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What Colonial Williamsburg may teach us about politics today
Colonial Williamsburg, capital of the British colony of Virginia, has been preserved as a sprawling museum. Its mission: that “the future may learn from the past.”
The crown jewels of Williamsburg, Virginia, are the interpreters, interacting with audiences of our day, but in the context of the world as they would have known it in their time.
By way of example, Thomas Jefferson welcomes visitors: “Good day, friends. How are you faring? You have no complaints? You must not be Virginians! If not from Virginia, where from? Pennsylvania, land of religious anarchy? Welcome! The Ohio Territories? From terra incognito. Welcome to civilization! Upper Canada? Bonjour! Are you immigrating here? Oh, you should. We are trying to encourage immigrants to immigrate here.”
Indeed, immigration was highly controversial in Jefferson’s time, but from a radically different perspective than ours. I raised the issue with Kurt Smith (who personifies Thomas Jefferson), and Katherine Pittman (a very feisty Martha Washington).
“It was there in 1776,” said Smith, “in the Declaration of Independence. You know that middle bit that everyone skips? In the 27 long train of abuses, Jefferson says, ‘He [the king] has prevented immigration.’ It is one of the reasons we declare independence.”
Pittman asked, “And how can we improve if we never welcome anything new?”
“We’re not talking about ‘never’ welcoming anything new,” Koppel said. “We need to know who’s coming. We need to know whether they are people of good character. Isn’t that what the argument is about?”
“It’s the argument in your time,” Pittman said. “We can just speak to our time.”
“Oh, cut it out!”
“You started it!” Pittman laughed.
“I’m in a pissing match with Mrs. Washington, for God’s sake!” said Koppel.
“I think I’m gonna win!” she laughed.
The interpreters are well advised to merely hint at the issues of our day. Jefferson (Smith) opined, “How do you get a body of men to vote for something because it’s the right thing to do? I don’t know. Maybe your politicians do it all the time!” The audience was amused.
Visitors to Williamsburg are left to grapple with the actual political problems of 2024. One woman remarked, “There are certain people that want all the power, like the king. They wanted the power over everybody, and I think that’s what’s happening now.”
One young woman said, “This country is steeped in conflict and a fight for liberty. But I truly hope I get to live in a world where I have rights to my body.”
“Abortion,” asked Koppel. “You feel strongly about that?”
“I do,” she replied.
It’s a subject on which Martha Washington also has her own views on, c. 1800. In that era, she said, the issue was dealt with from within the home: “Birth and a woman’s health is a woman’s sphere,” she said. “One does not need to ascertain the services of a midwife if that is the course that you are wishing. These remedies are known amongst female kind. It is known in the indigenous communities. It is known in the African culture. It is known in our European cultures as well, be it different herbs, be it different techniques, in order to rid one’s self of an unwanted child. But generally, they are held within the female sex. But I know that my husband, General Washington, would be in full support of whatever I wanted to do with my own person.”
An even more contentious issue, then and now, was race. In Jefferson’s day, that meant slavery. Despite owning more than 600 enslaved men, women and children, Jefferson put forward legislation in 1779 to end the practice. “But here’s the problem,” Jefferson said. “Bill 51, making the slave trade illegal, has to be presented to a body of men, all of whom own … what?”
Williamsburg chooses to depict slavery in a particularly dramatic, and unrepresentative, fashion, in the person of James Lafayette, an enslaved man who was directed to meet with the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who served the American cause (and whose name James would ultimately adopt).
Lafayette asked James to sneak across the British lines as a fake runaway slave, to ingratiate himself with the officers of the British army, and then report back what he heard. James succeeded so brilliantly that he eventually worked directly under General Lord Cornwallis. “I could take that British intelligence and information and share it with the American side over and over again, which I did,” James said.
He faithfully served the American cause, but he said, “I was not to be given my freedom for what I had done for American independence. I was sent back to slavery. I was sent back to Master William for six more years.”
Only after the Marquis de Lafayette petitioned the Virginia legislature for his freedom would it eventually be granted.
Given that extraordinary backstory, I wondered how Stephen Seals (who interprets James) deals with taking on that role. “You understand that so many of the issues that we deal with today are connected to many of the decisions that were made in the colonial area,” Seals said. “You can see the line from one to the other. And when you come to terms and you see that, I got very depressed, and I almost left. I almost quit.”
Then, a colleague reminded him he was giving a voice to ancestors denied one during their own lifetimes. “And the moment she said that to me, I had few issues with the fact that I had to play an enslaved person every single day, because I now understood why I was doing it,” he said. “So, I love what I do, it’s an honor doing what I do, but I live out in the middle of nowhere for a reason, because when I’m done here, I want to go and be away from it all. It’s how I cope.”
Finally, there’s the father of our nation, George Washington. “When we began, I mentioned that we should avoid seeing factions arise,” he said. “I specifically mentioned by regional distinction, but it is just as important that we endeavor to avoid seeing factions arise by the spirit and fury of party politics.”
Asked by a visitor whom he would support in the 2024 presidential race, Washington replied, “I’m not sure what you mean by presidential race, sir. Do you mean the election? Race? Can you imagine how lacking of any sort of virtue or dignity a race would have? We stand for elections, sir; we certainly don’t run for it!”
Ron Carnegie gives a striking portrayal of the man who could have been president for life, but chose a different path. “Very often when I’m talking to people at the end, somebody in that group will say, ‘I wish President Washington was running today,'” Carnegie said. “There’s no way a man like President Washington could be president today.”
Because? “He is aloof, he’s not friendly, he’s not outgoing, he doesn’t like to talk in public. And he doesn’t want the job. And how are you gonna become President today if you don’t want the job?”
That wasn’t a problem in 1800. John Adams very much wanted to keep the job; Thomas Jefferson wanted to take it.
Smith noted, “Things are just as nasty in the 18th century as they are in the 21st. There are newspapers that called John Adams pretty awful things. And there were terrible things thrown in Jefferson’s corner. There were New Englanders and New England newspapers that were certain that if Jefferson was elected president, he would personally go into their homes and steal their Bibles.”
John Adams lost that election, and conceded. “Jefferson calls that election of 1800 the Second American Revolution,” said Smith. “And it was precisely because, for the first time in this country, there was a change in political party at the very top of government, and it was peaceful. It was a peaceful transfer of power. That’s powerful.”
That had never happened before, but it set a precedent that lasted – until our time.
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Story produced by Dustin Stephens. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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2 killed in U.S. Civil Air Patrol plane crash near Palisade Mountain in Northern Colorado
Two people were killed and a third was injured when a U.S. Civil Air Patrol plane crashed in Colorado’s Front Range Saturday morning.
The small passenger plane with three people aboard crashed near Storm Mountain and Palisade Mountain west of Loveland around 11:15 a.m., according to the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office. The plane belonged to the Civil Air Patrol, the civilian auxiliary wing of the U.S. Air Force, and was on a routine aerial photography training mission when it went down, officials said.
Pilot Susan Wolber and aerial photographer Jay Rhoten were identified by CAP as those killed and co-pilot Randall Settergren was identified as the person injured. Settergren was airlifted to an area hospital by a National Guard helicopter, where he is undergoing medical care.
“The volunteers of Civil Air Patrol are a valuable part of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, and the lifesaving work they do on a daily basis directly contributes to the public safety of Coloradans throughout the state,” Maj. Gen. Laura Clellan, adjutant general of the Colorado Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said in a statement Saturday.
“We are devastated to hear of the loss of Susan Wolber and Jay Rhoten, and the injury of Randall Settergren, during a training mission in Larimer County. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families of those involved in the crash,” Clellan continued. “I would also like to thank all of the first responders who assisted with rescue efforts.”
Palisade Mountain is in Larimer County, about 20 miles west of Loveland and about 65 miles northwest of Denver. The area is part of the burn scar of the Alexander Mountain Fire, which burned almost 10,000 acres in over two weeks this past summer.
The crash happened about 200 feet below the summit of Palisade Mountain in an area that includes tall trees and steep hills as part of the mountain range. Rescue crews were heard on radio traffic working to find a landing zone for rescue helicopters. No structures were impacted by the crash.
The plane crashed in “very rugged” and “extensive and rocky terrain,” Ali Adams, a Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman, said at a news conference. First responders had to hike out to the site and the sole survivor was “severely injured” when responders finally got to them.
Rescue efforts were ongoing at 3:15 p.m., according to Adams, and recovery efforts for the two deceased people’s bodies could take several days.
Several agencies responded, including the Loveland Fire Rescue Authority, Thompson Valley EMS and the National Guard.
The Larimer County Sheriff’s Office is the lead agency investigating the crash and the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board will assist, according to Adams. The NTSB said it too was investigating the crash and identified the plane as a Cessna 182.
“This is one of those incidents that is really low frequency; it doesn’t happen really often, but unfortunately, our first responders have had more than their fair share of responses,” Adams said.
George Solheim lives in the area of the crash. He described conditions as “extremely windy” on Saturday and heard the plane just prior to the crash. He says he could hear “loud ‘throttle up/down’ immediately prior to sudden silence at (the) time of (the) crash. Couldn’t hear sounds of impact from here.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis extended his sympathy to the families of the victims in a statement Saturday evening:
“I’m saddened to hear of the loss of two dedicated Civil Air Patrol members, Pilot Susan Wolber and aerial photographer Jay Rhoten, who lost their lives in today’s crash and my thoughts are with their families, friends and colleagues. These individuals, along with survivor co-pilot Randall Settergren, who was injured, served the Civil Air Patrol as volunteers who wanted to help make Colorado a better, safer place for all. The State of Colorado is grateful for their commitment to service and it will not be forgotten. I also want to thank the first responders who assisted with the rescue and recovery efforts.”
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Fred Harris, former Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate, dies at 94
Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, presidential hopeful and populist who championed Democratic Party reforms in the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94.
Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. He had lived in New Mexico since 1976.
“Fred Harris passed peacefully early this morning of natural causes. He was 94. He was a wonderful and beloved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a text message.
Harris served eight years in the Senate, first winning in 1964 to fill a vacancy, and made unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976.
“I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my longtime friend Fred Harris today,” Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote in a post to social media. “Harris was a towering presence in politics and in academia, and his work over many decades improved New Mexico and the nation. He will be greatly missed.”
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said in a statement that “New Mexico and our nation have lost a giant,” describing him as a “tireless champion of civil rights, tribal sovereignty and working families.”
It fell to Harris, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, to help heal the party’s wounds from the tumultuous national convention in 1968 when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.
He ushered in rule changes that led to more women and minorities as convention delegates and in leadership positions.
“I think it’s worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “It’s made the selection much more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic, and many of the delegations were pretty much boss-controlled or -dominated. And in the South, there was terrible discrimination against African Americans,” he said.
Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, quitting after poor showings in early contests, including a fourth-place win in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter went on to win the presidency.
Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. He wrote and edited more than a dozen books, mostly on politics and Congress. In 1999 he broadened his writings with a mystery set in Depression-era Oklahoma.
Throughout his political career, Harris was a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs to help minorities and the disadvantaged. Along with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he also was active in Native American issues.
“I’ve always called myself a populist or progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I’m against concentrated power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we ought to have programs for the middle class and working class.”
“Today ‘populism’ is often a dirty word because of how certain leaders wield power,” Heinrich said in his statement Saturday. “But Fred represented a different brand of populism — one that was never mean or exclusionary. Instead, Fred focused his work and attention on regular people who are often overlooked by the political class.”
Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the urban riots of the late 1960s.
The commission’s groundbreaking report in 1968 declared, “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris co-wrote a report that concluded the commission’s “prophecy has come to pass.”
“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the work of the commission.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris rose to prominence in Congress as a “fiery populist.”
“That resonates with people…the notion of the average person against the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to articulate those concerns, particularly of the downtrodden.”
In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of the presidential campaign of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He and others pressed Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson on the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited to do so until late in the campaign, and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“That was the worst year of my life, ’68. We had Dr. Martin Luther King killed. We had my Senate seatmate Robert Kennedy killed and then we had this terrible convention,” Harris said in 1996.
“I left the convention — because of the terrible disorders and the way they had been handled and the failure to adopt a new peace platform — really downhearted.”
After assuming the Democratic Party leadership post, Harris appointed commissions that recommended reforms in the procedures for selecting delegates and presidential nominees. While lauding the greater openness and diversity, he said there had been a side effect: “It’s much to the good. But the one result of it is that conventions today are ratifying conventions. So it’s hard to make them interesting.”
“My own thought is they ought to be shortened to a couple of days. But they are still worth having, I think, as a way to adopt a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to get people together in a kind of coalition-building,” he said.
Harris was born Nov. 13, 1930, in a two-room farmhouse near Walters, in southwestern Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The home had no electricity, indoor toilet or running water.
At age 5 he was working on the farm and received 10 cents a day to drive a horse in circles to supply power for a hay bailer.
He worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to help for his education at University of Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1952, majoring in political science and history. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954, and then moved to Lawton to practice.
In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma state Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he launched his career in national politics in the race to replace Sen. Robert S. Kerr, who died in January 1963.
Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who left the governorship to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated an Oklahoma sports legend — Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who had coached OU football for 17 years.
Harris won a six-year term in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 when there were doubts that he, as a left-leaning Democrat, could win reelection.
Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, in 1949, and had three children, Kathryn, Byron and Laura. After the couple divorced, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.
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Compromise deal reached at COP29 climate talks for $300 billion a year to poor nations
Countries agreed on a deal to inject at least $300 billion annually in humanity’s fight against climate change, aimed at helping poor nations cope with the ravages of global warming at tense United Nations climate talks in the city where industry first tapped oil.
The $300 billion will go to developing countries who need the cash to wean themselves off the coal, oil and gas that causes the globe to overheat, adapt to future warming and pay for the damage caused by climate change’s extreme weather. It’s not near the full amount of $1.3 trillion that developing countries were asking for, but it’s three times the $100 billion a year deal from 2009 that is expiring. Delegations said this deal is headed in the right direction, with hopes that more money flows in the future.
“Everybody is committed to having an agreement,” Fiji delegation chief Biman Prasad said as the deal was being finalized. “They are not necessarily happy about everything, but the bottom line is everybody wants a good agreement.”
It’s also a critical step toward helping countries on the receiving end create more ambitious targets to limit or cut emissions of heat-trapping gases that are due early next year. It’s part of the plan to keep cutting pollution with new targets every five years, which the world agreed to at the U.N. talks in Paris in 2015.
The Paris agreement set the system of regular ratcheting up climate fighting ambition as away to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The world is already at 1.3 degrees Celsius and carbon emissions keep rising.
Countries also anticipate that this deal will send signals that help drive funding from other sources, like multilateral development banks and private sources. That was always part of the discussion at these talks — rich countries didn’t think it was realistic to only rely on public funding sources — but poor countries worried that if the money came in loans instead of grants, it would send them sliding further backward into debt that they already struggle with.
“The $300 billion goal is not enough, but is an important down payment toward a safer, more equitable future,” said World Resources Institute President Ani Dasgupta. “This deal gets us off the starting block. Now the race is on to raise much more climate finance from a range of public and private sources, putting the whole financial system to work behind developing countries’ transitions.”
It’s more than the $250 billion that was on the table in the first draft of the text, which outraged many countries and led to a period of frustration and stalling over the final hours of the summit. After an initial proposal of $250 billion a year was soundly rejected, the Azerbaijan presidency brewed up a new rough draft of $300 billion, that was never formally presented, but also dismissed roundly by African nations and small island states, according to messages relayed from inside.
The several different texts adopted early Sunday morning included a vague but not specific reference to last year’s Global Stocktake approved in Dubai. Last year there was a battle about first-of-its-kind language on getting rid of the oil, coal and natural gas, but instead it called for a transition away from fossil fuels. The latest talks only referred to the Dubai deal, but did not explicitly repeat the call for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Countries also agreed on the adoption of Article 6, creating markets to trade carbon pollution rights, an idea that was set up as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement to help nations work together to reduce climate-causing pollution. Part of that was a system of carbon credits, allowing nations to put planet-warming gasses in the air if they offset emissions elsewhere. Supporters said a U.N.-backed market could generate up to an additional $250 billion a year in climate financial aid.
Despite its approval, carbon markets remain a contentious plan because many experts say the new rules adopted don’t prevent misuse, don’t work and give big polluters an excuse to continue spewing emissions.
“What they’ve done essentially is undermine the mandate to try to reach 1.5,” said Tamara Gilbertson, climate justice program coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network. Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts, called it a “climate scam” with many loopholes.
With this deal wrapped up as crews dismantle the temporary venue, many have eyes on next year’s climate talks in Belem, Brazil.