Reflections on the 2024 election: Four episodes of authoritarianism in America
and the dissidents and heroes who spoke for equality and justice
and the dissidents and heroes who spoke for equality and justice
The 2024 election was deeply disappointing for me. It felt like a betrayal of everything America has always stood for. Shortly after the election, I began a series of blog posts to give voice to my reactions, both for myself and for anyone else who might happen to come along.
I remember jogging around that time (jogging is my most fruitful meditative practice) and wondering whether some of the abuses I saw on the horizon had any precedent in our national history. Have we been there before? Have we recovered? Have we survived? Are there stories that shed light on where we are now, and do those stories have heroes, as well as villains?
The result, as you will read shortly, is a ten-part series that explores four episodes of authoritarianism in America. There are villains, but yes, there are also heroes, people who stood against the infringements of integrity, liberty and justice that they saw unfolding before them. Sometimes they found some degree of success, and sometimes not. (And of course, “success” has a way of sneaking up on its own schedule that we only later appreciate). But we can look back on and find inspiration in how they responded in their times, which were never easy.
What follows are the ten blog posts, presented in order, from November 10 to April 6. You see the evolution of my project and often my thought in the constant motion of the first months of the new administration.
I remember jogging around that time (jogging is my most fruitful meditative practice) and wondering whether some of the abuses I saw on the horizon had any precedent in our national history. Have we been there before? Have we recovered? Have we survived? Are there stories that shed light on where we are now, and do those stories have heroes, as well as villains?
The result, as you will read shortly, is a ten-part series that explores four episodes of authoritarianism in America. There are villains, but yes, there are also heroes, people who stood against the infringements of integrity, liberty and justice that they saw unfolding before them. Sometimes they found some degree of success, and sometimes not. (And of course, “success” has a way of sneaking up on its own schedule that we only later appreciate). But we can look back on and find inspiration in how they responded in their times, which were never easy.
What follows are the ten blog posts, presented in order, from November 10 to April 6. You see the evolution of my project and often my thought in the constant motion of the first months of the new administration.
November 10, 2024: Introduction
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 large 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 ten parts, as they interest me and seem worth exploring.
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.
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 large 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 ten parts, as they interest me and seem worth exploring.
- Part 1: Shame and a glimmer of hope
- Parts 2-5: Fred plays the amateur historian and reflects on how we’ve been here before (and survived)
- Parts 6-9: Dissidents and heroes
- Part 10: Reflections and themes
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.
11/18/24: Authoritarianism 1: John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts
Five or six days after the election, when I hastily committed myself to write a several-part series of reflections (I had probably had too much coffee), the title of Episode 2, 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 Acts
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.
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 Acts
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.
12/2/24: Authoritarianism 2: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears
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.
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.
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.
Authoritarianism 3: 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.”
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.”
Authoritarianism 4: Woodrow Wilson, White Supremacy, and 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.
- - - - - -
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.
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.
- - - - - -
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.
Dissidents and Heroes Part 1: The Journalists
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.
-------
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.
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.
-------
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.
Dissidents and Heroes, Part 2: The Oppressed Citizen
Having described four episodes of authoritarianism in American history, we’re turning attention now to people who have stood against the tide.
As the encroachment on Cherokee land evolved in the 1820 and 1830s, there were occasional modest expressions of dissent among national leaders. In the wake of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Henry Clay wrote to Daniel Webster, commenting that the legislation would bring “a foul and lasting stain upon the good faith, humanity, and character of the nation.”
The most strident and coherent opposition came from the Cherokee nation.
Over the course of four decades, the post prominent Cherokee leader was John Ross. Born shortly after the American Revolution, Ross grew up with firm ties both to the European and Cherokee communities. His father was Scottish and his mother, Cherokee, and Ross drew from both traditions in his dress, language, and relationships. Operating a trading post that had been started by his grandfather, Ross became a wealthy merchant, planter, and, in fact, slaveholder.
With a deep respect for his mother’s culture, Ross was distressed to see repeated violations of federal treaties with the Cherokee. He developed expertise in the history of these treaties and, even as a young man, ventured into the public arena to advocate for the territorial integrity of his people.
Ross was part of a group that protested the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, which ended hostilities between Creeks and the federal government, with the result that 23 million acres in Georgia and Alabama were ceded to the United States. Ross found a sympathetic ear in Secretary of War William H. Crawford, but the treaty was implemented as signed.
Ross became the principal chief of the Cherokee nation in 1828. He was active in legal advocacy, representing the Cherokee in the unsuccessful Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and the successful Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In Worcester, (as you may recall from the earlier post), the court found that Georgia laws restricting the relationships between the Cherokee and the federal government were unconstitutional, such that the Cherokee community was vested with the integrity and authority to govern themselves, with their own laws. Andrew Jackson, as you also read, ignored this court decision.
As tensions with the federal government escalated, the Cherokee nation became divided between a faction that was willing to relocate and cede land in exchange for cash benefits, and a faction, led by Ross, that opposed any such arrangements. A small group of Cherokee, without authorization from the larger community, signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to removal in exchange for $5 million and land in Oklahoma. Ross vociferously opposed the treaty, writing to the federal congress that it would have lasting, disenfranchising effects on the Cherokee community.
Cherokee removal, both voluntary and involuntary, proceeded, with suffering and the loss of thousands of people on the Trail of Tears.
Ross continued as principal Cherokee chief, supporting and advocating for the community that remained, until his death in 1866.
In my previous blog post, introducing the theme of “dissidents and heroes,” I said:
For all the times of darkness, 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.
The journalists who opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts saw the fruits of their efforts within a few short years. Not so for John Ross. Cherokee displacement continued despite his efforts. Even in the absence of visible success, may we draw inspiration from the integrity of his raising his voice on behalf of justice.
As the encroachment on Cherokee land evolved in the 1820 and 1830s, there were occasional modest expressions of dissent among national leaders. In the wake of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Henry Clay wrote to Daniel Webster, commenting that the legislation would bring “a foul and lasting stain upon the good faith, humanity, and character of the nation.”
The most strident and coherent opposition came from the Cherokee nation.
Over the course of four decades, the post prominent Cherokee leader was John Ross. Born shortly after the American Revolution, Ross grew up with firm ties both to the European and Cherokee communities. His father was Scottish and his mother, Cherokee, and Ross drew from both traditions in his dress, language, and relationships. Operating a trading post that had been started by his grandfather, Ross became a wealthy merchant, planter, and, in fact, slaveholder.
With a deep respect for his mother’s culture, Ross was distressed to see repeated violations of federal treaties with the Cherokee. He developed expertise in the history of these treaties and, even as a young man, ventured into the public arena to advocate for the territorial integrity of his people.
Ross was part of a group that protested the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, which ended hostilities between Creeks and the federal government, with the result that 23 million acres in Georgia and Alabama were ceded to the United States. Ross found a sympathetic ear in Secretary of War William H. Crawford, but the treaty was implemented as signed.
Ross became the principal chief of the Cherokee nation in 1828. He was active in legal advocacy, representing the Cherokee in the unsuccessful Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and the successful Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In Worcester, (as you may recall from the earlier post), the court found that Georgia laws restricting the relationships between the Cherokee and the federal government were unconstitutional, such that the Cherokee community was vested with the integrity and authority to govern themselves, with their own laws. Andrew Jackson, as you also read, ignored this court decision.
As tensions with the federal government escalated, the Cherokee nation became divided between a faction that was willing to relocate and cede land in exchange for cash benefits, and a faction, led by Ross, that opposed any such arrangements. A small group of Cherokee, without authorization from the larger community, signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to removal in exchange for $5 million and land in Oklahoma. Ross vociferously opposed the treaty, writing to the federal congress that it would have lasting, disenfranchising effects on the Cherokee community.
Cherokee removal, both voluntary and involuntary, proceeded, with suffering and the loss of thousands of people on the Trail of Tears.
Ross continued as principal Cherokee chief, supporting and advocating for the community that remained, until his death in 1866.
In my previous blog post, introducing the theme of “dissidents and heroes,” I said:
For all the times of darkness, 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.
The journalists who opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts saw the fruits of their efforts within a few short years. Not so for John Ross. Cherokee displacement continued despite his efforts. Even in the absence of visible success, may we draw inspiration from the integrity of his raising his voice on behalf of justice.
Dissidents and Heroes, Part 3: The Washburns of Livermore, Maine
In my earlier blog about the movement away from the authoritarianism of the antebellum south, there were many heroes. Prominent figures, well known in our history… journalists like Horace Greely and ultimately Abraham Lincoln… championed the antislavery and anti-authoritarian causes in the years before and during the Civil War.
In the narrative that I cited from Heather Cox Richardson, though, the movement congealed as ordinary Americans gathered in towns and villages across the country and came to a growing consensus about justice for enslaved people.
A sentinel event, according to Professor Richardson, was a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington to develop a response to the impending Kansas Nebraska Act. The meeting, drawing together representatives from across the political spectrum, was convened by Israel Washburn, a congressman from Orono, Maine. Growing out of this meeting, the congressmen went to their home districts and communities and talked with people about the peril of extending slavery with the Kansas Nebraska Act and how the country might chart a different direction.
Washburn’s role with the Kansas Nebraska Act was a notable part of a long career of public service. He represented the Bangor area in Congress, served as Governor of Maine, and was active in recruiting troops during the Civil War. He was one of the founders, with Abraham Lincoln, of the Republican party, which 160 years ago stood for civil rights and later was a moving force in the cause of Reconstruction.
As I think about “dissidents and heroes” in this story, though, I want to back up a generation. Mainer that I am, I have been familiar for many years with the Washburn family and their homestead, which remains a thriving living history site, in Livermore, Maine. Israel was one of eleven siblings, ten of whom survived to adulthood, who were children of Israel Sr. and Martha Benjamin Washburn.
Israel Sr. was born in Massachusetts in 1784 and moved to Maine in 1806. Three years later, he bought the homestead from Cyrus Hamlin, the father of Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. (I have often wondered how the post-Civil War era would have been different if the progressive Hamlin had not been replaced in the 1864 election by the racist Andrew Johnson.)
Israel Sr. was a teacher, storekeeper, and farmer whose businesses were often financially challenged. He had a brief political career of his own, serving as a state representative in what was then Massachusetts, prior to Maine statehood in 1820. Martha is described by the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center as “a devoted wife and loving mother who instilled ambition in her children.”
The Washburn children were indeed ambitious.
Israel Jr., you know.
Algernon was a merchant and banker in central Maine who was prosperous and generous enough to support his younger siblings.
Elihu left home in a time of financial hardship and moved to Galena, Illinois. He became an attorney and served in the US House of Representative for seventeen years. In Galena, he struck up a friendship with a West Point graduate and dry goods merchant, Ulysses Grant. As a congressman, Elihu advocated for Grant’s military promotions.
Elihu was also an early supporter and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. Along with William Seward, it was Elihu who met Lincoln at Washington’s Baltimore and Ohio station in February, 1861, after a long, arduous and secretive train journey from Springfield. After the war, Elihu opposed the Johnson retrenchment in civil rights and served as Secretary of State and minister to France in the Grant administration.
Cadwallader relocated to Wisconsin. He served in congress, was a major general in the Civil War, was elected governor of Wisconsin, and founded the company that became Gold Medal Flour.
Charles took part in the California Gold Rush of 1849 and later worked as an editor/writer and diplomat.
Samuel was a naval officer in the Civil War and returned to Livermore to care for Israel Sr. and then to raise his family.
William was a businessman, congressman, and senator in Minnesota.
In an era with limited vocational opportunities for women, the three Washburn daughters, Martha, Mary, and Caroline, were all educated and actively engaged in teaching and family life.
------
Sometimes opposition and heroism in response to authoritarianism come in specific events, such as Israel Washburn Jr.’s convening fellow congressmen to begin a national conversation about the Kansas Nebraska act.
Sometimes opposition and heroism run deeper.
Israel Sr. and Martha Washburn never came to particular notoriety outside of their community. But they raised children who valued education, justice, and civil rights, and who embodied these values in their public and private lives throughout the mid-to-late 19th century.
You may not be in a position to change the course of history by convening 30 friends, but you can follow in the footsteps of Israel, Martha, and innumerable other people in simply living your life in a way that brings goodness into the world. Being a parent who instills “ambition.” Being a sibling, a colleague, a neighbor, a friend, who models qualities of respect, forbearance, and kindness. Being a person who speaks the truth, in public and in private.
Neither Israel nor Martha lived to see the full expression of these values in their children (Martha died in 1861 and Israel, in 1876), and so it may be with any of us. But that’s what it means to live in hope, or live in faith, right?
You chase away the darkness by being a beacon of light.
In the narrative that I cited from Heather Cox Richardson, though, the movement congealed as ordinary Americans gathered in towns and villages across the country and came to a growing consensus about justice for enslaved people.
A sentinel event, according to Professor Richardson, was a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington to develop a response to the impending Kansas Nebraska Act. The meeting, drawing together representatives from across the political spectrum, was convened by Israel Washburn, a congressman from Orono, Maine. Growing out of this meeting, the congressmen went to their home districts and communities and talked with people about the peril of extending slavery with the Kansas Nebraska Act and how the country might chart a different direction.
Washburn’s role with the Kansas Nebraska Act was a notable part of a long career of public service. He represented the Bangor area in Congress, served as Governor of Maine, and was active in recruiting troops during the Civil War. He was one of the founders, with Abraham Lincoln, of the Republican party, which 160 years ago stood for civil rights and later was a moving force in the cause of Reconstruction.
As I think about “dissidents and heroes” in this story, though, I want to back up a generation. Mainer that I am, I have been familiar for many years with the Washburn family and their homestead, which remains a thriving living history site, in Livermore, Maine. Israel was one of eleven siblings, ten of whom survived to adulthood, who were children of Israel Sr. and Martha Benjamin Washburn.
Israel Sr. was born in Massachusetts in 1784 and moved to Maine in 1806. Three years later, he bought the homestead from Cyrus Hamlin, the father of Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. (I have often wondered how the post-Civil War era would have been different if the progressive Hamlin had not been replaced in the 1864 election by the racist Andrew Johnson.)
Israel Sr. was a teacher, storekeeper, and farmer whose businesses were often financially challenged. He had a brief political career of his own, serving as a state representative in what was then Massachusetts, prior to Maine statehood in 1820. Martha is described by the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center as “a devoted wife and loving mother who instilled ambition in her children.”
The Washburn children were indeed ambitious.
Israel Jr., you know.
Algernon was a merchant and banker in central Maine who was prosperous and generous enough to support his younger siblings.
Elihu left home in a time of financial hardship and moved to Galena, Illinois. He became an attorney and served in the US House of Representative for seventeen years. In Galena, he struck up a friendship with a West Point graduate and dry goods merchant, Ulysses Grant. As a congressman, Elihu advocated for Grant’s military promotions.
Elihu was also an early supporter and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. Along with William Seward, it was Elihu who met Lincoln at Washington’s Baltimore and Ohio station in February, 1861, after a long, arduous and secretive train journey from Springfield. After the war, Elihu opposed the Johnson retrenchment in civil rights and served as Secretary of State and minister to France in the Grant administration.
Cadwallader relocated to Wisconsin. He served in congress, was a major general in the Civil War, was elected governor of Wisconsin, and founded the company that became Gold Medal Flour.
Charles took part in the California Gold Rush of 1849 and later worked as an editor/writer and diplomat.
Samuel was a naval officer in the Civil War and returned to Livermore to care for Israel Sr. and then to raise his family.
William was a businessman, congressman, and senator in Minnesota.
In an era with limited vocational opportunities for women, the three Washburn daughters, Martha, Mary, and Caroline, were all educated and actively engaged in teaching and family life.
------
Sometimes opposition and heroism in response to authoritarianism come in specific events, such as Israel Washburn Jr.’s convening fellow congressmen to begin a national conversation about the Kansas Nebraska act.
Sometimes opposition and heroism run deeper.
Israel Sr. and Martha Washburn never came to particular notoriety outside of their community. But they raised children who valued education, justice, and civil rights, and who embodied these values in their public and private lives throughout the mid-to-late 19th century.
You may not be in a position to change the course of history by convening 30 friends, but you can follow in the footsteps of Israel, Martha, and innumerable other people in simply living your life in a way that brings goodness into the world. Being a parent who instills “ambition.” Being a sibling, a colleague, a neighbor, a friend, who models qualities of respect, forbearance, and kindness. Being a person who speaks the truth, in public and in private.
Neither Israel nor Martha lived to see the full expression of these values in their children (Martha died in 1861 and Israel, in 1876), and so it may be with any of us. But that’s what it means to live in hope, or live in faith, right?
You chase away the darkness by being a beacon of light.
Dissidents and Heroes, Part 4: The faithful public servant
In an earlier blog post, I described the authoritarian practices of the Wilson administration, with its racist government policies, repression of dissent, early initiatives in surveillance, and attempts to deport people who were considered politically undesirable.
Leading the charge in opposition to these practices were two African American journalists, William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells. Trotter was born into a prosperous family in Boston (he graduated from Harvard and was the first African American Phi Beta Kappa honoree there) and pursued a life of activism against racial discrimination. He spoke out against Wilson’s segregation of the government workforce, led nonviolent protests, and distanced himself from other African American leaders who he saw as too slow in advocating for racial justice. Wells had been active in the 1890s in tracking and condemning lynchings and orchestrating boycotts of discriminatory white businesses. Along with her forceful advocacy for racial justice during the Wilson years, she was a life-long voice on behalf of women’s suffrage and feminist issues. Both Trotter and Wells were involved in the formation of the NAACP.
The roles of Trotter and Wells in speaking out against Wilson authoritarian policies are well documented in The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (W. W. Norton, 2024). As I have said, this has been a helpful resource in this blog series, and I highly recommend this to you.
In this post I want to highlight the courageous, vital, and less prominent role of a civil servant.
Louis F. Post was born in New Jersey in 1849. After a brief but successful legal career, he was active as a newspaper editor in the 1880s and 1890s. He brought an equalitarian spirit to his work, writing regularly about “Progress and Poverty” and supporting the Single Tax movement, which was aimed at funding government operations in equitable ways.
Post was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1913. This role included oversight of what was then called the “Bureau of Immigration.”
When Post served in these roles, immigration policies were defined by the Immigration Act of 1903. At the turn of the 20th century, there was a prominent anarchist movement (it was a self-proclaimed anarchist who assassinated William McKinley in 1901) and the 1903 act prohibited the immigration of anarchists (along with people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes).
As the First World War ground to a conclusion, the Wilson administration became increasingly concerned about people who they perceived were threats to national security and, broadly, political opponents. This included not only frank anarchists, but people from the labor movement and from the growing international communist movement.
The Immigration Act of 1918 expanded the definition of groups of people who were eligible for deportation. It prescribed a broad definition of “anarchist,” to include any writing, advocacy, or organizational membership that was opposed to “all organized government.”
The 1918 law provided the justification for targeting members of organizations, or people who had attended meetings of organizations, that held politically undesirable positions even without advocating or supporting violence. Included were people connected with the International Workers of the World and the Communist Labor Party.
Arrests and deportations got off to a slow start. In 1919, two people determined to be anarchists sere prevented from entering the United States, and 37 were deported. With widely reported bombings in 1919 and 1920, the pace quickened. Ultimately, several thousand people were arrested and subject to deportation under the act.
Post was determined to apply the law and to treat accused people justly. He insisted that people arrested under the law were entitled to due process. He acceded to the deportation of subjects who were demonstrably committed to violence and overthrow of the government, but he also recognized that many people had been unjustly caught up in a large net. He denied some search warrants. He reduced or eliminated bail requirements for some accused people. People who had merely attended meetings of organizations that voiced opposition to the government were released. He concluded that membership in some organizations, notably the Communist Labor Party, was not grounds for deportation because membership did not meet the requirements of the law.
All told, Post reviewed thousands of cases of accused individuals and dismissed a majority of them, saving an estimated 3000 people from deportation.
Post’s courageous stands earned him the wrath of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (the widespread raids to round up suspected radicals are known by his name) and an eager, early-career J. Edgar Hoover. Post was both vilified and supported in Congress and in the press, and a Kansas congressman demanded Post’s impeachment in 1920. Post defended his actions in Congressional testimony and the impeachment did not proceed.
In his 1923 autobiography, Post quoted the New York Evening Post:
The simple truth is that Louis F. Post deserves the gratitude of every American for his courageous and determined stand in behalf of our fundamental rights. It is too bad that in making this stand he found himself at cross-purposes with the Attorney General, but Mr. Palmer's complaint lies against the Constitution and not against Mr. Post.
There you have it. In the last four blog posts about “Dissidents and heroes,” we’ve seen a variety of people who have stood against authoritarianism. In the Adams administration, it was journalists. In the Jackson era, it was an oppressed citizen. In the Buchanan administration, into the Civil War, it was legislators. And in the Wilson administration, in the wake of the Great War, it was a civil servant. The act of speaking truth to power comes from all corners.
Having now told stories about four episodes of authoritarianism in American history and the dissent that followed, the next blog will explore what I’ve learned and some themes that stand out. Stay tuned.
Leading the charge in opposition to these practices were two African American journalists, William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells. Trotter was born into a prosperous family in Boston (he graduated from Harvard and was the first African American Phi Beta Kappa honoree there) and pursued a life of activism against racial discrimination. He spoke out against Wilson’s segregation of the government workforce, led nonviolent protests, and distanced himself from other African American leaders who he saw as too slow in advocating for racial justice. Wells had been active in the 1890s in tracking and condemning lynchings and orchestrating boycotts of discriminatory white businesses. Along with her forceful advocacy for racial justice during the Wilson years, she was a life-long voice on behalf of women’s suffrage and feminist issues. Both Trotter and Wells were involved in the formation of the NAACP.
The roles of Trotter and Wells in speaking out against Wilson authoritarian policies are well documented in The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (W. W. Norton, 2024). As I have said, this has been a helpful resource in this blog series, and I highly recommend this to you.
In this post I want to highlight the courageous, vital, and less prominent role of a civil servant.
Louis F. Post was born in New Jersey in 1849. After a brief but successful legal career, he was active as a newspaper editor in the 1880s and 1890s. He brought an equalitarian spirit to his work, writing regularly about “Progress and Poverty” and supporting the Single Tax movement, which was aimed at funding government operations in equitable ways.
Post was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1913. This role included oversight of what was then called the “Bureau of Immigration.”
When Post served in these roles, immigration policies were defined by the Immigration Act of 1903. At the turn of the 20th century, there was a prominent anarchist movement (it was a self-proclaimed anarchist who assassinated William McKinley in 1901) and the 1903 act prohibited the immigration of anarchists (along with people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes).
As the First World War ground to a conclusion, the Wilson administration became increasingly concerned about people who they perceived were threats to national security and, broadly, political opponents. This included not only frank anarchists, but people from the labor movement and from the growing international communist movement.
The Immigration Act of 1918 expanded the definition of groups of people who were eligible for deportation. It prescribed a broad definition of “anarchist,” to include any writing, advocacy, or organizational membership that was opposed to “all organized government.”
The 1918 law provided the justification for targeting members of organizations, or people who had attended meetings of organizations, that held politically undesirable positions even without advocating or supporting violence. Included were people connected with the International Workers of the World and the Communist Labor Party.
Arrests and deportations got off to a slow start. In 1919, two people determined to be anarchists sere prevented from entering the United States, and 37 were deported. With widely reported bombings in 1919 and 1920, the pace quickened. Ultimately, several thousand people were arrested and subject to deportation under the act.
Post was determined to apply the law and to treat accused people justly. He insisted that people arrested under the law were entitled to due process. He acceded to the deportation of subjects who were demonstrably committed to violence and overthrow of the government, but he also recognized that many people had been unjustly caught up in a large net. He denied some search warrants. He reduced or eliminated bail requirements for some accused people. People who had merely attended meetings of organizations that voiced opposition to the government were released. He concluded that membership in some organizations, notably the Communist Labor Party, was not grounds for deportation because membership did not meet the requirements of the law.
All told, Post reviewed thousands of cases of accused individuals and dismissed a majority of them, saving an estimated 3000 people from deportation.
Post’s courageous stands earned him the wrath of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (the widespread raids to round up suspected radicals are known by his name) and an eager, early-career J. Edgar Hoover. Post was both vilified and supported in Congress and in the press, and a Kansas congressman demanded Post’s impeachment in 1920. Post defended his actions in Congressional testimony and the impeachment did not proceed.
In his 1923 autobiography, Post quoted the New York Evening Post:
The simple truth is that Louis F. Post deserves the gratitude of every American for his courageous and determined stand in behalf of our fundamental rights. It is too bad that in making this stand he found himself at cross-purposes with the Attorney General, but Mr. Palmer's complaint lies against the Constitution and not against Mr. Post.
There you have it. In the last four blog posts about “Dissidents and heroes,” we’ve seen a variety of people who have stood against authoritarianism. In the Adams administration, it was journalists. In the Jackson era, it was an oppressed citizen. In the Buchanan administration, into the Civil War, it was legislators. And in the Wilson administration, in the wake of the Great War, it was a civil servant. The act of speaking truth to power comes from all corners.
Having now told stories about four episodes of authoritarianism in American history and the dissent that followed, the next blog will explore what I’ve learned and some themes that stand out. Stay tuned.
April 6, 2025: Some observations and themes
from our exploration of authoritarianism and heroic dissent
from our exploration of authoritarianism and heroic dissent
As a response to the election, we have now had eight blog posts about authoritarianism in America, and about the initiatives of citizens… journalists, legislators, civil servants, and people out of the public eye altogether… to challenge it. My working title at the outset of the project was “We have been there before (and survived)”.
So, have we? Have we been there before? Have we survived? What do we learn as we see stories of dissent across different eras? It’s been an interesting exercise to explore four of the notable times of authoritarianism in our history… John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, the Confederate states and the racism of the antebellum south, and Woodrow Wilson and the racism and repression associated with his administration during and following the first world war… and to see what themes emerge. And perhaps, even, to find reasons for hope. Let’s look.
Have we been there before?
We have indeed experienced many of the hallmark elements of authoritarianism in our history.
Free speech, both in terms of public speech and writing and personal affiliation, was severely compromised in the Adams and Wilson administrations. Particularly in the Wilson administration, the roundup of people suspected of being national threats in the Palmer raids largely ignored due process protections.
The antebellum south featured staggering economic and political injustice, with an overwhelming concentration of power and wealth, and disparity between rich and poor.
Sadly, the recurring blight of racism has been visible thought our history, most notably in our four examples with the subjugation of the Cherokee Nation in the Jackson administration, and the segregation initiatives of the Wilson administration.
Apropos of the current controversy about the Trump administration ignoring judicial orders, we even have the history of Andrew Jackson ignoring the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case about Cherokee sovereignty.
Every era is unique, but we can also argue that we have not been there before.
Absence of meaningful leadership. You may recall, in the introduction this series weeks and weeks ago, my quoting a Christian nationalist pastor who deflected Trump’s personal failings by saying that we were electing “a politician, not a preacher.” My opinion was that this is wrong. I suggested that 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.
The individuals in my authoritarianism stories have certainly had their weaknesses (Andrew Jackson owned hundreds of slaves), but they pale in comparison to the moral depravity of the current president. A convicted felon. A self-acknowledged and legally adjudged sexual abuser. An unapologetic insurrectionist. A self-aggrandizing liar. Lacking, as far as I have seen, any measure of kindness or compassion. (In my better moments, I feel sad for the man. Underneath the bluster, I suspect that he is insecure and lonely; I can’t imagine him having any friends in the way that most of us have experienced friendship.)
A further concern about Trump’s leadership is that he has shown great interest in becoming president but little interest in being president. In his first term, according to the Economic Times, Trump spent 428 of his 1,461 days spent playing golf (in the current term he has played golf on 9 of his first 30 days). His White House calendar, moreover, has always shown wide swaths of “executive time,” which has been understood to mean tweeting, phoning friends, and watching television.
His inattention to the responsibilities of the presidency has consequences. In his first term, a key campaign promise was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Despite having control of both houses of Congress for his first two years, Trump couldn’t be bothered to learn enough about the healthcare system to provide any leadership in making this come about, and the Affordable Care Act remains.
Ill-defined concentration of power and lack of accountability. The leadership vacuum of Donald Trump will be filled by other people, but it is not clear who they are. Elon Musk, certainly, The various actors in Project 2025, probably, along with the three billionaires with front row seats at the inauguration. Much of the current business of the administration is shrouded in darkness, with the firing of officers in several departments whose job it had been to oversee government operations and accountability. It is noteworthy that in the current “Signalgate” debacle, two key people were not included in the final decision-making; the president of the United States and the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I should add that the refrain from the left that Musk is an unelected, de facto president has merit, but is not completely without precedent. In the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke in October, 1919, his wife Edith essentially served as chief executive until the end of his term in 1921. While limiting public awareness of the extent of her bedridden husband’s disability, she was the conduit of communication between government officials and Wilson, and apparently played a substantial role in advising him on the decisions he was able to make.
Incompetence. A man, a likely sexual abuser, whose principal credentials are leading a small group of soldiers in Afghanistan and being a Fox television host serves as Secretary of Defense. A lawyer with no health care background or credentials (and a conspiracy theorist) serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services. An obscure general is nominated to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who meets none of the legal requirements for that position and is outranked by almost 200 senior officers in the uniformed services, being chosen arguably because he has ingratiated himself to the commander in chief. A group of twenty-somethings without documented security clearances, including the celebrated 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine are given access to government financial and payment databases. The impromptu group charged with reducing the cost of government fires people hires them back, and fires them again.
Lies and misinformation. A MAGA congressman in a northern district in my winter home in Arizona regularly cites Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax as sources for outrageous stories. Asked what their main source of news was, a group of Trump voters said… Donald Trump. Turning to entertainment tabloids or to a confirmed liar for information does not make for elevated dialogue. It brings us to a place where January 6 was a love fest, and its perpetrators, heroes.
Money. In the wake of the terrible Citizens United decision, we have Elon Musk buying the 2024 election for 275 million dollars. (As we speak, he is also paying $100 to Wisconsin voters to support a conservative candidate for the state supreme court.)
Elements of these challenges have been with us before. But it is the confluence and scale of these challenges… absence of meaningful leadership, ill-defined concentration of power, and the other factors we are considering… that may signify that we are coming to uncharted territory.
Have we survived?
At an individual level, the people who have borne the brunt of these authoritarian challenges have been ethnic and cultural minorities and individuals who spoke and acted against government abuses. Adams’ political opponents. Native Americans. African Americans and abolitionists. In the Wilson era, people of German ethnicity, conscientious objectors, labor advocates, and people who were allied to collectivist and equalitarian ideas. Other groups, too, that we have not featured here, notably women, white people in the lower socioeconomic strata, and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Individuals like me… educated white men who don’t make waves… have generally make out acceptably well.
Which raises a further concern about our current situation. White educated men (and women) who don’t make waves are being targeted. It’s not only ethnic and cultural minorities who have suffered (I’m waiting with bated breath for some Norwegian exchange student who voices concern about suffering in Gaza to be deported). It’s people of all backgrounds and ethnicities who have served the interests of public health, national security, government accountability, aviation safety, consumer protection, education, environmental protection, veterans’ affairs… the list goes on… who have been summarily terminated for non-existent performance issues.
At a society level, we have generally survived. Despite the authoritarian abuses that we have explored, we have remained an intact and functioning society (at least up to the beginning of this year).
David Brooks describes our national history in terms of continuing cycles of “rupture and repair.” In our four examples, this idea gets mixed reviews.
The Alien and Sedition Acts went away with the election of 1800, except for the alien enemies act that Donald Trump is using as a pretext for deportations. The Trail of Tears did not end well for the Cherokee community, and native American communities have had an uphill battle for recognition, dignity, and economic opportunity for most of our history before and since. The Lincoln efforts with racial justice brought us the brief light of Reconstruction, then the long and painful slog of Jim Crow, then the hopefulness of the Brown decision and the Johnson voting and civil rights laws, then the Supreme Court gutting the requirement of federal oversight for election laws in historically racially restrictive states. The Palmer raids quickly lost steam after the predicted revolution of May Day, 1920 didn’t happen, but the legacy of the Wilson administration gave us decades of J. Edgar Hoover and anti-union sentiment that continues to this day.
Significantly, we have indeed seen “rupture and repair” in big ways that we have not examined here. The excesses of the Gilded Age brought us to the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt. Decades of advocacy about women’s suffrage brought us to the 19th Amendment in 1920. The loose and free-wheeling post-war 1920s brought us to Frances Perkins, FDR, and the New Deal.
So, have we survived? It depends on who the “we” are, and it’s complicated.
Some themes
Finally, I want to share four or five reflections about this historical excursion.
People stand up
In these episodes, people from different arenas… journalists, oppressed citizens, legislators, civil servants… have stood in opposition to authoritarianism. Especially in times when it seems that the forces of power, self-interest, and money will have the upper hand, it is important to remember that there are other people out there who share values of justice, fairness, and integrity.
As I write this, I still feel energized by the rally, here in Tucson, at which Bernie Sanders and AOC presented an ambitious and hopeful positive vision for change in America. They had expected to attract seven or eight thousand people. The final attendance was 23,000, including people of all ages, ethnicities, and, as far as one can see, walks of life.
And numbers are still coming in, but the estimate I see is that the April 5 Hands Off protests attracted over 3 million people in well over a thousand locations.
We may all in some ways be dissidents and heroes.
The course of change is elusive
Sometimes, as we have seen, dissent changes the course of events. Sometimes it does not, witness the thousands of Cherokees who perished on the Trail of Tears.
And sometimes the advocacy for justice and equality bears fruit long after their advocates are gone. None of the abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century lived to see any substantial abatement of Jim Crow. None of the prominent advocates for women’s rights at the Seneca Falls convention and into the decades following… Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone… lived to see the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920.
Czech dissident, poet, and statesman Václav Havel comments,
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed.
Hope does not rest on the assumption or likelihood that the things that we hope for will come to pass. Rather, as Havel says, it is the willingness to work for something because it is good.
Nineteenth century women’s rights advocates clearly were hopeful that there might someday be a world where women were treated the same as men. But they were undeterred by the distance that lay between them and that horizon… and even by the fact that they would never see it themselves… and they were willing to work toward the justice of gender equality because it is good.
Ultimately, perhaps the challenge and the salvation for all of us is giving voice to what matters. You speak to a neighbor. You write your representative. You attend a rally. You post a blog (even knowing that few people will read it). You may not change the world, but you save your soul.
We survive and heal in community
Societal change happens when enough people come together to tip the scales. Enough people were dissatisfied with John Adams to elect Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Widespread community conversations across the north (along with battlefield victories) paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation.
The development of community has been the salvation at other times in our history, as well. The indifference and inaction of the Hoover administration led to a broad consensus about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The courage of Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith sparked a national consensus that ended the McCarthy era. Bipartisan and interracial initiatives laid the groundwork for the 1964 civil rights and voting rights laws. Mass discontent brought an end to the Vietnam War. Social movements led to marriage equality and Black Lives Matter (neither development, unfortunately, remains secure).
The sustaining and empowering role of community, of course, plays out in smaller groups, as well as the larger society.
This certainly was true for enslaved people in the antebellum south. And for the antiwar activists, labor organizers, and socialists during the Wilson era. And perhaps for you, in a religious community, or a book group, or a 12-step program, or a neighborhood association.
Community matters. It is a foundation for social change, and the companionship and sharing of the journey gives life to us all.
Especially as the forces of power and authoritarianism seem aligned against us, we may remember the comment from organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley:
There is no more powerful way to initiate significant change than to convene a conversation. When a community of people discovers that they share a concern, change begins. There is no power equal to a community discovering what it cares about.
So… we’ve been there before, and we haven’t been there before. Large challenges loom, but there is also a countervailing force of courage, integrity, and goodness from which I draw hope.
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.
Brooks D (2025). Everything We Once Believed In. The Atlantic, May, 48-54.
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.
National Endowment for the Humanities, The Trial of Thomas Cooper. https://edsitement.neh.gov/sites/default/files/2018-08/T_Cooper.pdf.
National Park Service/Independence National Historical Park. William Duane. https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-aurora-duane.htm.
Richardson HC (2023). Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. New York: Viking.
Solnit R (2016). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Washburn/Norlands Living History Center. Washburn Legacy: The Washburn’s Famous Sons. https://www.norlands.org/washburn-legacy/.
Wheatley MJ (2002). Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
So, have we? Have we been there before? Have we survived? What do we learn as we see stories of dissent across different eras? It’s been an interesting exercise to explore four of the notable times of authoritarianism in our history… John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, the Confederate states and the racism of the antebellum south, and Woodrow Wilson and the racism and repression associated with his administration during and following the first world war… and to see what themes emerge. And perhaps, even, to find reasons for hope. Let’s look.
Have we been there before?
We have indeed experienced many of the hallmark elements of authoritarianism in our history.
Free speech, both in terms of public speech and writing and personal affiliation, was severely compromised in the Adams and Wilson administrations. Particularly in the Wilson administration, the roundup of people suspected of being national threats in the Palmer raids largely ignored due process protections.
The antebellum south featured staggering economic and political injustice, with an overwhelming concentration of power and wealth, and disparity between rich and poor.
Sadly, the recurring blight of racism has been visible thought our history, most notably in our four examples with the subjugation of the Cherokee Nation in the Jackson administration, and the segregation initiatives of the Wilson administration.
Apropos of the current controversy about the Trump administration ignoring judicial orders, we even have the history of Andrew Jackson ignoring the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case about Cherokee sovereignty.
Every era is unique, but we can also argue that we have not been there before.
Absence of meaningful leadership. You may recall, in the introduction this series weeks and weeks ago, my quoting a Christian nationalist pastor who deflected Trump’s personal failings by saying that we were electing “a politician, not a preacher.” My opinion was that this is wrong. I suggested that 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.
The individuals in my authoritarianism stories have certainly had their weaknesses (Andrew Jackson owned hundreds of slaves), but they pale in comparison to the moral depravity of the current president. A convicted felon. A self-acknowledged and legally adjudged sexual abuser. An unapologetic insurrectionist. A self-aggrandizing liar. Lacking, as far as I have seen, any measure of kindness or compassion. (In my better moments, I feel sad for the man. Underneath the bluster, I suspect that he is insecure and lonely; I can’t imagine him having any friends in the way that most of us have experienced friendship.)
A further concern about Trump’s leadership is that he has shown great interest in becoming president but little interest in being president. In his first term, according to the Economic Times, Trump spent 428 of his 1,461 days spent playing golf (in the current term he has played golf on 9 of his first 30 days). His White House calendar, moreover, has always shown wide swaths of “executive time,” which has been understood to mean tweeting, phoning friends, and watching television.
His inattention to the responsibilities of the presidency has consequences. In his first term, a key campaign promise was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Despite having control of both houses of Congress for his first two years, Trump couldn’t be bothered to learn enough about the healthcare system to provide any leadership in making this come about, and the Affordable Care Act remains.
Ill-defined concentration of power and lack of accountability. The leadership vacuum of Donald Trump will be filled by other people, but it is not clear who they are. Elon Musk, certainly, The various actors in Project 2025, probably, along with the three billionaires with front row seats at the inauguration. Much of the current business of the administration is shrouded in darkness, with the firing of officers in several departments whose job it had been to oversee government operations and accountability. It is noteworthy that in the current “Signalgate” debacle, two key people were not included in the final decision-making; the president of the United States and the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I should add that the refrain from the left that Musk is an unelected, de facto president has merit, but is not completely without precedent. In the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke in October, 1919, his wife Edith essentially served as chief executive until the end of his term in 1921. While limiting public awareness of the extent of her bedridden husband’s disability, she was the conduit of communication between government officials and Wilson, and apparently played a substantial role in advising him on the decisions he was able to make.
Incompetence. A man, a likely sexual abuser, whose principal credentials are leading a small group of soldiers in Afghanistan and being a Fox television host serves as Secretary of Defense. A lawyer with no health care background or credentials (and a conspiracy theorist) serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services. An obscure general is nominated to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who meets none of the legal requirements for that position and is outranked by almost 200 senior officers in the uniformed services, being chosen arguably because he has ingratiated himself to the commander in chief. A group of twenty-somethings without documented security clearances, including the celebrated 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine are given access to government financial and payment databases. The impromptu group charged with reducing the cost of government fires people hires them back, and fires them again.
Lies and misinformation. A MAGA congressman in a northern district in my winter home in Arizona regularly cites Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax as sources for outrageous stories. Asked what their main source of news was, a group of Trump voters said… Donald Trump. Turning to entertainment tabloids or to a confirmed liar for information does not make for elevated dialogue. It brings us to a place where January 6 was a love fest, and its perpetrators, heroes.
Money. In the wake of the terrible Citizens United decision, we have Elon Musk buying the 2024 election for 275 million dollars. (As we speak, he is also paying $100 to Wisconsin voters to support a conservative candidate for the state supreme court.)
Elements of these challenges have been with us before. But it is the confluence and scale of these challenges… absence of meaningful leadership, ill-defined concentration of power, and the other factors we are considering… that may signify that we are coming to uncharted territory.
Have we survived?
At an individual level, the people who have borne the brunt of these authoritarian challenges have been ethnic and cultural minorities and individuals who spoke and acted against government abuses. Adams’ political opponents. Native Americans. African Americans and abolitionists. In the Wilson era, people of German ethnicity, conscientious objectors, labor advocates, and people who were allied to collectivist and equalitarian ideas. Other groups, too, that we have not featured here, notably women, white people in the lower socioeconomic strata, and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Individuals like me… educated white men who don’t make waves… have generally make out acceptably well.
Which raises a further concern about our current situation. White educated men (and women) who don’t make waves are being targeted. It’s not only ethnic and cultural minorities who have suffered (I’m waiting with bated breath for some Norwegian exchange student who voices concern about suffering in Gaza to be deported). It’s people of all backgrounds and ethnicities who have served the interests of public health, national security, government accountability, aviation safety, consumer protection, education, environmental protection, veterans’ affairs… the list goes on… who have been summarily terminated for non-existent performance issues.
At a society level, we have generally survived. Despite the authoritarian abuses that we have explored, we have remained an intact and functioning society (at least up to the beginning of this year).
David Brooks describes our national history in terms of continuing cycles of “rupture and repair.” In our four examples, this idea gets mixed reviews.
The Alien and Sedition Acts went away with the election of 1800, except for the alien enemies act that Donald Trump is using as a pretext for deportations. The Trail of Tears did not end well for the Cherokee community, and native American communities have had an uphill battle for recognition, dignity, and economic opportunity for most of our history before and since. The Lincoln efforts with racial justice brought us the brief light of Reconstruction, then the long and painful slog of Jim Crow, then the hopefulness of the Brown decision and the Johnson voting and civil rights laws, then the Supreme Court gutting the requirement of federal oversight for election laws in historically racially restrictive states. The Palmer raids quickly lost steam after the predicted revolution of May Day, 1920 didn’t happen, but the legacy of the Wilson administration gave us decades of J. Edgar Hoover and anti-union sentiment that continues to this day.
Significantly, we have indeed seen “rupture and repair” in big ways that we have not examined here. The excesses of the Gilded Age brought us to the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt. Decades of advocacy about women’s suffrage brought us to the 19th Amendment in 1920. The loose and free-wheeling post-war 1920s brought us to Frances Perkins, FDR, and the New Deal.
So, have we survived? It depends on who the “we” are, and it’s complicated.
Some themes
Finally, I want to share four or five reflections about this historical excursion.
People stand up
In these episodes, people from different arenas… journalists, oppressed citizens, legislators, civil servants… have stood in opposition to authoritarianism. Especially in times when it seems that the forces of power, self-interest, and money will have the upper hand, it is important to remember that there are other people out there who share values of justice, fairness, and integrity.
As I write this, I still feel energized by the rally, here in Tucson, at which Bernie Sanders and AOC presented an ambitious and hopeful positive vision for change in America. They had expected to attract seven or eight thousand people. The final attendance was 23,000, including people of all ages, ethnicities, and, as far as one can see, walks of life.
And numbers are still coming in, but the estimate I see is that the April 5 Hands Off protests attracted over 3 million people in well over a thousand locations.
We may all in some ways be dissidents and heroes.
The course of change is elusive
Sometimes, as we have seen, dissent changes the course of events. Sometimes it does not, witness the thousands of Cherokees who perished on the Trail of Tears.
And sometimes the advocacy for justice and equality bears fruit long after their advocates are gone. None of the abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century lived to see any substantial abatement of Jim Crow. None of the prominent advocates for women’s rights at the Seneca Falls convention and into the decades following… Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone… lived to see the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920.
Czech dissident, poet, and statesman Václav Havel comments,
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed.
Hope does not rest on the assumption or likelihood that the things that we hope for will come to pass. Rather, as Havel says, it is the willingness to work for something because it is good.
Nineteenth century women’s rights advocates clearly were hopeful that there might someday be a world where women were treated the same as men. But they were undeterred by the distance that lay between them and that horizon… and even by the fact that they would never see it themselves… and they were willing to work toward the justice of gender equality because it is good.
Ultimately, perhaps the challenge and the salvation for all of us is giving voice to what matters. You speak to a neighbor. You write your representative. You attend a rally. You post a blog (even knowing that few people will read it). You may not change the world, but you save your soul.
We survive and heal in community
Societal change happens when enough people come together to tip the scales. Enough people were dissatisfied with John Adams to elect Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Widespread community conversations across the north (along with battlefield victories) paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation.
The development of community has been the salvation at other times in our history, as well. The indifference and inaction of the Hoover administration led to a broad consensus about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The courage of Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith sparked a national consensus that ended the McCarthy era. Bipartisan and interracial initiatives laid the groundwork for the 1964 civil rights and voting rights laws. Mass discontent brought an end to the Vietnam War. Social movements led to marriage equality and Black Lives Matter (neither development, unfortunately, remains secure).
The sustaining and empowering role of community, of course, plays out in smaller groups, as well as the larger society.
This certainly was true for enslaved people in the antebellum south. And for the antiwar activists, labor organizers, and socialists during the Wilson era. And perhaps for you, in a religious community, or a book group, or a 12-step program, or a neighborhood association.
Community matters. It is a foundation for social change, and the companionship and sharing of the journey gives life to us all.
Especially as the forces of power and authoritarianism seem aligned against us, we may remember the comment from organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley:
There is no more powerful way to initiate significant change than to convene a conversation. When a community of people discovers that they share a concern, change begins. There is no power equal to a community discovering what it cares about.
So… we’ve been there before, and we haven’t been there before. Large challenges loom, but there is also a countervailing force of courage, integrity, and goodness from which I draw hope.
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.
Brooks D (2025). Everything We Once Believed In. The Atlantic, May, 48-54.
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.
National Endowment for the Humanities, The Trial of Thomas Cooper. https://edsitement.neh.gov/sites/default/files/2018-08/T_Cooper.pdf.
National Park Service/Independence National Historical Park. William Duane. https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-aurora-duane.htm.
Richardson HC (2023). Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. New York: Viking.
Solnit R (2016). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Washburn/Norlands Living History Center. Washburn Legacy: The Washburn’s Famous Sons. https://www.norlands.org/washburn-legacy/.
Wheatley MJ (2002). Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.