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PILGRIM'S CORNER - Documenting America. Scroll down for Table of Content.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Great Depression - facts and perspectives

The Great Depression

In many ways, the situation that we’re facing today mirrors that of the Great Depression.

Timeline Of The Great Depression
Many people attribute the start of the Great Depression to October 29, 1929, the day of the stock market crash known as Black Tuesday, but by many accounts, the country had gone into an economic downturn starting six months earlier.

The U.S. economic crisis soon turned into a world economic crisis, and stocks continued to fall. In late 1932, they reached their lowest point (20% of their October 1929 value). It took 27 years for the stock market to reach its pre-crash level.

By 1933, 11,000 of the nation’s 25,000 banks had failed, and unemployment had risen to almost 25% of the workforce. Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and began economic stimulus programs, primarily based around massive public works projects. America didn’t completely recover from the Great Depression until it entered World War II in 1941.

Causes Of The Great Depression
Many factors contributed to the Great Depression, most notably:
Leverage – People were buying stocks on margin (for example, paying 10% and getting 100% worth of stocks), leading to falsely inflated value in many companies.
Run On Banks – Once people began to panic and went into banks to withdraw their money, the banks began to fail, causing more panic, which led to more bank failures, which led to more panic.
Less Spending – As more American’s lost their jobs, savings, and investments, they stopped spending money, which led to a deeper rates of unemployment.
Dust Bowl – From 1930 to 1936, America’s farmers struggled with a severe drought and poor farming conditions brought on by years of over-farming without proper crop rotation. The soil turned to dust and blew around in large dark clouds. This natural disaster added to the economic crisis in the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl affected more than a million acres, primarily in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Mexico, putting tens of thousands of farmers in peril.

Unemployment During The Great Depression
At the worst point in the Great Depression, in 1933, almost 25% of the workforce was unemployed. By 1939, thanks to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, that rate had fallen to 15%. Only after America joined World War II did the unemployment figures drop rapidly as American factories geared up to make armaments and munitions.

The Great Depression Causes And Effects

The Great Depression represents one of the darkest periods in American economic history. Most people think the Great Depression started in October 1929, with the famous Black Tuesday stock market crash, but economists and historians point to an economic downturn which took hold in early 1929. The stock market crash led to unprecedented runs on banks, and by 1933, more than 11,000 of the nation’s 25,000 banks had failed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal is largely credited with bringing America out of the Great Depression by providing jobs and relief, but in truth, the country didn’t fully recover until 1941, when munitions and ammunition factories geared up for World War II.
That means the Great Depression timeline spanned approximately twelve years, with unemployment reaching its highest point in 1933, when 25% of American workers were idle.
From 1930-1936, American farmers struggled with conditions of the Dust Bowl, a drought that affected more than a million acres of farmland, and the result was mass migrations of people from rural lands to urban areas.

As we face tough economic times today and economic stimulus packages are being introduced right and left, it’s interesting to look at then and now Great Depression comparisons. Note: this hyerlink takes you to the source of information for this particular post. The site's title is : Great Depression - what happened and how it compares to today. Always be alert to historical "rewrites."

Great Depression Facts

  1. -Many of the nation’s parks, highways, and bridges were built during the Great Depression, projects designed and overseen by the WPA as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal to put Americans to work.
  2. -Social Security, a program that continues to this day, was introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression.
  3. -The “Roaring Twenties” weren’t roaring for everyone. By 1929, 1% of Americans controlled 40% of the wealth in this country.
  4. - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was formed in 1934 to insure deposits in banks and restore customers’ faith in the American banking system.
  5. -The Dust Bowl years spanned 1930-1936, when a million acres of farmland across the Plains became worthless due to severe drought and overfarming.
  6. -After the stock market crash in 1929, it took 27 years to reach pre-crash levels.
  7. -In 1939, the unemployment rate in America had dropped from a high of 25% to 15%, largely due to the New Deal programs introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  8. -Tuesday, October 29, 1929 is known as Black Tuesday because of the plunge the stock market took, and it largely symbolizes the start of the Great Depression, though the economy had been in decline for at least six months prior to that date.
  9. -By 1933, more than 11,000 of the nation’s 25,000 American banks had shuttered, victims of the Great Depression.
  10. -Hoovervilles were the catchphrase for the shantytowns that cropped up across the United States, as homeless Americans improvised with scraps, abandoned cars, and packing crates.
  11. -At its highest point during the Great Depression, unemployment reached 25% (in 1933).
  12. -The Great Depression began in 1929 and ended in 1941 when America prepared to enter World War II.
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Recounting the death toll for the Civil War.

September 20, 2011, 9:38 pm

Recounting the Dead

By J. DAVID HACKER
New York Times opinion page

Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.

The notion that we’ve drastically undercounted the Civil War dead is not a new idea: in fact, Francis Amasa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 Census, estimated that the number of male deaths was “not less than 850,000.” So how did the lower number come to be the accepted count — and why does it matter that it was wrong?

Efforts to identify, rebury and count the dead began as soon as the war ended. A precise count proved impossible, however: both armies lacked systematic procedures to identify the dead, wounded and missing in action, as well as an official means to notify relatives of a soldier’s death. Men went missing; battle, hospital and prison reports were incomplete and inaccurate; dead men were buried unidentified; and family members were forced to infer the fate of a loved one from his failure to return home after the war.

United States Census Bureau History StaffFrancis Amasa Walker

Instead, postwar counts of the Union dead drew from regimental muster-out rolls and battle reports. An 1866 report compiled under the direction of Provost Marshal General James B. Fry estimated that 279,689 men in the Union forces died in the war. The estimated death toll increased to 360,222 by the late 19th century, partly as a result of widows and orphans bringing forward information when applying for pensions and survivors’ benefits.

But a direct count of the Confederate dead proved impossible. The destruction of the Confederate army and many of its records limited investigators to partial counts. The Fry report documented just 133,821 Confederate deaths from incomplete returns. That number didn’t change much: since Confederate widows and orphans were ineligible for federal benefits, the estimate was never supplemented with information from survivors.

Francis Amasa Walker’s interest in estimating the number of war-related deaths was a result of the 1870 Census returns. The final Census count put the population at 38,558,371, up just 22.6 percent from the count in 1860. All previous 19th-century censuses had documented decennial growth rates between 32.7 percent and 36.4 percent, a near-constant rate of increase that 19th-century Americans had come to expect and celebrate as a measure of the nation’s strength, progress and future prosperity.

The 31-year-old superintendent was understandably defensive. City boosters in Philadelphia and New York had charged the 1870 enumeration with excessive coverage errors, and President Grant had taken the unusual step of ordering a recount of those cities. Although the second counts failed to turn up many additional residents, the Census remained suspect. After all, if past growth patterns had continued, the population should have been 41.5 million. Had the Census somehow missed 3 million people?

Walker acknowledged that the 1870 census was far from perfect, but he refused to concede that it was more deficient in its coverage of the population than preceding censuses. Instead, he reasoned, the war was to blame. The disappointing growth rate, he countered, was the result of the “notorious and palpable effects of the war, which hampered the growth of the black population, checked immigration, limited marriages and births and led to the direct loss of close to a million men.”

Although the Surgeon General’s Office had at that point documented 304,000 Union deaths, Walker noted that the number was based only on those men who died during their terms of service. About a third of the 285,000 men discharged for disabilities and many of the remaining 2 million men who survived the war, he argued, subsequently died as a result of diseases and wounds contracted while in the Army. “Tens of thousands were discharged to die; tens of thousands died within the first few months after discharge,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands more lingered through the first or second year.” Together with the losses calculated by the Surgeon General’s Office, Walker concluded that “500,000 will surely be a moderate estimate for the direct losses among the Union armies.”

Walker’s estimate of Confederate losses was necessarily rougher. He started with a guess at the number of men participating — about half of the aggregate number participating on the Union side — and his assumption that Confederate soldiers’ longer average terms of service and relative lack of nourishing food, medicine and skilled physicians resulted in a greater risk of death. “Without attempting to deal at all nicely with this subject,” he argued, “it is difficult to see how anyone could, upon reflection, place the losses of the confederate armies at less than 350,000 men.”

Unfortunately, Walker did not pursue the line of inquiry further. After his reappointment as superintendent for the 1880 Census, he had to explain the overly rapid growth of the South’s population between 1870 and 1880 and defend the Census from charges of fraud in the form of over-counting. After a field investigation by the Census geographer Henry Gannett failed to turn up any evidence of fraud, suspicion returned to the 1870 census. Gannett charged that many of the 1870 enumerators were appointed for their Republican political connections, not for their local knowledge or ability to conduct a census. The inevitable result, he concluded, was a large undercount.

This time Walker agreed. Having been successful in pushing through many costly reforms for the 1880 census, one of which was to shift enumeration responsibilities from federal marshals answerable to the Justice Department to a much larger field force selected for their qualifications and answerable to the Census Office, Walker must have felt some measure of justification from Gannett’s report.

But with the census discredited — a crude calculation by the 1890 census office subsequently indicated that the 1870 Census had undercounted the South’s population by 1,260,078 (10 percent of the region’s and 3 percent of the nation’s population) — the opportunity for a more comprehensive examination of the war’s human cost was lost to the political winds. The estimate of 360,222 Union deaths stood.

The count of Confederate dead was, however, heavily debated. William F. Fox, a private citizen and Union army veteran whose 1889 book on regimental losses remains a classic reference work for Civil War historians, relied on battle reports and unofficial estimates to obtain a total of 94,000 Confederate battle deaths. He complained, however, that records were incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted as wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds). In 1900 Thomas L. Livermore, who, like Fox, was a private citizen and Union army veteran, put the number of Confederate non-combat deaths at 164,000, using the official estimate of Union deaths from disease and accidents and a comparison of Union and Confederate enlistment records.

Livermore’s estimate assumed Union and Confederate troops suffered an equal risk of death from disease, a conservative assumption that Walker had explicitly rejected. Despite acknowledging that his estimate of disease mortality likely undercounted Confederate deaths and his concern that Fox’s estimate of battle deaths could “be accepted only as a minimum,” Livermore combined the two estimates to arrive at a total of 258,000 Confederate deaths, a total that remains unrevised more than a century later.

So why should we now doubt that number? For one thing, Fry, Walker, Fox, Livermore and other early investigators were limited by the quality of the data available. Using new quantitative sources, we can now make a more comprehensive and accurate estimate of war-related deaths. With one exception, microfilm copies of the original manuscript returns have been preserved for all censuses since 1850 (the 1890 Census manuscripts were lost in a fire). Census microdata samples created from these returns at the Minnesota Population Center make it possible to estimate undercounts by age and sex in censuses back to 1850 and to construct a Census-based estimate of male deaths caused by the war.

Census undercounts are estimated using multiple censuses and a demographic method known as back projection. The results confirm that, indeed, the 1870 Census was the most poorly enumerated. It was not nearly as bad as Walker feared and as 1890 census officials charged, however: the net undercount was 6.5 percent in 1870, compared to 6.0 percent in 1850, 5.5 percent in 1860, and 3.6 percent in 1880.

War-related losses are estimated by comparing sex differences in mortality during the 1860s with sex differences in mortality in the 1850s and 1870s. The results indicate that the war was responsible for the deaths of about 750,000 men (using less conservative assumptions, the total may have been as high as 850,000). Although that estimate is 100,000 fewer than the 850,000 deaths suggested by Walker, it is closer to his guess than it is to traditional estimate of 618,222 deaths, which has been cited uncritically for too long. If the Census-based estimate is correct, the traditional estimate is about 20 percent too low.

Although there are limitations to using Census data to estimate of Civil War mortality — civilian deaths are too few to be measured accurately, and deaths cannot be reliably divided into Union or Confederate subtotals — the method provides a more complete assessment of the war’s human cost. In addition to the men who died during their terms of service, the Census-based estimate of male mortality includes men who died between the date of their discharge and the 1870 Census from diseases and wounds contracted during the war, as well as non-enlisted men who died in guerilla warfare and other war-related violence. It excludes, however, men dying from war-related causes who would have died under the normal mortality conditions of the late 19th century. This final group, included in all direct counts of the Civil War dead, represents about 80,000 men.

So what? Above a certain count, do the numbers even matter? Well, yes. The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.

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Friday, November 12, 2010

1945 - First Flag Raising

To our veterans: Salute !!!!!

The 2nd flag-raising atop Mt. Suribachi
Feb. 23, 1945
The photograph at the right of Marines raising the American flag at the summit of Mt. Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima has become an enduring image of bravery and heroism. However, this was actually the second flag raised on the mountain's summit that day. The first flag-raising occurred a couple of hours earlier - shortly after Marines had gained the top of the mountain after hard fighting. This flag was deemed too small to be easily seen from the base of the mountain so a second, larger flag was raised.

The First Flag-Raising

Scott Tank sent us this eyewitness account of Cpl. Charles W. Lindberg, a friend and the last surviving member of the team that raised the first flag on the crest of Mt. Suribachi. Scott asked that we share Mr. Lindberg's story with you - we are honored to do so. Thank you Scott for sending us this account, and thank you Mr. Lindberg for the sacrifices you made during that bloody nightmare called Iwo Jima:

It was the job of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, to capture Mount Suribachi. They reached the base of the mountain on the afternoon of February 21, and by nightfall the next day the Marines had almost completely surrounded it.

As part of that Marine group, 24-year-old Corporal Charles Lindberg, a combat veteran of the Guadalcanal and the Bougainville campaign, watched the intense bombardment of Iwo Jima and realized that the landing at Red Beach One would be anything but easy. "The Japs had the whole beach zeroed in. Most of the fire was coming from Suribachi," he recalled. Surrounding Mount Suribachi were cliffs, tunnels, mines, booby traps, and ravines. The hostile terrain proved to be as tough an enemy as the Japanese who were firmly entrenched on the mountain.

At 8 a.m. on February 23, a patrol of 40 men from 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, led by 1LT Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, assembled at the base of Mount Suribachi. The platoon's mission was to take the crater of Suribachi's peak and raise the U.S. flag. As a member of the first combat patrol to scale Mount Suribachi, Cpl Lindberg took his 72-pound flamethrower and started the tortuous climb up the rough terrain to the top.

Raising the 1st flag under enemy fire
As they reached the top, the patrol members took positions around the crater watching for pockets of enemy resistance as other members of the patrol looked for something on which to raise the flag. Present at the crest were six Marines of a 40-man patrol. They were 1LT Lieutenant Schrier, Sergeant Thomas, Sergeant Hansen, Private First Class Charlo, Private First Class Michels, and Corporal Charles W. Lindberg.

At approximately 10:20 a.m., the flag was hoisted on a steel pipe above the island. The sight of the small American flag flying from atop Mount Suribachi thrilled men all over the island. And for the first time during WWII, an American flag was flying above what was considered traditional Japanese territory. This symbol of victory sent a wave of strength to the battle-weary fighting men below, and struck a further mental blow against the island's defenders.

Marine Corps photographer Sergeant Lou Lowery captured this first flag raising on film just as the enemy hurled a grenade in his direction. Dodging the grenade, Lowery hurled his body over the edge of the crater and tumbled 50 feet. His camera lens was shattered, but he and his film were safe.

As Cpl Lindberg would later remark, "Suribachi was easy to take; it was getting there that was so hard!" Of the 40-man patrol, thirty-six were killed or wounded in later fighting on Iwo Jima including Lindberg himself who would be shot through the stomach and arm a week later on 1 March, 1945. For his heroism Lindberg would receive the Purple Heart and Silver Star Medal with the citation reading in part:

"Repeatedly exposing himself to hostile grenades and machine-gun fire in order that he might reach and neutralize enemy pill-boxes at the base of Mount Suribachi, Corporal Lindberg courageously approached within ten or fifteen yards of the emplacements before discharging his weapon, thereby assuring the annihilation of the enemy and the successful completion of this platoon's mission. While engaged in an attack on hostile cave positions on March 1, he fearlessly exposed himself to accurate enemy fire and was subsequently wounded and evacuated."

Source: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/iwoflag.htm

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Saturday, July 3, 2010

A history of the Statue of Liberty.

We found this on the internet. A great summary of the history of the Statue of Liberty. We found the article here, at American Park Network , Columbus Circle Station.

"THE TWO SISTERS"

America probably could not have won its freedom from the British during the American Revolution without the help of the French. France provided arms, ships, money and men to the American colonies. Some Frenchmen - most notably the Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend of George Washington - even became high-ranking officers in the American army. It was an alliance of respect and friendship that the French would not forget.

Almost 100 years later, in 1865, after the end of the American Civil War, several French intellectuals, who were opposed to the oppressive regime of Napoleon III, were at a small dinner party. They discussed their admiration for America's success in establishing a democratic government and abolishing slavery at the end of the civil war. The dinner was hosted by Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye. Laboulaye was a scholar, jurist, abolitionist and a leader of the "liberals," the political group dedicated to establishing a French republican governme

During the evening, talk turned to the close historic ties and love of liberty the two nations shared. Laboulaye noted that there was "a genuine flow of sympathy" between the two nations and he called France and America, "the two sisters."

As he continued speaking, reflecting on the centennial of American independence only 11 years in the future, Laboulaye commented, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if people in France gave the United States a great monument as a lasting memorial to independence and thereby showed that the French government was also dedicated to the idea of human liberty?"

Laboulaye's question struck a responsive chord in one of his guests, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a successful, 31-year-old sculptor from Colmar, a town in the eastern province of Alsace, France.

Years later, recalling the dinner, Bartholdi wrote that Laboulaye's idea "interested me so deeply that it remained fixed in my memory." So was sown the seed of inspiration that would become the Statue of Liberty.

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi

The sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was born into a well-to-do family in Colmar, France on August 2, 1834.

Bartholdi's father, a civil servant and prosperous landowner, died when the child was only two years old, so he was raised by his stern, possessive mother, Charlotte.

Bartholdi began his career as a painter, but it was as a sculptor that he was to express his true spirit and gain his greatest fame. His first commission for a public monument came to him at the young age of 18. It was for a statue of one of Colmar's native sons, General Jean Rapp, a leader of Napoléon Bonaparte's army. Even at 18, Bartholdi loved bigness. The statue of the general was 12 feet tall and was created in Bartholdi's studio, where the ceiling was only one inch higher. The statue established his reputation as a sculptor of note and led to many commissions for similar, oversized, patriotic works.

A man of his time, Bartholdi wasn't alone in his passion for art on a grand scale. During the 19th century, large-scale public monuments were an especially popular art form. It was an age of ostentation, largely inspired by classical Greek and Roman civilizations. Most monuments reflected either the dress or architecture of these ancient times, so the artistic style of the 19th century came to be known as "neoclassical." The Statue of Liberty would be patterned after the goddess, Libertas, the Roman personification of freedom.

But it was a trip to Egypt that shifted Bartholdi's artistic perspective from simply grand to colossal. The overwhelming size and mysterious majesty of the Pyramids and the Sphinx were awesome to the enthusiastic young Bartholdi. He wrote, "Their kindly and impassive glance seems to ignore the present and to be fixed upon an unlimited future."

In 1870, with the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, Bartholdi served as a major in the French army in his hometown of Colmar. When the Germans annexed the entire Alsace region, making its residents German citizens, the reality of the word "liberty" took on a new, personal meaning for Bartholdi.

In time, France's Third Republic, would emerge out of the ruins of the Franco-Prussian War. Meanwhile, partially as propaganda to advance the cause of those who were seeking the creation of a French Republic, Laboulaye suggested that Bartholdi should travel to America.

In recalling his conversation with Laboulaye several years later, Bartholdi wrote: "'Go to see that country,' said he [Laboulaye] to me. 'Propose to our friends over there to make with us a monument, a common work, in remembrance of the ancient friendship of France and the United States. If ... you find a plan that will excite public enthusiasm, we are convinced that it will be successful on both continents, and we will do a work that will have far-reaching moral effect.'"

Bartholdi responded, "I will try to glorify the Republic and Liberty over there, in the hope that someday I will find it again here."

So Bartholdi was now to become a salesman. Armed with letters of introduction from Laboulaye to some of America's most influential men, Bartholdi sailed to New York in 1871.

Writing of his entrance into New York Harbor, he said:

"The picture that is presented to the view when one arrives in New York is marvelous, when, after some days of voyaging, in the pearly radiance of a beautiful morning is revealed the magnificent spectacle of those immense cities [Brooklyn and Manhattan], of those rivers extending as far as the eye can reach, festooned with masts and flags; when one awakes, so to speak, in the midst of that interior sea covered with vessels... it is thrilling. It is, indeed, the New World, which appears in its majestic expanse, with the ardor of its glowing life."

New York Harbor was the perfect locale, he added, since it was "where people get their first view of the New World." Continuing, he said, "I've found an admirable spot. It is Bedloe's Island, in the middle of the bay... The island belongs to the government; it's on national territory, belonging to all the states, just opposite the Narrows, which are, so to speak, the gateway to America."

Intelligent, warm, persuasive and charming, Bartholdi impressed the many prominent Americans he met, including President Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Greeley and Senator Charles Sumner.

His trip across America filled him with amazement. He wrote, "Everything in America is big ... Here, even the peas are big."

Everywhere he went, he enthusiastically promoted the sketch and a model he carried of the statue as it would appear on the island in New York Harbor. Americans seemed receptive to the idea of a statue dedicated to "Liberty Enlightening the World" (the official name for the statue), but no one was willing to make a commitment of money or a building site.

Back in France, Laboulaye was waiting, until the Third Republic became a reality, to publicize the idea of the statue. Upon his return, Bartholdi completed other projects, all the while refining his ideas and design for "the American statue."

In 1875, with the establishment of the Third Republic, Laboulaye and Bartholdi agreed that "the lady's" time had come. Because the project would be extremely expensive, they decided its cost should be shared: France would pay for the statue; America would pay for its pedestal and foundation. A fund-raising committee called the Franco-American Union was formed with members from both nations.

Elaborate fund-raising events were staged, but money was slow in coming. Enough was collected to begin work on the statue, but the goal of completing it in time for America's 100th anniversary was impossible.

Work Begins

Bartholdi selected Gaget, Gauthier and Company as the foundry where the sculpture was to be constructed. Its craftsmen were experts in the art of repoussé, a technique for creating sculptural forms by hammering sheet metal inside molds. Lighter than casting metal, repoussé was the only method available that would allow such a monumental work to be shipped overseas. The intricate skeleton for the statue was designed by famed engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, already known for his brilliant iron railroad bridges and later celebrated for the Eiffel Tower.

Bartholdi was chosen as an official French representative to the International Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. With three major sculptures on view at the Exhibition, Bartholdi's name was becoming known in America.

The 30-foot arm of Liberty traveled to Philadelphia in 1876 as well. For 50 cents, a visitor could climb a steel ladder to the balcony around the torch. A good deal of enthusiasm was generated for the project, since Liberty would be the first statue one could climb inside.

When Liberty's gleaming copper head appeared at the fair, she was a sensation. She wasn't sensational enough, however, to solve the never-ending problem of raising the money to complete her construction.

Fund-Raising in France

Someone with the Franco-American Union had an inspiration: They would hold a lottery. Since very few contributions were coming from France's moneyed elite, the idea of engaging the public's attention with a lottery was a brilliant one. The prizes were highly coveted and valuable, including two works by Bartholdi himself.

Additional funds were raised in a manner worthy of contemporary merchandising techniques: a signed and numbered collection of clay models of the statue were sold in France and America. By the end of 1879, about 250,000 francs (approximately $750,000 U.S.) had been raised for the statue's construction. Enough, most people thought, to complete the work.

Finis!

At last, in June 1884, Liberty received her final touches. (In May 1883, Laboulaye died of a heart ailment, never to see his dream come to life.) She was dedicated with much pomp and circumstance by French Prime Minister Jules Ferry and Ambassador Morton. But when Bartholdi invited the celebrating party to join him in climbing the statue's steps, few accepted the challenge.

Until the spring of 1885, when she was dismantled for the long voyage to America, Liberty remained in Paris, the hostess to thousands of French visitors.

Fund-Raising in America

While the statue was nearing completion in France, little was happening on the American side.

The American press continued to be critical of the project, especially of its cost. They couldn't understand why the pedestal should cost as much as the statue itself. Congress rejected a bill appropriating $100,000 for the base. New York approved a grant of $50,000, but the expenditure was vetoed by the governor.

Many Americans outside of New York considered it New York's statue. "Let New York pay for it," they said, while America's newly rich, self-made millionaires were saying and contributing nothing. The American half of the Franco-American Union, led by William M. Evarts, held the usual fund-raising events, but public apathy was almost as monumental as the statue itself.

By 1884, after years of fund-raising, only $182,491 had been collected and $179,624 had been spent. It took the intervention of Joseph Pulitzer and the power of the media to make a difference.

Pulitzer to the Rescue

Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant who fought in the Civil War, became a successful journalist and married a wealthy woman. In 1883, he bought a financial newspaper called the World; he already owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When he heard that the Statue of Liberty was about to die from lack of funds, he saw his chance to take advantage of three distinct opportunities: to raise funds for the statue, to increase his newspaper's circulation and to blast the rich for their selfishness.

Pulitzer set the fund-raising goal of the World at $100,000. In its pages he taunted the rich (thereby increasing the paper's appeal among working-class people) and firmly planted the notion that the statue was a monument not just for New York City but, indeed, for all of America.

Perhaps Pulitzer's cleverest ploy was the promise to publish the name of every single contributor in the pages of the World, no matter how small the contribution. The editorial that opened the fund-raising campaign set its tone. He wrote: "The World is the people's paper and it now appeals to the people to come forward and raise the money [for the statue's pedestal]." The statue, he said, was paid for by "the masses of the French people. Let us respond in like manner. Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money. It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America." The circulation of the World increased by almost 50,000 copies.

African American newspapers joined in the effort, encouraging their readers to contribute to a monument that would, in part, commemorate the end of slavery. So the money poured in, as single-dollar donations from grandmothers and pennies from the piggybanks of schoolchildren.

On June 15, 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived at Bedloe's Island inside 214 wooden packing crates.

On August 11, 1885, the front page of the World proclaimed, "ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!" The goal had been reached, and slightly exceeded, thanks to more than 120,000 contributions.

The Place on Which She Stands

The architect for Liberty's pedestal, Richard Morris Hunt, was a highly respected and popular designer of expensive homes. He designed an 89-foot-high pedestal that would sit upon a concrete foundation that would appear to grow up from within the 11-pointed, star-shaped walls of the existing Fort Wood. His fee for the project was $1,000, which he returned to the fund to reassemble the statue.

General Charles P. Stone was the chief engineer in charge of the entire construction project, including the foundation, the pedestal and the reassembly of the statue. Liberty's foundation alone required 24,000 tons of concrete, the largest single mass ever poured at that time. It measures 52 feet, 10 inches in height. At the bottom, it is 91 feet, and at the top, it is 65 feet. The pedestal rises 89 feet above the foundation.

The Statue of Liberty began to rise over her new home in America in May of 1886. It would take six months to mount the statue to her base.

The Dream Accomplished

On October 25, 1886, Bartholdi and his wife, accompanied by Viscount Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, chairman of the Franco-American Union, arrived in America. They were greeted by the American Committee and Joseph Pulitzer. At Bedloe's Island, surrounded by newspaper reporters recording his words for posterity, Bartholdi simply said, "The dream of my life is accomplished."

The Unveiling of "the Lady"

Unveiling day, October 28, 1886, was declared a public holiday. The rainy, foggy day could not dampen the spirits of the more than 1 million people who lined New York's streets, draped with red, white and blue and French tricolor bunting, to watch a parade of more than 20,000 pass by. Wall Street was the only area of the city working on the day of Liberty's unveiling. The New York Times reported that as the parade passed by, the office boys "from a hundred windows began to unreel the spools of tape that record the fateful messages of the 'ticker.' In a moment the air was white with curling streamers." And so the famous New York ticker-tape parade was born.

Dignitaries from both nations were in attendance. Representing America were President Grover Cleveland and his cabinet as well as the governor of New York and his staff. The French ambassador attended, accompanied by the French Committee. And, most ironically, members of some of America's wealthiest families - the same families who had not contributed a single cent to the statue's pedestal - now jockeyed for seats of prominence. New York, reported the World, "was one vast cheer."

Out on the water, the fog rolled in and out. The harbor teemed with ships of all sizes. Bartholdi stood alone in the head of the statue. He was to pull a cord that would drop the French tricolor veil from the face of the statue. For his cue, Bartholdi was to watch for a signal from a boy on the ground below, who would wave a handkerchief. The signal would come when Senator William M. Evarts, considered one of the more talented orators of his time, finished his presentation speech.

Evarts began his speech, stopped momentarily to take a breath, and the boy, thinking the speech was over, gave Bartholdi the signal. Bartholdi pulled the cord, revealing the statue's gleaming copper face to the world. Whistles blasted, guns roared, bands played ... and Evarts sat down.

When it was President Cleveland's turn to speak, he said, "We will not forget that Liberty has made here her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected."

Liberty's First 100 Years

At the time of the Statue of Liberty's dedication, she was the tallest structure in New York, reaching a total height of 305 feet. It wasn't until 1899 that she was overtaken by Saint Paul's Building, which rose to 310 feet. Lady Liberty remains the visual and spiritual center of New York Harbor.

In 1903, one of the most memorable changes to the statue occurred without fanfare or publicity. A bronze tablet was fastened to an interior wall of the pedestal. Cast as a part of the plaque was a poem written in 1883 that has become the credo for thousands of immigrants coming to America.

The poem, "The New Colossus," was written by Emma Lazarus to help raise funds for the construction of the statue's pedestal. Today, many people think of the statue and poem as inseparable.

In 1916, the World once again raised its voice to raise funds on behalf of the statue. This time, the goal was to floodlight the statue at night. The paper's readers contributed $30,000 and the torch was also redesigned in glass.

From the time of the Revolutionary War, the female figure Columbia was generally regarded as the symbol for America, but the statue's increased visibility and popularity during World War I easily shifted America's symbolic loyalties. Liberty's features appeared everywhere; she became a kind of female equivalent to Uncle Sam. To help finance U.S. participation in the war, the Treasury Department authorized using the statue as a rallying symbol on posters designed to raise funds. The government sold about $15 billion worth of bonds, equal to about half the cost of World War I.

President Calvin Coolidge declared the Statue of Liberty to be a national monument on October 15, 1924. In 1933, the National Park Service took over its administration and maintenance.

The French-American Committee for the Restoration of the Statue of Liberty was established in 1981. Following an initial diagnostic report for the NPS, it was determined that substantial work needed to be done. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation was then formed to raise funds and oversee any needed restoration. As in the past, private contributions were the backbone of the foundation's success: More than $295 million was collected; $86 million went directly to the statue's restoration.

On July 4, 1986, America threw a special birthday party for the Statue of Liberty. With a golden sunset glowing in the background, President Ronald Reagan declared, "We are the keepers of the flame of liberty; we hold it high for the world to see." Later, the president pressed a button that sent a laser beam across the water toward the statue. Slowly, dramatically, majestically, a light show unveiled Liberty and her new torch, while spectacular fireworks exploded across the sky. With an entire nation watching - along with 1.5 billion television viewers around the world - and thousands of people filled with gratitude, one wonders how Bartholdi and Laboulaye might have felt as Liberty enlightened the world that historic night.

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Friday, July 2, 2010

Care and keeping of the Declaration of Independence

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Saturday, March 27, 2010

"Wall of Separation" - Its original meaning

No metaphor in American letters has had a greater influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state." For many Americans, this metaphor has supplanted the actual text of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and it has become the locus classicus of the notion that the First Amendment separated religion and the civil state, thereby mandating a strictly secular polity.

More important, the judiciary has embraced this figurative language as a virtual rule of constitutional law and as the organizing theme of church-state jurisprudence. Writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, Justice Hugo L. Black asserted that the justices had "agreed that the First Amendment's language, properly interpreted, had erected a wall of separation between Church and State." The continuing influence of this wall is evident in the Court's most recent church-state pronouncements.

The rhetoric of church-state separation has been a part of western political discourse for many centuries, but it has only lately come to a place of prominence in American constitutional law and discourse. What is the source of the "wall of separation" metaphor so frequently referenced today? How has this symbol of strict separation between religion and public life become so influential in American legal and political thought? Most important, what are the policy and legal consequences of the ascendancy of separationist rhetoric and of the transformation of "separation of church and state" from a much-debated political idea to a doctrine of constitutional law embraced by the nation's highest court?

The Wall that Jefferson Built

On New Year's Day, 1802, President Jefferson penned a missive to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists had written the new president a "fan" letter in October 1801, congratulating him on his election to the "chief Magistracy in the United States." They celebrated his zealous advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who had criticized him "as an enemy of religion[,] Law & good order because he will not, dares not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ." At the time, the Congregationalist Church was still legally established in Connecticut and the Federalist party controlled New England politics. Thus the Danbury Baptists were outsiders'a beleaguered religious and political minority in a state where a Congregationalist-Federalist party establishment dominated public life. They were drawn to Jefferson's political cause because of his celebrated advocacy for religious liberty.

In a carefully crafted reply, the president allied himself with the New England Baptists in their struggle to enjoy the right of conscience as an inalienable right-not merely as a favor granted, and subject to withdrawal, by the civil state:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

This missive was written in the wake of the bitter presidential contest of 1800. Candidate Jefferson's religion, or the alleged lack thereof, was a critical issue in the campaign. His Federalist foes vilified him as an "infidel" and "atheist." The campaign rhetoric was so vitriolic that, when news of Jefferson's election swept across the country, housewives in New England were seen burying family Bibles in their gardens or hiding them in wells because they expected the Holy Scriptures to be confiscated and burned by the new administration in Washington. (These fears resonated with Americans who had received alarming reports of the French Revolution, which Jefferson was said to support, and the widespread desecration of religious sanctuaries and symbols in France.) Jefferson wrote to these pious Baptists to reassure them of his continuing commitment to their right of conscience and to strike back at the Federalist-Congregationalist establishment in Connecticut for shamelessly vilifying him in the recent campaign.

Several features of Jefferson's letter challenge conventional, strictly secular constructions of his famous metaphor. First, the metaphor rests on a cluster of explicitly religious propositions (i.e., "that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship"). Second, Jefferson's wall was constructed in the service of the free exercise of religion. Use of the metaphor to restrict religious exercise (e.g., to disallow a citizen's religious expression in the public square) conflicts with the very principle Jefferson hoped his metaphor would advance. Third, Jefferson concluded his presidential missive with a prayer, reciprocating his Baptist correspondents' "kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man." Ironically, some strict separationists today contend that such solemn words in a presidential address violate a constitutional "wall of separation."

The conventional wisdom is that Jefferson's wall represents a universal principle concerning the prudential and constitutional relationship between religion and the civil state. In fact, this wall had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between the national and state governments on matters pertaining to religion (such as official proclamations of days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving). The "wall of separation" was a metaphoric construction of the First Amendment, which Jefferson time and again said imposed its restrictions on the national government only (see, e.g., Jefferson's 1798 draft of the Kentucky Resolutions).

In other words, Jefferson's wall separated the national government on one side from state governments and religious authorities on the other. This construction is consistent with a virtually unchallenged assumption of the early constitutional era: the First Amendment in particular and the Bill of Rights in general affirmed the fundamental constitutional principle of federalism. The First Amendment, as originally understood, had little substantive content apart from its affirmation that the national government was denied all power over religious matters. Jurisdiction in such concerns was reserved to individual citizens, religious societies, and state governments. (Of course, this original understanding of the First Amendment was turned on its head by the modern U.S. Supreme Court's "incorporation" of the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment.)

The Metaphor Enters Public Discourse

By late January 1802, printed copies of Jefferson's reply to the Danbury Baptists began appearing in New England newspapers. The letter, however, was not accessible to a wide audience until it was reprinted in the first major collection of Jefferson's papers, published in the mid-19th century.

The phrase "wall of separation" entered the lexicon of American law in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1878 ruling in Reynolds v. United States, although most scholars agree that the wall metaphor played no role in the Court's reasoning. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, who authored the opinion, was drawn to another clause in Jefferson's text. The Reynolds Court, in short, was drawn to the passage, not to advance a strict separation between church and state, but to support the proposition that the legitimate powers of civil government could reach men's actions only and not their opinions.

Nearly seven decades later, in the landmark case of Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court "rediscovered" the metaphor and elevated it to constitutional doctrine. Citing no source or authority other than Reynolds, Justice Hugo L. Black, writing for the majority, invoked the Danbury letter's "wall of separation" passage in support of his strict separationist interpretation of the First Amendment prohibition on laws "respecting an establishment of religion." "In the words of Jefferson," he famously declared, the First Amendment has erected "'a wall of separation between church and State'. . . . That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach." In even more sweeping terms, Justice Wiley B. Rutledge asserted in a separate opinion that the First Amendment's purpose was "to uproot" all religious establishments and "to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion." This rhetoric, more than any other, set the terms and the tone for a strict separationist jurisprudence that reached ascendancy on the Court in the second half of the 20th century.

Like Reynolds, the Everson ruling was replete with references to history, especially the roles played by Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia disestablishment struggles in the tumultuous decade following independence from Great Britain. Jefferson was depicted as a leading architect of the First Amendment despite the fact that he was in France when the measure was drafted by the First Federal Congress in 1789.

Black and his judicial brethren also encountered the metaphor in briefs filed in Everson. In a lengthy discussion of history supporting the proposition that "separation of church and state is a fundamental American principle," an amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union quoted the clause from the Danbury letter containing the "wall of separation" image. The ACLU ominously concluded that the challenged state statute, which provided state reimbursements for the transportation of students to and from parochial schools, "constitutes a definite crack in the wall of separation between church and state. Such cracks have a tendency to widen beyond repair unless promptly sealed up."

Shortly after the Everson ruling was handed down, the metaphor began to proliferate in books and articles. In a 1949 best-selling anti-Catholic polemic, American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard advocated an uncompromising political and legal platform favoring "a wall of separation between church and state." Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (an organization today known by the more politically correct appellation of Americans United for Separation of Church and State), a leading strict-separationist advocacy organization, wrote the phrase into its 1948 founding manifesto. Among the "immediate objectives" of this new organization was "[t]o resist every attempt by law or the administration of law further to widen the breach in the wall of separation of church and state."

The Supreme Court frequently and favorably referenced the "wall of separation" in the cases that followed. In McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), the Court essentially constitutionalized Jefferson's phrase, subtly and blithely substituting his figurative language for the literal text of the First Amendment. In the last half of the 20th century, the metaphor emerged as the defining motif for church-state jurisprudence, thereby elevating a strict separationist construction of the First Amendment to accepted dogma among jurists and commentators.

The Trouble with Metaphors in the Law

Metaphors are a valuable literary device. They enrich language by making it dramatic and colorful, rendering abstract concepts concrete, condensing complex concepts into a few words, and unleashing creative and analogical insights. But their uncritical use can lead to confusion and distortion. At its heart, metaphor compares two or more things that are not, in fact, identical. A metaphor's literal meaning is used non-literally in a comparison with its subject. While the comparison may yield useful insights, the dissimilarities between the metaphor and its subject, if not acknowledged, can distort or pollute one's understanding of the subject. If attributes of the metaphor are erroneously or misleadingly assigned to the subject and the distortion goes unchallenged, then the metaphor may alter the understanding of the underlying subject. The more appealing and powerful a metaphor, the more it tends to supplant or overshadow the original subject, and the more one is unable to contemplate the subject apart from its metaphoric formulation. Thus, distortions perpetuated by the metaphor are sustained and even magnified. This is the lesson of the "wall of separation" metaphor.

The judiciary's reliance on an extra-constitutional metaphor as a substitute for the text of the First Amendment almost inevitably distorts constitutional principles governing church-state relationships. Although the "wall of separation" may felicitously express some aspects of First Amendment law, it seriously misrepresents or obscures others, and has become a source of much mischief in modern church-state jurisprudence. It has reconceptualized-indeed, misconceptualized-First Amendment principles in at least two important ways.

First, Jefferson's trope emphasizes separation between church and state -- unlike the First Amendment, which speaks in terms of the non-establishment and free exercise of religion. (Although these terms are often conflated today, in the lexicon of 1802, the expansive concept of "separation" was distinct from the narrow institutional concept of "non-establishment.") Jefferson's Baptist correspondents, who agitated for disestablishment but not for separation, were apparently discomfited by the figurative phrase and, perhaps, even sought to suppress the president's letter. They, like many Americans, feared that the erection of such a wall would separate religious influences from public life and policy. Few evangelical dissenters (including the Baptists) challenged the widespread assumption of the age that republican government and civic virtue were dependent on a moral people and that religion supported and nurtured morality.

Second, a wall is a bilateral barrier that inhibits the activities of both the civil government and religion-unlike the First Amendment, which imposes restrictions on civil government only. In short, a wall not only prevents the civil state from intruding on the religious domain but also prohibits religion from influencing the conduct of civil government. The various First Amendment guarantees, however, were entirely a check or restraint on civil government, specifically on Congress. The free press guarantee, for example, was not written to protect the civil state from the press, but to protect a free and independent press from control by the national government. Similarly, the religion provisions were added to the Constitution to protect religion and religious institutions from corrupting interference by the national government, not to protect the civil state from the influence of, or overreaching by, religion. As a bilateral barrier, however, the wall unavoidably restricts religion's ability to influence public life, thereby exceeding the limitations imposed by the First Amendment.

Herein lies the danger of this metaphor. The "high and impregnable" wall constructed by the modern Court has been used to inhibit religion's ability to inform the public ethic, to deprive religious citizens of the civil liberty to participate in politics armed with ideas informed by their faith, and to infringe the right of religious communities and institutions to extend their prophetic ministries into the public square. Today, the "wall of separation" is the sacred icon of a strict separationist dogma intolerant of religious influences in the public arena. It has been used to silence religious voices in the public marketplace of ideas and to segregate faith communities behind a restrictive barrier.

Federal and state courts have used the "wall of separation" concept to justify censoring private religious expression (such as Christmas creches) in public, to deny public benefits (such as education vouchers) for religious entities, and to exclude religious citizens and organizations (such as faith-based social welfare agencies) from full participation in civic life on the same terms as their secular counterparts. The systematic and coercive removal of religion from public life not only is at war with our cultural traditions insofar as it evinces a callous indifference toward religion but also offends basic notions of freedom of religious exercise, expression, and association in a pluralistic society.

There was a consensus among the founders that religion was indispensable to a system of republican self-government. The challenge the founders confronted was how to nurture personal responsibility and social order in a system of self-government. Tyrants and dictators can use the whip and rod to force people to behave as they desire, but clearly this is incompatible with a self-governing people. In response to this challenge the founders looked to religion (and morality informed by religious faith) to provide the internal moral compass that would prompt citizens to behave in a disciplined manner and thereby promote social order and political stability. The literature of the founding era is replete with this argument, no example more famous than George Washington's statement in his Farewell Address of September 19, 1796:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens . . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion . . . . [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Believing that religion and morality were indispensable to social order and political prosperity, the founders championed religious liberty in order to foster a vibrant religious culture in which a beneficent religious ethos would inform the public ethic and to promote an environment in which religious and moral leaders could speak out boldly, without restraint or inhibition, against corruption and immorality in civic life. Religious liberty was not merely a benevolent grant of the civil state; rather, it reflected an awareness among the founders that the very survival of the civil state and a civil society was dependent on a vibrant religious culture, and religious liberty nurtured such a religious culture. In other words, the civil state's respect for religious liberty is an act of self-preservation. The unfortunate consequence of 20th-century jurisprudence is that the First Amendment, designed to protect and promote a vital role for religion in public life, has been replaced with a wall of separation that, in the hands of the modern judiciary, has restricted religion's place in the polity.

Legacy of Intolerance

In his recent book, Separation of Church and State, Philip Hamburger amply documents that the rhetoric of separation of church and state became fashionable in the 1830s and 1840s and, again, in the last quarter of the 19th century. Why? It accompanied two substantial waves of Catholic immigrants with their peculiar liturgy and resistance to assimilation into the Protestant establishment: an initial wave of Irish in the first half of the century, and then more Irish along with other European immigrants later in the century. The rhetoric of separation was used by nativist elements, such as the Know-Nothings and later the Ku Klux Klan, to marginalize Catholics and to deny them, often through violence, entrance into the mainstream of public life. By the end of the century, an allegiance to the so-called "American principle" of separation of church and state had been woven into the membership oaths of the Ku Klux Klan. Today we typically think of the Klan strictly in terms of their views on race, and we forget that their hatred of Catholics was equally odious.

Again, in the mid-20th century, the rhetoric of separation was revived and ultimately constitutionalized by anti-Catholic elites, such as Justice Hugo L. Black, and fellow travelers in the ACLU and Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, who feared the influence and wealth of the Catholic Church and perceived parochial education as a threat to public schools and democratic values. The chief architect of the modern "wall" was Justice Black, whose affinity for church-state separation and the metaphor was rooted in virulent anti-Catholicism. Hamburger has argued that Justice Black, a former Alabama Ku Klux Klansman, was the product of a remarkable "confluence of Protestant, nativist, and progressive anti-Catholic forces . . . . Black's association with the Klan has been much discussed in connection with his liberal views on race, but, in fact, his membership suggests more about [his] ideals of Americanism," especially his support for separation of church and state. "Black had long before sworn, under the light of flaming crosses, to preserve 'the sacred constitutional rights' of 'free public schools' and 'separation of church and state.'" Although he later distanced himself from the Klan on matters of race, "Black's distaste for Catholicism did not diminish." Black's admixture of progressive, Klan, and strict separationist views is best understood in terms of anti-Catholicism and, more broadly, a deep hostility to assertions of ecclesiastical authority. Separation of church and state, Black believed, was an American ideal of freedom from oppressive ecclesiastical authority, especially that of the Roman Catholic Church. A regime of separation enabled Americans to assert their individual autonomy and practice democracy, which Black believed was Protestantism in its secular form.

To be clear, diverse strains of political, religious, and intellectual thought have embraced notions of separation (I myself come from a faith tradition that believes church and state should operate in separate institutional spheres), but a particularly dominant strain in 19th-century America was this nativist, bigoted strain. We must confront the uncomfortable fact that the phrases "separation of church and state" and "wall of separation," although not necessarily expressions of intolerance, have often, in the American experience, been closely identified with the ugly impulses of nativism and bigotry.

In conclusion, Jefferson's figurative language has not produced the practical solutions to real world controversies that its apparent clarity and directness led its proponents to expect. Indeed, this wall has done what walls frequently do -- it has obstructed the view, obfuscating our understanding of constitutional principles governing church-state relationships. The rhetoric of "separation of church and state" and "a wall of separation" has been instrumental in transforming judicial and popular constructions of the First Amendment from a provision protecting and encouraging religion in public life to one restricting religion's place and role in civic culture. This transformation has undermined the "indispensable support" of religion in our system of republican self-government. This fact would have alarmed the framers of the Constitution, and we ignore it today at the peril of our political order and prosperity.

Daniel L. Dreisbach is Professor of Justice, Law and Society is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., as well as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He received his D.Phil. from Oxford University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State; The Founders on God and Government; Religion and Political Culture in Jefferson's Virginia; and Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment.

This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 12, 2006, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar on the topic, "Church and State: History and Theory."

Read the entire article on the Imprimus website (new window will open). Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

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Federalist Papers - A Must Read for political conservatives.

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