GOODNESS OF HEART

Dissidents and heroes, Part 1

1/13/2025

In the last four sections, we have looked at instances of authoritarianism in American history; John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, the racial animus of the antebellum South, and Woodrow Wilson’s own policies of racial and ethnic intolerance and repression of dissent and speech.

These episodes bear witness to the reality that our national heritage is not just that of a glorious experiment with democracy; it holds dark times, as well.

For all the times of darkness, though, there are points of light. People from all walks of life… journalists, public officials, academics, and ordinary citizens… have resisted authoritarian policies. Sometimes their dissent has formed movements that have changed our history. Sometimes their dissent has not visibly changed anything but underscores the integrity and personal salvation of having a voice.

Let’s look at some examples in these four episodes in our history.

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Dissent about the 1798 Sedition Act was an early instance of the role of the press in counteracting authoritarianism. Although prominent public figures James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had voiced objections to the Sedition Act, it fell to journalists to take the lead in orchestrating public opposition.

A particular target of the Adams administration was the Philadelphia Aurora, a staunchly Democratic-Republican paper that often voiced opposition to Adams and his Federalist party. John Adams’ notion of free speech was that it allowed the existence of the press, in newspapers and pamphlets, but that direct criticism of the president or the presidency were off limits.

The Aurora, under the auspices of its young editor, Benjamin Bache (a grandson of Benjamin Franklin) disagreed. Criticism of the chief executive and the institution were fair game and, indeed, a vital protection of the First Amendment, which had been ratified in 1791. The Aurora therefore published stern objections to the Sedition Act, and about Adams’ relationship with the conflict in France, and other issues. Bache was charged with sedition in 1798 but succumbed to yellow fever before has case would come to court.

During the rest of the Adams administration, the Aurora and related papers were directed by two subsequent editors who continued the work that Bache had begun.

William Duane, an Irish immigrant to America, was especially incensed by the Alien Acts, which would have made him vulnerable to deportation, and voiced his opposition after his editorial tenure began. He also became the principal public dissenter to a Federalist proposal that would have allowed a partisan commission to certify (and alter) electoral outcomes. His opposition to the commission (in violation of the Sedition Law) was so forceful and widely disseminated that the proposal was withdrawn.

Thomas Cooper edited the Sunbury and Northumberland Gazette. When he published strident criticism of Adams, he was arrested and brought to trial.

In an era with only eighteenth-century communications, the trial captivated the attention of the country. It featured Cooper, an outspoken opponent of the Sedition Act under which he had been charged, defending himself in a proceeding in which the presiding judge, Samuel Chase, had been a principal advocate of the Sedition Act.

Cooper mounted an eloquent defense of the proposition that free speech… public dialogue about vital issues without the constraints presented by the Sedition Act… was essential to democracy. Numerous times, he tangled with Chase, who conducted the trial in an unashamedly partisan way.

Not surprisingly, Cooper was found guilty, fined, and sentenced to six months in jail. But although he lost the battle, he won the war. His writing and his forceful arguments at trial helped to cultivate public consciousness about free speech and democratic government. In tandem with the work of William Duane, he supported the successful candidacy of Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 federal election.

Two of the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Sedition Act itself, expired at the end of Adams’ presidency. The naturalization act was repealed in 1802. The Alien Enemies Act remains a part of the United States Code.

Sources

The Trial of Thomas Cooper. National Endowment for the Humanities, https://edsitement.neh.gov/sites/default/files/2018-08/T_Cooper.pdf.

Gagging the Press, Quashing Dissent. In MacWilliams MC (2020). On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Brettschneider C (2024). Presidents and the People: Five Leaders who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. New York, W. W. Norton.

William Duane. National Park Service/Independence National Historical Park: https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-aurora-duane.htm.

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Maintaining changes for the New Year

12/29/2024

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Every time I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes.

Mark Twain

New Years! The Times Square ball, confetti, Guy Lombardo (for people of my vintage) and… New Year’s resolutions!

Most of us make some kind of resolution for the New Year. It’s a good opportunity for a fresh start. Change isn’t easy, though, and lapsed New Year’s resolutions are certainly part of the common lore of our culture.

There is no lack of advice out there about how best to manage the resolutions we set for the year to come. Set clear goals (I prefer the word, “intentions,” by the way). Write them down. Check in regularly about how you’re doing. Enlist the caring and support of somebody else.

These are perfectly fine ideas that I’m sure you have heard before. I want to share with you, though, three ideas that get less press, that arise from some combination of empirical literature and my own experience working with people for a long time.

1. Remember why you want to be different.

I concluded long ago that for most people, “health” and even longevity don’t really have much inherent value. The status of our health and the length of our years are important, though, insofar as they allow us to live our lives in ways that matter to us.

Psychologist David Waters at the University of Virginia differentiates “health goals” and “life goals.” “Health goals” are the choices and lifestyle behaviors that people can pursue to address their most important health issues. Exercising, stopping smoking, developing a good nutritional plan. “Life goals” touch on the things that are most important to people in their lives… the things that they care about the most. Being a better teacher, coaching young people, being able to work in stained glass.

Waters argues that it is important for all of us (and our health care practitioners) to recognize the way that life goals energize health goals. The formula is “What is really important in my life is ________; therefore, my health goals are ________.”

Before I wrapped up my practice in 2015, I worked with a woman who had smoked for many years and had recently become involved in Buddhist tradition and practice. She said,

“Health” is not enough to motivate me to stop smoking. My reasons for stopping need to be more important than my reasons to smoke. I have taken a vow to work toward enlightenment, for me, and to help other people toward enlightenment. Smoking obstructs the inner channels where the chakras are… if I am serious about enlightenment, I have to quit.

You may not think much about enlightenment or inner chakra channels, but you get the idea. Changes in health practices (or any personal changes, really) need to be grounded in life values. Loving your partner. Caring for a needy family member or friend. Being an agent of disseminating kindness or compassion into the world. Working on behalf of causes that matter to you… environmental awareness, musical appreciation and creativity, social justice, or limitless others.

Remembering life values energizes personal changes.

2. Recognize the larger context.

How you’re doing overall either facilitates or inhibits personal changes.

A 2020 study from the University of British Columbia explored the relationship between purpose in life (yes, there are reliable and valid measures of this) and health behaviors in almost 14,000 people over a span of eight years. Researchers found that subjects with higher levels of purpose in life were significantly less likely to become physically inactive, to develop sleep problems, to develop unfavorable body-mass indexes, and modestly less likely to relapse in smoking cessation over the study period.

Those are some data about purpose, but I’d expect to see similar effects from any number of other global qualities… finding more joy in your life, or laughter, or social connections, or creative expression… apart from whatever you do to cultivate specific personal changes.

3. Be gentle with yourself with the ups and downs along the road

The journey does have its ups and downs, doesn’t it? Some days, like Mark Twain, you won’t exercise. Some days you’ll go for the mega sirloin in the restaurant rather than the Cobb salad. Sometimes, you will let emotions get the better of you and be unkind, rather than being an agent of forbearance and understanding.

Setbacks (the psychological literature calls these “relapses”) are common expressions of our humanity. In whatever way you may slide in a backwards direction, people have been there before. Having setbacks really isn’t an issue; the issue is how you deal with setbacks.

One of the exciting developments in the behavioral health world in the last few years is the emergence of research and practice in the arena of self-compassion. Arising mainly from work by psychologists Kristen Neff (UT, Austin) and Christopher Germer (Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance), self-compassion takes aim at our cultural tendency toward self-denigration when we don’t find ourselves behaving or managing our lives as we think we should.

Being gentle and compassionate with oneself has two benefits. First, it attenuates the health and emotional costs of unforgiveness, bitterness, and self-judgment. Second, self-compassion gives us the emotional space to be able to choose how we are going to react to setbacks. In our relationships with ourselves, just like our relationships with others, you forgive so that you can live your life.

Setbacks are unpleasant, of course, but they are also marvelous opportunities to step back and explore the conditions that prompted them. When you experience a setback with any personal change, what were the social circumstances that may have been involved? What internal experiences… thoughts, feelings, and images… may have been involved? How might you address these challenges better going forward?

So… as you find yourself teetering backwards with some personal change, think about what someone who knows you well and deeply loves you would say to you. Can you find it in your heart to treat yourself the same way?

There are many other lines of research and empirically based practice that bear on such things, notably work on gratitude, mindfulness, and on the larger picture of forgiveness. Stories for another day! For now, I’ll welcome your thoughts and comments on these ideas.

The quotation at the top, by the way, is a witty comment that has been attributed to a variety of people… Jimmy Durante, Edna Mae Oliver, Robert M. Hutchins, and Chauncey Depew among them. I imagine that they all probably said it at some point, with the original source being long lost. It is most frequently attributed to Mark Twain (who is likely not to have said it himself; he died before the quote began making its rounds), so that’s the way I’ve left it.

Happy New Year!

Fred

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Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived), Part 4

12/16/2024

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Woodrow Wilson, White Supremacy, and the Palmer Raids

When most of us recall Woodrow Wilson from high school civics, I suspect that we think mainly of the bespectacled academic who championed the League of Nations after the first World War. Wilson’s vision for the League is that it would support his cause of “making the world safe for democracy,” and would both safeguard peace and international cooperation and embody democratic and equalitarian principles. He asserted that the League would create a world in which “every voice can be heard, and every voice can have its effect.”

The League was never approved by the United States Senate, although Wilson did receive the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Life, alas, is complicated. Wilson’s lofty vision for democracy in the international order belied his unprecedented expansion of the powers of the presidency and the federal government a home, to the detriment of people of color and political opponents.

Born shortly before the Civil War, Wilson graduated from Princeton and briefly attended law school before charting a course in academic life. He received a PhD in History and Government from Johns Hopkins in 1886 (the only president to hold a PhD; George McGovern had a PhD in History from Northwestern but lost the 1972 election in a landslide to Richard Nixon). After short stints at other colleges, Wilson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1890, where he developed a reputation as an expert in constitutional law and later served as president.

Wilson served for two years as governor of New Jersey and won the 1912 presidential election with 42 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race with incumbent William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

In his academic life, Wilson was a prolific writer, and much of our understanding of his views and assumptions comes from published work like his 5-volume History of the American People. (An intriguing recent development has been the examination of a collection of his students’ lecture notes that have been held by the Princeton University archives.)

Emerging from these sources and Wilson’s tenure as president is a legacy of white supremacy.

His 1912 campaign promised a commitment to opening “gates of opportunity for all” and to justice being done for black people “in every matter.” His philosophy of government moved him in the opposite direction. He believed that society was best served by “efficiency,” meaning that leaders should have the responsibility and power to create conditions where people contentedly followed their prescribed roles. Working against efficiency was “chaos” and “friction.” When the smooth functioning of prescribed roles was challenged, he believed, the resulting turmoil would work to everyone’s disadvantage.

When a black student sought admission to Princeton during Wilson’s presidency, Wilson announced that it would be “inadvisable.” The resulting chaos would undermine the experience of this student and of white students, and the applicant should seek education elsewhere.

Extending the logic of interracial chaos, Wilson as president presided over a significant resegregation of the federal workforce. People of color held 11 percent of federal jobs in 1907, but the proportion was eroded during the Wilson administration as office holders were denied promotions and moved to less-skilled roles.

Wilson also supported the resurgence of the Ku Klux Clan, which had been largely eliminated during the Grant administration. Although he rejected Klan violence, he spoke admirably about the role of the Klan in maintaining the ordered regulation of life in the Jim Crow South.

Similarly, he detested the spate of lynchings in his era but did nothing to prevent them.

Emblematic of Wilson’s white supremacist values was the screening at the White House of the 1915 D. W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation. The film depicts African Americans in stereotyped, racist roles ranging from happy slaves to monstrous sexual predators, and glorifies the Ku Klux Clan, violence, and lynching as means to suppress black entitlement and equality.

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The First World War brought new elements to the Wilson administration’s campaigns of repression. With the United States entering the war in 1917, the federal government targeted German Americans, antiwar activists, left-leaning journalists, and labor organizers by stifling speech and orchestrating mass arrests.

Growing anti-German sentiment prompted vigilantism against people with German ancestry or surnames (with many people Anglicizing their names as a result). Conscientious objectors and men seeking to avoid the draft were sought out, with raids in New York in 1918 rounding up 60,000 men, among whom fewer than 200 were genuine draft evaders.

The labor movement, which had been especially engaged with activism and strikes in preceding years, was conveniently defined as being insufficiently supportive of the war effort and was particularly targeted. Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, banned socialist and labor material from the mails or impeded their distribution for technical postal violations. Offices of the Industrial Workers of the World… the IWW, the Wobblies… were raided and destroyed, with members arrested, convicted and imprisoned. In 1917, over a thousand copper workers in Bisbee, Arizona who had gone on strike were rounded up, herded into boxcars, and transported to a holding facility in New Mexico.

The legal underpinnings of these actions were provided by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The Espionage Act made virtually any expression of opposition to the war… “false reports or false statements…” a criminal offense. The Sedition Act (if you have read the John Adams blog, this will sound familiar) went further, declaring that any “words or speeches… or scurrilous libels… against the Government of the Unite States…” would be a crime. In these two years, over 1000 people were convicted under these two acts, with most going to prison.

Nor did the end of the war stop these abuses. The Russian Revolution spurred campaigns to frame “communism” as a widespread and profoundly threatening movement that was antithetical to American values. Aided by newly developed surveillance technology like telephone tapping, the suppression of communism was presented as a pretext for further disempowering organized labor and political opposition.

The most notable expression of post-war repression was the Palmer Raids. A. Mitchell Palmer had been appointed as Attorney General in 1919. The immediate post-war period was marked by continuing labor strife, civil unrest, and an anarchist movement that was responsible for terrorist bombings. Palmer was charged with addressing these threats.

The initial Palmer raids took place in November 1919. Working with local police, Department of Justice agents arrested several hundred people suspected of being radicals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. While many were released after questioning (having been found not to have committed crimes), a portion remained incarcerated for several months and many were subject to inhumane treatment and beatings.

Palmer then partnered with an eager, early-career J. Edgar Hoover, who compiled a list of 60,000 suspected radicals and agitators who would be the focus of more extensive raids in early January 1920. On January 2, agents in 30 cities arrested several thousand people, most without warrants. Like the earlier raids, many remained in jails without due process several months after the fact.

An upwardly mobile opportunist, Palmer announced his candidacy for president in March. He and Hoover then marshalled substantial resources to respond to what they projected would be massive communist upheaval on May Day. When May 1 passed without incident, Palmer’s credibility was substantially deflated, and a report from the precursor of the ACLU later that month documented his abuses and brought an end to the raids that bear his name.

J. Edgar Hoover, however, was appointed head of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and continued a program of surveillance and suppression of suspected dissidents for the next 37 years.

And now, in December 2024, Donald Trump’s nominee as FBI director, conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, is committed to use the office for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers and to secure retribution against journalists and other of Trump’s opponents.

Main sources, for your interest:

Brettschneider C (2024). Presidents and the People: Five Leaders who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. New York, W. W. Norton.

Hochschild A (2022). American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. New York: Mariner Books.

Hochschild A (2018). Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

MacWilliams MC (2020). On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Taking a break from the blog installments during the holidays. NEXT blog installment… some stories of resistance, and words of hope in these historical accounts, on January 6.

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Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived), Part 3

12/9/2024

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The Antebellum South and abolition

Those of you who read the daily posts from historian (and Mainer) Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, will be familiar with her telling of the remarkable transformation of American government in the short years prior to and along the course of the Civil War.

As contentiousness about slavery grew, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and (my native) Maine was separated from Massachusetts and admitted as a free state. Slavery was also prohibited above the 36th parallel and in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.

By the early 1850s, control of the government was in the hands of profoundly wealthy southern slaveholders, who controlled the presidency, the senate, and the supreme court. Exercising their power, they oversaw the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. Introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the Kansas Nebraska Act divided land west of Missouri into two new territories, with the provision that decisions about slavery there would be a matter of popular sovereignty. This effectively overturned the Missouri Compromise, because of the prospect that slavery would now be allowed in territory where it had previously been prohibited.

The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case further inflamed tensions about slavery. The Supreme Court declared that enslaved people were not citizens, and therefore were not entitled to protection from the federal government. The Dred Scott decision also found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

As the storyline developed, antislavery men in the north from across the political spectrum gathered and energized a growing consensus of opposition to Kansas Nebraska. (Men were the public face of antislavery activism, but women had been active in the abolition movement for years, and several of the leaders of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls grew out of that movement.) Conversations developed around the north, engaging ordinary people along with legislators and formal leaders.

By 1858, there was widespread enthusiasm in the north for abolition. A new Republican party had been established, championed by Abraham Lincoln, to embody the equalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Enslaved people were, in fact, people. Not property.

Lincoln, of course, was elected in 1860. Union success at the terrible battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the confidence in September, 1862, to announce the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued the following July. And I suspect that most of us have at some point memorized the Gettysburg Address, dedicating a national cemetery after the equally horrific battle, that November.

Professor Richardson’s summary in her telling of the story:

“In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom."

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Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived), Part 2

12/2/2024

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Continuing my comments about the election, this is the second of four reflections about the history of authoritarianism in America. A theme that I will suggest after the final post is that society, generally, survives authoritarianism, but some particular people or communities do not. This is an example.

Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears

The pressure of European settlement and expansion in the southeastern United States brought suffering and displacement to indigenous Native Americans. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole communities were all eventually subject to removal from their native lands.

For the Cherokee, the government negotiated over a dozen treaties, beginning in 1785, that promised peaceful relationships and territorial integrity. All treaties were violated.

Adding to the attractiveness of Cherokee land, the discovery of gold there in the late 1820s further prompted European encroachment. In 1828, the state of Georgia passed laws that seized Cherokee territory and decreed that settlement policies would be administered by the state.

The growing crisis offered the opportunity for the president to intervene. Andrew Jackson did not, allowing the state action to remain in force.

Hero of the War of 1812, wealthy planter (and owner of hundreds of African American slaves), and legislator in various roles before his presidency, Jackson believed in the cause of European displacement and settlement. In an address to congress in 1829, he called for native people to be removed beyond the areas that white settlers had begun to occupy. Soon thereafter, her signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allowing the president to negotiate for the removal of native people to lands west of the Mississippi.

Seeking legal redress, the Cherokee Nation took to the courts, arguing that the Georgia action was illegal because of the supremacy clause of the United States constitution. The supremacy clause (Article VI, clause 2) stipulates that the national government retains the ultimate authority with respect to laws and treaties, and that this authority supersedes that of states in the event of conflicts.

Two notable decisions by the Supreme Court followed.

In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Cherokee Nation sought an injunction to prevent Georgia from enforcing Georgia laws within Cherokee territory. The court said no, finding in a divided opinion that the Cherokee Nation was not a legal entity that had standing to challenge the Georgia laws. The Cherokee Nation, it declared, was a “domestic dependent nation.”

Worcester v. Georgia (1832) was more sympathetic, in a case that revisited the issue of Cherokee sovereignty. The particulars were that the Georgia laws included a provision that no white settlers could reside within Cherokee lands without a license form the governor and without having sworn allegiance to Georgia’s laws. White missionaries who had been working among the Cherokees, including one Samuel Worcester, were arrested and sentenced to several years of hard labor in prison.

This time, the court found that jurisdiction within Cherokee territory belonged to the federal government. Speaking for the majority in a 5-1 decision, Chief Justice Marshall wrote, “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.” The Georgia laws were therefore found to be unconstitutional, and the Cherokee community was vested with the integrity and authority to govern themselves, with their own laws. (The missionaries were released in 1833.)

Faced with a new barrier in his attempt to orchestrate Cherokee displacement, Jackson ignored the court decision. The oversight by the state of Georgia continued.

Additional depredations followed. Seeking to legitimize the process of removal the Jackson administration negotiated the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The treaty provided that Cherokees would vacate their lands within two years in exchange for 5 million dollars and land in Oklahoma. It was negotiated, however, by a small, selected group of Cherokees who were not elected officials of the tribe and lacked any authority to speak on behalf of the larger community. (Several of the treaty signers were assassinated in Cherokee infighting in 1839.)

The brutal winter of 1838 saw Cherokee Trail of Tears, the forcible removal of 16,000 Cherokees over 1000 miles between eastern Tennessee and Oklahoma. Between 4000 and 8000 perished from disease, malnutrition, and exposure. In his later years, a former Georgia Civil War soldier who had witnessed the march commented, “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

With countless choices available, Donald Trump chose the 1835 Ralph Earl portrait of Andrew Jackson to hang in the oval office in his first term.

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Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived), Part 1

11/18/2024

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Five or six days after the election, when I hastily committed myself to write a five-part series of reflections (I had probably had too much coffee), the title of Episode 2, as you see, was “Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived).”

As I began to develop this idea, the immediate question that presented was, “Well, what does here mean? Where are we?”

In a very particular sense, of course, we have not been here before. Never before has a twice-impeached insurrectionist and convicted felon (also facing 44 counts in two federal indictments and 8 counts in the remaining state indictment, all of which are likely to go away) been elected to the highest office in the land.

But in a larger sense, we have been here before. Our national history is one of courage, honor, and sacrifice, but it also has a darker side. Our history is replete with conflicts between rich and poor, and with people scheming for wealth and power at the expense of others. With individuals and small groups controlling the narrative and straining the bounds of truth to secure what they want. With egregious suffering of social and ethnic minorities.

I have chosen to reflect on authoritarianism. Definitions vary, but common features include the concentration of power in a select group, framing the narrative… creating the story… that works to the advantage of building or maintaining power, and often the suppression of dissent and subjugation or dismissal of somebody else.

In the upcoming four posts, I want to look at some examples.

John Adams and the Sedition Act

Less than twenty years after France had supported the American colonies in the American Revolution, hostilities erupted between the United Staes and the newly-formed French First Republic. The two-year “Quasi-War” arose in a context of shifting international alliances and competition. Disputes with France over military cooperation treaties and war loan repayment ushered in a maritime free-for-all, in which French privateers seized American ships trading with the British and the United States responded by hastily building a navy, which saw action against French ships in the Caribbean and in waters off the American east coast.

The American administration was headed by President John Adams. Born in 1735, Adams was a Founding Father and had assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence. He served as president with the Federalist party, joining Alexander Hamilton and others in advocating for a strong central government. Standing in opposition was the Democratic-Republican party, led by Vice President Jefferson and James Madison.

The political climate was tense and deeply divided, with each side holding their vision for governance and jockeying for advantage.

Controlling the mechanisms of government, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Adams framed the acts as “war measures,” but Jefferson saw them as attempts to solidify political dominance.

The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws. A naturalization act extended the time required of immigrants to seek United States citizenship. The Alien Friends Act gave the president the power to deport any alien he considered to be dangerous. The Alien Enemies Act gave the president the power to deport aliens who came from countries at war with the United States. The two Alien acts were never invoked, likely because many people of French descent chose to leave voluntarily in an unwelcoming climate.

The fourth law was the Sedition Act. The Sedition Act was the first United States law to make free speech a criminal offense. It made it a crime to “write, print, utter, or publish” any “false, scandalous or malicious writing” that was intended to defame the president or congress.

Unlike the Alien laws, the Sedition Act had consequences. Twenty-six Americans, including leading Republican journalists, were arrested for violating the Sedition Act. Ten were tried, and all were convicted by largely partisan juries and judges. Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon was convicted and imprisoned for accusing Adams of selfishness and avarice. He campaigned for reelection to congress from jail and won. Republican editor Thomas Cooper was convicted and imprisoned for arguing against the abridgment of civil rights inherent in the Sedition Act. Journalists James Callendar and Benjamin Franklin Bache (a grandson of Benjamin Franklin) were similarly arrested, with Bache dying in jail as he awaited trial.

Publicity about the suppression of speech and the conduct of trials prompted widespread objection. The Democratic Republicans swept into power in the 1800 elections and two of the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Sedition Act itself, expired at the end of Adams’ presidency. The naturalization act was repealed in 1802.

The Alien Enemies Act remains a part of the United States Code. It was invoked by candidate Donald Trump at his Madison Square Garden rally as a context for his plan to deport illegal immigrants.

I’ll be out of town traveling to our winter home in Tucson beginning later this week. The next post, on December 3, will be “Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears.”

Happy Thanksgiving to you and loved ones.

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Election Part 1: Shame (and a glimmer of hope)

11/10/2024

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It is now six days since the election. Like many of the more progressive variety of patriotic Americans, I am disheartened.

I learned long ago and have taught for many years that writing is a good response to emotional and personal challenges. People may never read what you write (and I don’t expect a larger readership for this) but writing is not always for an audience.

You write… I write… to clarify things for yourself. I remember speaking with a young poet, early in a medical career, who said that she writes “to learn something about myself.” You sit down, you mull ideas around, you see what words and directions emerge. And maybe there’s something to be said for just indiscriminately putting your voice out there into the universe.

Rather than droning on for too long at a single sitting, my plan today is to share reflections about the election in five parts, as they interest me and seem worth exploring.

• Week 1 (today): Shame and a glimmer of hope
• Week 2: Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived)
• Week 3: Fred, the researcher and writer about the spiritual life reflects on this vantage point.
• Week 4: My thoughts on public and community responses
• Week 5: My thoughts on my personal response

If anyone else is reading this, thanks for your interest and may these ideas invite your own meaningful reflections.

Shame (and a glimmer of hope)

I recall reading, several months ago, an interview of a Christian nationalist/evangelical pastor who supported Donald Trump. He was asked how he reconciled his support with Trump’s behavior and character… cruelty, incessant lying, sexual predation… that would be considered antithetical to the spiritual life. He responded that “we are electing a politician, not a preacher.”

He is wrong.

American presidents have many roles. They are administrators. They embrace and advance policies. But at its core, I believe the presidency is about being the face of America. The president embodies our aspirations, our hopes, and our values, and shows our country and the rest of the world who we are as Americans.

Kamala Harris would have done this admirably. Donald Trump does not.

Harris clearly values respect and decency. She is the kind of person who looks for and brings out the best in other people. Trump traffics in fear, hate, and divisiveness. He brings out the worst in us all.

The fact that over half of American voters looked at Trump’s life… Trump the racist, the misogynist, the insurrectionist, the self-aggrandizing liar… and said “This is who we want; this is who we are; this is what America is about” is appalling and shameful.

Policies, you say? My goodness, this election was not about policies. Perhaps it was for some specific cohorts. Billionaires and corporate CEOs will delight in the prospect of further accumulating wealth and power. People who dearly want states to be able to deny reproductive and health care for women will see this happen. Select small groups stand to benefit in their particular areas, like the owners of for-profit prisons who are salivating at the possibility of being paid to create internment camps for millions of undocumented people who stand to be deported.

Predominantly, though, policies had little to do with the election results. A Washington Post study published a couple of weeks before the election surveyed over 8000 voters from across the political spectrum. The study reported that Harris’ policies garnered significantly greater approval than Trumps’ policies… notably, on healthcare, crime, firearms, social and reproductive issues, education, and the environment… as long as respondents weren’t told which candidate had proposed them.

The election, as I see it, was about perceptions and identity. Right wing media relentlessly portrayed Harris as an elite, detached, ruthless person who wanted to murder babies and empower schools to perform sex change operations on merciless students. Right wing media portrayed Trump as a man of the people, a strong and courageous leader, a man steeped in devotion to faith and wrapped in the flag.

And this is where we end up.

Some good news, of course, is that 71 million people voted for Harris and presumably voiced support for the kind of values of truth and character that I think do reflect the best of who we are as Americans. May we cherish and hold onto our kinship with one another as we go forward from here.

Next week: Fred, the amateur historian, reflects on our having been here in America before (and survived).

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Permission to Rest: Reflections for International Self-Care Day

7/21/2024

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Self-care is vital for a sustainable and meaningful life.

Some approaches and perspectives on self-care may feel arduous and unattainable. I have always had plenty of aerobic exercise, but I struggle in my semi-retirement years to get the strength-building exercise that I know I need.

Self-care, though, also has to do with the personal values, priorities, and perspectives that we set for ourselves.

My friend and faculty colleague at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, Siri Chand Khalsa, MD, MS, speaks of her journey with Covid. Like many of us, including me, she tested positive for Covid, but as the days and weeks progressed, she realized her symptoms weren’t going away. In the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Khalsa was one of the first people to experience what we now call “long Covid.”

She suffered from migraines and severe systemic pain. She experienced neurological problems like neuropathy and dysautonomia (that are increasingly recognized as among potentially severe symptoms of long Covid). Most debilitating for her were cognitive symptoms. She found it unusually difficult to concentrate and to focus on the myriad scientific and relationship elements of being a busy physician.

Dr. Khalsa put her medical practice on hold and pursued her own healing. Time, she says, did not make a difference. An expert in integrative medicine, she explored nutritional changes and explored integrative modalities like Ayurveda with, at best, modest benefits.

When I spoke with her this spring, Dr. Khalsa reported that she had finally recovered very well. I asked what had ultimately made the difference. Without hesitation, she said, “I gave myself permission to rest.”

I can see it. In our culture, most of us labor under the assumption that our value and worth increase in tandem with what we accomplish. This is certainly a reality in medicine. There are external forces in medical systems that move health care practitioners to be “productive,” often beyond the bounds of human capacity. And there are internal pressures, as well. When you are passionate about your profession and about making a difference in other people’s lives, the temptation is to work with greater zeal and greater engagement, rather than less.

For Dr. Khalsa, rest mattered. Being able to rest was restorative, and it also gave her the space to listen more attentively to what she needed in her own self-care. She sought the support of wellness consultants. She became more discerning about relationships that were uplifting, and those that were not. She found herself being more creative. She slept better. She followed her own unique path as a physician and healer with renewed energy and passion.

Self-care is not selfish. On the contrary, seeking the kind of balance that Dr. Khalsa describes is life-affirming.

Self-care rests firmly on self-compassion. Self-compassion means being able to have goals and hold intentions, but being gentle with oneself when life doesn’t allow doing everything, and doing everything to unreachable standards.

Even the arena of self-care itself presents its own challenge of standards and expectations of accomplishment. At the Weil Center, we talk about seven core areas of health, each of which provides opportunities for self-care. They are movement/exercise, nutrition, sleep, resilience, relationships, spirituality, and environment (the latter having to do both with avoidance of toxic exposures and seeking out peaceful places and moments).

All these arenas of self-care can be vitally important, but you can’t do it all. No, you can’t meditate in the garden, have a nutritious breakfast, put in a day of work, come home and do something educational with the kids, run 5k, cook a vegan meal to share with Chris and Pat, read some uplifting spiritual literature, journal, and sleep eight hours. And repeat, with going to the school board meeting and volunteering at the soup kitchen added in your theoretical spare time.

You have to do the best you can. You have to be gentle with yourself. You have to give yourself permission. You have to rest.

So let me invite you to reflect. How might you give yourself permission to pursue self-care in some new or important way? How might you further develop your own spirit of self-compassion? And where do you find rest?

May your own approach to self-care open a door to equanimity in your own life and enlivened service to others.

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Readers will enjoy seeing more about Dr. Khalsa’s journey and current professional passions and contributions… particularly about the benefits of healthy and creative nutrition… at her website, https://drsirichand.com/blog/.

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The Citizen Soldier

5/26/2024

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When my wife and I came into each other’s lives over 50 years ago, she had four living and age-appropriately healthy grandparents. The lived locally when she was growing up and she was blessed to have known them well. For several years until they began passing away, I was blessed to spend time with them and come to know them, as well.

Among them was her paternal grandfather, Charles. Charles had spent much of his adult life around motor vehicles, running a small bus line that failed after the stock market crash, selling trucks in upstate New York during the Depression (often, we understand, to bootleggers, the only people who had money to buy trucks) and selling cars after that. Befitting his professional life, he had an engaging interest in people and a ready smile, coming naturally with total sincerity and genuineness.

I remember him as a singularly soft-spoken, sweet, and gentle man. Into his early eighties, he had a part time job driving kindergarteners home after school, and I can picture him taking delight in his personal connection with each of them. He was devoted to his equally sweet and retiring wife, to his son, and to his four granddaughters. When my wife and I moved across the country for graduate school, he would send us over-stuffed envelopes filled with wads of newspaper clippings he thought we would enjoy. Charles and Lola were absolutely over-joyed to meet their great-granddaughter when we brought her to their home one Christmas vacation in their closing years.

We knew that Charles had served in the First World War, but were not much aware of the specifics of his service. His reflections came largely through his son (himself a veteran in the second world war), who passed along his father’s stories of happy times and friendships and cheerfully rendered camp meeting songs (Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parlez-vous!). My father-in-law also said that Charles had been in “major battles” of the war and advised him, as the clouds of the new war approached, not to go into the infantry. Hence, my father-in-law’s service in the Army Air Corps.

Gaps filled in with my older son’s initiative to transcribe his great-grandfather’s World War 1 journal. The family had been aware of the journal, but it had lain, largely unexplored, for a hundred years.

The journal itself is a pocket-sized, leather-bound book that has small space for daily entries over a 5-year period. The army apparently made these available to soldiers with the rationale, reflected in a preface, that

You have neither the time nor the inclination, possibly, to keep a full diary. Suppose, however, out of the multitude of matters that crowd each day, you jot down a line or two those most worthy of remembrance. Such a book will be of the greatest value in after years. What a record of events, incidents, joys, sorrows, successes, failures, things accomplished, things attempted. This book is designed for just such a record.

Charles did, indeed, record some things that were worthy of remembrance, in pen and pencil with such small font that we sometimes needed a magnifying glass to discern what he had said.

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The story emerged.

Charles enlisted in his hometown of Albany, New York, and was mustered into federal service as part of the New York National Guard in July, 1917. His initial training- drills and signaling, tent-pitching, rifle training, map reading- was in upstate New York and offered enough time on passes that he was able to visit with his fiancé and family, go to the local Y to swim, and see the latest movies at the hippodrome. He was apparently also a good horseman, and he records being invited on rides with officers from his company.

He and his unit shipped out in late September and made their way to Spartanburg, SC. For the remainder of 1917, Charles’ time was divided among continuing drill, menial tasks like grading a street, riding and caring for horses, and serving as an orderly for the commanding general.

Recognizing Charles’ leadership potential, he was accepted for Officers’ Training School, which he attended and from which he graduated as a Second Lieutenant at Camp Wadsworth, SC, from January 5 to April 5, 1918. He shipped to Europe aboard the USS Antigone, a Navy transport that made eight transatlantic crossings carrying troops during the war.

Much of his journal into the late summer of 1918 documents continuing training, camp life, and furloughs into Paris and into local communities in France. He also refers to regular correspondence, as he was able, with his beloved Lola, parents, and other friends and family.

As the weeks passed, he came closer to the front lines.

July 27: Received orders to go up the line in reserve. Ah! Well might just as well start now. Had a few shells drop around. Saw my first dead men. Camped in woods. Gas alarm about 2 A.M. M.P.’s shooting. Some scare.

August 17: Saturday. At last the order came and we pulled out at noon by truck. Some dusty ride but then would rather ride than walk eh! Passed thru a beautiful section of the country. Billeted in a wheat field rather hard sleeping but then “a la guerre.” Slept fine under the eaves of a wheat stack.

Sept 5: Thursday. Laid around all day except when I packed up. Have order to move. Hope not up front as yet because the men are not sufficiently trained but if so why so be it. I’m ready when they are. Will have lots to tell the folks when I get back, eh! Started hike at 8:20 and hiked until 4:30 A.M. Was about all in but kept going. Had a good bed to sleep in when we stopped.

Sept 11: Wednesday. Slept all day under escort wagon. Some bunk. Rained all day. Left at 9 P.M. Still raining. Halted on the top of hill for three hours and watched first American barrage. Some “hell,” I’ll say. It was a wonderful sight from this side, but the Germans must have suffered. Arrived in shellfire at 3 A.M.

Sept 12: Thursday. Barrage started at 1 A.M. Slept in woods near Pont-a-Mousson. Had about three hours sleep. Started out again at 12 M. Jerry retreating so fast we don’t even have time to sleep. Good news. Advanced five miles this A.M. Past beaucoup prisoners along the road. Reached first line trenches at 8 P.M. Slept in open.

Sept 18: Wednesday. Camped at 2 A.M. on hillside. Rain rain rain. Awoke at 7 A.M. and moved to new camp in woods. Boshe were here in 1914. Beaucoup dead French near Julevecourt.

September 26, 1918, then, was the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest campaign of the war, and the second costliest military engagement (next to the Normandy campaign) in American history, with ultimately over 26,000 deaths.

Sept 26: Thursday. Big barrage started at 3A.M. Seemed like a continuous thunder. I am glad that I am in the rear of it. Barrage still continues at 10:30. Had a good breakfast. Am ready for whatever comes now. Moved at 12 noon. Hiked about 10 kilos. Saw beaucoup prisoners also 2 balloons brought down & 1 Boshe Plane. Camped in 1914 battlefield. Some holes. Gas alarm.

Sept 29: Sunday. Spent the day in the woods. Rained all day. Orders to move in the evening. Hiked thru no man’s land (4 years). Some shell holes. It poured all the way. Slept in the woods for three hours.

Sept 30: Monday. Started forward at 7:30 A.M. Some cool. Lay in trenches until 5 P.M. Ordered to move forward. Very foolish in broad daylight. Dutch fired point blank at us crossing hill. Bugler and my striker killed. Addie and Lidey wounded. Some experience. Never expected to reach the other side but God was with me. You bet I thanked him. Dug in and slept in the woods.

October 1: Tuesday. Awoke at 9 A.M. and located rest of company. Under shell fire all day. Laid Buglar and Larsean away at Mont Faucon. News came that we were to be relieved. Welcome. Well yes. Started back at 11:30. Heavy barrage during the night. No one hurt.

October 2: Wednesday. Chow arrived. Coffee-beans-doughnuts-bacon-was cold but tasted better than anything I have ever eaten. Had a good nights sleep. Laid in reserve all day. A “few” shell dropped around. Lost a couple of men. War surely is hell. Hot chow arrived at 8:30. Some feeds. Beans , had jam and coffee. Received news about Austria. Hope it comes true.

October 3: Thursday. Still at reserve dugout. Jerry sent over some barrage. We were lucky. Expect to go forward today. Can’t say that I’m enthusiastic over this war game. They hurt too many men. Hope we get relieved. Loud shells busting around now.

October 4: Friday. Started attack on Cierges at 5:30. I acted as liaison officer. Some hill. Advanced about 2 kilos. Got into some gas. Beaucoup machine guns. Had some narrow escapes. Slept with Howell Co “A” that night.

October 5: Saturday. Spent day connecting with flank snipers. Very busy. Hope they don’t get me. Some one provided barrage.

October 6: Sunday. Took “A” Co up in attack on Mec. Luns. Shot us up pretty badly. Don’t know how I escaped it. Plenty of shells today. Relieved at 8P.M.

After this point, Charles was apparently moved to the rear and spent much of his time until the Armistice censoring letters and writing to families of fallen comrades. There is no entry for November 11 and the following week; I have read that many American soldiers greeted that day less with exhilaration and more with exhaustion and relief.

Charles moved into and across Germany with the Army of Occupation after the Armistice. He returned home in 1919 to marry his sweetheart, raise what became a loving extended four-generation family, and live his life.

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I have always been struck, particularly since reading the journal, with the gulf that stands between the warrior of 1918 and the sweet, gentle man who dearly loved his family and drove kindergarteners home after school into this eighties.

I think that Charles embodies well the idea of a “citizen soldier.” The historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, “The American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and all of us, living and yet to be born, must be profoundly grateful.”

I never spoke with Charles about his motivation around his military experience, but I believe these ideas would resonate with him. I can’t imagine for a moment that Charles had any interest in being a professional soldier, but he was part of a flow in American life that saw a cause worth pursuing, and made sacrifices to pursue it.

My own professional life and journey has been so much about spirituality, dialogue, reconciliation, and love (often making for interesting conversations about warfare) but these things seem a little beside the point when I think of Charles. Here was a good man, an honorable man, who put a hold on his relationship with the woman he loved and the family that nurtured him, on behalf of values that mattered to him.

So, to Lieutenant Allen, aka “Granddaddy” in our family, you will always have my admiration and love.

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My friend George, 1950-2023

3/31/2024

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My friend George died last year, at age 73, from Parkinson’s Disease. He had had this diagnosis for 13 years and, at the end, spent his days in a wheelchair and composed emails with voice recognition software, being unable to manipulate a keyboard.

We grew up together in the same tidy suburban community, peopled by young World War II veteran dads, stay-at-home moms, and flocks of widely-roaming children. While I was always involved in sports, George was not especially athletic, or at least not athletically inclined, and we spent our time together talking, laughing, and joking.

Our social circles diverged as high school moved along, but we stayed in touch. George went to Carleton College, which seemed just right for him, married soon after graduation, and settled in Minnesota for the rest of his life.

My wife and I stopped to visit George and his wife on their farm in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, on our way back east after my first two years of graduate school in Salt Lake City. We were both engaged in our separate and different lives, and we fell out of contact after that, and I never saw him in person again.

Fast forward forty-five years. A cryptic comment appeared on a blog post on my website; “If you grew up in northern New Jersey, we have some catching up to do. George.” It could only have been him. We exchanged email addresses and indeed, began catching up.

George commented, right off, that he was moved to reconnect with me as he read on my website about my work with spirituality and health. Spirituality, he said, had been at the center of his life since college. My wife reminded me, recalling our 1973 visit to Fergus Falls, that he had then been a Jehovah’s Witness.

True. George, I learned, had been deeply involved in his local Witness community and had done consulting and speaking with the Witness community nationwide, spanning all the years when we had been out of touch. Even as the scope of his life was largely limited to his home, he remained actively involved with Jehovah’s Witnesses remotely.

My commitment, as I hope you know, is to honor and respect other people’s spiritual traditions and practices. I think it’s fair to say, though, that Jehovah’s Witnesses occupy a particular niche in American religious life, with their distinctive approach to door-to-door and street corner evangelism and their preference to be a separate religious community, rather than engaging in inter-faith dialogue or incorporating ideas from other spiritual traditions.

I wasn’t sure what to expect.

What I found was a rekindled, dear friendship.

We exchanged more emails. We Zoomed. We brought in a mutual friend who had grown up with us both.

We acknowledged, early on, that we had differences in our spiritual lives and practices, but that they really didn’t matter. We eagerly joined together in conversations about our shared values… kindness, compassion, respect, equality, justice.

George sent me links to Jehovah’s Witnesses conference keynotes and articles from JW.org. “Jehovah’s Powerful Acts Inspire Faith!” “Why Did God Create the Earth?” “Why Did the Holocaust Happen?” “Why didn’t God Stop the Holocaust?” I sent him reflections from British theologian John A. T. Robinson and American theologian (founder of the Koinonia Community in south Georgia) Clarence Jordan. We spun off at one point to a dialogue about mentors and protégés, with stories from our own lives. We talked about the ways that expressions of goodness and care for other people can have reverberating effects across many generations.

We shared insights from our professional lives, respecting people’s values but inviting them to a broader and deeper spiritual journey.

And there was more, the kind of conversations about day-to-day matters that can help to cement friendships. Why baseball would be profoundly different if the baselines were 89 feet or 91 feet, instead of 90 feet. What it had been like for both of us to move to new homes. How much we both cherished the loving relationships with our wives.

I asked him (psychologists ask questions like this) how he kept going with 13 years of Parkinson’s Disease. He sent me a long list of tips. Low salt diet. Qi Gong. Electrical muscle stimulation. Regular massage. Daily reading of the bible, jw.org, and “compassionate, empathetic literature.” Thirty minutes daily with a light box. And, yes, Zooming with friends.

I congratulated George and sent him and his wife flowers on their 50th anniversary. George didn’t live to see ours. My last email looking for a time to Zoom brought a response from George’s wife that he had passed away peacefully.

George signed his emails, “love, George.” In my family and cultural experience men don’t say this to other men, but I was touched by his genuineness and forthrightness, and it has brought me to be freer in giving voice to my own values of love.

Maybe that’s the central theme as I think about my friend George. Love that transcends unimportant small differences like religious affiliation. Love that shares in matters large and small. Love that reaches out across decades of distance.

Thanks, George.

Love, Fred

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