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Columbus Day (last updated September 27, 2002) (back to top)
More than 500 years after he first reached what are now known as the Caribbean islands, Christopher Columbus has become a symbol surrounded by legends and misinformation, and this mixture of facts and myths helps explain how so many people see him so differently and why Columbus Day has become a source of debate and conflict.
Those hailing him have emphasized his bold (though flawed) vision that one could sail west from Europe to Asia and his reaching a new continent basically unknown to Europe beforehand; they also have held up the myth that he stood alone in believing that the world was not flat. Those damning him do so for how he used slavery to try making his voyages profitable, for his failures as a governor, and for the conquistadors who followed him.
People have also debated the significance of his accomplishments, including whether it is accurate to say that he "discovered" the Americas. But regardless of how one defines the word "discover," or whether the Vikings or the Chinese reached the Americas sometime before 1492, or whether his accomplishment was good or bad, Columbus was indeed the first to bring the Americas to the attention of Europe (even if he always thought he had reached Asia and never reached North America himself), and his place in history is undeniable.
The Vision and the Myth
To begin with, Columbus was born in 1451, almost definitely in the northern Italian republic of Genoa on the coast of the Ligurian Sea, though many have tried claiming him for their own. A sailor and a mapmaker, he became convinced that he could reach Asia by sailing west (instead of south around Africa) - thus opening up a new trade route and perhaps even gaining China as an ally against the Muslims - and he began seeking financial backing for this idea in the 1480s.
He turned to the Iberian peninsula (now organized in the countries Spain and Portugal), which was then ruled by four Christian kingdoms (Aragon, Castille, Saville, and Portugal) and one Muslim kingdom (Granada). King Joao II of Portugal rejected the proposal, but King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife, Queen Isabel of Castille, gave it years of consideration. Columbus made his initial proposal to them in 1485, was rebuffed a year or so later, and then tried again in 1491, again failing. He was on the verge of leaving entirely when Ferdinand finally decided the venture would be worth some small investment.
Contrary to popular belief, Columbus's difficulties were not because he was the first or only man of his time to consider the world a sphere. In fact, most 15th-century scholars and sailors believed, as did the early Greeks, that the world was a sphere; they simply believed that the ocean was too large for Columbus to sail from Europe to Asia safely or economically. In the 15th century, the standard calculations for the world were those of Claudius Ptolemy, who believed the world was covered by 180 degrees of land for the known world of Eurasia and Africa, and 180 degrees of ocean. Columbus apparently calculated the open sea as covering much less of the world and believed the overall world to be much smaller in circumference.
The myth that Columbus stood alone in his belief that the world was round is largely derived from a 19th-century biography by Washington Irving, and deserves two further points to deflate it. First, there is some doubt as to what sources Columbus used in making his calculations and in coming to his belief. He was not necessarily a man of science contesting against closed-minded men of religion. A religious man himself, Columbus used Biblical sources for some of his belief. Also, Christianity does not necessarily have anything to say about the shape of the earth; Augustine argued that the Bible is silent on the matter, which makes it irrelevant to salvation and any religious discussion on the topic irrelevant.
Second, even if there had been any real doubt, Columbus reaching the Americas would not necessarily prove the world was a sphere, only that the earth's flat plane was bigger than previously thought and that there was a large, previously unknown land mass to Europe's west. The only way to conclusively prove the world's nature is to travel all the way around, which did not happen until 1519-22, when Ferdinand Magellan's men completed the first circumnavigation of the world, though Magellan himself died around the Philippines.
Ultimately, Columbus's critics were indeed closer to estimating the earth's true circumference, and if not for one twist, Columbus would have died at sea or turned back in failure. But then, neither Columbus nor his critics ever imagined that there could be another landmass waiting in the wide ocean between the known lands of Europe and Asia.
The Voyage and its Unexpected Results
In 1492, Columbus finally had the funds for three ships - the Santa Maria, the Nina, and the Pinta - and he had a contract that, if he was successful, would award him hereditary noble status, the offices of admiral, viceroy, and governor general for all the lands that he might claim for Castile, and one-tenth of the profits from the venture. He then raised a crew of sailors (despite another part of the legend, only a few were convicted felons) and prepared to set out.
Captain of the flagship Santa Maria, Columbus left the Iberian port of Palos on August 3, 1492 for the Canary Islands, from where the true Atlantic crossing would begin on September 6, 1492. Columbus told his crews not to expect land for about 3,000 miles (the idea that Columbus kept two logs, one true and one false, in order to deceive his crews that they had traveled less than they actually had seems to be a myth, derived from an early misinterpretation of Columbus's diary) and they began heading west.
By early October, the ships had gone further than expected without finding land. On October 6, some of the crew tried urging Columbus to turn back, though whether this approached a mutiny is difficult to say. In any event, Columbus received the backing from the Nina's and Pinta's captains, and the fleet went on.
And then, on October 12, the fleet finally saw and came upon land, the first definitive encounter between Europe's empires and the Americas. Columbus named this Caribbean island San Salvador, which was called Guanahani by its natives (this island probably is the island today known as San Salvador, though a debate does still continue). Columbus and his fleet stayed there two days, and then spent the next three months exploring nearby islands such as modern-day Cuba and Haiti, looking unsuccessfully for gold and for the Asian empires Columbus had expected to encounter.
Still believing that he had found Asia even without the riches he had expected, Columbus began the return voyage in early January 1493. He now had only two of his original three ships (the Santa Maria had run aground on Christmas Eve), so he left behind about 40 men of his crew (all subsequently died from illness or were killed by natives), though he did take with him six or seven San Salvador/Guanahani natives as slaves and as evidence of what resources these new lands offered. The return voyage proved more difficult, and, ironically, required a stop before King Joao II, who had rejected Columbus years before.
Finally, Columbus returned to the port of Palos on March 15, 1493. He returned a hero.
The Other Voyages
Had his first voyage been the only one that Columbus made across the Atlantic, his legacy probably would have stood complete and his legend more pristine and storybook-like. However, Columbus's 1492 voyage was just the first of four that he would undertake.
Each voyage, he continued to look for gold and for proof that he had found Asia, and each time, his efforts as governor fell into greater disarray. His initial claims that these newfound lands held great riches soon turned out to be hollow, and he turned to native slaves as a way to show profit and to reward the unruly settlers that came from Europe, justifying enslavement as a measure of war and as a means of improving the natives' own lot in life. As a governor, his skills proved lacking, and he was even investigated on charges of mismanagement and brought back from his third voyage in chains.
Nonetheless, Columbus was not directly responsible for the mass deaths sometimes associated with the opening of the new world. First, the massive deaths and corresponding social upheaval were caused not intentionally or as a result of Columbus's slaving expeditions but by the inadvertent spread of the smallpox virus and other diseases in the Americas; many did die, though estimates for the population pre-1492 are unclear and much debated. Second, it was not Columbus but subsequent conquistadors from Spain who violently conquered the native populations on a large scale; Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs in Mexico in 1519-21 and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas in Peru in 1532-33.
Columbus's second voyage lasted from September 1493 to early 1496. During this time, Columbus continued his explorations but also served as a somewhat absent governor over an unruly and chaotic populace. He began implementing slavery, first to show some profit and justify more supplies from Spain, and then as a labor system for the settlers. Critics began questioning the truth of Columbus's earlier reports as to the idyllic nature and vast riches of the New World, as well as his competence as a governor, and Fernando and Isabel authorized a royal commission to investigate; Columbus then decided to return to Spain in response.
The third voyage, from 1498 to 1500, went even worse. Columbus returned to find the colonies in disarray and was unable to restore much order. Despite explicit instructions to arrange for the conversion of natives, Columbus continued to seize natives and send them to Europe to be sold as slaves; Queen Isabel ordered them freed. He also implemented a land-distribution system beyond his authority. Finally, an investigating judge, Francisco de Bobadilla, was sent to the New World to investigate. Bobadilla quickly seized control and sent Columbus back to Europe in chains.
Fernando and Isabel released Columbus from custody and allowed him to retain some of his titles and property, but they stripped him of authority and appointed new leadership in the colonies. No longer a governor, Columbus was now just one of many explorers, and his final expedition from 1502 to 1504 was difficult and once again disappointing.
Still a rich man, Columbus spent his remaining years in Europe trying to restore his grants and titles. He died in Valladolid, Spain on May 20, 1506.
Legacy
Columbus's legend has lasted through the centuries, thanks to popular books and his malleable use as a symbol, both favorable and otherwise. For centuries, many have seen Columbus as a symbol of progressive thinking and exploration. But, many have also condemned Columbus and the Spanish for the "Black Legend" of their actions in the New World and their greed. In doing so, these critics have often turned to the writings of Bartolome de Las Casas, who accompanied Columbus on his early voyages but then became a crusader against Spain's treatment of the natives.
The United States, for the most part, saw Columbus in a positive light for most of its existence. By 1792, the 300th anniversary of his first crossing, the then-new country hailed him as an inspiration and model (some even suggested naming the United States after Columbus, rather than after the relatively minor Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci for whom mapmaker Gerhard Mercator first named the continents in the mid-16th century). Celebrations were even grander in 1892, when the World's Columbian Expedition in Chicago used Columbus as a symbol for progress and American ideals.
Columbus Day has also, of course, become a national holiday in the United States, first as a centennial event and now largely to celebrate Italian-Americans' influence and role. October 12, 1892, the fourth-centennial anniversary of Columbus's arrival, was officially recognized by President Benjamin Harrison, but recognition of the day did not become an annual tradition for several more years. Colorado was the first state to recognize Columbus Day as an annual, noncentennial holiday in 1907, and 15 states so celebrated it by 1910. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked states to recognize the day, and Congress officially recognized the second Monday of October as Columbus Day beginning in 1968.
Sources: William D. Phillips, Jr. & Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge University Pres, 1992). Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian explorer became an American hero (University Press of New England, 1992). John Noble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Christopher Columbus: An exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and modern historians (Praeger Publishers, 1991). The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia (Simon & Schuster, 1992), edited by Silvio A. Bedini. The current federal law recognizing Columbus Day as a legal public holiday is 5 U.S.C. section 6103(a).
Mercator v Peters Maps (last updated June 24, 2001) (back to top)
Actually, the debate is already over, and both lost.
The Mercator map was published in 1569 as a navigational tool; a straight line drawn across the map will have a constant compass bearing. This is done, however, by spacing the lines of latitude farther apart as one gets further away from the Equator. And because the mapmaker, Gerardus Mercator, was German, he put his homeland at the center of the map, with the Equator down 2/3 of the map rather than halfway down the world as it is by definition.
(Mercator, by the way, was the first mapmaker to have his works published, posthumously, as an "atlas," after the Greek legend who bore the world on his back).
The Peters map, by contrast, is an equal-area map that distorts the actual shape of land masses in order to represent their areas equally proportional. Dr. Arno Peters, also a German mapmaker, devised the map in the 1960s and then announced it in 1973 in order to display third-world countries in a way that recognized their value in world politics. This kind of map, however, was not exactly new to the professional cartography world; Englishman James first released this kind of equal-area map in 1885, though Peters has denied knowing of Gall's work beforehand.
The problem is that all rectangular and all two-dimensional maps are inherently flawed in taking the surface of the world, with its curves and three-dimensional nature, and reducing it to a flat sheet of paper. The larger an area you're trying to depict, the greater the distortion. This is why even wide-area aerial photos cannot be used as maps without modification, as the aerial photos reflect the curvature of the globe.
Accordingly, seven North American professional organizations adopted a resolution in 1989 calling for a stop on the use of all rectangular world maps, whether Mercator, Peters or whatever. "Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth."
The National Geographic Society, perhaps the most popular cartographic organization, lives by its example. It began moving away from rectangular maps for depicting the world as early as 1922, when it adopted the circular Van der Grinten map. The society then moved to pseudocylindrical projections, adopting the Robinson map in 1988 and then the Winkel Tripel formulation in 1998. This is the map that it has given out to schools in recent years.
Sources: Maps and Civilizations, by Norman Thrower. Flattening the Earth, by John P. Snyder (University of Chicago Press, 1993). National Geographic Society's website, available here (including examples of the Van der Grinten, Robinson and Winkel Tripel maps).
The Shakespeare Authorship Question (last updated March 1, 2003) (back to top)
William Shakespeare may be generally considered one of the greatest authors in the English language, but very little is known about him beyond some basic biographical facts that highlight his life as a businessman far more than as a writer. This dearth of information, which some say seems mysterious only by modern biographical standards, has helped inspire a long debate over the authorship of the plays and sonnets (as well as allow for fictional portrayals in the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love and in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic books).
Was the man from Stratford-upon-Avon actually the writer of the works attributed to William Shakespeare? Or was he simply a failed actor and moderately successful businessman who acted as the public front for a conspiracy to hide the true writer's identity? Those who scoff at these questions are generally considered Stratfordians, and those who do question Shakespeare's identity are considered anti-Stratfordians.
Stratfordians generally dismiss the entire debate as irrelevant and as a distraction from the works themselves, but it nonetheless has drawn the interest of many over the years. Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and so many others over the years have weighed in (both Twain and Freud were anti-Stratfordians). Three Justices of the United States Supreme Court even heard oral arguments on the question in 1987. They decided ultimately that doubters had not yet proven their case, but did acknowledge that the doubters may in the end be right.
And if one does doubt this initial premise, then new questions arise : who did write the works attributed to Shakespeare, how did this anonymous writer publish them under Shakespeare's name, and why? Some of the more popular candidates have been Francis Bacon, Edware de Vere, and Christopher Marlowe.
(NOTE : For the sake of clarity, I've adopted the convention of referring to the man from Stratford as "Shakspere," which is how his name was commonly written in his hometown, and to the writer (whoever he was) as "Shakespeare.")
Biography
Let's start with some basic biography. What do we really know about the life of the man known as William Shakespeare? As Mark Twain once pointed out, there is not as much as one would expect. Twain called Shakespeare one of "the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet" and argued that the best evidence against Shakspere being Shakespeare was that one can learn "nothing [about Shakspere] that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person
There are many reasons why
but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself - he hadn't any history to record." (emphasis in original)
William Shakspere, the man traditionally seen as William Shakespeare, was born in April 1564 to farmer-class parents in Stratford-upon-Avon. He probably attended the Straford Grammar School, though some dispute this. In 1582, when he was 18, he married Anne Hathaway, a local woman eight years older; within six months, their first child, a daughter named Susanna, was born. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585. He then left Stratford for London, apparently abandoning his family.
Little is known of the Stratford man's first few years in London, but he appears in some scattered records as an actor in the 1590s, appearing before the queen once in 1595. He seems to have run in rough circles in those years, and a writ for his arrest was issued in November 1596. Back in Stratford, his son Hamnet died earlier in 1596 at the age of 11.
He bought land in Stratford in 1597 and continued to accumulate money and reputation. His name began appearing on the title pages of plays in 1598, though he continued to pursue a business career through these years. He returned to Stratford sometime around the age of 40. He died on April 23, 1616 at the age of 52. His daughters Susanna and Judith lived on to have children, but none of his grandchildren bore children of their own.
The Case for Shakspere
Probably the strongest evidence that Shakspere was in fact Shakespeare comes from the first collection of Shakespeare's plays. This First Folio was published posthumously in 1623, seven years after Shakspere's death, but it establishes definite connections between the two men. First, the Folio included a drawing of Shakspere as Shakespeare. Second, it included a eulogy by Ben Jonson in which Jonson praised Shakespeare as "the sweet swan of Avon," as well as "the soul of the age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!"
Anti-Stratfordians somehow have to explain away the First Folio if their doubts about Shakspere are to survive. They first of all question why Shakspere did not oversee the production of the First Folio himself, wondering why a writer would not try to preserve his works. They also raise questions about the publishers' motives and about Jonson's involvement. Some have parsed out Jonson's language as possibly evasive and misleading.
The Case against Shakspere
Moving past the First Folio, anti-Stratfordians going back to Twain and even further look to Shakspere's own life for signs that he could not have been the author Shakespeare. They say that Shakspere lacked the education to write his plays, that it is not clear that Shakspere could even write, that Shakspere lacked the time to write, and that Shakspere was not held in regard by the literary or theatre community. For example :
- Shakspere left behind a record as a businessman that seems inconsistent with the life one would expect of a noted author. He was litigious and he was cheap. He was memorialized in his hometown chapel not as a writer but as a businessman dealing with grains; this was later changed to fit the image one would expect of a writer. And would such a businessman not bother trying to capitalize more on perhaps his greatest investment, the works in his name, unless there was some reason he could not?
- Shakspere's family life seems inconsistent with the life one would expect of a great writer. His daughters, for example, were illiterate. Moreover, it is not entirely clear that Shakspere himself could write; he left behind only a handful of signatures which arguably showed a lack of familiarity with the act of writing.
- Shakspere's death was a non-event for the literary and theatre communities in London and even for the local community in Stratford-upon-Avon. This strikes doubters as evidence that everyone in the know was well aware that Shakspere was not Shakespeare, but scholars have pointed out that Shakespeare was no longer part of the literary or theatre community by the time of his death, since he had left London for Stratford-upon-Avon years before.
- Shakspere would have been more consistent with and protective of the use of his name had he been a real writer, some argue. The man from Stratford's name was commonly written in Stratford-upon-Avon as Shakspere, it was spelled Shagspere and Shaxpere on his marriage licenses, and the name on his monument in Stratford is Shakspeare. But the name on almost all the plays and poems is spelled Shakespeare or Shake-speare. Some say the hyphen suggests a pseudonym, and some say that a true writer would have been more careful with the spelling of his name throughout his life.
- Could Shakspere the businessman and father have had the time or education to write so many plays covering so many different topics? Shakespeare's plays cover too wide a range for someone like Shakspere, some say. Stratfordians, however, argue that Shakspere was either a genius or, alternatively, that he was not. The works of Shakespeare borrow from other plays and contain many factual, historical and legal mistakes; Shakspere need not have had an aristocratic background or a wide formal education to write his works.
In making their case, anti-Stratfordians also point to the lack of solidity in the facts linking Shakspere to Shakespeare. They point out that the order of the plays is not definitively established, and that the plays could thus have been written by someone else at different times; the Tempest is generally considered the last play because some scholars believe it was inspired by a shipwreck in the Bermudas in 1609, but this is not necessarily solid evidence. They also point out that no manuscripts survive.
Other Candidates
But if Shakspere wasn't Shakespeare, then who was? The list of various candidates is long, and some have suggested that Shakespeare was actually the front not just for an individual but for a group of writers. Some of the most popular individual candidates are :
- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Once the most popular candidate due to his background and extensive education, Bacon is seen as less likely nowadays, in no small part because Bacon's writing style is seen as not poetic and very different from Shakespeare's.
- Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). An aristocratic lawyer whose life arguably parallels that of Hamlet and so fits what one would expect of Shakespeare that the parallels convinced Freud, Edward de Vere is perhaps the most popular modern candidate. Some say that de Vere would have used Shakespeare as his front in order to hide the embarrassment that may have come from a nobleman writing popular literature, but others scoff at this theory and point out other embarrassing details about de Vere's life. Some of the most prominent proponents of this theory include Thomas J. Looney and Charles J. Ogburn.
- Sir Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Marlowe is the only professional playwright among the leading candidates, and proponents of this theory argue that Marlowe faked his death in 1593 and then wrote plays while in exile.
The debate goes on and probably will go on for many more years to come without resolution. Twain thought centuries might pass before William Shakespeare's true identity would be accepted and William Shakspere knocked off his perch. "Disbelief in him cannot come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process," he wrote.
Sources: John Michell, Who wrote Shakespeare? (Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 1996). Irvin Leigh Matus, Shakespeare, in fact (Continuum, 1999). Richard F. Whalen, Shakespeare - who was he? : The Oxford challenge to the Bard of Avon (Praeger Publishers, 1994). Mark Twain, 1601, and Is Shakespeare Dead? (Oxford University Pres, 1996). The Atlantic Monthly has articles on the subject on-line here. PBS's Frontline has aired two specials on the question and has resources on the question on-line here. James Lardner, The Authorship Question, New Yorker, April 11, 1988.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (last updated December 8, 2002) (back to top)
Controversy continues as to whether President Thomas Jefferson fathered some or all of the children of Sally Hemings, a slave who worked at Jefferson's home on Monticello and accompanied his family to Paris for a few years in the late 1790s, and who had at least four surviving children.
These charges, first aired in 1802 as part of a political attack, gained some newfound weight and credibility in 1998 when DNA tests published in Nature magazine showed a link between the Hemings and Jefferson descendants, thus showing that an individual carrying the male Jefferson Y chromosome - though not necessarily Thomas Jefferson himself fathered at least the last known child born to Sally Hemings. With that much shown but so much still left unanswered, scholars as well as Jefferson's accepted and alleged descendants have continued to turn to historical evidence to pinpoint which adult male Jefferson was in fact the father.
The researchers behind the 1998 tests concluded that "the simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings" were that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Heming's last known child. The Monticello Research Committee, convened by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which owns and operates Monticello today, also concluded in 2000 that there was a "strong likelihood" that Jefferson and Hemings had a relationship that led to the birth of one or more of Hemings' children, and said that "convincing evidence does not exist for the hypothesis that another male Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children."
However, others continue to dispute the historical evidence. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society's Scholar Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter, for example, published a report in April 2001, saying that the evidence was not conclusive. This commission pointed to another Jefferson male, his much younger brother Randolph, as a likelier candidate as the father of Hemings's children.
Some of Heming's descendants have long sought recognition as part of Thomas Jefferson's family and have won some recognition in the arena of public opinion, but their efforts have had little success in convincing the Monticello Association, a non-profit organization composed of Thomas Jefferson's lineal descendants. The Monticello Association has continued to deny Hemings's descendants membership because it is still unclear whether they actually qualify. If recognized as qualifying, Hemings's descendants would be entitled to join the Monticello Association as full members; they would thus be entitled to be buried in the Monticello graveyard, to attend annual reunions at Monticello, and to have full voting rights within the organization.
Records have established that Sally Hemings had at least four children who survived their infancies : Harriet, Beverly, Madison and Eston. But another long-running question exists as to whether Sally Hemings had an earlier child. The descendants of Thomas C. Woodson have long claimed that their ancestor was an unrecognized son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, that Thomas C. Woodson was identified as such in the 1802 article that first asserted the existence of a relationship between the two, and that they are entitled to recognition as lineal descendants of Thomas Jefferson. However, there is no documentary evidence that Thomas C. Woodson was Sally Hemings's child. Moreover, the DNA tests in 1998 determined that Woodson was not descended from any Jefferson male; Woodson's descendants have denied the validity of such tests and continue to argue that they are descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
A review of some of the disputed evidence follows:
- The timing of Jefferson's visits to Monticello correlates with the conception windows for Hemings's known children. This is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence in support of the relationship, but critics have said that this can be explained if other Jefferson relatives were likely to visit Monticello while Jefferson was present.
- Jefferson gave unique access to freedom to Hemings' children, even though he did not free Sally Hemings himself. Jefferson freed Hemings' daughter Harriet during his lifetime, allowed others to flee without being retrieved, and freed Hemings's two youngest sons, Madison and Eston, in his will. Critics point out that other members of the Hemings family were also freed in that will and received more favorable treatment than Sally Hemings's own children.
- Some of Hemings's children claimed to be descended from Thomas Jefferson, and have passed that belief down through generations. Some people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community also believed that Thomas Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings's children.
- Thomas Jefferson himself arguably denied the charges in a letter to a member of his administration. In an 1805 letter to a member of his Cabinet, Jefferson admitted that only one of the charges leveled against him by his political opponents was true, thus implicitly denying his enemies' charge that he had fathered a child with Sally Hemings. Dr. McKenzie Wallehnborn dissented form the Monticello Research Committee's report, finding that "this has to be a very straight forward denial of all the Federalist charges which included the report of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings."
Whether Thomas Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings's children or not may never be decided to complete satisfaction.
Nevertheless, as one member of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society' Scholar Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter, Prfoessor Paul Rahe, wrote, "There is
one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he expressed for the propensity of slaveowners and their relatives to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man."
Sources: The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, on-line here, has collected resources on the controversy on-line here, including the January 200 Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which is on-line here. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, on-line here, released its own critique in April 2001, on-line here. The Monticello Association is on-line here. Eugene A. Foster et. al, Jefferson fathered slave's last child, Nature 396, 27-28 (1998) (note: the headline is inaccurate; Foster's article simply provides evidence that Jefferson could have been Eston Hemings's father, and that was the "simplest and most probable explanation" of the DNA evidence). Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings : An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia, 1997). Byron W. Woodson, Sr., A President in the Family : Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson (Praeger Publishers, 2001).
Confederate Battle Flag (last updated April 27, 2003) (back to top)
For many Southerners, the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of the Lost Cause, states' rights, and those who died during the Civil War. But for many blacks, the flag is a symbol of white supremacy and slavery, especially since the Confederate battle flag was not adopted by any Southern state until long after the Civil War and in response to Reconstruction-era changes and to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The continuing controversy has focused on three Southern states : Georgia (which adopted a flag acknowledging the Confederacy in 1956, adopted a new design in 2001, and adopted a new design in 2003 that would last until a 2004 referendum that would decide between the 1956 and 2003 designs), Mississippi (which began using a flag acknowledging the Confederacy in 1894 and approved its continued use in a 2001 referendum), and South Carolina (which began flying a Confederate battle flag over its Capitol in 1962 and then removed it to the grounds in 2000).
Georgia
1956-2001
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Mississippi
1894-present
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Confederacy Battle Flag
1861-65
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the most vocal opponents of the Confederate battle flag, and has organized protests and boycotts of states still using the flag. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said of the flag in 2001 that it was "representative of an era that epitomized everything that was wrong and inhumane in this country and should be stripped of any sovereignty context and placed into a historical context."
Such protests have had an impact, especially in connection to sports. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announced in April 2000 that it would cancel future events in South Carolina if that state did not take down its battle flag from its Capitol, and South Carolina did so about two months later. "Obviously, the Confederate flag means many things to different individuals, but there is no question that to a significant number of our constituents, the flag is a symbol of oppression," said NCAA Executive Committee chair Charles Wethington in April 2000. "This has created an inhospitable environment for many coaches and student-athletes, and for some, it is an intolerable environment."
Overview by State
The following discusses the status of the debate in various states as of April 2003 :
- Georgia. Georgia has debated the flag issue periodically over the past decade and has changed its flag twice in recent years. Georgia adopted a state flag in 1956 that incorporated the Southern Cross of the Confederate battle flag into its design. Gov. Zell Miller then tried convincing the Georgia legislature to change the design in 1993, but this effort failed. The legislature again considered the issue in January 2001 and adopted a new flag that reduced the 1956 flag's prominence by including it only along with other prior Georgia state flags. Gov. Sonny Perdue revived the issue in 2003 and called for a referendum as to whether the state should keep the 2001 flag or return to the 1956 design. The state legislature then voted on April 25, 2003 to drop the 2001 flag in favor of a new design similar to the pre-1956 design and to have a March 2004 referendum between the 1956 and 2003 designs.
1920-1956
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1956-2001
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2001-2003
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- Mississippi. Mississippi is now the only other state displaying the Southern Cross in its official state flag and the only one to do so since the 19th century. Mississippi began using a flag that incorporated the Southern Cross in 1894. It was then discovered in 2000 that the flag had never been officially adopted, and Mississippians then voted overwhelming (65 percent to 35 percent) to officially adopt the 1894 flag in an April 2001 referendum.
1861-1894
(except for Confederacy years)
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1894-present
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- South Carolina. South Carolina's flag was adopted in 1861 but has no direct references to the Civil War; a proposed resolution in 1899 would have changed the color of the flag's background from blue (which honored Revolutionary War soldiers) to purple (for the Confederate dead) but was rejected. South Carolina began displaying the Confederate battle flag prominently over its statehouse in 1962, ostensibly to honor the 100th anniversary of the Civil War but also in response to the civil-rights movement. The state continued to fly the flag over the Capitol until it relented in the face of protests and moved the flag to the Capitol lawn in July 2000.
State Flag
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Displayed over state Capitol
1962-2000
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- Alabama. Alabama's state flag features a red cross against a white background. It was adopted in 1895 and is reminiscent of white resistance to blacks, but it has not inspired much controversy.
- Arkansas. Arkansas's state flag was originally adopted in 1913 as a way of acknowledging the three countries that owned the land before statehood (France, Spain and the United States), its status as the 25th state admitted to the United States, and the fact that diamonds had been discovered there. Arkansas then revised the flag in 1923 and 1924 to acknowledge the state's part of the Confederacy; the final 1924 design re-arranged the flag's original three stars and added a fourth blue star above the state's name. This flag has not inspired much controversy.
The Confederacy's Four Flags
The Confederate battle flag was actually not the Confederacy's national flag, but a flag used only in battle. The first flag adopted by the Confederate States of America was known as the "Stars and Bars," but was considered too similar to the United States flag and caused confusion on the battlefield. Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard thus requested a new battle flag, which was known as the battle flag or the Beauregard flag and which incorporated a design known as the "Southern Cross." That flag saw a resurgence in the 1940s, largely after Southern Democrats led by Strom Thurmond adopted it in the 1948 presidential election, and became so popular that the New York Times Magazine wrote in 1951 about the surprising new "fad" sweeping the Atlantic seaboard.
First Confederate Flag
1861-63
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Second Confederate Flag
1863-65
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Third Confederate Flag
1865
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Battle Flag, 1861-65
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Sources: Kevin Thornton, The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History, Southern Cultures, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 1996). E. John Long, Conquest by Bunting, New York Times Magazine (October 14, 1951). David Goldfield, Still fighting the Civil War : the American South and southern history (Louisiana State University Press, 2002). Georgia's Secretary of State has information about the Georgia state flags and the various Confederacy flags on-line here. Mississippi's Department of Tourism has information about the state's flags on-line here, and Mississippi's Secretary of State has information about the 2001 referendum on-line here. Arkansas's Secretary of State has information on the Arkansas state flag on-line here. The Alabama Department of Archives & History has information about the Alabama flag on-line here.
Lincoln's Alleged "Corporations Enthroned" Speech (last updated March 13, 2003) (back to top)
Was Abraham Lincoln worried about the rise of corporations in the post-Civil War United States? Many over the years have attributed such a quote expressing such views to Lincoln, but it appears that Lincoln never actually said or wrote such a thing.
First of all, it seems unlikely that Lincoln would have held such views given his long career as a lawyer who often represented the railroad industry. It also seems unlikely that circumstances arose in which Lincoln would have said such a thing; the Civil War did help some corporations gain power but Lincoln's assumption of extremely broad presidential powers was probably cause for greater concern at that time.
The quote in question supposedly comes from a November 21, 1864 letter to Colonel William F. Elkins :
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"Yes, we may all congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its close. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
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No such letter appears in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, an 8-volume chronological compilation by the Abraham Lincoln Association in 1953 with two later supplements. The letter is quoted in Archer Shaw's The Lincoln Encyclopedia (1950) and cited as coming from Emanuel Hertz's Abraham Lincoln, a New Portrait (1931); the quote as printed above does appear in Hertz's book but without any date, recipient or other identifying information. Caroline Thomas Harnsberger deliberately did not include the quote in The Lincoln Treasury (1950), calling it "spurious."
Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, himself a lawyer for the railroad industry, reportedly wrote a short letter in March 1917 dismissing the quote as inauthentic. In a longer, unsent draft of that letter, Robert Todd Lincoln wrote that he had tracked the source of the quote to a Spiritualist S้ance in Iowa and that the quote was supposedly said by Abraham Lincoln through a medium. "[B]elief in its authenticity should therefore be held only by those who place confidence in the outgivings of so-called Mediums at the gatherings held under their auspices," he wrote.
Robert Todd Lincoln also wrote in the unsent draft that the quote's authenticity is doubtful because it seemed anachronistic. "I am old enough to remember that time very well, but I do not recall that there was then, or for a good many years thereafter, any public discussion of the danger to the public of corporations or of combinations of corporations, and I do not believe that there was then any feeling whatever adverse to corporations large or small," he wrote.
"In short, I regard the quotation as being simply an impudent invention," Robert Todd Lincoln wrote in the unsent draft.
By the way, there actually was a Colonel William F. Elkins, who Abraham Lincoln had some connection with through his early political career in Illinois. But Elkins does not appear to have been a close friend of Lincoln or to have had much role in Lincoln's later political life, and Robert Todd Lincoln wrote in March 1917 that he had no memory of such a man.
Sources: The best reference on this topic is Thomas F. Schwartz, Lincoln never said that, For the People (Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 1, Number 1, Spring 1999), available on-line via the Abraham Lincoln Association here. Archer H. Shaw, The Lincoln Encyclopedia (Macmillan, 1950). Emanuel Hertz, Abraham Lincoln : A New Portrait (Volume 2) (Horace Liveright Inc., 1931). Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, The Lincoln Treasury (Wilcox & Follett Co., 1950). The Abraham Lincoln Association, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler (1953). Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last, Best Hope of Earth : Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Harvard University Press, fourth printing, 1995).
Corporate Personhood (last updated March 26, 2003) (back to top)
Corporations are now seen in the United States as "persons" under the law with many but not all of the same rights that actual human beings have. Corporations now can invoke their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, have some First Amendment rights of free speech, and cannot be subjected to unequal treatment by the government.
The development of such "corporate personhood" was a process that some say started with the 1886 case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, but that case was actually just an early point in two different legal stories : the development of corporate personhood as well as the development of the 14th Amendment as a limitation on what government can constitutionally do. The Santa Clara case did help establish that corporations were "persons" under the Fourteenth Amendment, but what that meant would not be clear until the 20th Century.
Some, such as Justice Hugo Black (1886-1971) and Ralph Nader, have at times called for court rulings or constitutional amendments that would revoke corporations' status as persons. Such a change might allow for easier and more extensive regulation of corporations, they say. For example, if corporations weren't considered persons, then laws could tax certain kinds of corporations more heavily or limit corporations' free-speech rights more easily, and regulators probably could do more surprise inspections.
Others, including Chief Justice William Rehnquist, have at times called for stricter limits on corporate rights. Rehnquist wrote in a dissenting opinion in 1978 that corporations should only be entitled to the rights that they need to carry out the purposes for which they were incorporated, and would have denied corporations First Amendment rights unless they were specifically in the media business.
Some have tried over the years pinning corporate personhood on a conspiracy involving various parties: the legislator primarily responsible for drafting that section of the 14th Amendment in 1866, the lawyer who argued most strongly for corporate personhood in 1882, and the Supreme Court justices who decided Santa Clara in 1886 (the judges now seem to get most of the blame). But all these theories seem to give too much credit to the alleged conspirators : the Fourteenth Amendment has in so many ways grown far beyond what anyone could have predicted in the 19th century and corporate personhood did not become a truly powerful tool until a decision in 1905.
The Meaning of "Person" in the 14th Amendment
With the end of the Civil War, legislators passed constitutional amendments that would help ensure that blacks were treated equally and without the badges of servitude. The 13th and 15th Amendments clearly were responses to the Civil War; the 13th Amendment ratified in 1865 banned slavery, and the 15th Amendment ratified in 1870 ensured that voting rights could not denied anyone because of his race (though this right was limited to men for another 50 years).
Most of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, clearly also is a response to the Civil War. But the first section goes farther and establishes who is a citizen of the United States. It also dictates that no state "shall derive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
One question is whether the term "person" as used in the 14th Amendment includes corporations. But another, deeper question is whether anyone knew at the time or could have predicted just how important "due process" and "equal protection" would come to be.
The Supreme Court answered the question of corporate personhood affirmatively at some point in the 1880s, though exactly when is not entirely clear. Even though some have referred back to the Santa Clara decision for this ruling, the Supreme Court actually did not make such an explicit holding in that case. Rather, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court cut off oral argument on that point and simply stated his belief that this issue was already well-settled; the point was then adopted in the case summary without actually being formally decided. In any event, the Supreme Court did hold the point to be law in subsequent cases, such as Minneapolis & St. L. R. Co. v. Beckwith, 129 U.S. 26 (1889).
In order to understand the court's thinking, we must look at a lower-level opinion that did go more deeply into this point and into an argument before the Supreme Court. An 1882 circuit-court opinion, County of San Mateo v. Southern Pacific R. Co., written by one Supreme Court justice and supported by the circuit-court judge for California shows that corporate personhood was seen by some people as a way of protecting individual persons' investments in these corporations. According to this view, individuals had certain property rights and should not lose those rights merely because they were operating via a corporation.
"[W]e think that it is well established
that whenever a provision of the constitution, or of a law, guarantees to persons the enjoyment of property, or affords to them means for its protection, or prohibits legislation injuriously affecting it, the benefits of the provision extend to corporations, and that the courts will always look beyond the name of the artificial being to the individuals whom it represents," Justice Stephen Field wrote.
We must also look at how Roscoe Conkling, a former member of the Joint Congressional Committee which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 and a lawyer who had twice declined nominations for the Supreme Court, argued the appeal of the San Mateo case before the Supreme Court. In 1882, Conkling publicly produced for the first time the Committee's notes and argued that the Committee had intentionally used the word "persons" to include corporations. He did not explicitly say that the Committee had done so, but he left an impression that undoubtedly affected the Supreme Court justices when the issue came up again six years later.
But others have disputed this reading of the 14th Amendment as too broad and have said that this reading was not what the people who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment intended. Justice Hugo L. Black, for example, wrote in a 1938 dissent that "Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection
No word in all this amendment gave any hint that its adoption would deprive the states of their long-recognized power to regulate corporations." See Connecticut General Life Ins. Co. v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938) (on-line here).
Accordingly, Black wrote that "this Court should now overrule previous decisions which interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to include corporations." Black noted that corporations had invoked the 14th Amendment so often that more than 50 percent of the cases invoking the 14th Amendment in its first half-century were on corporations' behalf, and less than one-half of 1 percent were for blacks.
It is not entirely clear what the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had in mind. The key drafter was John A. Bingham, a Republican from Ohio who served in the House of Representatives for almost two decades and helped prosecute those who allegedly helped assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Scholars such as Howard Jay Graham have pointed out that Bingham had long sought greater constitutional protections for blacks and also for whites, though Bingham might have tried accomplishing other goals at the same time.
For better or worse, corporate personhood under the 14th Amendment won out in the 1880s and Black's opinion never won much support. The only other member of the Supreme Court to back Black's viewpoint was Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote in a 1949 dissent that the Supreme Court misinterpreted the 14th Amendment in the 1860s and should rectify the mistake. See Wheeling State Corp. v. Glander, 337 U.S. 562, 576-80 (1949) (on-line here.
Substantive Due Process and Equal Protection,
or, So What?
However the Supreme Court got there, as of the late 1880s, corporations could not be deprived of property without "due process" of law and were entitled to "equal protection" under the laws. So what? The idea meant very little throughout the 19th century; the early understanding of "due process" was that it simply guaranteed that government action affecting you would follow certain procedures, and that of "equal protection" was that it simply meant that government classifications would have some reasonable connection to a legislative purpose.
Nevertheless, section one of the Fourteenth Amendment has over time grown into one of the most powerful and farthest-reaching parts of the Constitution. For example, "due process" was the basis for applying the Bill of Rights against the states; the rights therein were originally seen as applying only to the federal government and one of Bingham's goals was to nationalize those rights as did later happen. In the modern day, "due process" and "equal protection" have become the basis for many individual rights such as the right to have an abortion.
Similarly, "due process" slowly took on a broader meaning in terms of economic regulation. Justice Stephen J. Field, recognized as a big booster of laissez-faire economics and the first Supreme Court justice to recognize corporate personhood, consistently argued that courts should use the Fourteenth Amendment to examine the substance of laws -- not merely whether they were enacted according to proper procedure - and to strike down laws that substantively violated "due process." This was a minority, not-controlling viewpoint in the Slaughterhouse Cases decided in 1871, but it became the majority viewpoint with the 1905 decision of Lochner v. New York, in which the Supreme Court struck down a New York law capping the maximum hours that could be worked a week.
For the next few decades, a period now called the Lochner period, corporations and businesspeople regularly invoked the 14th Amendment to strike down laws that tried regulating workplaces and the free market. See e.g. Louis K. Liggett Co. v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933) (on-line here) (in which the Supreme Court struck down a Florida law taxing chain stores greater than other stores). Courts thus struck down many economic regulations, including most of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
Finally, however, the threat of FDR's court-packing plan and a change in the composition of the Supreme Court in the late 1930s resulted in a change of judicial philosophy. The Supreme Court stopped reviewing economic laws substantively and began giving more deference to such laws as passed. (Substantive due process would be revived in the 1960s as a way of ensuring individual rights)
Given the shift in judicial philosophy, corporations' "due process" rights under the 14th Amendment are no longer as important as they were beforehand. Courts now generally accept that laws comply with the 14th Amendment, so corporations as well as individuals cannot have laws struck down on this point as easily as before.
Other Rights
The Santa Clara decision had nothing to do with whether corporations could claim rights under the Bill of Rights, but corporations have developed these rights over time. The Supreme Court has at times noted that corporations' rights are not as extensive as actual persons, but the breadth of these corporate rights has grown, especially with the fall of substantive due process. These rights are established via Supreme Court decisions, so the extent and precise contours are somewhat unclear.
The 1905 case of Hale v Henkel was apparently the first to recognize that a corporation had a Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the 1978 case of First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, established that all corporations had some First Amendment rights of free speech and political participation. But these cases also show that these rights are not absolute and not entirely clear; the Supreme Court in First National Bank of Boston case indicated that legislatures might be able to curtail corporations' First Amendment rights in certain circumstances.
Some would limit the rights further. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, for example, wrote a dissenting opinion in the 1978 First National Bank of Boston case and would have held that a corporation should only be entitled to the rights that are necessary for the corporation's purpose. A business corporation must have the right not to be deprived of its properly absent due process, but a business corporation does not need to have free-speech rights unless it is specifically in the media business, Rehnquist wrote.
The following list discusses a few of the rights corporations have and have not established via United States Supreme Court decisions.
- First Amendment rights of free speech. Corporations have some free-speech rights, such as the right to spend money to influence the outcome of a state referendum. In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978) (on-line here), the Supreme Court majority decided that nothing justified "the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation that cannot prove, to the satisfaction of a court, a material effect on its business or property." However, these rights were not absolute, as the Supreme Court majority also noted that it might consider limiting corporation's First Amendment rights if there were "record or legislative findings that corporate advocacy threatened imminently to undermine democratic processes, thereby denigrating rather than serving First Amendment interests."
Rehnquist dissented, writing that corporations that were not involved in the media should not have First Amendment rights and that such corporations could be regulated by the states. "A State grants to a business corporation the blessings of potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance its efficiency as an economic entity. It might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere," Rehnquist wrote. "Furthermore, it might be argued that liberties of political expression are not at all necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist. So long as the Judicial Branches of the State and Federal Governments remain open to protect the corporation's interest in its property, it has no need, though it may have the desire, to petition the political branches for similar protection. Indeed, the States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed."
- Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Corporations have this right, so government inspectors or regulators need limited subpoenas in order to conduct searches and inspections. See Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906) (a href="http://laws.findlaw.com/us/201/43.html" target="_blank">here) ("A corporation is, after all, but an association of individuals under an assumed name and with a distinct legal entity. In organizing itself as a collective body it waives no constitutional immunities appropriate to such body."). See also See v. City of Seattle, 387 U.S. 360 (1967) (on-line here).
- Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This right is limited to actual persons who can give testimony, so corporate agents cannot invoke this right to prevent incriminating their corporation. See Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906) (a href="http://laws.findlaw.com/us/201/43.html" target="_blank">here) ("The amendment is limited to a person who shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself; and if he cannot set up the privilege of a third person, he certainly cannot set up the privilege of a corporation.").
Sources : Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 1992). Howard Jay Graham, Everyman's Constitution: Historical essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the "Conspiracy Theory", and American Constitutionalism (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1968). Howard Jay Graham, The "Conspiracy Theory" of the Fourteenth Amendment, Part One, 47 Yale L.J. 371-403 (1938), Part Two, 48 Yale L.J. 171-94 (1938). Louis B. Boudin, Truth and Fiction about the Fourteenth Amendment, 16 N.Y.U.L.Q. Rev. 19-82 (1938). Willard Hurst, Book Review, 52 Harvard L.R. 851-60 (1939). Gerald Gunther and Kathleen M. Sullivan, Constitutional Law (13th edition, Foundation Press, 1997). Henry J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents and Senators (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999, 4th edition). Cases as cited above.
Alger Hiss (last updated June 24, 2001) (back to top)
Alger Hiss was the government lawyer and diplomat who was accused of being a Communist spy while working in the State Department in the 1930s, was convicted of perjury in 1950, and spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. The case against Hiss would lay the groundwork for McCarthyism and jumpstart the political career of then-Congressman Richard Nixon. Hiss's guilt or innocence is still debated today, especially with periodic revelations from declassified government files.
Hiss was a Harvard-trained lawyer and former Supreme Court clerk who joined FDR's administration in 1933. A rising star in the New Deal, he joined the State Department in 1936 and became director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. He accompanied FDR to the Yalta Conference in 1945, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin set the stage for the Cold War. Hiss then helped found the United Nations through his work as an organizer and chief adviser to the U.S. delegation. He left government service in 1946 to become the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Then, in 1948, Hiss was publicly accused of espionage and delivering government documents to the Soviet Union while working for the government in the 1930s.
His accuser was Whittaker Chambers, who had joined the Community Party and had been involved with espionage for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Chambers severed ties with the party in 1938 and had become a senior editor at Time magazine by 1948, when his accusations before the House Un-American Activities Committee became public.
(Chambers had what appears to have been an unhappy life and some issues were brought out in court, such as his brother's suicide and his grandmother's insanity. One aspect, however, was not raised at trial. Hiss argued in later years that Chambers's homosexuality was relevant "not on the issue of homosexuality per se, but on the self-torture and admitted mental instability which his sexual feelings caused him.")
Under oath, Hiss denied being a Communist or knowing anyone named Whittaker Chambers. It turned out that Hiss had indeed known Chambers under the alias of George Crosley and that Hiss had sublet an apartment out to "Crosley" in the 1930s.
Chambers continued his accusations against Hiss, and Hiss sued Chambers for libel. Eventually, Chambers led federal agents to his Maryland farm, where they found the so-called pumpkin papers, two strips of developed film and three rolls of undeveloped film containing government documents, hidden inside a hollowed-out pumpkin. This film was allegedly given by Hiss to Chambers for eventual delivery to Soviet spies.
The three-year statute of limitations for espionage had run out by this time, but the grand jury still was able to indict Hiss for perjury for lying about his dealings with Chambers.
Hiss was put on trial twice. The first trial in early 1949 ended with a hung jury, split eight to four for conviction. The second trial took place in November 1949 and included a new witness who admitted being a Soviet agent and knowing Hiss to be a Communist in 1935. Hiss was convicted on January 21, 1950, and sentenced to five years in prison. He served 44 months and was released on November 27, 1954.
Hiss spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. He was reinstated to the Massachusetts Bar in 1975 and then filed a coram bonis petition to overturn the verdict (it was denied in 1982 by Judge Richard Owen, and the decision was upheld by higher courts). Hiss died in November 15, 1996 at the age of 92. His accuser, Whittaker Chambers, had died decades earlier in 1961.
The end of the Cold War has brought to light documents that may or may not shed further light on Hiss's innocence or guilt.
In 1992, General Dimitri Volkogonov, head of the Russian military intelligence archives, said that "Not a single document substantiates the allegation that Mr. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union;" he later admitted that his review had been incomplete and that many documents had been destroyed. In 1993, a Hungarian historian, Maria Schmidt, released documents showing that another American believed to be a Communist spy, Noel Field, had admitted during an arrest that Hiss had tried to recruit him in the 1930s; however, Field recanted after being released.
In 1996, the National Security Agency released a document considered by some to be the strongest new evidence against Hiss. The March 30, 1945 document was one of thousands of pages of decoded cables exchanged between the Soviet Union and its American agents from 1939 to 1957, the results of a US-British intelligence project named "Venona." It refers to an agent code-named "Ales," a State Department official who had flown from the Yalta conference to Moscow. A footnote says that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss." Hiss had indeed been one of only four men who met the description, but he said that he went to Moscow only to see the subway system; others have criticized the identification as flawed on other grounds. See the document here.
More government documents are slowly being released. In 1999, Federal District Judge Peter K. Leisure ordered the release of thousands of pages of grand jury testimony from the Hiss case. Still, many records from the House Un-American Activities Committee are not scheduled to be made public until 2026.
Sources: Perjury, by Allen Weinstein. Footnote on an Historic Case, In Re Alger Hiss, No. 78 Civ. 3433, by William A. Reuben. Venona and Alger Hiss, by John Lowenthal, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn 2000), available here. A comprehensive website is The Alger Hiss Story, available here.
"Let Barlett be Bartlett" (last updated January 24, 2002) (back to top)
This rallying cry actually goes back to the early 1980s, when right-wing conservatives were disappointed in Ronald Reagan's performance as president and believed that he was being kept in check by more moderate Republicans such as George Bush and Reagan's chief of staff, James Baker 3d, who had served previously as Bush's campaign advisor.
The phrase probably evolved from a broadcast by the United States Information Agency in January 1982 telling the Soviet Union to "let Poland be Poland." The Reagan-specific variation started spreading in mid-1982 and seems to have caught on especially after Interior Secretary James G. Watt used it in a Republican pep rally before Reagan held a press conference in January 1983.
Reagan himself was asked about the phrase in a press conference on February 16, 1983. Reagan said that he was "pretty frustrated" with what some of his "unnamed aides" were saying. "I'm not being pushed around. I'm being given what I have asked for, which is every option, every shade of thinking on issues, and then I make the decision," he said. "And there's no one pushing me, and I'm beginning to think that those aides are akin to that mysterious 'they' who always are saying something - 'they say.' I've never met 'they,' as yet."
A NEXIS search found that the New York Times has used the phrase "Let Reagan be Reagan" 43 times. Searches for comparable phrases regarding George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush turned up only one reference for George Bush and four references for Bill Clinton.
The phrase "let Bush be Bush" appeared only once in the New York Times database, and then only dismissively. William Safire wrote in a October 1992 column that "nobody ever says, 'Let Bush be Bush," because nobody can be sure what that would be."
Senator David Borden, a moderate Democrat from Oklahoma, used the phrase "Let Clinton be Clinton" several times in 1993 when he opposed Clinton's proposed economic package. "We want to let Clinton be Clinton," Boren said in March 1993. "We don't want to let the traditionally entrenched, big-spending liberals steal the momentum away from the President's commitment to deficit reduction."
Sources: Francis X. Clines, Reagan holds U.S. is 'on the mend'; hails his record, New York Times, January 21, 1983. William Safire, Poetic Allusion Watch, New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1991. William Safire, Bush's Gamble, New York Times, October 18, 1992. Clifford Krauss, Some Senate Democrats push more spending cuts, New York Times, March 6, 1993.
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