My daughter Darlene is in San Francisco this week, taking part in one of the satellite celebrations of the sesquicentennial of the establishment of her alma mater, Cornell University. (She had considered going to the one on Hong Kong, but figured that the one in San Francisco would be just as culturally diverse and she wouldn’t have to be on a plane for 16 hours.)
Ezra Cornell was Bill Gates-rich from owning Western Union. To his eternal credit, his university was co-educational from the jump. (The other seven Ivy League schools didn’t allow women to matriculate until at least the 1970s! Columbia didn’t integrate along gender lines until 1982. Double exclamation point!!)
Eighteen sixty-five was one of those important years where history clicks forward a notch. During that year, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery; Wild Bill Hickok shot and killed a man in what is considered the first-ever Old West gunfight; the Civil War came to an end; extra-creepy Lewis Carroll published “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”; the Salvation Army was established; and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Sometimes mistakenly presented as the ultimate irony is the fact that on April 14, 1865, President Lincoln signed into law a bill that established the Secret Service. That night, he was shot and killed. The Secret Service was actually established to fight rampant counterfeiting. At the end of the Civil War, it’s estimated that one in three of all pieces of American currency was counterfeit. The Secret Service was created to clean up that mess. It wasn’t until the assassinations of Lincoln, then Garfield and then McKinley that the Secret Service was also assigned to protect the President (and others).
While I was doing the research, I found that, 100 years ago (in 1915), the United States House of Representatives voted down a proposal to allow women to vote. That’s 1915, not 1815. Over the past century, that legislative body has become much more open-minded and progressive. Nowadays, it votes on a regular basis to strip millions of Americans of their health-care coverage. It also refuses to do anything about the millions of people who are in this country illegally and then cries like little bitches when the President attempts to tackle the problem.
The House sucked then and it industrial-strength sucks now. However, in between—50 years ago—it voted by more than a two-to-one margin to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the companion piece of legislation to the Civil Rights Act that had been passed the year before. Fortunately for Arizona, Barry Goldwater (who had joined with the Southern racists in voting against the Civil Rights Act) was no longer a Senator. His successor, Republican Paul Fannin (and Democrat Carl Hayden) both voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act.
No matter how many ways his supporters try to spin it, Goldwater’s vote remains a stain on his legacy and laid the foundation for Arizona’s connection with crackpot politics. The term “states’ rights” might have meant one thing when the Constitution was being drafted, but in the 1960s, it meant “institutionalized racism.” Today, it means, “I just hate it when the federal government does something right.”
Also in 1915:
•Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental phone call. Bell was in New York and he called (this is way cool) Mr. Watson in San Francisco. In a few years from now, they’ll be teaching disbelieving school kids that, back in the old days, people actually used telephones to speak to one another.
•Thomas Edison invented the telescribe, the forerunner to the phone answering machine. Those same kids will scoff at the notion that people used to leave voice messages for one another.
•The Germans not-so-wisely torpedoed the Lusitania, killing 1200 people and eventually dragging the United States into World War I.
•French fighter pilot Roland Garros was shot down over Germany. He and German Anthony Fokker had both been simultaneously working on the problem of shooting a plane-mounted gun without shredding one’s own propeller. Garros would eventually escape his POW camp and return to the air. He was shot down and killed one month before the end of the war and a day before his 30th birthday.
The clay-courted tennis stadium in Paris where they hold the French Open is named for Roland Garros.
•Finally, it must be mentioned that in 1915, a guy named Frank Holt, who had been a teacher of German at Cornell, planted a bomb in the United States Senate cloak room. It exploded, but no one was hurt. The next day, he went up to New York and broke into the mansion of financier J.P. Morgan, with whom Holt was angry because Morgan was supporting England in the war against Germany. Holt shot Morgan twice, but Morgan still managed to subdue the would-be assassin. (While Morgan held Holt down, his butler conked Holt out cold with a piece of coal.) Holt committed suicide in jail.
It turns out that Holt was actually Erich Muenter, who, while a professor at Harvard a few years earlier, had killed his wife and then escaped. The word is that when Cornell officials learned that Holt was actually Muenter, they denied him tenure but did nothing else. They figured that since he had started out at Harvard, he had already suffered enough.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.
At least he threw a round about jab at Republicians. Other than that, I’m lost.
I enjoyed this one Tom!
Pointless, but an enjoyable read.
A) My name’s not Lucy.
B) I graduated from a 2 year college with a 3.6 G.P.A.
C) Like Da Coach I’m just curious as to the point.
D) Is that really your picture ?
Simply riveting Tom. Even your “chickball” article was better than this drivel. The House sucks? Are you going through your second childhood? My grandkids have enough class not to say “sucks”.
You mention Goldwater voting with Southern racists. Are you talking about Clinton mentor J.W.
Fulbright? They hooked up about 1965. Maybe you mean KKK superstar and Democrat Senator Robert “sheets” Bird. You really wear out that “putting down the south” crap. Does it make you feel superior like that ugly Canadian Neil Young? To paraphrase Skynrd from ” Sweet Home Alabama”
“My conscience doesn’t bother me , does your conscience bother you?” Yep, no racists up north you know. Your selective outrage is as phony as the Hillary tape of her lecturing about Bush era emails.
Oh, on another topic that you lectured about recently………… your beloved street car is almost empty now and wrapping it in advertisements can’t hide that fact.
Vince,
Does it make me feel superior that I am not, nor have I ever been, a racist? Yeah, a little. (Did you know that Neil Young was once in a band with Rick James? Weird but true.) I sincerely understand why knuckleheads like Byrd and Fulbright voted the way they did; it was part of their DNA. But some of them (including Fulbright) later came around. Fulbright voted for a civil rights bill in the 1970s. It’s to their credit that they evolved over time. While I have a generally positive view of Barry Goldwater, he never apologized for that vote. Finally, as for Hillary and her e-mails, if she broke the law, then prosecute her. If she didn’t break the law, people should shut the ___ up and focus on real news.
Real news. Like that in 1915 some tennis court in France was named after some guy named Roland Garros.. Now that’s real news. Save your breath, Vince. You’ll never get these people to admit when they’re wrong. They always have an excuse. Just be thankful that God gave you the brains to reside on the right. That ought to get the dislikes going. Even though they know they ’em.
I know CW. I must have some masochistic issues to deal with. I am thankful that I wised up about 1980. Hmmm, anything interesting happen in that year?
Unfortunately our local newspaper is a complete joke and Tom is easily the best writer in this
little humorless enclave that we reside in. He is also very funny and usually quite interesting to read.
Most progressives are not only boring, they are pissed off constantly. This is a really horrible country you know.
I have always believed that way down deep Danehy probably agrees with us, and this weekly gig is
a big joke on everybody.
As for prosecuting the Clinton’s, good luck with that. Bill lied under oath, but the mainstream media circled the wagons and Ken Starr became the bad guy. Lois Lerner should be in big trouble for the IRS shenanigans also, but when the big three networks totally ignore the story, what chance do we have for justice?
It is a Dem who has been leaking all this info. to the NY Times on Hillary by the way Tom.
Obviously somebody is pushing for Elizabeth Warren or like me they just can’t bear the thought of those god awful pant suits for the next four years.
Neil Young was a roommate of Rick James also. That doesn’t change the fact that Rick was a funk hero and Neil made the “whitest” music this side of Judy Collins. With a whopping total population of 19 colored folks in Canada, it was pretty lame when old Neil started lecturing on race relations.
I also noticed that your side never gave Strom Thurmond credit for “evolving over time”. Oh yeah, he was a Republican.
Double standard again?
Strom Thurmond was a Dixiecrat when he ran for President in 1948, then a Southern Democrat (as opposed to a real Democrat) when he ran for the Senate in the 1950s and then switched to the Republican Party a month or so after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. He mellowed a bit after it was revealed that he had a black child, but he never renounced his earlier stances. That pant-suit line made me laugh hard.
“With a whopping total population of 19 colored folks in Canada, “
Colored folks ???
Orange, blue, green….?
Tom, you digest history like we all digest the news. It’s all sound bites and stats now. Nothing in depth because…SHORT ATTENTION SPAN…Was that a squirrel? Where did it go? Hey, Newspapers long ago taught us to simply read the headlines and move on.
You have got to be kidding Timmothy (nice picture)
Are you really gonna play P.C. policeman over a joke?
I bet you think “people of color ” is just fine though.
O.K. African-Canadians. Is that better?
Hey CW, please beam me up.
Among other drivel Tom whines thus:
“Nowadays, it votes on a regular basis to strip millions of Americans of their health-care coverage. It also refuses to do anything about the millions of people who are in this country illegally and then cries like little bitches when the President attempts to tackle the problem.”
1) When did it become a constitution imperative that the federal government was supposed to provide health insurance for anyone? It’s simply none of their business, just like it’s not their business to know who I talk to on my telephone or what Internet website I visit. God forbid that they know that I read TW. They might mistake me for an Obama voter.
2) The Congress has passed numerous bills defining the legal process for visiting this country or becoming a citizen. These are long-standing and completely adequate for regulating who is or isn’t allowed to legally enter the country. What more is necessary, other than strict enforcement of existing law?
It is not the Congress’s duty to enforce these laws, it is incumbent upon the Chief Executive to order the round up and deportation of those found to be here illegally. Period (to paraphrase the Chief Executive). Regrettably, he is incapable of performing his duties, or running a lemonade stand for that matter.
Golly Tommy, in your history lesson you failed to mention that Hillary was once a “Goldwater Girl.”
She wrote: ” I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide.”
Vince, you have to understand these people look for things to bitch about. Show me a liberal with a smile on his face and I’ll show you a conservative in disguise.
Wes S. knocks it out of the park on health insurance and border security.
Perhaps you can also set him straight on “public education” and whether the feds should even be involved.
Here you go Vince:
The US Department of Education used to admit on its website (since “sanitized” by the Obama administration) that education in the US was primarily a state and local responsibility. They also acknowledged that the feds provided only about 10% of the money spent on education in this country.
I have argued many times in other forums, that school districts in their Pavlovian desire to receive federal funds probably spent more than 10% of their budgets in compliance costs.
Quoting the current DOE website about what they (claim to) not do:
“Thus, the Department does not
establish schools and colleges;
develop curricula;
set requirements for enrollment and graduation;
determine state education standards; or
develop or implement testing to measure whether states are meeting their education standards.*
These are responsibilities handled by the various states and districts as well as by public and private organizations of all kinds, not by the U.S. Department of Education.”
Sounds good, huh? Unfortunately, like everything in this administration, it’s a lie, as anyone with a brain and ethics knows well.
Excellent Wes. I think you should write a column and add a little balance to the TW.
Oops, that might increase readership. Can’t have success at an alternative weekly.
At least this paper allows rebuttals and Tom even joins in the commentary and does not pretend to be “above the fray”
Much better than the local daily with all Fitz all the time and heavy censoring of opposing views.
Fitz. A whole new meaning to dead from the neck up.
Hey Tucson Weekly, is this guy really your Opinion Journalist?
No wonder people rarely read this rag unless they find it somewhere that they happened to be trapped for hours at a time, and succumb to reading twaddle like this (since we are speaking of “Industrial strength” sucking!) out of sheer boredom. His comment in the last sentence of the fifth paragraph really sounds intellectual doesn’t it?
He must be educated to the hilt to come up with a line like that, because only an overeducated buffoon can find a Constitutional right which does not exist, and accuse the Congress of “stripping millions” of Americans of that right; and yet stay mum about the actual Constitutional rights we are actually being “stripped” of, or the Constitutional authority this President is usurping, or the duties he is shirking.
“While I was doing the research, I found that…” Really Tucson Weekly? Research? I think most of us learned about voting rights for women in the fifth grade. I wonder if Tom’s research led him to discover that those who you referred to as “the Southern racists” were Democrat politicians like Al Gore’s father, or did he perhaps just leave that out because it was an inconvenient truth. What a bunch of swill!
No matter how many ways his supporters try to spin it, this article leaves a stain on Danehy’s journalistic aptitude. I suspect though that the problem with this particular stain is that when seen among the many others, to the Cool Aide drinkers, it looks like a coat of many colors. A journalist, laughable. Serious magazine, again, Laughable.
Wonk and a nerd to TD for sharing a piece of historical pi, but you failed to note the exception to round cylindrical volume equation:
At Little Ceasars: pi r squared.
You’re welcome.
Wow! Thanks to “Vince of Darkness” for the almost humorous distortion of history!
The the two major parties flip flopped during the ’60’s and the Party of Lincoln traded his amazing
legacy for the white sheets and hoods of the Dixiecrats. We now have the Bubba Belt, stretching from the deeply disturbed South, to the OU campus, Ohio, Wisconsin, and crAZy AZ with it’s Taliban-like
hiding of hatreds to numerous to count behind a theocratic jihad against reason, the Black guy,
as well as the true intent of Lincoln and our founding fathers. No more fact farts from the dark recesses of Vince’s warped mind please.
Sorry True
When you write:
“Wonk and a nerd to TD for sharing a piece of historical pi, but you failed to note the exception to round cylindrical volume equation:
At Little Ceasars: pi r squared. “
you err. It’s pi r^2 H