THE FOURTH OF JULY, THE FIRST AMENDMENT, AND A GREAT WRITER

Rob pays tribute to our constitution and a national treasure.

This week brings the Fourth of July and its parades, picnics,

and flag waving. For me, the Fourth of July means reflecting on the best of America and how we make it better. Henry, Woodson, and I write a lot in this blog about what would improve America – racial justice, economic equality, political stability. Today, I write about two things already good about America – our First Amendment and a writer it protects named Robert A. Caro.

 

In case you don’t know Caro, I’ll provide an introduction.Robert Caro has written two Pulitzer Prize winning books, won two National Book Awards, and captured three National Book Critics Circle Awards. President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. He began as a newspaper reporter, then turned to writing books with publication in 1974 of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. That launched his career, but the four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson made his national reputation.

             

I got a treat when I ran across Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Caro’s new, 207-page memoir of his writing career. I flew through it in two days. It inspired my own writing ambitions and made me realize, as the Fourth of July nears, how fortunate I am in living in a country that allows the work of a Robert Caro. Because that work explores and explains political power, including its excesses and misuses, some countries would quash it and punish anyone doing that work. Through physical intimidation or vexatious, unfounded libel suits, Caro’s volumes would never see the light of day. In America, Robert Caro flourishes. Indeed, I only pray he can finish the fifth and final book in the Johnson series. He is 83 years old. 

The Johnson books

Caro published his first Years of Lyndon Johnson volume, The Path to Power, in 1982, while I attended graduate school at the University of Texas. I worked then for Texas Attorney General (later Governor) Mark White. Many of those around White were old LBJ hands. Naturally, the book keenly interested them, so I ran out and bought a copy. Over the next two years, between graduate papers and starting law school, I struggled through Path’s 848 pages of text and notes. Reading it that way prevented a full appreciation of Caro’s narrative gifts, but I didn’t miss the thoroughness of his research or the comprehensiveness of his effort at understanding Johnson’s native Texas Hill Country.

Path’s dust jacket promised two more volumes (as indicated, we now await number five). When the second, Means of Ascent, arrived in 1990, I found myself immersed in raising children and working at making partner in a big law firm. Though shorter at 482 pages, it went on my shelf, unread.

I didn’t even buy the third volume, Master of the Senate,on its release in 2002, scared off by its 1141 pages of text and notes. Shortly after Caro published Master, because of my work with the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation, I ended up on the mailing list of Democratic kingmaker Bernard Rapoport, a millionaire Waco, Texas businessman known for financing dozens of U.S. Senate campaigns. Rapoport distributed hundreds of copies of Master, including one to me. It too went on my shelf, unread.

Tragedy leads to enlightenment

In 2009, my wife got sick. Ida didn’t survive cancer, but her illness was not for naught. While she underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment, I sat with her, just being there. Often I read, in a doctor’s office or at home, while she slept or tried reading herself. Hearing about the awards Caro won for his books, I pulled Master off the shelf and read it during that trying year and a half while Ida fought for her life. 

The book enthralled me, especially the part about Johnson, as Senate Majority Leader, spearheading passage of the

Civil Rights Act of 1957 over the opposition of his ally and friend, arch segregationist Richard Russell of Georgia. I also saw Johnson’s other side, in his ruthless destruction of the career of a man named Leland Olds. When their battle ended, Johnson told him, “there’s nothing personal in this …[i]t’s only politics, you know.” 

Reading Master enticed me back to Means of Ascent and its story of how Johnson stole the 1948 Senate race from former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson by 87 votes, leading to Johnson’s nickname, “Landslide Lyndon.” Caro tracked down the man who arranged and reported the fraudulent votes that gave Johnson victory and saved his political career. From that point, I was hooked.

I could barely wait for the 2012 release of The Passage of Power, detailing Johnson’s futile 1960 run for President, his miserable years as Vice President, and his November 22, 1963, ascension to the Presidency. I read the book in Ida’s memory, gratefully celebrating our precious hours together during her final days. 

                                     

Caro and the First Amendment

Because of Robert Caro, we better understand how government works, for good and ill. We see political power’s uses and abuses. Caro said in Working people often ask why writing his books takes so long. Read one and you’ll see. It takes so long because he tells us so much. Thanks to the First Amendment, Caro can tell the whole story. That he can is one of the things for which I am grateful this Fourth of July.    

               

KATE SMITH, LIMITATIONS, FIRST STONES, AND NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

RELIVING A HARMFUL PAST

Decisions by two venerable sports franchises cutting off their relationships with the work

of the late singer Kate Smith reminded us how much good a look in the mirror and back at history can do. Many humans engaged in past behaviors they’re not proud of and might not like being judged by today’s standards, as that incident demonstrated.

 

Recently, the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League and Major League

Baseball’s New York Yankees announced they’d no longer play Kate Smith’s recordings of God Bless America in connection with their games. The Flyers also removed a statue of Smith from the front of their arena.  Both team acted afer a fan discovered and advised them of racist songs  Smith recorded during

the 1930s. Since the September 11 attacks, the Yankees had played Smith’s God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch of games. The Flyers had a long time association with Smith, who died in 1986, and considered her a good luck charm during their championship run in 1974.  

 

The songs, Pickaninny Heaven and That’s Why Darkies Were Born, included lyrics like “someone had to pick cotton … That’s why darkies were born.” One said “Old Black Joe is their Santa Claus” when referring to African-American children. Another lyric mentioned “great big watermelons” and “mammy waiting.”

Limitations: how old is too old?

As lawyers, we understand the concept of limitations – the principle that the time for bringing complaints must end sometime. Nearly every criminal and civil statute includes a limitations period. After “X” number of years, one can’t be prosecuted or civilly pursued for certain offenses. 

Statutes of limitations recognize the

difficulty of pursuingstale claims. After some period of time, moving on better serves the interests of justice than pursuit of a claim, no matter how meritorious.  

The Smith case raises the question of cultural and political limitations. When is it just too late for penalizing someone or something for an old bad act?  Reports indicated Smith first recorded That’s Why Darkies Were Born in 1931 and Pickaninny Heaven in 1933. Certainly the world has changed since then and many asked if cutting Smith’s God Bless America from the programs at Flyers’s and Yankees’s games now served a useful purpose. 

Both teams, however, made a strong case for their actions. The Yankees emphasized how they “take social, racial, and cultural insensitivities very seriously.” The Flyers said the lyrics of the old songs include “sentiments that are incompatible with the values of our organization” and added that the team could not “stand idle while material from another era gets in the way of who we are today.” We understand these imperatives and recognize their powerful import.  

Our own skeletons

Smith’s family jumped to her defense, asserting that she wasn’t a racist and her past should not be held against her. Thinking about that, however, prompted some personal soul searching. What do we have in our past we aren’t proud of today?  What about our friends and neighbors? Our readers?

Two subjects immediately came to mind – gender and sexual orientation.  Without going into the details, each of us admit we have held attitudes, said things, and done things that disrespected women and gays and lesbians. We know we’d have some explaining to do if, for example, we ran for public office and these matters became public. People out there know about our bad acts, thoughts, and comments. In this age of social media, a few would come out of the woodwork.

Thinking about this topic raised the issue of

personal growth. Our bad acts, thoughts, and comments didn’t stem from bad motives; mostly they were about ignorance. We didn’t understand or appreciate people different from us and we labored under old, accepted conventions of thought.  We never considered the hurt we could cause. We grew out of these attitudes and, even if we aren’t perfect now, we have a much better sense of how our behavior affects others.

Having grown up in, and gone to school in, the second half of the 20th century, all of us observed and studied social movements -- the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement. They all emphasized changing minds and hearts – persuading people they should see the world differently.  Sometimes they based their appeal on moral imperatives and sometimes it rested on enlightened self-interest. Changing attitudes toward a particular group might make your own life better.

No matter the motive to which people respond, social movements seek changes in attitudes. The other side of that coin, however, carries a warning. If people grow and change as a movement seeks, some understanding of and toleration for prior attitudes and behavior should come with the territory.

We’d guess almost everyone in America has done something, thought something, or said something they’d like having back because it was ethnically, racially, sexually, or otherwise insensitive. 

Does this mean that Kate Smith should be given a pass? Rob suggests perhaps so.  He answers this through the eyes of faith, saying, “The case of Kate Smith and the pro sports franchises reminds me of the wisdom in John 8:7: ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’”  

Henrys agrees the teams got it right, but declines going as far as Woodson.

Woodson examines the question though the eyes of history and politics. “Because of the very harmful nature of Kate Smith’s words and the widespread publication of them, I do not think there is a moral equivalency between what a private citizen says or does in private conversations as compared to public utterances of a public figure such as Kate Smith. 

“The Jewish experience in Germany provides a better answer. Ironically during the same time that Kate Smith was bellowing her lyrics about African Americans, singers in Germany were in 1934 bellowing similarly offensive rhetoric about the Jews. ‘Put the Jews up against the wall … throw the Jewish gang out of the German fatherland, send them to Palestine, once there – cut their throats so that they will never come back.’ Not only have the writers of such lyrics been banished in current day Germany, it is now a

crime to publically sing a song identified with Nazi Germany.  The First Amendment

prevents us from punishing anyone in America for singing songs such as the ones Kate Smith made popular; but the Flyers and Yankees acted appropriately in taking down the statue and not honoring her with the use of her voice at their sporting events.” 

Like the Jew, African Americans want never to forget history less it repeats itself,” Woodson says.   

THANKSGIVING PERSPECTIVES: DIFFERENT LOOKS AT AN AMERICAN HOLIDAY

As Thanksgiving approaches, then passes, we pause and focus our lenses on this uniquely American holiday. As we’ve said, the three of us, great friends though we are, are not all alike. We see things differently sometimes, as our individual perspectives on Thanksgiving so starkly demonstrate:

Woodson

I feel conflicted at Thanksgiving. I find joy and sadness uncomfortably co-existing within my spirit.

The First Thanksgiving

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving in grade school at Holly Springs Elementary.  My teacher, my mom, invariably led us in a traditional Thanksgiving carol that went something like: “The year 1620 the Pilgrims came over. They landed at Plymouth Rock, then built up their homes. At harvest time, they started our Thanksgiving Day.” My mother didn’t teach us the Pilgrims were European immigrants who had, through war, confiscated from the natives the land on which they celebrated. She didn’t tell us native resistance to European conquest persisted until 1898.

So, each season when I sit down to a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with family and friends, I can’t help but ask myself: How do my Native American brothers and sisters feel today?  The disenfranchisement of Native American voters in North Dakota this year reminded me of their unique struggle.

I am truly grateful to be an American, but what about them? While I have much for which to be thankful – a superb education, a wonderful wife, five great children, a hopeful future, and a guardian of my liberty in a free press – I can’t help but wonder how Native Americans feel. Do they feel as native South Africans felt under apartheid?  I wonder.

Rob

The Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving week, I sat in a church with my significant other and almost 600 others for the 20^th annual Faiths Together Thanksgiving  program near my home in The Woodlands, Texas. This celebration promotes religious acceptance and convenes the area’s faith traditions for an evening of music, inspirational messages, fellowship, and food. Some congregations refuse participation apparently out of a reluctance to join in services with certain other religious groups. Nevertheless, the program brings together  Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus. and many other faith groups in a learning experience about one another and a celebration of commonality, not an accentuation of difference.

As I sat there listening, for example, as a Muslim professor described the numerous references to Jesus in the Quran and watching the joyous faces in a choir made up of

members from seven or eight different congregations, I felt especially thankful for living in a country where such a thing can happen. Despite America’s imperfections, we get many things right, religious freedom being one of them. Increasing hatred based on religious bias notwithstanding, our First Amendment and its twin guarantees of freedom from the tyranny of a state sanctioned church and from government interference in worship, including the right not to worship at all, stands almost alone in the world in its protection of religious choice. Citizens of many countries could never attend a program like Tuesday’s. I give thanks such a thing can happen in my country.

Henry

In my childhood, Thanksgiving was an exceptionally joyful time for interacting with family and friends.  The fall colors,

wonderful aromas, the school and church plays, and visits with family members made my world a beautiful, safe place full of love and enjoyment. There was a continuing expression of thankfulness at home, school, and church.  Our church, in fact, distributed dinners to the needy, though I didn’t then understand the depth of poverty and want in our world.

As the years passed, Thanksgiving became more complex. Yes, we still enjoyed family and friends and I helped our church distribute meals to the needy. I got my kids involved by promising a great breakfast at a restaurant if they woke up early enough to help. The bribe worked.

                          

In the midst of this joy, a pervasive sadness attached itself to me, a sadness I haven’t shaken. As we give thanks for our bounty, I think of all the pain, hunger, loneliness, and hopelessness far too many people across the globe feel. So, I increase my giving and I volunteer more, searching for ways of helping, and I guess, quelling that sadness.

I’ve concluded sorrow may be the price we pay for refusing to express the kind of love that would help those in need. We have the resources and technical skill that would end hunger, but we don’t. Practical solutions are complex and we erect walls of indifference and apathy. Suppose, however, each of us found a way to make some difference each day. We might stumble upon a movement. 

How can I ask for Blessings

On the Universe

And not universal Blessing?

Though I cannot comprehend All

I can entertain the notion of All

And

Wish you well

While enhancing that solitary Blessing

With the constant universal march of Grace

Does absolution follow?