approve an amendment takes two-thirds of the House and Senate or a constitutional convention made up of two-thirds of state legislatures. Then, three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify it. Only then is it part of the Constitution.

The 27^th and most recent amendment was first introduced in 1789 but wasn’t ratified until 1992. The measure makes sure that when Congress raises its pay, the raise doesn’t go into effect until the next congressional term.

“Amending America” continues through Sept. 4, 2017, and is especially relevant this Election Year. The Founders limited voting to white, land-owning men. The exhibit traces the five amendments have expanded our voting rights.

“Could you vote in 1869?” asks an interactive display. Visitors answer questions about their gender, race, age, poll tax and residence. Many adults discover that, no, they could not have voted in 1869. 

Not until the 15^th Amendment in 1870 were all people guaranteed the right to vote  --regardless of race. It took another half century for women to get the vote, with the 19^th Amendment in 1920. The 23^rd Amendment in 1961 allowed residents of the District of Columbia to vote for president, though they still lack full congressional representation.

The 24^th Amendment in 1964 prohibited poll tax fees for voting in federal elections. Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled state poll taxes unconstitutional. The 26^th Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age to 18.

The exhibit features more than 50 original documents, including rarely seen letters from citizens for and against amendments. A faded Western Union telegram from 1962 from Augustus C. Johnson of Springfield, Va., to Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, urges an end to the poll tax.

“No man who has studied the history of the adoption of this tax by Virginia can honestly deny that its basic purpose was to curtail the vote of our Negro citizens,” wrote Johnson, a Democratic congressional candidate at the time.

A 1964 letter from W.J. Isbell Jr., secretary of the Alabama Baptist State Convention, asks Congress to reject an amendment authorizing school prayer. Isbell supported the Supreme Court ruling that held forced prayers and Bible readings in school unconstitutional, reflecting the view that the state had no right to decide which prayers were said in school.

“I said, `Amen.’ For this is as it should be,” Isbell wrote about the court’s ruling. “I personally felt that the news media would inform the people and sanity would prevail, but this did not seem the case.”

    

Today, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald J. Trump wants to repeal the 14^th Amendment, which grants anyone born in this country citizenship.

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton favors an amendment to reverse the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which said the government cannot ban corporate spending in campaigns.

Conservative Republicans hope to convene a constitutional convention to consider amendments.

Talk is talk. But a new amendment to the Constitution? Don’t count on it.  

 ©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Honoring Jefferson's vision for the next 200 years -- column of Nov. 5, 2015

By MARSHA MERCER

Before we relied on smart devices to answer our questions, people became smart by reading books.

Many still do, of course, on paper and screens, but few read or collect books the way Thomas Jefferson did, almost compulsively. He was a human Google, a genius whose vast knowledge and interests reflected his appetite for learning.   

During the five years he lived in Paris as a diplomat, Jefferson wrote later, he spent his free afternoons in bookshops, “turning over every book with my own hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science.”

Jefferson, who read six languages and spoke four, amassed a library at Monticello of more than 6,000 books in 33 languages. He sold his library to Congress in 1815 to replace the 3,000-volume Library of Congress burned by the British the year before.

Congress could set the price, Jefferson said, but he insisted that it take the collection in its entirety, not choose among the volumes.

Amazingly, the decision to buy the trove was not the 19^th century equivalent of a slam dunk. Then, as now, Congress fretted about spending in a time of bitter partisanship.     

Some legislators thought the price -- $23,950, estimated to be $265,500 in today’s dollars -- was too high. Some argued there were higher spending priorities than a grand library and that the government needed to economize.  

Others found fault with Jefferson’s expansiveness -- too many works of literature and French philosophy, some irreligious and immoral, having encouraged the French Revolution.

The books were “good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages many cannot read, and most ought not,” one congressman complained, calling it “true Jeffersonian, Madisonian philosophy to bankrupt the Treasury, beggar the people, and disgrace the nation.”  Sounds familiar.

But Jefferson had a high opinion of the intellectual curiosity and capacity of Congress: “There is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have the occasion to refer,” he wrote.

Fortunately, Congress finally approved the purchase – narrowly and along party lines. Jefferson watched as wooden planks were nailed to his bookcases, which were then loaded onto 10 wagons for the 125-mile, six-day trip to Washington.

Jefferson,72, used the proceeds to pay off debts – and buy more books.

I review this history because the Library of Congress, where Jefferson’s splendid library is on display, is at a crossroads. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington retired Sept. 30 after 30 years. Billington, 86, was widely criticized for failing to take the nation’s library into the 21^st  century.

A search is on for a successor. Too often we see technology in conflict with tradition, an either-or proposition, but we need not. In its next 200 years, America’s library should honor Jefferson’s vision by using the newest technology.

In Jefferson’s time, the great libraries of England and Europe were in monasteries, courts and palaces -- accessible to the elite but not to ordinary people. Jefferson wanted the Library of Congress to serve the public as well as Congress.

“The idea that knowledge belongs to everyone was a fairly radical concept at that time,” Jurretta Heckscher, Library of Congress history specialist, said in a web discussion Oct. 20. While it was accepted that men and women should be able to read the Bible, she added, slaves were prohibited from learning to read and risked their lives doing so.

It’s wonderful that ordinary people can still walk in and use the library in Washington, the world’s largest with 160 million items. Millions more people worldwide use the Library of Congress at all hours on the Internet.

Only a fraction of the library’s books are available online, though, and that needs to be addressed so anyone with a computer -- laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone and whatever’s next -- can access the library’s collections. That’s a goal that would please Jefferson.
(C) 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Backstory on SOTU: TJ wouldn't approve -- Jan. 15, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama will ride in his limo to the Capitol where, bathed in TV light, he will deliver his State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress. 

Ho hum, you may say with 21^st century ennui. Big deal. We don’t think twice about presidents appearing before Congress.

But nobody was blasé in April 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress in person. It was shocking.

Presidents in those days didn’t deliver speeches to Congress. They followed the model of Thomas Jefferson and sent carefully written reports.  

The Constitution requires that a president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” It’s silent on how the information should be delivered.

Presidents George Washington and John Adams gave annual messages to Congress in person, but Jefferson ceased the practice. He found the pomp and ceremony too reminiscent of the English monarch’s “speech from the throne” to Parliament. The first two presidents had appeared with quite the entourage -- their entire Cabinets and all their secretaries.

Jefferson apparently wasn’t a polished public speaker and the Capitol wasn’t yet finished, so he was happy to give the speech a pass. So were his successors.   

Wilson, the Virginia-born former president of Princeton University and former governor of New Jersey, was a gifted orator at ease before crowds. He said when he broke with the tradition: 

“I think that (a personal appearance) is the only dignified way for the president to address Congress at the opening of a session, instead of sending the address to be read perfunctorily in the clerk’s familiar tone of voice. It is a precedent which, it is true, has been discontinued a long time, but which is a very respectable precedent.”

Wilson gave a brief speech and made the trip simply, driving to the Capitol with one Secret Service man. His male secretary followed in his own car, The New York Times reported. Democrat Wilson was fortunate to have Democrats in control of both houses of Congress.

After appearing in person before Congress a few weeks after his inauguration, Wilson went back to Congress in June and August of 1913. He started weekly press conferences. That December, he gave his first annual message to Congress – what we now call the State of the Union Address.  

Subsequent presidents went back and forth between written and oral State of the Union messages and some delivered both. Since Reagan, presidents have delivered speeches. The first official televised response by members of the opposing party came in 1966. In 2010, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the official Republican response.

   

This will be Obama’s sixth State of the Union Address, and he’s a lame duck. His legislative wish list will be dismissed as mostly fantasy – if people watch at all.

Viewership of Obama’s State of the Union speech last year dropped to its lowest level since his first address. In 2009, about 52.4 million people tuned in to see Obama. Last year, just 33.3 million watched. That was also the lowest viewership for the State of the Union since Nielsen began keeping track in 1993. That year, Bill Clinton’s first, 66.9 million people watched.

Presidents often hit the road to sell their proposals after the State of the Union address. Obama has tried to build interest in his speech by previewing his proposals. He quipped that with only two years left in his term, he couldn’t wait for the speech to roll out his ideas.

Traveling around the country, he announced an array of proposals aimed at improving the lives of middle-class Americans. These include making community colleges free, stepping up cybersecurity measures, expanding broadband service, protecting the environment and allowing workers paid family and sick leave.

The catch is that many of Obama’s proposals require the approval of Congress. That will be no mean feat -- even after the president stands before a joint session and makes his pitch in person.  

© 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Thankfully, we finally agree on Thanksgiving -- Nov. 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Thanksgiving, now deeply entrenched in modern American life, got off to a shaky start.

Yes, there were prayers of thanksgiving in Virginia and harvest feasting in Massachusetts in the 17^th century. But the first Congress squabbled over even asking the president to issue a thanksgiving proclamation.

In September 1789, a representative from New Jersey proposed that a committee from the House and Senate visit President George Washington and ask him to recommend to the people a day giving thanks for the many favors of Almighty God, especially the “opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.”

Two representatives from South Carolina objected -- one to the “mimicking of European customs, where they made a mere mockery of thanksgivings” and the other to interfering in matters beyond the proper scope of Congress, according to an account in The Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia.

“Why should the president direct the people to do what, perhaps, they have no mind to do?” asked Thomas Tudor Tucker of South Carolina. “They may not be inclined to return thanks for a Constitution until they have experienced that it promotes their safety and happiness.”

Besides, said Tucker, Congress had no business getting involved in religion, and, he added, “If a day of thanksgiving must take place, let it be done by the authority of the several states.”

Despite the opposition, the resolution passed, and a committee did visit Washington, who issued a proclamation naming Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, a day to unite in “sincere and humble thanks.”

Citizens and churches took to the first Thanksgiving, but the observance wasn’t set in November. Washington later proclaimed Feb. 19, 1795, a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” 

The second president, John Adams, issued proclamations for May 9, 1798, and April 25, 1799, but they weren’t officially for thanksgiving. We’d never recognize our feast-football-shop extravaganza in Adams’ day of “solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer.”

But when Thomas Jefferson became president, the proclamations of prayer or thanksgiving ceased. For eight years, he refused to issue any on the ground that it would have infringed on the separation of church and state.

During the War of 1812, Congress asked President James Madison to declare a day of “public humiliation and fasting and prayer to Almighty God for the safety and welfare of these States,” and he chose Jan. 12, 1815. A few months later, Madison named the second Thursday in April 1815 as a day of thanksgiving for the blessing of peace.

After that, no president until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States called for a day of fasting and humiliation in 1861 “in view of impending conflict,” and Lincoln proclaimed three days of thanksgiving for battle victories in 1862 and 1863.

For the national Thanksgiving holiday, we can thank Sarah Josepha Hale, an author and editor of Godey’s Lady Book magazine who campaigned tirelessly. By the 1850s, she had successfully lobbied more than 30 states and territories to put Thanksgiving on their calendars. Her goal, though, was a national holiday, which she believed would unify the country.

With the nation torn apart by Civil War, Hale wrote Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, asking him to use his executive authority to give Thanksgiving national recognition “to become permanently an American custom and institution.”

Days later, on Oct. 3, Lincoln signed a proclamation, actually written by Secretary of State William Seward, that the last Thursday of November would be “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Thanksgiving became our holiday on the last Thursday of November, not by law but by tradition.  

But in 1939, when the last Thursday fell on Nov. 30, with just 24 days before Christmas, retailers begged Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving up a week to lengthen the Christmas shopping season.

FDR proclaimed Thanksgiving to be on Nov. 23. His edict applied only to the District of Columbia and federal workers, but angry letters poured into the White House.

Sixteen states refused to accept the change. Two Thanksgivings were celebrated until 1941, when Congress stepped in.

A representative from Michigan declared that only Congress could change the date, “not the fancy or whim of any president.”

Congress set the federal holiday as the fourth Thursday in November. It may be one of the few things for which we all can be thankful.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Thank George -- first in war, peace, inaugurations -- Jan. 17, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Constitution requires only the 35-word oath of office.

All the rest in our presidential inaugurations – the address, poetry, prayers, marching bands and balls -- is gravy.

Before we get swept up in the pomp and pageantry – lobster and bison luncheon in the U.S. Capitol! Native Americans in their regalia! Unicyclists from Maine!  -- let’s take a moment to remember that George Washington was first in the hearts of his countrymen and first to invent a presidential inauguration.

The father of our country had to decide not only what to wear and what to say but how big the buttons on his coat should be and whether to say anything at all. He had to decide where he wanted to stay. The nation’s capital and first inauguration were then in New York, a long way from Mount Vernon.

   

Washington was aware he was setting precedent, and, although not everything he did stuck, it’s instructive to see where we started.

       

In the weeks before his swearing in as the first president on April 30, 1789, Washington wrote letters (yes, by hand) praising the locally made “cloth and buttons” his friend and future Secretary of War Henry Knox had sent him and asked Knox for “six more of the large (engraved) button to trim the coat in the manner I wish it to be.”

He was determined to stay only in “hired rooms” or inns, and not in private homes when he made the trip. “I am not desirous of being placed early in a situation for entertaining,” he wrote James Madison.

    

Washington worried about the “oceans of difficulties” awaiting him as the first Congress had failed to begin its business, and he lamented his lack of political skill. In fact, Washington’s war service had given him excellent political skills, says Jim Zeender, a long-time registrar in the Exhibits Division of the National Archives, whose excellent blog posts about early letters of the founders I draw from here. Zeender’s posts can be found on the National Archives’ Prologue: Pieces of History blog.

The Library of Congress and Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies also have robust web pages on inaugurations.

In 1789, Washington took the oath on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street before a joint session of Congress and addressed the crowd below:  “Fellow citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives,  among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties” than the notification of his election as president. His flowery speech continued for 1,400 words.

   

And later that day, another tradition – of critiquing the president’s inaugural performance -- was born.

U.S. Sen. William Maclay of Pennsylvania wrote in his diary that Washington “read off his address in the plainest manner, without even taking his eyes from the paper, for I felt hurt that he was not first in everything. He was dressed in deep brown, with metal buttons, with an eagle on them, white stockings, a bag, and sword.”

For his second inauguration in Philadelphia, Washington wore a black velvet suit with black stockings. He was weary and his speech was just 135 words. Maclay had lost his re-election bid, so we don’t have his review.

  

Inaugurations have taken place in various locations. The first in the new capital city of Washington was Thomas Jefferson’s second inauguration in 1801. He walked over from his boarding house. 

Social butterfly Dolley Madison came up with the first inaugural ball in 1809, but her husband the president was not impressed. “I’d rather be in bed,” James Madison reportedly confided.

We’ve now come to the 57^th inauguration. Expectations are low for President Barack Obama’s second act.   

Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse likened second inaugurations to the renewal of wedding vows – “the ceremony might be great, but you can’t ignore what you already know about the groom: He snores, he sniffles and he forgot to pay the electric bill last month.”

While almost nothing could equal the pure joy and excitement of four years ago, this inauguration is a time to look at our history and our future with hope.

   

An inauguration gives us a day to celebrate us. Let’s enjoy it. We don’t need George Washington’s big eagle buttons. We have apps.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Campaign summer debate: the bacon sundae -- June 14, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

My fellow Americans, we meet today to note a milestone in American food history.

The wizards who brought us monster sandwiches, pizza crusts stuffed with pasta, and tubs of soda big enough for regattas are out with a new temptation. They’ve married sweet and salty, cream and crunch, fat and fatter. It’s the bacon sundae, brought to you by Burger King as part of its summertime menu.

Most of us were blissfully unaware that ice cream and bacon even knew each other, let alone that they enjoy a close personal relationship and have moved in together.

The BK bacon sundae is soft-serve vanilla ice cream drizzled with caramel and chocolate fudge, sprinkled with bacon crumbles, and topped with an insouciant thick strip of hardwood-smoked bacon. It costs 510 calories, 18 grams of fat, 61 grams of sugar and about $2.49 plus tax.

Naturally in this political summer, the dessert is controversial. Its fans say everything tastes better with bacon. Critics say we’re already too fat, and we don’t need help clogging our arteries. Yes it does. Yes we are, and no we don’t.

Can’t we all get along?

The outrage over the bacon sundae – obesity is America’s No. 1 health issue; how could they? – is misplaced. Fast food is a business. The marketplace – that’s all of us -- will decide whether Burger King is smokin’ or flaming out.

Going burger to burger against McDonald’s, BK retired the king from company logos, reportedly to attract women and younger customers. Hmm. This spring, it introduced truffle burgers in Hong Kong. A private equity firm led by Brazilian billionaires took over Burger King in 2010, but the company is about to go public again.

Denny’s offered a bacon maple sundae last year during its Baconalia promotion. Bacon sundaes may not be health foods, but they do generate buzz.

And nobody has to purchase the dessert.

As for sugar content, giant soft drinks pack more sugar wallop than the decadent bacon sundae. A 30-ounce Classic Coke provides 77 grams of sugar and the 40-ounce delivers 102 grams of sugar, according to BK’s nutrition information.
There’s something very American about this particular melting pot of sweet and savory flavors.

Archaeologists say people living in what’s now Turkey domesticated the first pigs 10,000 years ago. Did they also discover bacon? The Chinese claim Emperor Tang (618 to 697 A.D.) invented a version of ice cream. Venetian explorer Marco Polo may have brought it back to Europe in the 13th century, or that may be myth.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both served ice cream and bacon, but never the twain did meet, as far as we know.

“Virginia ladies value themselves on the goodness of their bacon,” Washington wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in June 1786. Really, George?

Several American cities argue over which one invented the sundae. Ithaca, N.Y., says it was first in 1892.

Growing up with bacon and eggs, many Americans have strong views about bacon. On this side of the Atlantic, we insist on crisp strips -- no limp bacon here. Maybe that says something about American drive and determination or maybe it’s just about cooking time.

Any day now, I expect to see President Obama or his Republican challenger Mitt Romney bring the bacon sundae to the campaign trail, rhetorically at least.

What this campaign needs is another Clara Peller, the diminutive octogenarian who charmed the country in 1984 with her whiny question: “Where’s the beef?”

The question -- from Wendy’s TV ads for its hamburgers -- became a catch phrase of that year’s presidential campaign. During the Democratic primaries, Vice President Walter F. Mondale, not particularly known for his wit, told Gary Hart in a debate that his vague promises about new ideas reminded him of the commercial.

“Where’s the beef?” Mondale asked.

In case you’re wondering, I won’t be indulging in any bacon sundaes. When I need a bacon fix, I’ll stick to what can be the world’s best summer sandwich, the BLT on toast. With mustard.

You can have yours with mayonnaise. It’s a free country.

(C) 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Smithsonian finally shines light on Jefferson, slavery and liberty -- Feb. 2, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Searching for the right words to condemn slavery, Thomas Jefferson called it an “abominable crime,” a “hideous blot” and “moral depravity.” Yet he owned slaves all his life.

Nor was Jefferson alone. Twelve of the first 18 American presidents were slave-owners.

For most of our nation’s history, Americans have swept these uncomfortable historical facts under the red, white and blue rug. Some have romanticized Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers while others have regarded them with cold-eyed contempt.

Finally, a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in Washington focuses with compassion on the inherent contradictions of a nation that was founded on the lofty ideals of liberty and freedom while it relied on the institution of slavery.

“Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” open through Oct. 14, neither celebrates Jefferson nor makes him into a monster. The sponsors -- the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is slated to open on the National Mall in 2015, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, where a companion exhibit also explores slavery -- present an ugly, painful era with calm sensitivity.

I draw heavily here from the exhibit in Washington and the web site, www. slaveryatmonticello.org.

Jefferson owned about 600 slaves over the years, and his life and theirs were intimately intertwined. Slaves helped build his beloved home at Monticello, tended his crops, ran his household, made his furniture, cooked and served his meals, almost certainly gave birth to his babies, cared for his children and grandchildren, comforted him as he lay dying and then dug his grave. Enslaved children and adults worked six days a week, sunrise to sunset.

The exhibit displays items handed down in the Jefferson family that portray an active life of the mind – the revolving bookcase on which Jefferson could keep five books at a time to appease his “canine appetite” for reading, his silver spectacles from Philadelphia, his inkwell in the shape of Voltaire’s head and his silver-and-gold fountain pen.

It’s jarring to turn to the sad remnants of slave life also on display. Iron shackles, called bilboes, from slave ships come in two sizes – for the ankles of children and adults. The nails made by boys just 10 years and up who crashed their hammers 20,000 times a day. A few buckles and fragments of ceramics are all that’s left of personal belongings.

Slavery in the New World started as a trickle and grew to a flood. In 1660 only a fraction of Virginia’s planters held slaves, and white indentured servants worked the tobacco fields. But by 1700 slaves worked the fields instead.

No doubt the growth was fueled in part by those born and bred into slavery. The Virginia Slavery Act of 1662 declared that children would be slave or free “only according to the condition of the mother.”

When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, declaring that “all men are created equal,” one of every five men, women and children in the “free and independent states” were slaves.

If the exhibit did no more than explain Jefferson’s ties to slave labor and what slaves’ lives were like, it would deliver a strong, if depressing, dose of American history, but the exhibit turns the corner to offer a hopeful look at slave descendants’ struggle to make Jefferson’s ideals real for everyone.

Since 1993, researchers at Monticello’s “Getting Word” oral history project have interviewed almost 200 slave descendants. The exhibit highlights six families, including that of Elizabeth Hemings, whose daughter Sally likely was the mother of four of widower Thomas Jefferson’s five children.

Descendants of the slave families served in the Civil War, formed and led churches and businesses, and, imbued with the love of learning, became teachers and professors.

As for Jefferson, despite finding slavery abhorrent, he never freed his slaves, and his will granted freedom to only a handful. He died deeply in debt, his 130 slaves sold with his other property at auction, tearing apart families that had served him for generations.

“You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from,” says a descendant in the exhibit’s video. Amen.

© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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On politics, religion and the Jefferson Bible -- Dec. 21, 2011 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Earlier this year, when presidential candidates claimed that God had “called” them to run for the White House, some people were offended. I couldn’t help thinking that God has a sense of humor.

But I wondered how people would react if the president – any president -- were sitting up nights in the White House, cutting out parts of the Bible he or she didn’t like. Many would find such handiwork a sacrilege and an outrage. I’d figure Thomas Jefferson had reached out for a chat.

Barack Obama is not busily reconstructing the New Testament, as far as we know. But in the White House in 1804 Jefferson started editing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with a pen knife or similar sharp instrument and carefully began pasting passages of Christ’s teachings by topic on paper.

Decades later, when he was 77 and living at Monticello, Jefferson produced an edited text of the Gospels. He created an 86-page volume of the life of Christ, parables and teachings by cutting and pasting passages from the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French and English. Jefferson left out the miracles and supernatural events, including the annunciation, angels, virgin birth and the Resurrection.

He titled his version “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” had it bound in red leather and read it regularly.

The first volume Jefferson made has been lost, but the Smithsonian Institution bought the Jefferson Bible in 1895. It deteriorated over years, but after a year of restoration is on display at the National Museum of American History.

Like most people, I’d heard about the Jefferson Bible, but seeing the book that Jefferson himself made scrapbook style was a highlight of my museum experiences this year.

The exhibit, open through May 28, does what a visit to a museum should: It makes you think.

In our age, a presidential candidate’s ability to speak a foreign language is fodder for ridicule -- check out YouTube. Our politicians too often feel obliged to wear their faith on their sleeve.

Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain both claimed that God called them to run for president. Anita Perry, wife of Rick, said God spoke to her about a presidential bid, but her husband needed to see a “burning bush,” a reference to God’s first appearance to Moses.

Mitt Romney tells stories about his year spreading Mormonism in France. Newt Gingrich talks about converting to Catholicism after marrying his third wife, Callista, a Catholic. Gingrich admits to past extramarital affairs but says he has repented to God.

Gingrich even sent a letter to the head of a major evangelical group in Iowa recently, pledging “to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.”

All this likely would seem strange to Jefferson, who held his faith close. Lambasted as a “howling atheist” during the brutal presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson later described himself in a letter as “a real Christian – that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus Christ.”

Scholars say Jefferson, like George Washington, was a deist who believed that a supreme being created the world and then stepped back. Jefferson called the Bible “the best book in the world” but believed its zealous authors had embellished the story of Jesus Christ.

Jefferson described his Bible project in a letter to John Adams as “abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.”

The Smithsonian has published a facsimile edition of the Jefferson Bible, and versions are available from other publishers. The Jefferson Bible is available online at the Monticello site.

Jefferson’s views on religion were complex and he was reluctant to express them, says Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough in Smithsonian magazine. Clough quotes Jefferson: “I not only write nothing on religion,” he told a friend, “but rarely permit myself to speak on it.”

Smart man, that Jefferson.


© 2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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