The First Four

Today is the day that some of us get to stay home from work or school because -- presidents.

Given the impracticality of giving people the day off for both George Washington's birthday and Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the holiday bureau, or whomever makes these decisions, combined them into a single "President's Day" holiday.

To be honest, I don't think too many of us sit around pondering past presidents all day. No doubt we're too busy resisting the urge to take advantage of the great sale prices at our local Buick dealership.

But it is worth a ponder, especially when the question of who will be the next president looms so large on our consciousness.

It seems reasonable on President's Day to look at the question of the next president within the framework of past presidents, good and bad.

Who were the best presidents? Why are they favored and what characteristics did

they have that we would like to see in the next president?

Is it Teddy Roosevelt's muscular leadership style?

Wilson's idealism, the dichotomy of an unwavering belief in world peace contained within the frame of an unapologetic racist?

Is it Kennedy's particular blend of inspiration, pragmatism and a history scrubbed clean by tragedy?

Although they all brought unique qualities to the office, so much of what it means to be president can be found among the first few.

Consider that the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, conceived of the presidency mostly as a kind of clerkship, carrying out the wishes of the legislature, which he, veteran of many state legislatures that he was, considered to be the supreme representation of the will of the people.

But almost from the beginning, the chief executive's post captured the imagination of the electorate and the post, for better or worse, has come to epitomize the America of each president's time.

Ray Raphael convincingly argues in his book "Founding Myths" that this should not be so.

American history is so much more than a list of presidents, he writes.

The United States came about, Raphael says, not just because of the actions of great men, but, more importantly, by the collected actions of thousands of unnamed patriots.

Raphael writes that those leaders whose names now echo through the history books, sometimes falsely, were merely following the trends of history and the will of a people bent of self-governing; and that the study of American history these days suffers from a kind of "presidential chic."

He is essentially right, but its hard to write a history of everybody.

Regardless of the arguments to the contrary presidents have, from the beginning, symbolized their times and the nation they led, for better or worse.

And when it comes to making the most of symbolism, few compare to our first president.

George Washington may not have been the most lettered of the founders, but his

desire to be considered a gentleman fed a deeper understanding of symbolism, and of appearances than perhaps his more well-read patriots could appreciate.

Ben Franklin once quipped that left to their own devices a roomful of men would inevitably elect the tallest of them as their leader.

This was certainly true of Washington.

But luckily for us, this was his particular genius and he more than any other understood that everything he did would be precedent-setting -- everything from policy to protocol.

Few people held in awe by their contemporaries felt the weight of that responsibility more keenly and, as a result, considered every action a careful balance between preserving the prestige he required to lead the country, and what was best for that country in the long-term.

Consider that when Washington set out to visit every state, he was would usually

stop a mile or so outside of every town, climb out of his carriage and up onto his white charger and ride in ahead of his baggage train, the way the people would expect a military hero to do.

Today, that action might be seen as craven. But at the time, it was necessary to cement a disparate and far-flung people into having some kind of national identity.

As Madison said: "The Presidency alone unites the conjectures of the public."
But Americans tire of heroes and by the time he walked away from power -- making him the "greatest man in the world," according to King George III, his former enemy -- he was being pilloried on the highly partisan press of the day, much like any other politician.

If Washington was the example of everything we say we want in a president, his successor was the opposite.

Poor, brilliant, flawed, insecure, proud, patriotic John Adams.

Just as we had never had a president, we had never had a second president and

he wrongly believed that keeping all Washington's people in his cabinet -- a cabinet filled with political opposites held together almost entirely by the power of Washington's prestige -- was the right way to go.

Bad decision. Their loyalty was to Washington and Adams, a prickly patriot not well-suited to inspiring comrades to personal loyalty, was not well served by the decision.

Ever the paradox, the steadfast patriot who took on airs, Adams oversaw perhaps the worst and best actions a president has ever taken.

He allowed himself to be talked into signing the alien and sedition act, jailing those who wrote ill of the government; a more anti-American law it would be hard to imagine.

But while he was manipulated at home by his own party, and a temperament ill-suited to the constant criticism inherent in the office, he refused to be manipulated by the conniving French.

For the good of the country, he fulfilled the wishes of his political enemies -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- and kept the nation out of war with France, something the self-confirmed Anglohile considered to be the greatest achievement of his one-term presidency.

Jefferson, whose flair for the dramatic was at its best when he held his pen, declared his too-close-to-call election to the office to nevertheless by a "second revolution" -- conveniently papering over the fact that it was brought about by another irony of American history.

His political enemy Alexander Hamilton maneuvered to provide Jefferson the votes he needed in the House of Representatives to break the electoral tie because Hamilton would rather have the country in the hands of an honorable man with whom he fervently disagreed, than a candidate from his own state he considered to be unscrupulous.

But it was Jefferson's successor, and legislative right hand, who was the first truly modern president.

By the time Madison took office, political parties or "factions" as the politicians of the day called them, had taken firm hold of the American political system, never to be dislodged.

Although he was among those who had warned of their dangers, Madison was also the political realist best-suited to roll up his sleeves and get dirty to get things done -- some at the time said all too willingly.

Years of making deals in the trenches of the Virginia Legislature and in the House of Representatives and Senate had prepared Madison for the inescapable facts of American politics, that compromise is necessary to get things done.

He was willing enough to do it, to risk his reputation both to history and his own "faction," for the good of the country.

History has been kind of Madison, and rightly so. But compromise, his signature skill as a founder, has lately fallen on hard times.

Public education undermined, our history re-written, compromise is now viewed not as the result of reasonable accommodation among reasonable people, but a weakness that shames the nation, particularly by some of those now running for the presidency.

There is a fine line to be walked in leading such a large, powerful and diverse country.

Absolutism is not leadership, and compromise is not weakness, it is a necessity.

Let's all hope we can elect a president who recognizes this.

Founding a Friendship Over the Fourth

Today is the day the nation celebrates the signing of Declaration of Independence.

(It was actually approved by a vote on July 2, which was the day John Adams always thought would be the one celebrated, but I digress.)

But it is also the day we should celebrate two men, without whom the Declaration would never have been written or adopted, and who poetically died 50 years after its adoption, within hours of each other.

It would be hard to find two men more different in character than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Adams: irascible, brilliant and often over-compensating for his inexplicable self-confidence problem.

Jefferson: urbane, equally brilliant and with the unusual capability of believing two opposing things at the same time without being destroyed by the conflict between them.

The two men shared two things -- a common belief in the need for independence, and a common experience both in Philadelphia and Paris.

John Adams

For most friendships, this is an either/or situation, but Adams and Jefferson had both, this despite having personalities which did not exactly mesh.

In political circles at least, Jefferson almost exclusively acted through others, most famously James Madison, his chief political operative, and James Callender, the scurrilous scribe who turned on Jefferson and alerted the world to his affair with slave Sally Hemmings after Jefferson refused to get him out of jail.

Adams, on the other hand, was more hands-on and addressed political matters in a head-on manner, often a bull-headed, head-on manner.

As Benjamin Franklin, who had the work of the American delegation in Paris in common with both, once said of  Adams: "always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was not the drive for independence, nor the conduct of the war to ensure it, that drove a wedge between the two presidents.

It was the more difficult problem of how the country should be governed, and by whom.

And isn't that always the way?

It's easy enough to rally around an idea, but much harder to find constant agreement over how that idea should be implemented, particularly if it has never been done before.

After the apex of their friendship -- their time together in Paris as emissaries working to get French troops and money to the fledgling United States -- came the nadir, the inexorable growth of political parties.

Thomas Jefferson

Both said they hated what they called "factions," but both ended up as the leaders of one; Adams the aristocratic Federalists, whose avatar was Alexander Hamilton, a man Adams did not trust; and Jefferson the Republicans.

Both men were, arguably better patriots then they were presidents, although each managed to make a major contribution to the young nation while in office.

Adams had the unenviable task of following in George Washington's footsteps and, unsure of the protocol of doing so, made the mistake of keeping much of Washington's cabinet, men kept in check largely by their loyalty to Washington, a feeling they did not extend to Adams.

But that did not excuse his approval of the Alien and Sedition Act against his better judgement, which outlawed speech against the government and which is what put Callender in jail, who had all the time been doing Jefferson's bidding.

It occurred during a panic when most of the country was convinced we were about to be invaded by France, but principles ignored during times of stress are not principles at all.

However, Adams refusal to succumb to popular opinion, a trait often on display with Adams, resulted in his skillful handling of the XYZ Affair and an agreement that kept the young nation out of a war with France.

Jefferson's election in 1800 essentially spelled the end of the Federalists' time in power and, never one to pass up an opportunity to coin a phrase, Jefferson insisted on calling it America's second revolution.

Unfortunately for the American economy, Jefferson believed that diplomacy and national interests could be conducted economically rather than militarily.

So his 1807 trade embargo with Britain, America's primary trading partner, nearly crippled the economy, particularly New England where manufacturing was beginning to take hold.

And of course the primary contradiction within Jefferson, a freedom fighter who held slaves, also manifested itself with his temporary dissatisfaction with the Constitution, written while he was serving in France, which evaporated when as president he realized that its three-fifths clause gave disproportionate power to the south.

As outlined in Garry Wills' convincing treatise, "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power," it resulted in seven of the first 10 presidents and 14 of the first 25 Speakers of the House being from the south; this despite significantly smaller populations of eligible voters.

But of course, without Jefferson, we would not have expanded as we did through the Louisiana Purchase, a move Jefferson himself thought to be outside of his Constitutional authority. Like Adams, his principles could be flexible depending on circumstances.

By the time both had left office, they were bitter enemies, each having committed crimes against the other that each considered unforgivable.

Benjamin Rush

It was Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, also a signatory to the Declaration, who finally cajoled the two of them to begin corresponding again.

Adams went first, sending Jefferson a letter on New Year's Day, 1812, wishing him many happy new years to come -- a wish which was fulfilled -- and Jefferson wrote back recalling them being soldiers in a common cause.

What resulted was just one more gift to the nation from these two remarkable men -- 14 years of correspondence by two people who really knew how to do it.

Subjects ranged from the current governments, to old friends, to philosophy, religion and science.

I came to my fascination with this period and these people through the David McCullough biography of Adams which was the basis for the excellent HBO series.

At the same time, my father was editing a book on Jefferson's letters and diary writings while serving in Paris called "Travels."

We discovered that each was an advocate for our chosen subject.

While my father admired Jefferson's facility of intellect, his love of books and his nearly universal array of interests; I admired the constant self-examination of motives and methods to which Adams subjected himself and the self-awareness it brought. He was a flawed human being, he knew it, but achieved greatness anyway.

We exchanged several months of e-mails in mock debate and I've been hooked ever since.

(As a bow to Adams willingness to examine all sides of an argument, I allowed my father to recommend several books on Jefferson, including his own of course, through which I began to see some of Jefferson's admirable qualities.)

As everyone knows, in a mythic coincidence which cemented their legend in American history, the two men died within hours of each other, each in his beloved home, on the Fourth of July at the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration's release upon the world.

Adams was 90. Jefferson was 82.

And so when I watch the parade go down High Street today, I will be thinking not only of the Declaration of Independence, that singular product of Enlightenment thinking, but also of two men whose deep, unexpected friendship was nearly broken by running the nation they had helped to found.

Constitutionally Speaking

So what did you do for Constitution Day?

Me? I served on jury duty. (I'd like to pretend I arranged it that way for the purposes of riding a high horse for this blog post, but I must give credit for the coincidence to whatever or whoever oversees such things.)

Nevertheless, being a journalist I was pretty much guaranteed not to be picked as a juror and once I told the judge that I had indeed investigated civil claims as part of my job, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would not be a juror in a civil case about a car crash -- another circumstance about which I have written so many articles that it no doubt disqualified me from being considered impartial.

Two-hundred and twenty five years (and one day) ago, 39 men signed what would become the framework of the world's longest lasting Republic.(We won't count the democratic monarchies for our purposes here today.)

National Constitution Day does not work up the kind of patriotic fervor that say Independence Day or Veteran's Day does. Maybe that's because there is no war involved and instead of being about fighting, it's about agreeing.

Constitution Day should recognize one thing that sadly has become positively un-American -- compromise.

When did meeting in the middle become anathema to America?

The "Fiscal Cliff" looms and Congress is going on vacation.

On the way home from jury duty, I was listening to an NPR report about the "fiscal cliff," the next financial crisis we may all face because rather than compromise and reach a budget deal over the debt ceiling last year, members of Congress kicked the can down the road and set a new deadline by which they would do their jobs.

Missing the deadline means we "fall off the fiscal cliff." I am loathe to explain the particulars here due to the likelihood of error contained in the explanation, but rest assured that anything that involves falling off a cliff is rarely good news.

Despite this grave danger to the economy both sides say they want to save, they're going to put off this important work, apparently, because they want to keep their jobs rather than do them, Congress is headed home to ask for your vote and have pushed off the tough decisions until after the November election.

Remember, they just came off a five-week break in August during which they got in touch with their constituents by cutting ribbons and sending you mass mailings and me press releases about what a good job they're doing.

They've got their work cut out for them. Approval ratings are hovering around 13 percent.

This will leave the the matter of whether the nation goes fiscal cliff-diving up to a lame-duck Congress which will either be bitterly licking its wounds or patting itself on the back, causing the word "mandate" to fall out of their mouth at every turn.

It's the "art" of compromise...get it?

Neither seems like fertile ground for compromise.

That leaves the current Congress four months to reach one fiscal agreement for what is likely to be one year. Let's remember that that's how long it took to reach agreement on the entire Constitution!

While the debates 225 years ago were no less spirited, and certainly the issues were just as important that September in Philadelphia, one characteristic existed within those men that allowed them to make this country, something whose absence now may break this country -- a willingness to compromise.

In American politics, "compromise" it is now a synonym for "weakness."

At the founding of our country, however, it was our strength.

Alexander Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia with visions of a president for life and a unicameral legislature.

James Madison arrived hoping to curb the un-checked idiocy of state legislatures left to their own devices (a problem with which we ruefully remain cursed).

George Washington arrived hoping to maintain his stature as the first among prominent Americans.

Most of the others who arrived, thought they would be tinkering around the edges of the Articles of Confederation, as they had tried to do months before in Annapolis.

Everyone got some of what they wanted, but not everything.

Instead, what emerged was a new framework of government that continues to operate, however clumsily, to this day.

It remains a wonder but, like all things older than the present, it could not predict all things to come.

The three branches of government we all learned about in school.

It could not predict abortions or automatic weapons; super highways or super-PACs; global warming or the global economy.

And so it has remained, what we call, perhaps with a dab of hope, "a living document," something that can adapt to the changing times.

And we have never stopped trying.

At only 4,543 words, the original, un-amended Constitution is one of the world's shorter guiding documents.

But members of Congress have, in their wisdom over the ensuing years, proposed more than 11,000 amendments to make it better, everything from banning flag burning, to banning gay marriage.

It is perhaps a testament to what the framers could foresee -- the callowness of politicians -- that they made the process of amending the Constitution so onerous, that only 27 of those proposals have become amendments.

It speaks, perhaps, to one of the primary reasons the Constitution was necessary; because the founders' belief that elevated men could be counted upon to put their own interests aside for the good of the greater polity turned out to be a little pie in the sky.

The painfully divergent paths that state legislatures undertook under the leadership of less than scrupulous men, soon threatened to tear the country apart.

There was no single currency, no single entity to negotiate treaties, tariffs or taxes and a sense of every state for itself.

And so the founders gave way to the framers. The foundation for freedom had been built on high-flying philosophy, due largely to the rhetorical skill and extensive reading habits of one Thomas Jefferson.

But Jefferson and Adams, the two who could most take credit for the Declaration's tone and contents, were both overseas when the Constitutional Convention convened.

Although no less brilliant, the men who crafted the Constitution had, I think, the harder job.

It's is easier to rally people against something, in the first case English colonyhood, particularly to fight against oppression; than it is to get them to rally for something, particularly something that is destined to contain elements they don't like.

Winning wars is for heroes. Cleaning up afterward and trying to have everyone get along fairly is a job for grown-ups.

Soaring phrases about freedom are good for starting and winning wars, but they won't run a country. A system had to be set up, practical matters had to be worked out and the experiment that Enlightenment thinking had been working decades to undertake was finally at hand.

It was a typically muddle American event, with some crucial questions, like slavery, put off until later. And maybe that's where the tradition of kicking the can down the road started.

But the consequences of that failure to find a middle ground came roaring back to us in the form of the Civil War.

We're 225 now. Perhaps its time we acted our age, started learning from history and started to listen to each other enough to find common ground and move the country forward.

One of the original drafts of the Constitution is on
display today at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Otherwise, we may be the generation which oversees the failure of that ongoing experiment.

(If you have the day off today, you can see six rare original drafts and copies of the Constitution at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at 1300 Locust St. in Center City from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 18. Admission is free.)

(Also Click here for a link to the U.S. Constitution Center just down the road in Philadelphia to learn more about our Constitution. Maybe I'll see you there.)

The Year of Legislating Dangerously

So I confess, at first I was willing to shrug my shoulders at the PA House of Representatives’ unanimous passage on Jan. 24 of a resolution declaring 2012 as the “Year of the Bible.”

After all, this is the same group of individuals who spent time debating the identity of the state reptile in 2009 while the Commonwealth’s budget was overdue by a month and wallowing in red ink.

Why should we expect them to start doing their jobs now? 

Further, denying the Bible as a central focal point in the development of western civilization is a fool’s errand. It inhabits western literature, laws and traditions.

PA Rep. Rick Saccone

Then we ran an op-ed piece on TheMercury opinion page Sunday in which the resolution’s sponsor, western PA Rep. Rick Saccone, peddled the same statement about his resolution that is on his web site and has been published in half a dozen places around the Commonwealth.

In it, he attempts to appropriate the nation’s founders as assumed supporters of his case that such resolutions, however “non-binding,” are not inappropriate and to suggest that the founders would agree, thus rendering them inherently patriotic and inviolable.

This is a particular pet peeve of mine and is in fact the reason I started several years ago reading up on these wealthy white men founders of ours.

I was tired of having George Washington and Thomas Jefferson thrown up as unassailable bulwarks of Conservative politics. 

As it turns out, what I found is that the founders were not the marble statues imbued with bedrock convictions chiseled in stone that we have come to mythologize them as being, but human beings with faults, doubts and uncommon insight.

They were, to put it simply, men of their times, the close of a period of thought called the Enlightenment.

They were attempting to build a republic larger than anything ever imagined and they were leaders in a country founded by adventurers and refugees from a Europe where the mixing of church and state had bred centuries of warfare over whose interpretation of that selfsame book was correct and whose was heresy.

This issue is squarely at the intersection of ...

In his first inaugural address, Jefferson alludes to this history noting: “And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered…”

Remember, it was nearly 200 years between Plymouth Rock and the Declaration of Independence and the country that was then being established was stepping carefully on religious questions.

The goal of the founders Saccone cites was not to found a Christian nation, favoring one of many factions of Christianity fighting overseas over the other, but a nation in which Christians – and the faithful of every and any other religion – could worship as they pleased without interference from the state and without oversight from the state.

I won’t deny that many of the values on which the country was to be founded have a basis in Christianity and the Bible – after all, they were nearly all Christians of a sort themselves and it was what they knew and where they came from.

But it’s not that simple.

Nothing ever is.

As Jon Meacham wrote in his excellent 2006 work on the subject, “American Gospel: God, The Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation,” many of the founders Saccone cites, were not so much Bible thumping Evangelicals as they were “Deists.”

Wikipedia defines Deism as “a religious philosophy which holds that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator rarely, if ever, either intervenes in human affairs or suspends the natural laws of the universe.

“For them, Jesus of Nazareth was a great moral teacher – even the greatest in all history – but he was not the Son of God,” Meacham reveals.

In fact, the Rev. Dr. James Abercrombie, rector of the church George Washington attended with his wife, when asked about Washington’s religious beliefs replied directly: “Sir, Washington was a Deist.”

Nonetheless, Rep. Saccone plays the game of quotes (one in which I myself have indulged on more than one occasion) to bolster his case, citing Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln to infer they would be likely supporters of his resolution.

Lincoln is a little after the founder’s time, but as an American icon, he’s always a good one to throw in.

Saccone cites Lincoln saying “I believe the Bible is the best book God has ever given man.”

To which I provide this statement of Lincoln’s: “The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession.”

And who knew Lincoln better than his wife?: “Mr. Lincoln's maxim and philosophy were: ‘What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.’ He never joined any Church. He was a religious man always, I think, but was not a technical Christian.”

What are we to believe? (Thus, the point of the game of quotes.)

It’s important to remember that in addition to being men of their time, the founders were also politicians and were speaking to a nation populated by people who, if they had ever read any book at all, likely had read the Bible and little else.

So while Saccone presents us with Jefferson saying (chiseled in granite I might add) “God who gave us liberty,” he ignores the fact that Jefferson also cut up his Bible to remove all reference to miracles by Jesus, leaving only his moral teachings.

Is this the act of a man who reveres the Bible as the inerrant word of God, as Saccone’s resolution insists it is?

Saccone selects from among Jefferson’s many beautiful phrases words chosen for him on a memorial built more than a century after his death. 

But what did Jefferson himself chose to be remembered by?

Thomas Jefferson's tombstone

Among the three things Jefferson himself chose to be chiseled in the granite of his tombstone, and of which he was presumably the most proud, was his authorship of “the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom.”

That most worthy document, written at a time when the state of Virginia was providing salary to Episcopal ministers, actually warns against the very thing Saccone would have us embrace.

Jefferson writes that since “God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens; or by civil incapacitations (italics mine), tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness…”

It further warns against “the impious presumption of legislators (again, italics mine) and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible; and as such endeavoring to impose them on others as the only true and infallible…”

To put it in today’s vernacular: “God gave me free will to believe as I see fit, who the hell are you to tell me what I should believe when God himself left the choice up to me?”

In his 1782 work “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson writes: “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.”

Does Saccone not know Jefferson is the author of the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state?”

This is the man to whom Saccone would have us look as someone who would endorse the Pennsylvania government’s endorsement of a religious book? 

It seems an odd choice when one looks beyond simple monuments. 

But then, that is the source Saccone quotes as his evidence of the founders’ implied blessing. 

True, George Washington used a Bible when he took the oath of office.

'Washington was a Deist'

 But in 1789, when a group of clergymen complained that the Constitution contained no mention of Jesus Christ, Washington replied: “I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of our country.”

Perhaps the most ridiculous citation of all is for Saccone to have invoked John Adams in his defense of governmental support for the Bible.

If ever there was a founder who cast a skeptical eye at organized Christianity and its chief book it was John Adams.

There are too many quotes to choose from, but perhaps this one, from one of his last letters to Jefferson in 1825, will convince the reader that Mr. Adams would not have likely jumped on the Saccone resolution bandwagon:

“There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books?”

None of which is to say that religion does not have a place in the public square. 

It always has and it always will.

It is, to a lesser or greater extent, the motivator and guide for most public figures and thus inherent in their beliefs on which their actions are based and therefore inseparable from the public actions they take.

As Meacham observed: “Our finest hours – the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, fights against terror and tyranny, the battle against Jim Crow – can be partly traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice and charity. Yet theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours – from enslaving black people, to persecuting Native Americans, to treating women as second-class citizens.”

Meacham further writes: “If totalitarianism was the great problem of the 20^th century, then extremism is, so far, the great problem of the 21^st.”

He intuits, correctly I believe, that “extremism is a powerful alliance of fear and certitude; complexity and humility are its natural foes.”

And if ever there was a complex relationship in our history, and one greatly in need of not a little humility, it is the relationship of religion and government.

All of which is a long-winded way of pointing out that even more than 200 years ago, the question of religion’s role in U.S. government was being debated, a debate which has not yet been settled and will not be settled by Rep. Saccone’s resolution.

Speaking of which, Saccone’s statement in The Mercury talks a lot about how the founders would certainly endorse his “simple resolution” but fails to quote a single line from it.

You can read the entire text here. It’s not long.

And, in truth, I have little argument with the majority of its text – that is until we get to the final resolved clause, in which there is: “recognition of both the formative influence of the Bible on our Commonwealth (still historically true) and our national need to study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures (italics mine).”

It is this last line that crosses a line and instead of simply recognizing the undeniable influence the Bible had on the formation of the nation, now takes a formal position that the government is calling on its citizens to study and apply the teachings of one religious book.

Will 2013 be the Year of the Koran in PA? Not Likely.

Were I convinced that Rep. Saccone would next year be calling for a “Year of the Koran,” followed by a “Year of the Tao-Te-Ching,” and then a “Year of the Veda,” I might be inclined to simply see this as a respectful recognition of the importance of religion.

But given Rep. Saccone’s sponsorship of House Bill 2029, which is similar to an anti-Sharia law law in Oklahoma that was recently struck down by a federal court, I think rather that instead, this is a way for Rep. Saccone to have the government of Pennsylvania place the Bible and Christianity on a higher plane than other religions.

I doubt you would find a founder who, no matter his private beliefs, would support that as an official government action.

And that is a dangerous precedent to let slip past us without notice, or, as Rep. Saccone and the leadership in the House did, slip into a stack of resolutions deemed “non-controversial.”

In fact the matter of the resolution’s passage has led to its own little controversy within the House itself. 

Also approved unanimously in the stack with the Year of the Bible were such constitutionally weighty resolutions as:

·  designating the week of Jan. 22 through 28, 2012, as "Nurse Anesthetists Week" in Pennsylvania.

·  designating the month of January 2012 as "Financial Aid Awareness Month" and commending the work of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency and the Pennsylvania Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

·  recognizing the month of January 2012 as "Cervical Cancer Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.

·  designating February 3, 2012, as "Wear Red for Women Day" in Pennsylvania.

Is this who you want telling you which religious books to emulate?

Now, some of the legislators, chiefly from Philadelphia, guilty of VWR (Voting Without Looking) want a “do-over,” not having noticed that they were taking a step closer to establishing a state religion.

Should we be surprised they voted without paying any attention?

Let’s leave that question unanswered while we ponder these questions:

·        Are the finances of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in such solid shape that we should spend time debating the separation of church and state?

·        Have the hundreds of structurally deficient bridges in Pennsylvania, among the most in the nation, now been fixed so that we can spend time the separation of church and state?

·        Have we solved the problem of rising pension payments for state and education workers to the satisfaction of all so we can now spend time debating the separation of church and state?

·        Have the geniuses in Harrisburg finally solved the puzzle of regressive property taxes and figured out a fair and equitable way to fund public education in the Commonwealth (as the state Constitution requires) so that we can now spend time debating the separation of church and state?

·        Has the second largest legislature in the country figured out a way to cut its size and expenses, or even how to create legislative districts that cross fewer than five county borders so that we can we can now spend time debating the separation of church and state?

·        Have any of the dozens of other more immediate problems facing Pennsylvania, problems those legislators were elected to solve, been addressed to the satisfaction of the people who put them there to the point where we can waste what little time these people actually spend legislating (or getting anything done for that matter) on debating the separation of church and state?

I think if there were any position for which you argue universal support from the, it would be less talk about Bibles and more actual work on behalf of the people who elected you.

I put it to you that we would all be much more impressed with Rep. Saccone if he and his fellow House members would unanimously adopt a resolution declaring 2012 as “The Year of the Effective Legislature.”

Follow Evan Brandt on Twitter @PottstownNews

Undermining Public Education, Hobbles Our Hope for the Future

Undermining education undermines jobs

As the presidential campaign gears up and every candidate is sure to use the word "jobs" in every sentence they speak, I am sometimes struck by the acknowledgement gap that exists between the words "jobs" and "education."

Education, particularly public education, is a dirty word these days.

Depending on who you listen to, education is either the primary cause of Pennsylvania's budget deficit, a financial black hole into which the public's money is recklessly and unthinkingly flung, the refuge of lazy teachers who get every summer off; or, in some extreme cases, "factories" where "weird socialization" occurs.

To which I say, even if all of that were true, and I doubt it is, that does not do away with the need for the function.

Why can't we agree to fix public education, instead of "throwing the baby out with the bath water," or trying to starve public education into some kind of stasis, so we then can blame it for not adequately educating our kids.

The educator bubble?

I will be the first person to say that sometimes it seems that educators live in a bubble, separated from the real world where the rest of us have been paying a heavy share of their own health benefits for more than a decade and go years without a raise.

At the same time, not many of us can say we've spent any time in their world, struggling to deliver a mandated curriculum to a room packed with 20 to 30 6-year-olds, several of whom have severe learning disabilities but are nevertheless judged by the same standardized tests which have become the only measure for the value we place on education.

What got me started on all this was, first, this article in The Atlantic about how complicated manufacturing jobs have become in America and the need for an educated work force to man the factory jobs for which a high school education is no longer adequate.

Then I saw this article in Sunday's Washington Post and I really got riled.

Today's manufacturing machines are complex

We keep talking about how manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. for Asia, Mexico and elsewhere, and it's true they have.

The U.S. has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years.

(And how is China preparing to receive those jobs? A massive public education effort.Would that we had that much foresight.)

But significantly, the Post also revealed that a recent report for the Manufacturing Institute found that as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in this country are going unfilled.

Why?

A shortage of skilled workers.

Factory floors these days look more like laboratory clean rooms than grease and metal-filing filled machine shops, with high-tech computers doing the work once done by 10 un-skilled laborers.

Lament it if you will, but we won't be going back -- ever. Time to adjust to the present and plan for the future.

Here's the thing, those machines need at least one skilled workers to run, program and maintain them. Add to that the fact that many of the workers who remain and run these machines are aging and we may soon find even more jobs leaving for overseas, not because it's cheaper, but because the workers there are better educated.


So what's our plan?

Apparently, cut public funding for public education.

Have we not learned yet that it's cheaper to educate our citizens, then to imprison them or support them indefinitely on Welfare?

The Post article quotes 27-year-old Greg Rowles who got a job paying between $18 to $28 per hour because he "took some classes at the local community college."

Pottstown's Western Campus of Montgomery County Community College is among the 50-fastest growing in the country, but when it comes time to prepare for a future of high-tech manufacturing jobs, what is our plan?

Cut community college funding.

In a Feb. 7 article I wrote for The Mercury, MCCC President Karen Stout lamented this short-sighted approach as is proposed on Gov. Tom Corbett's budget.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett

In his budget address, Gov. Corbett said: “Maintaining our commitment to the technical professions and practical trades keeps a bargain with today and builds for tomorrow. As our energy sector expands and manufacturing revives, Pennsylvania needs a trained work force ready to meet the demand for workers."

This will apparently be achieved with a  4 percent cut to MCCC's budget, on top of last year's cut of 10 percent.

“On a per-student basis, we’re looking at the same level of state funding that we received in 1994,” Stout told me.

Like the Post story, Stout said that manufacturers here in Montgomery County need qualified workers.

A Feb. 17 lasagna dinner raised $1,187 for West Campus scholarships

" I was meeting with CEOs of manufacturing firms in the Upper Perk area and they were explaining how important the work we’re doing is to those companies, and the jobs it will create, but we can’t keep offering new programs that adapt to the needs of the job market with these constant cuts to our funding,” said Stout.

The cuts will, in all likelihood, lead to an increase in tuition costs and a need for more lasagna dinners like the one shown here to raise more money for more scholarships.

Which brings me to another aspect of how we're sabotaging our best chances of growing our way out of this recession.

Rich kids are doing better than poor kids in testing

The third spoke in this tirade of mine was this Reuters article, which also ran in The Atlantic, which looks at new research showing that "the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40 percent since the 1960s."

The achievement gap between rich and poor students is now twice the gap between white and black students.

More worrisome is information that indicates when it comes to college-completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50 percent since the 1980s, according to the Reuters report, which was based on this more detailed report in The New York Times.

Poor kids are now 50% less likely to finish college than rich ones

So what are we doing to level the playing field for poor families? Why making it even more tilted in favor of affluent families of course.

As The Mercury reported last year, Pennsylvania's lopsided method for public education funding discriminates against the Commonwealth's children based solely on their zip code.

Poor communities like Pottstown are getting the scraps. Under Corbett's proposals, state funding was to be cut by $600 per student last year in Pottstown, leading to the painful contemplation of cuts to music and art.

But in places like affluent Lower Merion -- where two new high schools, one complete with an indoor pool, had just been completed -- Corbett wanted to cut funding by a mere $83 per student.

This year's spread, shown below in a chart I made for this story in Sunday's edition of The Mercury, is less extreme, but the pattern remains the same.

So let's put all this together.

Children, the workers of tomorrow, from low-income families have less chance of doing well in school and even less of a chance of completing college; so we cut the funding to their primary and secondary schools; this while the increasingly well-paying manufacturing jobs left in the U.S., will require even greater education; this while we cut funding to community colleges, the cheapest and most applicable college education to allow those poor children to access those jobs; and therefore make it even less likely those children can afford the education they need to get those jobs, and perhaps improve the odds for success of their children, the next generation of American workers after them.


Someone please explain to me how this is a sustainable plan for long-term success.


Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see it.

Tell me how the above ensures the future success of all Americans and the continued success of our nation.

And don't tell me what you don't want to pay for.

I didn't want to pay trillions for the Iraq war, but that's the price we pay for living in a Democracy.

I agree, no one wants to pay for failing schools. But why can't we figure out how to make them successful schools?  Is it really that hard?

Shouldn't every politician prefer to pay for schools over prisons? Shouldn't we the taxpayers?


So enough fulminating, the real question is, what to do about it?

The answer, I believe, is to fix what's wrong with public education, not torpedo it and hope "the market" will get the job done. That's the easy way out.

(The market works for some things. I believe that now. I've seen it. But it is not a panacea for everything that ails us.)

Admittedly, fixing what's wrong with public schools  -- and I take a moment here to point out that there is a lot that is right with public schools -- is hard, complicated and politically explosive work.

But we don't elect our public officials to make easy choices do we? If that were the case, we could leave it all in the hands of Pottstown Borough Council.


It will require sacrificing some sacred cows.

In all likelihood, it will mean lower pensions for educators, more contributions toward their health benefits and consolidation of school districts, perhaps to the county level as is done in Maryland.

It will also require a state funding formula closer to the one implemented by the prior administration which is based on the "costing out study," which looks at a district's actual costs in determining how much aid it should receive and uses that to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students.

It could be funded by (shudder) a tax hike or a revenue source from, say, a natural resource we have in abundance and now being harvested at bargain basement prices.

But we have to do something other than let public education die on the vine. The founders realized this and saw the need for an educated population to make this republic work.

Until the founding of the United States, society had two models to choose from: either elites ran everything and enjoyed all the benefits, or, as was the case before that, there was chaos and all that mattered was who was strongest.

The founders tried to walk the line between those two, envisioning "the best" of the nation naturally assuming leadership (which, admittedly, to them, meant white, land-holding males); but they also pictured "the best" leading an educated populace, one that could understand the issues facing the nation and come to logical well-reasoned decisions (and votes) about how to face them.

To accomplish this, they favored a radical plan of raising public discourse and decision, by educating the public, at the cost of the public.

Thomas Jefferson proposed an extensive system of free public education in Virginia, and, as president, submitted to Congress in 1806 a proposed amendment to the Constitution to legalize federal support for education.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right," Jefferson said.

John Adams

His fellow signatory on the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, put it, as he had a tendency sometimes to do, more bluntly: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”


Even Pennsylvania's founders enshrined it in our own Constitution.


Article III, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania Constitution requires it: "The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth."

Raise your hand if you think there is anything "thorough" or "efficient" about their efforts to provide for public education these days.

Seriously, raise your hand. I realize this is a volatile subject, post your thoughts on what should happen to public education. Maybe you think I'm totally off base on this. I invite you to say so civilly here.