Daily Archives: May 3, 2021

Bruce Levine, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2020

The name of Thaddeus Stevens is too little known today. Bruce Levine, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, has provided a political biography of the leader of the Radical Republicans in Congress during the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction that should help to bring this revolutionary figure broader recognition.

It is fitting that President Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the leader of the Second American Revolution that put an end to chattel slavery. But it was Stevens who, along with Frederick Douglass, best personified the uncompromising abolitionist struggle against slavery in the Civil War era, including the early years of Reconstruction after the defeat of the Confederacy.

What distinguished Stevens from his contemporaries was his implacable opposition to slavery and racism, and his fervent advocacy of the democratic principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. He was certainly among the most significant figures within the Radical Republicanswho constituted the left wing of American politics in the 1860sand, within the framework of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, perhaps the staunchest advocate of egalitarianism.

Levine quotes Douglass assessment of Stevens: There was in him the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of knowledge, and the power of conscious ability, qualities that at last made him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined. Like Douglass, Stevens prodded President Lincoln to take more decisive action, even as Lincoln masterfully assessed the political situation, responded to demands from Stevens and others, but waited until he judged the time ripe.

Stevens refused to be bound by what was considered realistic or widely acceptable. He created public opinion and molded public sentiment, according to one political associate. As chairman of the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, Stevens played a critical role in the financing of the war. At the same time, he fought to articulate the political goals of the war and pointed the way forward to victory. Stevens was among the very first political figures to call for recruiting Southern slaves into the Union Army, and as early as 1863 he was demanding the measure that would follow two years laterthe 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, not only emancipating slaves in rebel territory, but outlawing slavery forever within the United States.

Stevenss intransigence won him many enemies, and not only within the Confederacy. On the subject of Reconstruction, the New York Times wrote, Mr. Stevens must be considered the Evil Genius of the Republican Party. The New York Herald added, in 1868, that Stevens could be compared to the leaders of the French Revolution, displaying the boldness of Danton, the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre. The newspaper did not intend a compliment. A British journalist concurred, calling Stevens the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one.

Stevens was born in 1792 in Vermont, a separate independent republic for more than a decade, before it became the 14th state of the Union in 1791. The young man was shaped by a spirit of agrarian radicalism, the struggles and sometimes violent battles of small farmers. He graduated from Dartmouth College, next door in New Hampshire, and soon moved to Pennsylvania, his home state for the rest of his life.

This future leader of the Radical Republicans began his political career in the 1820s in Pennsylvania. He was active for several years in the Anti-Masonic Party, but by the mid-to-late 1830s had aligned himself with the newly formed Whigs, which became one of the two major political parties on a national level in the US until the early 1850s. The Whigs were bitterly divided on numerous issues, on none more irreconcilably than the burning question of slavery and its expansion.

Throughout his long career, Stevens was among the foremost champions of public education, or the common schools as they were called. Stevenss hatred of aristocracy linked his advocacy for the right of education to his fight against slavery. In 1835, Stevens fought off an attempt to repeal legislation for public education in Pennsylvania. He said that any such effort should rightfully be called An act for branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich and the proud. Stevens went on:

When I reflect how apt hereditary wealth, hereditary influence, and perhaps as a consequence, hereditary pride, are to close the avenues and steel the heart against the wants and rights of the poor, I am induced to thank my Creator for having, from early life, bestowed upon me the blessing of poverty.

It was as a Whig that Stevens first went to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, elected in 1848. Militant in his anti-slavery stance, he clashed with pro-slavery Whigs, as well as party leader Henry Clay, the key force behind the Compromise of 1850. Increasingly under fire from those who sought to conciliate the southern slaveholding aristocracy, he chose not to run for reelection to the House in 1852.

The Whigs collapsed over the slavery issue by 1854. Stevens briefly associated himself with the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, apparently willing to overlook its reactionary views in his search for a political home that could challenge the hegemony of the pro-slavery Democratic Party. In 1855, however, he finally found this home when he joined the newly formed Republicans, the party whose presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would triumph only five years later.

As Levine writes, History seemed to speed up after the 1856 election. The irrepressible conflict over slavery was approaching, but few would then have predicted the bloody Civil War that would take the lives of roughly 750,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. Stevens, however, had long been preparing for a mortal struggle with slavery. He understood the significance of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the US Supreme Court ruled essentially that Congress never had a right to limit slaverys expansion. By that standard, as Levine writes, the Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and all territorial laws outlawing slavery had always been null and void.

Two years later came John Browns famous raid at Harpers Ferry. Stevens, who had been reelected to the House in 1858, now as a Republican, denounced the act of revolutionary terror, through which Brown hoped to spark a slave rebellion, but only on the grounds that it was doomed to failure. He called Brown a hopeless fool, but a week after Brown was sentenced to death, Stevens was pressing for publication in booklet form of that mans powerful last letters, statements, and interviews. Stevenss words on the subject of John Brown led his pro-slavery opponents to physically threaten him on the House floor.

The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was soon followed by the secession of the slave states of the Deep South. When the Civil War began in April 1861, Stevens was almost 70 years old, a generation older than Frederick Douglass, and at least a decade older than all of the prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Harriet Tubman and others.

But Stevens displayed the energy and determination of a much younger man. Levine quotes a Republican Congressional colleague of Stevens: To most men there comes, sooner or later, a period of inaction, inability for further progress. This is the period of conservatism, and usually comes with gray hairs and failing eye-sight. It converses with the past and distrusts the future. Its look is backward and not forward. The congressman continued, This period Mr. Stevens never reached. The slaveholders rebellion seemed to rejuvenate him and inspire him with superhuman strength.

Stevens predicted a long and bloody war. His views became more and more radical. Twenty-five years earlier, he was, as the author notes, [A] firm believer in the Norths free-labor capitalist society who opposed the stoking of hostilities among its social classes as unjustified and dangerous to prosperity, social order, and republican government.

Stevens certainly remained a defender of capitalism and of the system of wage labor in opposition to slavery. His years of struggle had made him more sensitive to the struggle against inequality, however, and he revised his earlier hostility to the French Revolution. In 1862, writes Levine, Stevens wished aloud that the ardor which inspired the French revolution might find its like in the United States. The revolutionaries of France, like others elsewhere, he recalled with admiration, were possessed and impelled by the glorious principles of freedom. This was required to carry out to final perfection the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Stevenss willingness to challenge the status quo of racism and oppression was demonstrated in other ways. In the 1860 election campaign, both Democratic and Republican Congressmen had called for stepped-up attacks on Native Americans near the Texas and New Mexico borders. Stevens declared in response that he wish[ed] the Indians had newspapers of their own, because if they had, you would have horrible pictures of the cold-blooded murders of inoffensive Indians. You would have more terrible pictures than we have now revealed to us [of white casualties], and, I have no doubt, we would have the real reasons for these Indian troubles.

When Republicans in California enacted measures against the Chinese immigrant population, Stevens denounced them and said the treatment had disgraced the State of California. He reminded the House that China has been much oppressed of late by the European nations, which had recently made war upon China because it refused to consent to the importation of poisonous drugs that demoralize its society and destroy its people. He insisted on the rights of the Chinese migrants, adding, in words that are indeed appropriate today, long after the United States has become the leading world imperialist power, that the anti-Chinese legislation is a mockery of the boast that this land is the asylum of the oppressed of all climes.

As noted above, Stevens fought for the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army, tirelessly insisting that the logic of the conflict required the mobilization of the freed and escaped slaves in the fight for their freedom, the policy eventually adopted by the president. Stevens went on to fight for the necessary two-thirds majority in the House for the 13th Amendment, achieved on January 31, 1865, after the first vote had fallen just short of that margin. Steven Spielbergs Lincoln (2012) focused in part on the bargaining and political horse-trading that preceded this vote, but Levine explains that the Republican victory in the 1864 elections and the work of Stevens and his Radical Republican colleagues were also crucial to the victory.

Levine relates an anecdote that summarizes Stevenss forthright defense of revolution. When an Ohio Democrat taunted the Republicans, demanding that they admit they were a revolutionary party, Stevens praised the purifying fires of this revolution and proudly acknowledged, revolution it is.

After the assassination of Lincoln, just days after the surrender at Appomattox that ended the war, Stevens forged ahead, now leading the struggle in the early years of Reconstruction. He secured the necessary approval for the 14th Amendment in 1866, although it fell well short of his original proposals, including full voting rights for the former slaves. He also fought for civil rights legislation in answer to the notorious Black Codes and horrific attacks on freed slaves in Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere. The 1866 civil rights bill and the 1867 Reconstruction Act were enacted after Congress overrode vetoes by President Andrew Johnson, who had quickly revealed himself as a racist sympathizer of the defeated slaveholders.

Another indication of Stevenss radicalism in the early days of Reconstruction was his proposal to transfer land confiscated from the ex-Confederate aristocracy into the hands of the former slaves. This ambitious land reform proposal was resisted by the majority of his Republican colleagues. As the author points out, Republicans also wondered nervously whereif they began redistributing landed property to exploited and impoverished peoplethat road would lead. The New York Times, once again the rigid defender of the ruling elite, warned, It is a question of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North. Levine continues, quoting Bostons Daily Advertiser: there are socialists who hold that any aristocracy is anathema.

Stevens led the impeachment of Johnson in 1868, voted for overwhelmingly by the House. The president was acquitted by the Senate by a margin of only one vote. However, in May of that year. Stevens was already gravely ill, and he died on August 11, 1868, at the age of 76. Five thousand mourners, both black and white, came to pay their respects in the Capitol Rotunda. A crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000, also completely integrated, attended his funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following Stevenss death, Ulysses S. Grant was the successful Republican candidate for president, and Reconstruction continued under the protection of the federal authorities. By the early 1870s, however, the top leaders of the Republican Party, representing increasingly powerful Northern industrial capitalism, were already preparing a retreat. The stage was set for the 1877 Compromise that resolved the bitterly disputed presidential election of the previous November by installing Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, while at the same time withdrawing federal troops from the South. This in turn set the stage for the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation, along with lynch mob terror and the political disenfranchisement of the black population that continued for almost a century.

At this point, posed with the need for an explanation of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, a serious weakness in Levines approach becomes clear. He laments that the Second American Revolution was left unfinishedin other words, that it did not complete its historical tasks.

What Levine has in mind is that the Civil War, despite its achievements, did not realize the world of racial equality that its most radical figures, including Stevens, envisioned. But this is to ask more of the past than was possible. Each one of the democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries was unfinished, including the most progressive and liberating, such as the Great French Revolution and the Civil War. Their incapacity to fulfill the egalitarian promises on which they mobilized masses was a result of their class nature. The development of capitalism, which emerged out of these revolutions, could do no other than put on historys agenda a new class struggle, between capitalists and workers. And in that, the most fundamental sense, the Second American Revolution was completed. Destroying the economic system based on chattel slavery, it cleared the path for the development of capitalism.

Levine underlines his own confusion over Reconstruction when he states that the basic cause for the retreat from the goals of racial equality was the fact that the Northern public, never firmly devoted to racial equality, tired of the seemingly endless struggle in the South.

The public, however, is divided into classes. It was the ruling capitalist class, the commercial, manufacturing and financial interests, which turned away from the struggle. It had achieved its main aim of unifying the country on the basis of a free-labor economic system. The Northern victory gave a mighty impulse to the development of industrial capitalism. But with that came a new and existential challenge to bourgeois rulethe working class.

In this new context the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, including its most radical wing, quickly retreated from its headier egalitarian promises, including its commitment to voting rights and equal protection under the law for the freed slaves. Stevens did not live to see the full scope of this retreat, which eroded support within the Republican Party leadership for Grant and Reconstruction, culminating in the election Compromise of 1877 and the restoration of the southern Bourbonsnot incidentally, the same year as the Great Uprising of American rail workers. The enemy, in other words, was no longer the former slaveholders, but the militant working class. The authors reference to the public obscures this class reality.

Levines unfinished revolution thesis, which was first developed by historian Eric Foner, suggests that the great task of progressive forces in the US today is to complete it. It assumes that a more egalitarian society must be created under capitalism before there can be any talk of workers taking power. The task, however, is not to perfect capitalism, but to destroy it. Only this will end social inequality and all the ideologies, such as racism, that have always been used to justify it.

In any case, capitalist reaction was not confined to the South, precisely because the ruling class was faced with the need to divide and weaken the growing working class. Although taking a different form in the rest of the country, discrimination and second-class citizenship replaced the progress that had been made in the Civil War and Reconstruction. This project was facilitated by the historical falsification of Stevens, who became the object of decades of calumny. As Levine points out, when the notoriously racist D.W. Griffiths epic motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, appeared in 1915, Stevens was depicted in obvious caricature as a monstrous villain.

The shift was reflected in Civil War historiography. W.E.B. Dubois, the author of Black Reconstruction in America, which was published in 1935, praised Stevens for his grim and awful courage, but his account of this period was overwhelmed by vicious attacks on Reconstruction, which predominated in official histories from the turn of the 20th century onwards. Professor William Dunning of Columbia University, who called Stevens vindictive, truculent and cynical, was instrumental in propagating the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy as a struggle for states rights

As late as 1955, future president John F. Kennedy could write, in his Profiles in Courage, in an assessment that reveals the racist pedigree of the Democratic Party, that Stevens was the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement. It was not until the 1960s, amid the mass civil rights movement and broader struggles of the working class, that historians such as James McPherson began to correct the record on the role of Stevens and his co-thinkers. It was precisely the growth and the increasing integration of the working class, especially in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, the great labor struggles of the 1930s, and the experiences of World War II, that made possible the heroic struggles for racial equality in the post-World War II period.

Stevens and the Radical Republicans still make the ruling class nervous today, for fundamentally the same reasons as 150 years ago. Some have found a different way of minimizing Stevens, of even ignoring his role entirely, or defaming him. The advocates of critical race theory, now increasingly dominant in the elite universities of the US, were promoted by the New York Times and its 1619 Project, which insisted that all American history must be seen as a racial conflict and as the manifestation of white supremacy, against which blacks fought back alone.

The life and struggle of Thaddeus Stevens are an irrefutable answer to this reactionary falsification of history. It is one more reason to welcome this new biography, despite its failure to fully explain the end of Reconstruction.

Speaking at the time of the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, Stevens said, I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: Here lies one who never rose to any eminence and who harbored only the low ambition to have it said that he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.

Stevenss legacy a program of common struggle of the oppressed of every race and language and colorshould be studied by all who seek to understand the past in preparation for new revolutionary struggles.

Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter

Read the original post:

The Danton, Robespierre, and Marat of America, all rolled into one: A new biography of antislavery leader Thaddeus Stevens - WSWS

While unveiled in 1897 to the acclaim of Bostonians, the bronze relief does not escape todays examination of monuments within a broader conversation and reckoning on racism. The memorial foregrounds the soldiers white commander, stressing a racial and social hierarchy even as its meant to illuminate the dignity of the soldiers.

The Black men depicted in the statue, made by renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, reflect the mostly young men who marched in formation through the streets of Boston to the Common in May of 1863. There on the green, thousands had come to see them off before their voyage into slave-holding South Carolina, where they would wage an assault on Fort Wagner. Nearly half the regiment would be lost. They look resolute. Above them, in the sculpture, is an angel. Behind them and not represented in the monument are the whole communities from which they come, and which they represent, including the Boston Black community.

Here begins Bostons Black Heritage Trail a walking tour created by the Museum of African American History that winds its way through the North slope of Bostons Beacon Hill neighborhood. The area was home for more than a century to a free Black community, one of the most active such communities in the nation. The trails sites focus on life before and after the Civil War. Highlights include the museums African Meeting House; the Abiel Smith School, the first public school established for Black children in the United States; and former residences, a number of which served as important stations of the Underground Railroad, the vast network of contacts, safe houses, and routes used by fugitives in pursuit of freedom. The 1.6-mile trail, which can be walked in about two hours, comprises 14 historic sites. Maps and information can be found online and at the Museum of African American History. I suggest walking it in good weather.

I am following the trail for the first time, though I have lived in Boston for years, and am a reader of Black and African diasporic history. I have attended unforgettable programs at the African Meeting House. I have walked past the Shaw memorial more times than I can count. I have stopped at times to gaze upon the bronze faces, on my way downtown, to the State House, or to a wonderful shoe store that existed on Beacon Street when I was an undergraduate at Emerson College. Then, I did not place the monument within the larger framework of the trail.

How did following the entire trail escape me? Did my association of Beacon Hill with the history of Boston Brahmins, with power and wealth, with the industrialists who by and large opposed racial equality because of their ties to Southern cotton, keep me from walking its streets? Did I have the feeling of not belonging on those slopes in the 20th century, on the Beacon Hill of impossible rents (for me), flower shops, and antiques stores? Am I guilty, perhaps, of not seeing something because it is so close to me in proximity? There on Beacon Hill was and is a textbook of the 19th-century Black experience. Am I redeemed if I admit that the more recent and practical question of finding on-street parking has more than once stopped me? (I strongly recommend taking the subway to Park Street Station on the Red Line, a short walk from the Shaw memorial.) No matter, here I am, finally on the trail, map in hand.

The trails second stop, the George Middleton House, sits snuggled between two red brick buildings, likely built after the house was erected in 1787 by Middleton, a Black hero of the Revolutionary War and esteemed activist. It is the oldest standing house built by African Americans on Beacon Hill in fact, it is the oldest house on Beacon Hill, period. There is a particular sweetness to the three-story wooden structure, with wide windows gazing out onto Pinckney Street. I am standing in front of the house, waiting for the spirit of Middleton to speak to me, when the most unexpected thing happens (I cannot guarantee this will occur on all tours): A tall man emerges from the front door. He finds me gazing at the house, now a private residence. I imagine he is accustomed to such behavior, living in a historic house.

We exchange greetings and he shares with me his name and affiliation: Stephen Judge, fifth owner of the house. He lives there with his husband. Here is the story Judge relays: Middleton shared the house with his partner, Louis Glapion, who hailed from the Caribbean. Glapion, Ive since discovered, worked as a hairdresser, an occupation of high standing in the Black community of the day, which would have made both Middleton and Glapion respected members of the contemporary Black community. Several sources support the inclusion of Middleton and Glapion in queer histories.

This information requires the consideration of assumptions I didnt realize I had about what I would find on the Black Heritage Trail. Here I was expecting musty history. I had never heard of Middleton, this early leader of Bostons African American community. Glapions origins remind me of the great diversity of Black Boston in the 18th century (and the centuries before and after), with members coming from all regions of North America, from the Caribbean, and other parts of world. I am reminded that American Blackness has never been monolithic in identity or ideology which challenges the white supremacist myth of the natural hierarchies of race.

What did unite 19th-century Black Bostonians, however, were common goals including racial equality foremost; the abolition of the institution and economics of slavery; the protection and provision of aid to fugitives; ongoing advocacy for the education of their children in the long struggle for equal school rights; and the preservation of their rights as citizens, particularly after the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that required escaped slaves be returned to their enslavers, and after the 1857 US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, which effectively stripped citizenship from Black people. The court ruled that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States.

I carry my new awareness, as well the historically contested ideas of Black freedom and citizenship, to the next stop of the trail a few blocks away. The Phillips School is a beautiful brick building on top of which sits a cupola designed to increase the natural light and flow of air within the space beneath it. Granite stairs lead into the school, also now a private residence. When it was constructed in 1824, it was seen as one of the best public schools in Boston, educating primarily children from nearby wealthy families. The Phillips School would not be integrated until 1855 after a tireless fight by Black parents. It ended with the Massachusetts Legislature banning segregated schools, the first law in the country to do so. (It would be nearly 100 years until the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional nationwide.)

Much has been written about the critical struggle for equal school rights in Boston and the nation, and the important laws that have emerged as the result of the advocacy of Black communities. Standing before the Phillips School, I try to imagine the experience of the children and young people who personified desegregation, the ones who walked into the schools for the educations their parents so wanted for them, despite the animus raging around them. I try to see girls like the young Sarah Roberts, whose story is beautifully rendered in The First Step, a picture book written by Susan Goodman and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Her expulsion from her neighborhood and all-white school in 1848 ultimately led to Roberts v. Boston, the first case to challenge a segregated school system.

The Phillips School is the first school on the Black Heritage Trail. The second, near the trails end, is the Abiel Smith School, one of the most significant for several reasons. But there is more between the schools for me to see and consider: a handful of sites including The John J. Smith House, the Charles Street Meeting House, and the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House.

THE JOHN J. SMITH HOUSE stands a large edifice with black shutters on its many windows, a second-floor window seat, and a stately black door that metaphorically opens onto history. There is Smith, a Massachusetts state representative. There is Georgiana Smith, his wife, who works for the Freedmens Bureau, a federal agency established in 1865 to provide relief to formerly-enslaved people and others after the Civil War. See them creating a home and a hub for community organizing and activism here on Pinckney Street. How to visualize the many people who visited while working on emancipation and abolition, and who walked renewed out of the house onto the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill? Perhaps en route to the Hayden House?

A glass-arched entryway and dark green door mark the brick house of Lewis and Harriet Hayden on Phillips Street the sixth stop of the Black Heritage Trail. This door also serves as a passageway to the past, and to one of the most noted stations, or safe houses, of the Underground Railroad, which extended from the South to Canada. The Haydens had themselves been fugitives, from Kentucky, and were among the enslaved who emancipated themselves with the help of fellow abolitionists. Once settled in Boston in the 1850s, they became among the communitys most influential antislavery activists contributing to Bostons longstanding reputation as a sanctuary for fugitives.

Women, men, and children mobilized to protect fugitives. In 1836, a group of Black women in Boston, in an incident later called the Abolition Riot, executed a daring rescue of two fugitives who had self-emancipated from Baltimore. When Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates were brought before a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the Boston women rioted in the courtroom, creating a path for Small and Bates to be spirited into a waiting carriage that sped away. The day I stand outside the Hayden house, bright yellow flowers rest in the buildings two window boxes.

To walk the Black Heritage Trail is to be reminded of difficult American history, of the daily discrimination and segregation Black people faced; of the brutality of slavery and the slave economic system; of the conditions of Black schools; and challenges and threats to Black lives and Black freedom. To walk the Black Heritage Trail is also to be amazed at what the Boston community has endured and achieved, to acknowledge its ongoing advocacy, organization, vision of freedom, and upholding of American ideals.

This is one of Bostons most rewarding walkable histories, says LMerchie Frazier, director of education and interpretation at the Museum of African American History.

The trail ends at the twin sites of the African Meeting House, built in 1806, and the Abiel Smith School building completed in 1835. They comprise the museums Boston campus (there is another campus on Nantucket). The museum organizes exhibitions, programs, and education activities that showcase the powerful stories of black families who worshipped, educated their children, debated the issues of the day, produced great art, organized politically and advanced the cause of freedom as its website so aptly describes.

The African Meeting House, the nations oldest existing Black church building, stands as a space of extraordinary history and community. For 19th-century Black Bostonians, it was a think tank and site of worship, a concert and lecture hall, a site of collaboration between Black and white abolitionists, an incubator of rescue missions, the launch pad for emancipatory movements and the very center of Black Boston.

During visiting hours, the doors of both the meeting house and museum are open to the past, present, and future.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

> The Black Heritage Trail: The Museum of African American History partners with the National Park Service, which offers free guided tours of the trail (currently on hold). Check nps.gov/boaf for updates. Homes on the trail are not open to the public.

> Museum of African American History: The Abiel Smith School and African Meeting House are now open for visitors. Reserve timed tickets at least 24 hours in advances at maah.org.

> The African American Trail Project: This collaborative history project housed atTufts University highlights more than 200 sites across Greater Boston and Massachusetts. Find a map and more information at africanamericantrailproject.tufts.edu.

Danielle Legros Georges, a writer, literary translator, and professor of creative writing at Lesley University, was Bostons poet laureate from 2015 to 2019. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Follow this link:

The Black Heritage Trail: A walking tour deep into Boston history - The Boston Globe

History

My years of military service and 40 years of hard work were rewarded by the freedoms afforded by this wonderful nation. Not once did I discriminate or abuse anothers rights. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution have been the basis on which this wonderful exceptional Nation was founded. Slavery was a terrible thing, however the lives of over 700,000, mostly white men finally settled the issue. Yes, there has been discrimination, Catholics, Jews, Italians and many others to include my ancestors the Irish. They all accepted it and solved it by hard work and accepted the American way. The news print, news TV media, TV shows, motion picture industry and educational liberal machine has perpetuated the Cancel Culture. I am appalled at the biased reporting. When the unarmed demonstrators entered the Capitol building, both papers screamed Insurrection, not even close. The Idaho Press headlines today read Anti-school indoctrination was passed by the Legislature. This is an attempt to level the playing field. I will bet you the students in the gallery dont know true history.

Bad ideas

Bad ideas in Idahos Legislature often resurface. Rep Joe Palmers bill to more than double electric vehicle registration fees is dead for this session, but it will boomerang back next year in some form.

Electric vehicle owners in Idaho are willing to pay their share for road maintenance. But pulling numbers out of the air is not a fair approach. There will continue to be more alternatively fueled vehicles in Idaho, so the gas tax a reliable source of revenue since the 1920s will be less useful every year.

Tying a use fee to the miles driven by each vehicle is a better, though not perfect, approach. If, as in Palmers failed legislation, 2.5 cents per mile is a number that would be fair for electric vehicles as an alternative to paying a flat fee, then it is also fair for gasoline-powered automobiles.

Legislators need to find a better solution to funding roads than spitballing fees to discourage the use of electric vehicles.

Radical

I have learned. Being a Democrat. I am part of the radical left. According to the r.n.c. thats because I believe that everyone should get a fair shake. When it comes to paying taxes. Even the top one percent does not do. We need to create more green type jobs for our future. Drive down high drug costs. We need police reform. So when police cross the line with excessive force. They need to be punished. We also need to raise the minimum wage to $ 12.00 dollars an hour. Everyone needs a fair shot. When it comes to being to have a decent life. For you and your family. So, yes. I am a left wing radical.

Initiatives

This years Legislature and Governor enacted legislation that makes it almost impossible for the people to propose and pass/reject an initiative or referendum. Idahos history bears no signs of of problem with this area. In our history, wed have 31 initiatives proposed, and 16 passed. With referenda, weve had just 6, with 2 passed. California, on the other hand, has had over 300 initiatives. I am a fiscal conservative, and I was raised to believe that Republicans believed in the power of the people to govern. Shame on them for this pro-government, almost imperial, law. They remind me of the gasbag Democrats I grew up hating.

Think

I wonder if our retrumplican Lt. Gov. and state legislators have ever heard of the McCarthy hearings in the 50s and 60s, or about what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Apparently not. I noticed that our Lt. Gov. while railing against different forms of government and ideologies didnt mention Fascism. I wonder why?

Rep. Nichols, Middleton, said our rights were given to us by God. Really? So after giving Moses the ten commandments he waited five thousand years then came to Idaho and wrote our state constitution. Or does he communicate only with Rep. Nichols tells her what he likes and dislikes and she then gets to tell everyone what to do like it or not.

Rather than choose to find paths that will help our state move forward in a sane responsible manner our legislators have decided to follow an agenda of goofy conspiracy theories and nonsense that has no truth, facts, or proof. Only I HEARD.

Qanon, the I.F.F. and other crazy no facts idiots are destroying our nation. THINK FIRST!

Climate

Idaho is poised for a very bright and clean future because our state is already blessed with an abundance of natural beauty and resources. We are the envy of many other states. One of our greatest assets includes a significant capacity to produce agricultural products that will meet our nations needs long into the future. Yet we can only do so if we are able to preserve and protect the environment that we all live in and depend on.

One of the ways we can ensure a sustainable future for Idaho and our farmers is by quickly passing the Growing Climate Solutions Act (GCSA). This bill, recently reintroduced with Senator Mike Crapo as a cosponsor, will help create consistency and reliability for ag producers who want to participate in carbon markets by creating a certification program within the US Department of Agriculture.

My sincere thanks go out to Senator Crapo for seeing the value in farmer-friendly legislation, like the GCSA, that seeks to leverage the power of the free market to address a changing climate.

Support

Im writing to elevate the story of the 19-year-old intern at the Idaho Legislature who has accused Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger of sexual assault. Von Ehlinger happens to also be a teacher. This story must be seen by as many people as possible.

As an adjunct professor of English, I teach young, impressionable people usually they are in their late teens to early twenties. What Ive learned from teaching this age demographic is that these individuals need support and guidance. Rep. von Ehlinger is accused of assaulting a young intern and is claiming that it was consensual, and his colleagues have come to his defense, to the extent that some of them are doxing the victim. This is a story that risks being dominated by the louder, more powerful voice, which, in this case, is the perpetrator and those on the far-right that support him.

CRT

The phrase critical race theory keeps appearing again and again in Idahos legislature this year, but I have yet to see anyone define it. Even in the Idaho Press Tribune article about finalists for the West Ada superintendent position, the writer indicated the finalists had to struggle to define it. I have not seen or heard anyone identify the source which created the phrase. Nor have I seen or heard anyone referencing any studies about how, when or where it is being taught. Even if you google critical race theory, all one can find is the phrase being used by our legislators, Fox News Network and the Idaho Freedom Foundation. I would like to see the Idaho Press interview all the legislators who are against whatever critical race theory is to provide their definition(s) and information identifying where it is currently being used to indoctrinate anyone in any school anywhere before creating a law which includes such a vague phrase.

The Idaho Press does not vouch for the factual accuracy or endorse the opinions expressed in Letters to the Editor. If you would like to respond to anything you read here, please submit a letter at idahopress.com/opinion

Read more here:

Letters to the editor, May 2, 2021 - MDJOnline.com

Heres what you need to know:President Biden visited Philadelphia on Friday to mark Amtraks anniversary and used the occasion to promote his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, which includes $80 billion for mass transit.CreditCredit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

For a majority of his political career, President Biden was a commuter, making the 90-minute Amtrak Metroliner trip between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Del., when the Senate was in session. There were even a few trips thrown in when he was vice president.

On Friday, he arrived in Philadelphia transported by presidential plane to celebrate the railroads 50th anniversary; deliver a passionate case for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, which includes $80 billion for mass transit; and reminisce.

Amtrak became my family, Mr. Biden said, ticking off the railroads environmental and economic benefits while standing in front of a parked Acela train at the William H. Gray III 30th Street Station.

It provided me with, and Im not joking, an entire other family, he added. Amtrak doesnt just carry us from one place to another, it opens up enormous possibilities.

Mr. Biden, blue presidential baseball cap pulled down over his brow on a blustery day, proceeded to go through an anecdotal memory reel.

On many nights, he would be so exhausted that he would wake up in Philadelphia after sleeping though his stop, he said.

Then there was the time he rushed from D.C. to Wilmington to watch his daughter blow out her birthday candles on the platform, then rode back to Washington for a vote.

When Mr. Biden was vice president, his buddy Angelo, one of the conductors, would squeeze through the phalanx of jittery Secret Service agents, risking bodily harm, to wish him well.

Angelo came up and said, Joey baby! and would grab my cheek and squeeze it like he always did, Mr. Biden recalled. I thought he was going to get shot.

Many politicians have emphasized their workaday origins (the image of Abraham Lincoln as a rail-splitter was an early campaign ad). Mr. Bidens Amtrak Joe nickname was earned from an estimated 8,000 round trips on the line, often in a window seat, often reading the days newspaper by the morning light en route to the Capitol.

This is a birthday I certainly wouldnt miss, he wrote on Twitter, posting a picture of himself on the train from his middle-age years.

The trip is part of what the White House is calling the Get America Back on Track Tour, with Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hitting the road to sell the infrastructure package. The plan calls for improvements to Amtraks high-traffic Washington-to-Boston corridor and expanded service to Las Vegas, Nashville, Atlanta and Houston.

The commuter railroad traces a roundabout route through Mr. Bidens mid-Atlantic life, through loss, revival and relentless transit as a person and politician. And on Friday, he spoke about Amtrak as if it were his friend, not a battered and underfunded federal railroad system patched together from the remnants of dying regional lines.

Mr. Bidens journey mirrors that of Amtrak. He began riding in the earliest days of the railroad in the 1970s, when he traveled back home every night to care for his two young sons, Hunter and Beau, after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash.

Ive been riding an Amtrak for almost as long as theres been an Amtrak, he said.

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, told local news reporters on Friday that he would not support a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., saying he believed a constitutional amendment was needed instead of legislation.

It is the latest example of Mr. Manchin, a critical swing vote, pushing his party toward the center on major issues. Among other things, he has pushed for a smaller corporate tax hike in President Bidens infrastructure plan and for more limited unemployment benefits in the $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

In a radio interview with Hoppy Kercheval of West Virginias MetroNews, Mr. Manchin said he had done a deep dive on the issue and pointed to findings from former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and from the Justice Department under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

They all came to the same conclusion: If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment, Mr. Manchin said. It should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote.

Even with Democrats in control of the 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harriss tiebreaking vote, the statehood legislation already had dim prospects before Mr. Manchin made his decision public. Several Senate Democrats have not publicly voiced support for the proposal, and no Republicans have come out for it, leaving the measure short of the support it would need to clear a filibuster.

Mr. Manchin has also made clear that he opposes eliminating or weakening the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold needed to end debate in the Senate.

The Democratic-controlled House passed the statehood measure along party lines last week, and Mr. Biden has said he supports it.

The legislation would establish a 51st state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth in honor of Frederick Douglass, the Black emancipation and civil rights leader and would give the new state a voting representative in the House and two senators to represent its more than 700,000 residents.

The Biden administration is starting to see some success in its efforts to suitably house the migrant children flooding to the southwest border, with a fraction of the number of children in Customs and Border Protection custody than there were a month ago.

Over the past month, the number of migrant children in the jail-like facilities of the Border Patrol dropped 83 percent, from 5,767 on March 29 to 954 on Thursday, according to government statistics. The length of time children are staying in border shelters is down as well, from an average of 133 hours to 28. By law, children are not supposed to stay in border shelters for more than 72 hours.

The improvements are attributable in part to an increase in facilities overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services where children can be housed under better living conditions.

More children are also being discharged from government custody, most often to live with a relative.

The number of migrant children arriving alone at the southern border has decreased by a much smaller amount, from 626 on March 29 to 525 a month later, according to an official briefed on the data.

While the number of migrants at the border surges each spring, the surge this year has been much higher than normal.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, led Republican senators on Friday in protesting a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the legacy of American slavery, calling the guidance divisive nonsense.

In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Mr. McConnell, of Kentucky, and three dozen other Republicans singled out a reference in the proposal to The New York Times Magazines 1619 Project, which was included as an example of a growing emphasis on teaching the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society.

Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it, the senators wrote. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.

It was the latest bid by Republicans to stoke outrage within their conservative base about President Bidens agenda, which party leaders are portraying as a radical overreach into every corner of American life. With Mr. Biden pushing a number of popular domestic programs, Republicans have increasingly turned to litigating cultural issues, which they believe will help them regain majorities in Congress in 2022.

The White House, citing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced Friday that it would begin restricting travel from India to the United States next week, a major new test of the Biden administrations pandemic response.

The decision was one of the most significant steps yet taken by the White House in response to the crush of new infections in India, where over 3,000 people are dying each day as citizens gasp for air on the streets. The country recorded almost 400,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday alone.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the policy would go into effect on Tuesday. The travel restrictions will not apply to citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States, their spouses or minor children or siblings, or to the parents of citizens or lawful permanent residents who are under 21. People who are exempt from the ban must still abide by the guidance the United States has already put in place for international travelers, including a negative test for the virus before traveling and again upon entering the country from India, and they must quarantine if they are not vaccinated.

Doctors and news reports in India have cited anecdotal but inconclusive evidence to suggest that a homegrown variant called B.1.617 is driving the countrys outbreak and that people who have been fully vaccinated are getting sick.

As federal health officials, including Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the C.D.C. director, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the governments top infectious disease expert, discussed the possible move in recent days with White House officials, they emphasized that there was little known about how coronavirus vaccines respond to that variant.

One U.S. official said the travel restrictions could be modified once there was more data on vaccine response.

Researchers say that data so far suggests that another variant that has spread widely in Britain and the U.S., the highly contagious B.1.1.7, may also be a significant factor.

In the past 24 hours, U.S. military cargo planes began the first deliveries of emergency supplies promised to India by the Biden administration, with shipments of small oxygen cylinders, large oxygen cylinders, regulators, pulse oximeters, about 184,000 rapid diagnostic tests, and about 84,000 N-95 masks, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.

After President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, the Biden administration announced Monday that it intended to make up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine available to other countries, so long as federal regulators deem the doses safe. It was a significant, albeit limited, shift for the White House, which had been reluctant to export excess vaccines in large amounts.

As hospitals face shortages of intensive-care beds, relatives of the sick are broadcasting desperate pleas on social media for oxygen, medicine and other scarce supplies. Many Indians say they do not know if they are infected with the coronavirus because overwhelmed labs have stopped processing tests.

Several Indian states said they could not fulfill the governments directive to expand vaccinations to all adults beginning on Saturday because they lacked doses. Only a small fraction of the country has been vaccinated so far.

Linda Qiu contributed reporting.

The Transportation Security Administration extended a mandate Friday that requires travelers to wear masks at airports, on airplanes and on commuter bus and rail systems, through Sept. 13. The mandate was set to expire on May 11.

Right now, about half of all adults have at least one vaccination shot and masks remain an important tool in defeating this pandemic, Darby LaJoye, a T.S.A. spokesperson, said in a statement.

The original order took effect in February and was part of the Biden administrations goal to require masks for 100 days. Exceptions to the mandate are travelers under the age of 2 and those with certain disabilities that dont allow them to wear a mask safely.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed mask rules earlier this week, saying that fully vaccinated Americans no longer need to wear a mask outdoors while doing activities alone or in small gatherings. But the C.D.C. stopped short of not recommending masks outside altogether and still recommends wearing a mask indoors.

Airlines started requiring passengers to wear masks nearly a year ago, but they had no federal mandate to back up their rules. As the orders expiration date got closer, leaders in the airline industry began to push for an extension. The Association of Flight Attendants applauded the extension in a statement. Earlier this month, it called for the directive to be extended to make it easier to deal with passengers who were not complying with mask rules set by airlines and airports.

A new group dedicated to promoting President Bidens ambitious agenda is beginning a multimillion-dollar ad campaign trumpeting his Covid recovery package and infrastructure proposal while contrasting Mr. Bidens low-key style with his bombastic predecessors.

Building Back Together, a progressive organization run by Biden allies, will air minute-long television commercials next week in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin that highlight the presidents response to the coronavirus and his wide-ranging economic plans. The group is planning to spend over $3 million on a monthlong effort, including a shorter advertisement that will appear on digital platforms in the same four states and in North Carolina.

Both spots differentiate Mr. Bidens approach from that of former President Donald J. Trump.

You wont hear him yelling or sending angry tweets, because for Joe Biden, actions speak louder, says a narrator in the television commercial.

The shorter digital advertisement concludes, No drama, just results.

The strategy illustrates how determined Democrats are to effectively keep running against Mr. Trump.

The message is simple: Chaos is out, competence is in, and help is here for Americans, said Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to Building Back Together who is close to Mr. Biden and top West Wing officials.

The group, whose formation was first reported in February, is going on the air in vote-rich and costly markets: Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, as well as Scranton, Pa., Mr. Bidens childhood home. The group has drawn some scrutiny because it has said it will not disclose the identity of its donors.

The last time America came close to creating a national child care system was in 1971. There were a total of 15 women in Congress. And a young Joe Biden, then a councilman in New Castle County, Del., was beginning to consider running for a Senate seat. But President Richard Nixon vetoed what was a largely bipartisan effort, worried that it would have family-weakening implications.

Now, as president, Mr. Biden plans to vastly expand access to care for infants and toddlers in a highly ambitious national effort that lawmakers, advocates and child care workers believe may fundamentally transform Americas cultural ambivalence toward child care, and help bridge gender and racial inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has widened.

In his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, the president laid out the broad contours of his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. It includes a total of $425 billion to scale up and enhance the child care industry so that affordable, high-quality early education is available to almost every parent.

It is so amazing that what has been a secretly whispered stress campaign for so many parents for so long is finally seeing prime-time attention, said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who has been championing child care reforms and family-friendly policies since she was elected in 1993.

The last investment in child care that was considered significant was in 2018, when Congress injected about $2.8 billion into a national funding program for low-income families, known as the Child Care and Development Block Grant, bringing the programs total funding to $5.2 billion. As the pandemic drove the child care industry to near collapse, Congress passed a set of temporary relief measures amounting to a total of more than $50 billion to help shore up providers.

Price tag aside, there is now more momentum and bipartisan support than ever before for an overhaul of the child care system, experts say.

In just the past week, congressional lawmakers including Ms. Murray, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts have introduced three separate but similar child care reform bills. In recent years, several states, like Alabama, have successfully expanded their early childhood programs. And the last year laid bare for voters across the political spectrum particularly mothers how essential child care is for their productivity. Even the right-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce acknowledged on Wednesday that without some kind of investment in child care, the economy could not fully recover.

The conversation has completely changed, said Charlie Joughin, communications director at the First Five Years Fund, a bipartisan advocacy group. We definitely know that there is no shortage of support for some kind of solution to the challenges that families are facing.

But Mr. Biden faces pressure from Democrats to earmark more federal money for child care. And the presidents plan to pay for the $1.8 trillion package by increasing taxes on the richest Americans has already drawn harsh criticism from some Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress, setting up a clash in the coming weeks.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will travel to Kyiv next week, a clear signal of the Biden administrations support for Ukraines government against threats from Russia.

In a statement announcing his trip, the State Department said that Mr. Blinken would reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russias ongoing aggression.

Mr. Blinken will meet in Kyiv on Wednesday and Thursday with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, senior officials and civil society representatives. His visit will be preceded by a three-day stop in London.

Mr. Blinken will be the most senior American official to visit Kyiv since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled there in February 2020, soon after Congress impeached and acquitted President Donald J. Trump on charges that he abused his power by leveraging U.S. policy toward the country in an effort to incriminate Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a Democratic candidate for president, and his son Hunter.

As president, Mr. Biden has offered strong support for Ukraine against Moscow, which annexed Crimea in 2014 an act the United States has never recognized and fomented a Russian-backed separatist rebellion in the countrys east that has claimed more than 13,000 lives.

But Russia has tested that support, intensifying its military intimidation of Ukraine this spring with a huge troop buildup along the countries shared border, which many analysts said could be a precursor to an invasion. Russia announced plans to withdraw many of those forces earlier this month. But earlier this week, John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters that it was too soon to tell and to take at face value Russias claim.

The number of people targeted by the F.B.I. for court-approved searches and surveillance in terrorism and espionage investigations dropped sharply in 2020, a report released Friday said, amid the pandemic and the continuing political and legal fallout from the F.B.I.s botched use of its eavesdropping power in the Trump-Russia investigation.

There were just 451 targets of wiretap and search warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 2020, according to the newly declassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That was the lowest number of FISA targets in the eight years that the office has been releasing annual transparency reports disclosing statistics about the governments use of national-security surveillance powers. The number of targets of FISA warrants peaked in 2018 with 1,833; dropped significantly in 2019 to 1,059; and then plunged again.

The two-year drop in targets starting in 2019 corresponded with scorching political scrutiny on the F.B.I.s use of FISA to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with close ties to Russia, Carter Page. In late 2019, an inspector general further unveiled serious flaws in applications for those wiretaps, and a follow-up audit of unrelated cases found pervasive sloppiness in the F.B.I.s preparations to seek FISA orders.

The problems led both the F.B.I. and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to impose new bureaucratic restrictions on the process that played out in 2020 like requiring officials to swear that applications to the court contain all information that might reasonably call into question the accuracy of the information or the reasonableness of any F.B.I. assessment in the application, or otherwise raise doubts about the requested findings.

Still, a variety of factors were responsible for the fluctuating numbers, so isolating the effects of any one cause is difficult, Benjamin T. Huebner, the chief civil liberties, privacy, and transparency officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a briefing with reporters on Friday ahead of the reports release.

The new report also showed that the number of foreigners abroad targeted for warrantless surveillance, with help from American companies like Google and AT&T, dropped slightly to 202,703 in 2020, down from 204,968 in 2019. That slight dip broke a yearslong pattern of a steadily rising number of such targets.

Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, said on Thursday that in a lot of cases gig workers in the United States should be classified as employees, not independent contractors. In some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not, and I think it has to be consistent across the board, he told Reuters.

Shares of Uber, Lyft, Fiverr and DoorDash fell sharply on the news. These companies business models depend on classifying workers as independent contractors, who are not entitled to labor protections like a minimum wage or overtime pay.

But how much control does Mr. Walsh have over how companies classify their employees?

Theres no single law that makes workers employees or contractors. The Labor Department can enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes the federal minimum wage and overtime pay. This law applies only to employees, and who should fall into that category has been the subject of a long-running debate.

In 2015, the Obama administration issued guidance that many interpreted to mean that app-based workers should be considered employees. It was rescinded by the Trump administration.

In 2021, the Trump administration issued a rule that would have made it easier for the same companies to classify workers as contractors. It was nixed by the Biden administration. Mr. Walshs comments suggest his interpretation will be similar to the Obama administrations. And David Weil, reportedly President Bidens nominee to lead the Labor Departments wage and hour division, wrote the 2015 guidance.

New guidance wouldnt change the law, but it could change how the Labor Department decides whether to bring lawsuits against gig economy companies. Its implicitly a sign to employers that you should comply with this interpretation or theres a risk of enforcement, Brian Chen, a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, told the DealBook newsletter.

Although such guidance is nonbinding, Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School, said courts tend to give it deference when making decisions. I wouldnt be surprised if we saw specific action coming from the department sometime this year, said William Gould, a Stanford law professor and the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

President Biden will meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in Washington on May 21, the White House announced on Thursday.

President Moons visit will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people, and economies, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. President Biden looks forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen our alliance and expand our close cooperation.

In an interview with The New York Times published last week, Mr. Moon urged Mr. Biden to sit down with North Korea and kick-start negotiations, calling denuclearization a matter of survival for South Korea.

Mr. Bidens predecessor, Donald J. Trump, left office without removing a single North Korean nuclear warhead. Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, has resumed weapons tests.

He beat around the bush and failed to pull it through, Mr. Moon said of Mr. Trumps efforts on North Korea. The most important starting point for both governments is to have the will for dialogue and to sit down face to face at an early date.

He also called for the United States to cooperate with China on North Korea and other global issues, like climate change. Deteriorating relations between the two countries could threaten negotiations over denuclearization, he warned.

Mr. Biden met with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House on April 16, marking the first in-person visit of a foreign leader during his presidency.

On the campaign trail, Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed to bring science back to the White House, the federal government and the nation after years of presidential attacks and disavowals, neglect and disarray.

As president-elect, he got off to a fast start in January by nominating Eric S. Lander, a top biologist, to be his science adviser. He also made the job a cabinet-level position, calling its elevation part of his effort to reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy.

In theory, the enhanced post could make Dr. Lander one of the most influential scientists in American history.

But his Senate confirmation hearing was pushed off for three months. The slow pace, according to Politico, arose in part from questions about his meetings in 2012 with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who had insinuated himself among the scientific elite despite a 2008 conviction that had labeled him as a sex offender.

Link:

Biden Promotes His $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Package and His Love of Train Travel - The New York Times

Americas transition from a nation of dispersed communities and local economies to a national market generated exciting opportunities. It also created new winners and losers and fundamentally altered the peoples relationships to their neighbors, families and government. When they argued about whether to dredge a river or build a canal, Americans of the antebellum period were really arguing about what kind of country they wanted to live in. And thats exactly what politicians are still fighting about today.

Prior to the 1820s, Americas infrastructure was a rudimentary and scattershot affair. Roads were locally built and maintained. Riverways were mostly undredged. Canals and railroads were nonexistent. The downstream journey from Pittsburgh, an emerging western market hub, to the Southern port city of New Orleans took at least six weeks; the return trip, upstream, took 17 weekswhich is why most people transporting goods simply broke their boats up for timber upon arrival in New Orleans and walked or rode back home. When newly elected Senator Henry Clay first made the journey from his home in Lexington, Kentucky, to Washington, D.C., in 1806, it took three weeks of hard overland travel.

Many Americans, particularly those who lived inland from coastal townsthose pushing outward beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachian range, extending as far as the Old Northwest territorieswere essentially cut off from a regional, let alone national, market. Like many of their neighbors in the new state of Indiana, Abraham Lincolns family cultivated only a small portion of its land to grow corn and vegetables and raise hogs and cattle, leaving the rest fallow and overgrown. As a neighbor later explained, there wasnt no market for nothing else unless you took it across two or three states. Though Lincolns father, Thomas, attempted on several occasions to take pork and corn by flatboat to New Orleans, in the absence of roads and canals, and with large parts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers largely unnavigable, the cost of transportation all but erased the profit margin.

Without a market for goods, and in the absence of a developed cash economy, most families did what was logical, producing enough for home consumption and little more, perhaps selling a small surplus to neighbors, bartering with others for goods and services, manufacturing clothing and other necessities at home, and purchasing what few items they could not produce themselvessugar and other dry goods, glass for windowsfrom a nearby country store. Survival demanded a collective outlook. Like other families, the Lincolns relied on a growing kinship network of cousins and in-laws who established small, adjoining homesteads and built an informal system of cooperative farming, home production and bartering.

That soon changed. Following the War of 1812, which exposed the logistical dangers of a fragmentary transportation system, federal and state governments made significant investments in roads and turnpikes.

Then came Canal Fever.

Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal, a 363-mile wonder stretching from the Hudson River in Albany to Buffalo, thus making it possible to ship freight between New York City and the Great Lakes, set off a decade of construction that saw $102 million of public and private capitala staggering sum in its dayinvested in new connective waterways as far and wide as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Virginia.

Canal fever was followed by a boom in steamboat construction, which not only reduced the time required to carry goods downstream but made it feasible and worth the cost to move freight upstream. Suddenly, a trip from New York City to Albanytwo weeks by sailboat, or a full day by coachtook just eight hours. This efficiency, in turn, reduced regional price disparities for different goods. In 1816 a resident of Cincinnati paid roughly $0.16 more for a pound of coffee than counterparts in Southern cities closer to New Orleans. Riverboats cut the difference to about $0.02.

Railroads were the final piece of the puzzle. Trains were virtually unheard of when Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington, D.C., by carriage to assume the presidency in 1829. Eight years later, he left the capital city by rail. By the end of the decade, the country claimed 450 locomotives and 3,200 miles of track. By 1850, 9,000 miles of track. On the eve of the Civil War, 30,000.

If canals and steamboats made travel faster, railroads were practically science fiction come true. The same three-week trip that Senator-elect Henry Clay made from Lexington to Washington, D.C., in 1806 took just four days by 1846.

Together, twin revolutions in transportation and information (inspired by the U.S. Post Office, which subsidized the delivery of newspapers and magazines, and after 1848, the telegraph) drew disparate communities into closer connection with one another and with an emerging market economy that relied on credit, surplus production and trade. America evolved quickly from an agrarian republic into a capitalist democracy.

It was a world that many Americans welcomedbut which equally as many dreaded and resisted.

Opposition to federal investments in internal improvements (the popular term for what we, today, call infrastructure) emerged as early as the 1810sthe Era of Good Feelingswhen presidents James Madison and James Monroe both vetoed bills that would have directed funds to the improvement of national roads. Despite his assertion of the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority, Madison doubted the governments authority to undertake most work without the benefit of a constitutional amendment.

It was a position echoed by Monroe, who vetoed plans to erect tolls on a national highway, and Andrew Jackson, who famously vetoed funding for the Maysville Road in 1830. All three presidents professed support for internal improvements, but only if they were principally financed by state and local governments, or by chartered corporations.

Qualms about the constitutionality of funding for infrastructure reflected a broader concern about the proper size and scope of the federal government. Often, that concern struck a nerve with Southern representatives who feared that a central government strong enough to build national roads might be strong enough to interfere with slavery. If Congress can make canals, a longtime representative and senator from North Carolina warned, they can with more propriety emancipate.

But opponents of federal funding for internal improvements feared more than just an empowered federal state. They understood that internal improvements would usher in a new realityone in which a cherished agrarian republic gave way to a mixed economy of farms and small towns, factories and cities, agriculture and commerce. In a short story published in 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a steadfast Jacksonian Democrat in politics, likened the railroad to a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions.

In North Carolina, opponents of state funding for internal improvements popularized an election ballad that framed canals and roads as the ruin of their agrarian paradise:

So therefore let it be our care,To keep these men away from there,Who build their castles in the air,Who dream they can vast things perform,Aid in a breadth Gods works reform,[But to] us send such men as willCut no canals through vale nor hill.

In the eyes of opponents, where canals and railroads cut a swath through the countryside, they seemed to decimate local communities and turn once healthy, independent farmers into washed-out wage laborers. A New York editor invited readers to gaze on the sallow complexions, emaciated forms, and stooping shoulders of mill workers and consider what a crime against society it was to divert human industry from the fields and the forests to the iron forges and cotton factories.

The debate over internal improvements ultimately folded into the larger divide between Jacksonian Democrats, who generally opposed them (along with a national bank and tariff) and Whigs, who rallied behind Henry Clays American Systema bold agenda to modernize the American economy through a protective tariff that would encourage homegrown industry, investments in internal improvements and a banking system that could support these ambitions with a stable influx of paper currency.

Go here to read the rest:

What the Infrastructure Fight Is Really About - POLITICO