Tag: Abraham Lincoln

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

We’re All in Kansas Now

I was struck last weekend by a Twitter thread from GOP presidential candidate Joe Walsh. Yes, there is a Republican seeking to challenge President Trump for his party’s nomination, but he’s tilting at windmills, since the GOP establishment has already eliminated primaries in many states in order to protect Trump’s incumbency.

Walsh reported that he walked a line of Trump supporters outside the president’s Iowa rally last week, trying to convince them to consider his candidacy. Here’s what he wrote:

“Plenty of Trump supporters were angry at me and many got in my face. But here’s what made me sad: I asked about 40 folks a very simple question: Has Donald Trump ever lied to the American people? Every single person said ‘No.’ Trump has never lied. Every single person gave me that answer. But that wasn’t all. A few people told me that Trump, unlike Obama, has never golfed. Nobody in line knew that Trump was increasing the debt way faster than Obama. Nobody knew that under Trump our deficit was now greater than $1 trillion. Nobody I asked could think of one single thing that Trump has done that has disappointed them. Nobody thought Trump did anything wrong with Ukraine.

“Almost everyone thought that China was paying for Trump’s tariffs. Nobody cared that Russia screwed with our 2016 election. On and on it went. I left sad and frustrated because all of these folks in line were being fed a sea of lies by Trump, Fox News, and the rest of Trump’s media sycophants. … They didn’t believe basic truths.”

Anyone so far down in the Foxhole that they don’t think Trump ever golfs is pretty much beyond saving. Facts truly don’t matter to them. Trump is perfect, godlike. It was Obama who golfed, not our magnificent president!

After the president’s much-mocked tweet congratulating “the Great State of Kansas” for the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory, the usual Fox pundits lined up to rally the troops. Maybe the snooty liberal coastal elites don’t realize there is a Kansas City, Kansas, they snickered. There are Chiefs fans in Kansas, too, they snorted. Silly snowflakes! Remember when Obama said there were 57 states?

Seriously, is it really that hard to just say the president goofed? Must he be utterly without fault, a flawless golden Superman? This level of intentional ignorance — and the amplifying of said ignorance by right-wing media — is terrifying.

If it makes you feel any better, none of this is new. There is a thread of know-nothing-ness that has woven itself through American history, usually driven by xenophobia and politicians who seek to exploit it. There was even a major political party that surfaced around the time of the Civil War that called itself the “Know Nothings.” I went down that Google wormhole so you wouldn’t have to:

“The Know Nothing party, formally known as the Native American Party and the American Party, was a far-right nativist political party and movement that operated nationwide in the mid-1850s. It was primarily an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, and xenophobic movement, originally starting as a secret society. Adherents to the movement were to simply reply ‘I know nothing’ when asked about its specifics by outsiders.”

Shorter version: The Know Nothing party was anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, and sought to keep America white and protestant. Sound familiar? Same as it ever was.

But if you really want to get your mind blown, see if you can guess the author of the following:

“I am not a Know Nothing — that is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it as ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to that, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

That was soon-to-be President Abraham Lincoln writing to a friend in 1855. Does history repeat itself? Nearly 165 years later, it would appear so. Let’s hope America survives this latest round of Know Nothings.

Categories
News The Fly-By

New Tennessee State Museum Will Feature Memphis Exhibit

A new $160 million Tennessee State Museum will open in 2018 at Nashville’s Bicentennial Mall. The 137,000-square-foot facility will house artifacts from across the state, and each city will get its own chronological exhibit.

The museum broke ground earlier this month, and now its staff is on a statewide tour to inform residents of Tennessee towns and cities of the museum’s progress. The tour stopped in Memphis earlier this week

The Flyer spoke with the museum’s community officer Mary Skinner and Chief Curator Dan E. Pomeroy about the hurdles of the expansive project and what sort of representation Memphis will have. — Joshua Cannon

Flyer: When outsiders think of Memphis, they often think of Elvis and barbecue. How will the museum break that cliché in what’s represented about the city?

Mary Skinner: The State Museum traces the roots of its large collection back to 1818 and has been collecting artifacts pertinent to the telling of Tennessee’s history for almost 200 years.

We literally have hundreds of objects (furniture, art, textiles, musical items) from Memphis in our collection, including a 1919 American LaFrance Type 45 triple-combination fire engine, an 1860s Rococo Revival mirror from the Hunt Phelan House, a collection of Ernest Withers’ civil rights photographs, a document signed by Abraham Lincoln concerning Civil War government in Memphis, and paintings by Carroll Cloar. The list goes on and on.

How is the museum determining what to fit and what to leave out?

MS: It is impossible for any museum with a collection as large as ours to put everything on exhibit for public view at one time. That is why the new museum will have separate galleries that will allow visitors to explore specific periods and themes more deeply — including our Civil War history, music, art and cultural issues of the day. These exhibits will be easier to change and update as we continue to acquire new artifacts.

How do you tell a state’s long and varied story through artifacts?

Dan Pomeroy: In order to be prepared to tell this full story, the State Museum has been aggressively and selectively adding to its collection of objects and artifacts for the last four decades.

This collection contains artifacts relating to notable personalities, such as presidents and governors, but also includes items designed to tell the story of other aspects of Tennessee, such as Native Americans, urban centers, business, manufacturing, labor, immigration, African Americans, art, crafts, music, children, home life, rural communities, women, sports, and common soldiers. These and other stories obviously intersect and are interwoven, which is part of the challenge to museum interpretation.

What do you think visitors will take away about Tennessee?

DP: The ultimate goal is to create as complete a story as possible for the people of Tennessee and for our state’s visitors. Tennessee’s story is a critical and significant part of America and the world, and, taken as a whole, it should be a source of pride and empowerment to Tennesseans everywhere. This may be particularly important for the tens of thousands of school children who will visit the State Museum.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Deforming Tennessee Justice

A Tennessee “country lawyer” named Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party. An Illinois “prairie lawyer” named Abraham Lincoln founded the Republican Party. Both represented people charged with violent crimes. Jackson allegedly committed a few of his own in his early years, and Lincoln was defending people charged with murder, right up to the time of his run for the presidency.  

Lincoln’s memorial now stands on our national mall in Washington, D.C., as both a tribute to justice and the most visible platform for those seeking fairness to peaceably assemble. Many of our founding fathers were defense attorneys. John Adams even defended the British soldiers at the Boston massacre. But today, the voices of private criminal defense lawyers are not wanted nor welcomed by the state government in Nashville. Somehow, American heroes like Thurgood Marshall and the fictional Atticus Finch are no longer valued as part of American culture.

Last week, Governor Bill Haslam formed a 27-member task force to reform sentencing laws in Tennessee. The goal is a noble one, as nearly every study of prisons reveals that the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but more than 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrate the anger that many citizens have at a government that is over militarized and increasingly appears to be waging war on its own people. 

Citizens of Tennessee can likely expect more of the same from the sentencing task force. The commission counts numerous prosecutors, judges, and police chiefs among its membership, and gives the appearance of being well rounded. However, the task force lacks even one private criminal defense lawyer among its members. In fact, the governor appointed only one recently reelected public defender to the task force. In other words, almost no one charged with “reforming” sentencing in a draconian justice system has ever defended a citizen at a sentencing hearing.  

The act of standing alone with a single citizen as the overwhelming weight of our government crushes his liberty is an experience that almost no one on the task force understands. The government will reform itself largely on the advice of its own employees, and without the advice of those independent thinkers who exist outside of government — like the lawyers who founded our country.

Six Shelby County residents were appointed to the task force. All are white Republicans, now tasked with reforming a system that overwhelmingly affects people of color. But, more importantly, none have defended a sentencing hearing since these laws were created in 1994.  

Senator Brian Kelsey is a lawyer who has never argued a case in criminal court. Sheriff Bill Oldham is not a lawyer, but his son serves as a prosecutor in the criminal courts. His predecessor in the Sheriff’s Office is Mark Luttrell, our current county mayor, who never argued a criminal case. Bill Gibbons is the current director of Tennessee’s Department of Homeland Security, a law enforcement position. As a lawyer, he served as our district attorney in an administrative capacity and never argued a criminal case.  

Amy Weirich is one of the most accomplished trial attorneys in the history of Shelby County, but has served only in the role of prosecutor. The Honorable John Campbell is equally accomplished as a trial lawyer, having served as a prosecutor from 1986 until he took the bench in 2012. A notable local lawyer who differs from all others on the committee in both appearance and work history but was not selected is Memphis Mayor A C Wharton.

I know several of these citizens, but my affection for them does not change the fact that each of them presents only one side of the debate about sentencing in Shelby County. For example, our laws send people to prison for six years for possessing $40 worth of marijuana, an act that is no longer a crime in several states. Possessing just $10 of cocaine can lead to a 30-year sentence.  

The elected officials of the task force all promise to be “tough” on crime. None ran advertisements promising to be “fair” or “smart” on crime. But the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that families in Shelby County are destroyed by many of our sentencing laws. How can a commission this one-sided and completely lacking in practical perspective make any meaningful reform? 

The task force should remember the words of Lincoln: “A law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.” It would be even better for Tennessee if the task force had members who actually live and work as Lincoln did — to remind the group in person.

Mike Working is the owner of The Working Law Firm, and serves as a member of the board of directors for the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Categories
Opinion

Could Abraham Lincoln Be Elected?

last.jpg

There’s a new movie coming out starring Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, so I went looking for a quick read on Lincoln and checked out “Lincoln at Gettysburg” by Garry Wills.

I had forgotten most of the 272-word speech I memorized long ago that Lincoln delivered in three minutes. The main speaker that day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours.

Wills goes into the making of the man and the making of the Gettysburg Address, which does not directly address slavery. “Lincoln was accused during his lifetime of clever evasions and key silences,” Wills writes. “He was especially indirect and hard to interpret on the subject of slavery.”

Lincoln dodged the subject in his 1858 debate with Senate candidate Stephen Douglas, and delivered some campaign speeches that would get him branded as a racist today. Here is one Wills quotes:

“I will say then that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarrying with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of political and social equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Wills writes that Lincoln’s political base, Illinois, had a case of “Negrophobia” and in 1848 amended the state constitution to deny freed blacks the right to enter the state.

“Lincoln knew the racial geography of his own state well, and calibrated what he had to say about slavery according to his audience.”

The movie “Lincoln” directed by Steven Spielberg, comes out November 9th and focuses on the year 1865.