~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The headlines are awful, the news below them is worse – lots of mayhem out there, continual violence, bad behavior as the rule rather than the exception.
And then there’s politics.
Politicians earn their low ratings, although the calling to serve one’s country in the capacity of representing the populace is noble. The problem is within the human race itself: there are few of us who can rise to the high mark of statesmen and women; the rest who run for office seem to be mostly interested in power and money; and the majority of us have not enough courage in our own private lives, let alone in a public life. The “news” of the elected as crooked, self-serving party loyalists before country do-gooders is always startling, but it isn’t news.
The only good news I can see when it comes to breaking news is old news forgotten; which, in a way, makes it breaking news. Things were just as bad or worse when Lincoln was in office and when Teddy Roosevelt was coming up in politics as a reform candidate. And he was a Republican who reformed, in the tradition of that relatively fresh new party at the time.
In the early days of the Republican party (founded in 1854), it was their intent to do something about slavery, and soon after (in 1860), they helped elect everyone’s favorite (to date) president – intelligent, thoughtful, well-read, versed in the Constitution, the man who freed the slaves, gave excellent and very short speeches; oh, and was honest — Abe Lincoln himself.
Things have changed in the R party since then, as they have in the D party. It’s almost as if they’ve changed sides – the Rs not friends of the Blacks and the Ds trying reforms that fade. The Republicans after the Civil War instituted Radical Reconstruction, which was a wise and necessary reformation for African-Americans who had been enslaved, set free and now they could finally begin to make lives for themselves, which included their unabridged privilege to vote. Those reforms all went to hell by the end of the century as southern white Democrats began passing segregation laws that undermined Reconstruction – what came to be known as Jim Crow.
The thing about reading history is how it makes one feel a little foolish about finding oneself so up in arms in the present moment of bad-news politicians; they’ve taken over state houses and Washington in much the same ways as they’ve done before; and both sides have played this game. Bribery and false news stories, rumors and lies, making fun of and calling names, wheeling and dealing, grabbing money off the taxpayers, ignoring the taxpayers. Teddy Roosevelt, mid-twenties in age, leaped into politics in New York state, as biographer David McCullough wrote, “to rescue the party from the hands of the professionals, which was no new idea in American politics certainly.” It was 1876, and Teddy became the face of the Progressive Era via the reforming Rs.
Here we are, nearly a century and a half later, living through so many of the things TR lived through up to and including his presidency from 1901 through 1909 and until he died in 1919.
The outrageous shenanigans of the latter half of the 19th century make the early days of the 21st century at least look familiar, if not satisfying. Teddy thought that the worst thing was party loyalty before loyalty to country, a familiar peeve today. There were disputed votes in Florida in 1876 (someday the state will figure out how to count votes); and Teddy thought and wrote about “that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class.” He was talking about his own background, and many of his wealthy friends were appalled by him.
He also wrote: “Now, anything the people demand that is right, it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do…. If the people disapprove our conduct, let us make up our minds to retire to private life with the consciousness that we have acted as our better sense dictated….”
Wow. A man of principle.
That’s what we’re asking for. Apparently, it’s what we’ve always asked for, over the years, the decades; now, the centuries – people of principle to lead us. Because history, in its seemingly lazy way, repeats itself endlessly and coughs up the unprincipled periodically . . . this means that we patriots, as the President likes to call his countrymen, need to keep working toward social justice, for the rights of all, in decency, and so forth. To help our leaders, or despite them.
