CSotD: Holding a few rights to be self-evident
Skip to comments
Clay Jones posts a cartoon in anticipation of this weekend’s holiday, raising an issue that, while hardly new, remains of interest.
He also conflates the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, which was written a dozen years later and has a completely different function. (And if you blow it up, you’ll see he conflates it with a lot of Twitter and Facebook wisdom.)
The Declaration was something of a manifesto and, had the Revolution failed, would be a curiosity. Similarly, Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses, nailed them to the church door and then succeeded in what Catholic school children were told was “The Protestant Revolution” and everyone else calls “The Protestant Reformation.”
The Declaration of Independence is somewhat better known, in that people have heard the opening paragraph and know none of the rest, while nobody quotes any of the 95 Theses, even out of context.
As for the Constitution, the 3/5 Compromise was about Congressional representation, not human worth.
There was also no mention of voting rights in the document until 1868, when the 14th Amendment offered equal racial protection, but with this important limitation (Section II):
Suffragists fought against inclusion of the word “male” in vain. Still, the Constitution did not forbid women to vote. It simply left it up to the individual states, the general judgment of historians being that the Southern States were scared enough of the prospect of their former male slaves voting, and letting all former slaves vote would have doomed ratification.
Anti-suffragists in Washington continued to hide behind states rights, as this 1914 Doane Powell cartoon from the Omaha Bee points out, and suffrage efforts split between efforts to amend the Constitution and efforts to lobby state legislatures.
A more egregious error is to say that the Founders limited the franchise to white, male, landowners. Jones doesn’t state that, but his inclusion of “gentlefolk” underlines the elite status of the Founders, which is true: These revolutionaries were neither Toussaint L’Ouverture nor Fidel Castro.
Then again, Jefferson, a slaveowner, wanted citizens to be literate and favored universal education, even founding the University of Virginia to extend education.
History is full of such contradictions, and understanding the past means working through a troublesome balancing act, not cherry-picking the parts that prove your point.
The bottom line is that the Declaration of Independence included everyone, because the intention was that they’d all be free of Britain whether or not they wanted to be, while the Constitution is more complex, because it was intended to apply to “everybody” but we had an extremely limited sense of what that word means.
To which I would point out that nearly every indigenous group seems to have a name for themselves that means “the people,” to the exclusion of outsiders.
Ethnocentricity is hardly an invention of white men, which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep working on it.
History is a work in progress.
And, Bill Day suggests, we appear to be backsliding, his cartoon being a pointed edit to Norman Rockwell’s Post cover:
Juxtaposition of the Day
I see an interesting distinction between these cartoons on the collapse of that condominium in Surfside, Florida, particularly in light of the discovery that the flaws in the building were known and that — to put it politely — residents had not been told of those flaws.
Heller lays out all the warning signs, which makes his approach more specific and critical than Marlette’s suggestion that moving into these places is a frightening gamble. Some of the labels on those Jenga sticks are things everyone moving to Florida should consider, some are specific to the project itself.
I suppose you could say that they also factor into Marlette’s “gamble” theory, because people take certain gambles when they live, for instance, in places prone to blizzards or tornados.
I’m honestly not sure which approach I prefer, though I do like Marlette’s “Sandcastle Condominiums” label.
Dave Granlund skips the metaphors and goes straight to that inspector’s report that never quite got to the people who lived there.
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told NPR’s Weekend Edition that the engineering report was likely not read at the time.
Which is an odd thing to say when you know you’re speaking into a microphone, though I suppose he’s not high on the list of people who were supposed to have read it.
I heard a story about the number of rescue workers headed for the scene. I hope they aren’t blown off the road by the swarms of attorneys.
Sigh. Moving there seemed like such a good idea!
Speaking of Lawyer Festivals
Kevin Siers celebrates some local news with national implications, as Juul has agreed to a settlement in one of, according to Reuters, 2,000 pending cases over their marketing of e-cigarettes.
When I was editing a kids’ publication over the past decade, we saw continuous, conflicting reports about vaping, with the most encouraging being that, if you already smoked, they might help you cut back and eventually quit. But the marketing, and the candy flavors, hardly seemed targeted at that 50-something who started smoking before smoking became uncool.
Vaping was cool. Except, y’know, for making you look like a trend-obsessed douchebag.
But that’s the thing about marketing to kids: How their parents and grandparents feel about it doesn’t much matter, and Juul was quite successful in luring them in.
Let’s see how successful they are in defending the 1,999 suits still pending.
I met Pedro X. Molina at a conference of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists not all that long after he’d managed, with the help of Cartoonists Rights Network International, to get out of Nicaragua ahead of the death squads and emerge in Ithaca, New York, where he has continued to work on behalf of his country.
The offices of his publication have been raided back home, but that’s a funny thing about newspapers these days: They’re devilishly hard to stop, and Confidencial has continued as an on-line opposition publication in a nation that does not tolerate opposition.
Things are reportedly getting worse by the moment, but Molina is not only continuing to stir things up at home in absentia but to speak out internationally.
Here’s an interview worth reading.
(“Evidence of crime, according to the dictatorship.”)
Comments 9
Comments are closed.