Christmas Eve:I wrote about this painting a year ago on Christmas Eve. The painting depicts Washington returning to civilian authority his letters of commission. An empty throne is behind him. He congratulates Congress for its leadership and bids "an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted."
The artist John Trumbull painted a nativity scene. It was the birth of a republic.
It depicts the peaceful transfer of power.
Americans got complacent in the two centuries since this event. We took the peaceful transfer of power for granted.
We got a warning back in November, 2000 when the "Brooks Brothers Riot" intimidated vote-counters in Florida into stoping their work. George W. Bush's campaign and Republican Party staffers organized a protest. A crowd dressed in casual business attire entered the vote-counting area in Miami-Dade county and began shouting that the counters were stealing the election.
Authorities stopped counting the stacks of questionable, not-machine-countable ballots, primarily ones in which the perforated punch card holes were incompletely detached. Candidate Bush was ahead at that moment. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that counting could stop. That meant Bush won Florida and therefore the presidency. Al Gore conceded.
Heather Cox Richardson reminded me of this event in her post yesterday. I had forgotten my own post about it. This great event in American history took place on December 22, 1783, not Christmas Eve. Richardson quoted Trumbull telling President Madison:
I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him. . . .
George Washington gave us a gift. Our job, as Americans, is to be worthy of it.
My gift to readers is to recommend Heather Cox Richardson's blog become a part of your daily routine. She is a professor of history at Boston College. She writes a superb history and politics blog, published on Substack: Letters from an American
3 comments:
Highest moral order would not be a strong suit for Trump, nor for the Republicans. I don’t imagine Trump would argue that point, but I wonder if republicans would have the audacity to do so?
Regardless, merry Christmas!
The U.S. became a wealthy, powerful nation, protected by an ocean on two sides, but none of that could protect us from ourselves. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Helping elect Trump was the cheapest, most effective sabotage Russia ever perpetrated against the U.S.
This Christmas Eve, let’s also remember the death toll in the Holy Land now exceeds 20,000. At Bethlehem’s Lutheran Evangelical Church, the nativity scene shows a baby doll wrapped in a black and white keffiyeh lying in concrete rubble.
I'm still troubled by how the 2000 election story is told. If the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Gore, Bush still wins (as proved by later counts of the counties in the suit). All SCOTUS said was that select counties could not be super-counted, compared to all the rest. Reasonable judgment, no matter one's party. Certainly nothing to get mad about! What's more, later comprehensive audits of the Florida vote STILL determined that Bush won (but of course by a vanishingly small margin). The true fact is the margin of victory was tiny and far far smaller than any margin of error that could be calculated. In all events, the correct result was determined. What Democrats should be mad about is Gore's weird talent for losing both his home state of Tennessee and Clinton's home state of Arkansas. Not that's something to get mad about.
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