Invoking a Greek myth, he argued that the abolitionists and their supporters, “have for long years been sowing dragons’ teeth, and have finally got a crop of armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved.”

He accused northern senators of seeking to violate the constitutional rights of southern states and to overturn “our social system.”

“Your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race in a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people…”

Claiming to speak for the people of his state—even those who didn’t own slaves—he declared, “This is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other…”

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The South would go on to lose the civil war. But that didn’t end the determination of many white Georgians to deny freed blacks the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes, literacy tests, primaries in which only whites could vote and terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan nullified the power of black voters for decades.

Today’s moves to disenfranchise voters have more complex motivations than simply race. But the onerous requirements of President Donald Trump’s proposed SAVE America Act could sharply depress turnout, particularly among the poor and minorities.

As the New York Times noted, current law mandates that those registering to vote provide a driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Under Trump’s proposal, the Times reported:

Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote. That would limit mail or online registration, and direct voters to local election offices instead. There, they would have to produce documentary proof of U.S. citizenship such as an enhanced form of REAL ID — a state identification card compliant with federal regulations — that indicates American citizenship; birth certificate; passport or military identification card.

The bill would also mandate that all voters present a government-issued photo ID at polling places. Those seeking to vote by mail would have to enclose a copy of photo identification both when requesting a ballot and when returning it.

States would be required to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, to be cross-referenced with citizenship data and purged of those deemed ineligible to vote. And election workers who fail to properly verify an applicant’s eligibility to vote could face criminal penalties.

The new law would go into effect immediately, with the midterm elections a little more than three months away. It could unleash chaos at polling places as officials ask for costly or difficult-to-obtain credentials that an estimated 21 million Americans lack. The financial burden of getting the needed credentials amounts to a new poll tax.

“The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately,” according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. “Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.”

For all practical purposes, it would essentially kill the popular option of voting by mail.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Sen. Lisa Murkowski explained why she’s against the bill being pushed by the president and members of her party.

“The president is right that we should protect the security of our elections,” Murkowski wrote. “But we can’t make it harder for American citizens to cast their ballots, because free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

In her state, Alaska, online registration is vital, since there are only six election offices where people could prove they were qualified to vote: “Six places in a state more than twice the size of Texas, where roughly 80% of our communities, and about 20% of our population, aren’t connected by road…”

“Say you are an 18-year-old living in Savoonga, on a remote island in the Bering Sea, who wants to register to vote for the first time. If the SAVE America Act passed, your only option would be to buy a ticket on Bering Air to Nome, which runs about $780 round-trip. A night at the Aurora Inn would be more than $300. So, not counting food and local transportation, it would cost more than $1,000 just to register to vote.”

Other states face far less severe challenges, but there are a myriad of particular issues. The wisdom of a locally administered electoral system in a country as big as the United States seems evident.

Congressional Republicans are faced with a choice: Disobey Trump or destabilize the system that put them in office, which has experienced few instances of voter fraud and is popular with the folks back home.

Trump is attacking a voting process that elected him twice, with the bizarre explanation that the 2024 victory over Joe Biden was “too big to rig.” In this sense he is the ultimate sore winner.

Yet those who attribute Trump’s zeal for the SAVE America Act to his inability to get over his loss in 2020 may be missing the point. The president likely isn’t primarily trying to rewrite history so much as shaping the future: by questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections and weakening the GOP’s opponents in the 2028 balloting for the presidency.

Robert Toombs

When Robert Toombs spoke, people listened. “He could be kind, pushy, funny, arrogant, charming, eloquent, sarcastic, dedicated, slovenly, candid, manipulative, and a host of other dispositions that his mood or the circumstances required,” his most recent biographer Mark Scroggins observed.

Raised by an affluent planter family that traced its roots back to Virginia and England, his childhood nickname for a while was Runt. But he grew to be six feet tall, with a powerful torso that served him well for speechifying.

In his sophomore year at Georgia’s Franklin College, “the fifteen-year-old Toombs quickly earned a reputation for gambling, drinking, fighting, foul language, and other hell-raising,” Scroggins wrote. One story about his student days “has a proctor discovering him as he is drinking and gambling with some friends. All of the students flee except for the inebriated Toombs who wobbily exclaims: “The guilty flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion!”

After imposing repeated fines and other punishments, the college expelled Toombs. He did much better at Union College, where he ranked 3rd among the 83 members of his graduating class. After taking up legal studies, he became one of Georgia’s highest paid lawyers, noted Scroggins. “By the 1870s, it was rumored that he would not touch a case for less than five thousand dollars.”

By 1837, he was living in a luxurious home with his wife and two daughters. They owned 53 slaves.

Toombs became active in Georgia’s States Rights party. He had voted for Andrew Jackson, but looked down upon the populist president’s followers and Jackson’s opposition to the argument that states had the right to nullify federal laws.

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Following his elections to the state legislature and eventually Congress, Toombs’ speeches stood out. Skilled at dropping in literary allusions, he became what one writer described as a “bold, fluent, sarcastic speaker.” He could be charming in person, but as one associate recalled, “He was haughty, imperious, and overbearing, intolerant and impatient of contradiction.”

One example of his acid tongue: Toombs said President James Polk was the “vilest poltroon that ever disgraced our government,” a “sharp district politician without statesmanship or patriotism.”

Scroggins gives us this portrait of Toombs, relying on an account by the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis:

He was considered handsome, even though he was negligent about his “toilet and dress.” Varina Howell Davis was taken with him. “His coloring was good, and his teeth brilliantly white, but his mouth was somewhat pendulous and subtracted from the rest of his strong face,” she wrote. “His eyes were magnificent, dark and flashing, and they had a certain lawless way of ranging about that was indicative of his character.” Mrs. Davis was particularly struck by his hands. She described them as “beautiful,” and wrote that they were “kept like those of a fashionable woman.”

For more than 15 years, as a member of the House and later the Senate, Toombs had used his ample oratorical skills to insist that the U.S. Constitution protected the South’s property interest in the enslaved.

Through all the debates about the potential expansion of slavery to new territories, Toombs argued the south’s side while trying to support compromises to preserve the union. But by the presidential election of 1860, with the prospect of Republican Abraham Lincoln winning, he had lost hope.

Scroggins wrote:

In October, Toombs traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and dared the nation to elect a Repbulican: “Let the night which decides the election of Lincoln be ushered in by the booming of hostile cannon of the South,” he roared to the cheering crowd. In Atlanta, one witness said that Toombs “spoke like a madman and acted like a fanatic.” But the nation answered right back on November 6 when Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won the presidential ticket.

Toombs maintained that “black people were unfit to have political power and incapable of living as freemen.” The prospect of civil war didn’t scare him: “Wars are to history what storms are to the atmosphere — purifiers.” He told a student interviewer that, ““We are the gentlemen of this land, and gentlemen always make revolutions in history.”

Toombs would go on to become the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, a job he detested, and later a brigadier general in the rebel army, where he clashed with higher-ranking professional officers.

His ambition to become president of the Confederacy was dashed. A close friend and Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, “believed Toombs blew the presidency because he drank too much. ‘He was in the habit of getting tight every day at dinner,’ Stephens wrote bluntly to his half-brother, Linton. A day or two before the election, Toombs drank more than was good for him at an important banquet. Then he went to a late party, got even drunker, and made a spectacle of himself,” according to Scroggins.

After the Civil War, he fled to Cuba and Europe to avoid arrest for his role in the rebellion. Though Toombs returned to Georgia and resumed practicing law, he never renounced his Confederate beliefs nor took an oath of loyalty to the U.S. And he never abandoned his opposition to blacks voting.

“He believed since their livelihood depended on those who owned property—such as himself—their votes could be manipulated,” Scroggins wrote. “There was no harm in blacks voting as long as the whites all belonged to one party, he said. But he feared the time when whites would divide and blacks would be courted by ‘the lower classes of white men.’ If this coalition formed a majority it might attack the interests of the ‘landed proprietors’—like himself.”

To Toombs, the KKK was a positive force. “There is no evidence that Toombs himself ever wore a hood, rode with, or was a member of the Klan. But he certainly approved of their purposes and probably knew a great deal about their activities. Toombs told a reporter that the Klan was the ‘natural protest of an oppressed people against tyranny’ and that the Klan ‘tempered’ the ‘despotism’ of the Radicals.”

In his post-war career, Toombs had his biggest impact as prime mover of a Georgia constitutional convention. The constitution that emerged in 1877 undid Reconstruction reforms that followed the Union victory. Georgia weaponized the poll tax to disenfranchise the freed slaves (along with poor whites). All 11 states of the former Confederacy would eventually adopt poll taxes.

The poll taxes had to be paid in advance of the elections, noted C. Vann Woodward, in Origins of the New South 1877-1913. “The tax receipts usually had to be preserved and sometimes presented twice, once to the registrar and once to the election official,” he wrote. The taxes were cumulative, so would-be voters often faced prohibitively high levies to establish their eligibility. Woodward quotes an Alabama politician as saying “We want that all tax to pile up so high that he will never be able to vote again.”

The voter suppression tactic worked. “In the mid-1940s, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax estimated that 10 million Americans were denied the right to vote because they simply could not pay,” wrote Carol Anderson, in One Person, No Vote.

Georgia’s $1-per-person poll tax was finally abolished by a reformist governor in the 1940s. But similar taxes in other states survived until the mid-1960s when the 24^th amendment, the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections finally ended them.

“Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, “the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”

Georgia’s vote

One day before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s win, a different kind of electoral upheaval took place in Georgia. Two Democrats—Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—were elected to represent the normally red state in the U.S. Senate.

Trump had failed in his bid to nullify Biden’s victory in the state. On January 2, 2021, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and attempted to persuade him, through a number of fallacious arguments, that he won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes. Then Trump said, “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

Shortly before 4 a.m. on January 7, Congress put an end to Trump’s hopes by certifying Biden’s victory, including the 16 electoral votes cast by Georgia for the Democrat.

On March 18 this year, a little more than 165 years since Robert Toombs angrily resigned from the Senate, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock spoke in the chamber.

“I rise today as a child of the Civil Rights movement,” he said. He described himself as “a member of only the second generation of our nation to have full and fair access to the right to vote. …”

“Every American citizen must have access to the franchise, and it must not be treated as a privilege; it is a right. And when you put up unnecessary barriers, you undermine that basic understanding…We know that this will disenfranchise thousands, if not millions of Americans.”

“Anyone could call in and talk to the president,” wrote William Neuman in his book, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela.

“It was democracy in action. A direct channel to the most powerful man in the country, who took the time to listen and chat with ordinary citizens.” The show, titled Alo, Presidente, began on radio and expanded to television in 2000.

It could go on for as long as eight hours. In addition to taking calls, Chávez featured special guests, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Part of the appeal was its unpredictability. As Neuman noted, Chávez “issued orders to ministers, criticized them, embarrassed them, put them on the spot. He made surprise announcements, ordered troop movements, berated his enemies, carried out diplomacy.” In 2002, he delighted the audience by firing executives of the state-run oil company on air, two years before Donald Trump made showy firings a trademark of The Apprentice.

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The Venezuelan leader mastered the medium. His government had a TV station and unveiled a 24-hour cable news outlet. But that wasn’t enough. Chávez had the power to pre-empt broadcasting on all television and radio stations so he could spread his propaganda more widely — and he did so 2,377 times, according to Espacio Público, an organization cited by Neuman.

As Tom Shannon, an American diplomat, told Neuman, “This idea of communicating directly with the people, not having any mediating institution or entity and setting a media agenda almost on a daily basis—he was the first to do that. It was quite remarkable at the time and at the time it seemed a little folkloric, kind of like The Jerry Springer Show instead of government. But it was very effective.”

Fidel Castro was impressed too: “Never has a revolutionary made use of the media so effectively,” the Cuban leader wrote. And when social media became a real-time venue for news and commentary, Chávez signed on, reaching an audience of millions on Twitter.

His all-encompassing use of a medium that speaks directly to the public parallels the way Trump used Twitter, and later Truth Social, to rally his followers and impose a political agenda.

The U.S. president can’t order the networks to carry his speeches live, but he can pressure them. Whether to air Trump’s planned Thursday night speech on “free and fair elections” is the thorny question facing television executives leery of his false claims about the 2020 election being rigged against him.

Chávez’s skill at television helps explain why he and his successor maintained an iron grip on Venezuela despite the collapse of its economy, the widespread suffering of its people and the end of its democracy. Chávez became one of the false gods of politics, an authoritarian leader whose unquestioning followers backed him up no matter how ridiculous, dictatorial and corrupt he became.

We can and should debate the merits and demerits of socialism and capitalism. But political figures like Chávez don’t survive primarily because of ideology. It’s their cultlike command of their backers that makes the difference.

The damage that was done by Chávez shows us why competence and experience in government are the bare minimum we should look for in selecting leaders. Beware the Graham Platner-style candidate whose sole qualification for office is appearing good on TikTok.

Learning what went wrong in Venezuela is particularly important right now given the greatly expanded U.S. role following Trump’s seizure of President Nicolás Maduro.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is exercising viceregal control over the country, according to the New York Times. “Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government,” the newspaper reported. Trump and Rubio are relying on a Chavista loyalist, Delcy Rodríguez, to run the country under their oversight. Her government has been severely criticized for its flailing response to a pair of earthquakes that killed or injured more than 20,000 people.

Rise of Chávez

On February 4, 1992, an obscure lieutenant colonel led a coup against the elected government of Venezuela. The plotters seized government buildings and sent a tank lumbering up the steps of the presidential palace in an effort to break down the door. But President Carlos Andrés Pérez remained in control and accepted the surrender of the coup’s 37-year-old leader, Hugo Chávez.

To persuade all the rebels to submit, the president’s team gave Chávez a moment in front of the TV cameras. That move proved to be a big mistake. Chávez won attention by accepting responsibility for his failure and admitting the rebels hadn’t achieved their objectives “for now.”

As William Neuman, a former New York Times correspondent, wrote, “It was part veiled threat, part promise, part cockiness, part delusion. But what strikes me now, watching, on video, the Chávez of nearly three decades ago, is that opening line: ‘First, I want to say good morning to the people of Venezuela,’ so casual, so offhand, so sure of himself and yet so oddly courteous and self-effacing. You just sent someone to ram a tank through the door of the presidential palace—but first you want to say good morning?”

A star was born. “Chávez went to jail,” Neuman wrote, “but he was an instant celebrity, a savior, a new Bolívar,” and in 1998 he won the presidency outright in an election.

Chávez's achievement would not lie in seizing the means of production so much as seizing the means of communication. Now he could recruit and mobilize followers by building an us-against-them dynamic — exactly the kind of relationship Trump has engineered with his MAGA movement.

The Venezuelan leader connected with his supporters on television. “They were the people. He was one with them,” Neuman observed. But he also used his spotlight to vilify opponents: “the not-the-people, the ones who hated, opposed, and underestimated him, the ones he called worthless, the squalid ones…He would taunt and mock and skewer his opponents, at home and abroad. He would make announcements that his supporters knew would enrage his enemies, and because of that, they loved him even more.”

Chávez had the good fortune of presiding over Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, at a time of high energy prices. He rode a wave of oil revenue to launch showy construction projects and heavily promoted giveaways.

Chávez and his successor Maduro scared off foreign companies and investors. They replaced competent workers in the state oil company and electric utility with unqualified loyalists. Oil production plummeted. Venezuela’s cities were plunged into blackouts, and looting broke out.

Maduro, whom Chávez named as vice president before he died of cancer, proved to be a far less skilled communicator and dithered over decisions. He became so unpopular that he had to rig elections to maintain the pretense of legitimacy.

A great deal of ruin

The pioneering economist Adam Smith once said, referring to Britain’s prospects after losing a key battle of the American Revolution, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” If there is any country that proves him right, it is Venezuela.

The government’s encouragement of a black market in U.S. dollars opened up vast opportunities for corruption and hollowed out Venezuela’s private companies.

When oil prices came back down to earth, the broken economy was buried by debt. “By some estimates, Venezuela’s economy shrunk by as much as three-quarters between 2013 and 2021, the victim of economic mismanagement, corruption and — especially since 2017 — tough US sanctions,” according to the Financial Times.

Russian journalist Anatoly Kurmanaev wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2018:

Venezuela’s collapse has been far worse than the chaos that I experienced in the post-Soviet meltdown. As a young person, I was still able to get a good education in a public school with subsidized meals and decent free hospital treatment. By contrast, as the recession took hold in Venezuela, the so-called Socialist government made no attempt to shield health care and education, the two supposed pillars of its program. This wasn’t Socialism. It was kleptocracy—the rule of thieves.

Neuman agreed in his book that Chávez wasn’t truly a socialist. He “made no serious effort to dismantle the market economy.” State control of the oil industry predated his election. “Chávez simply continued what was already there and painted it a different color.”

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Despite Venezuela’s gusher of oil money, its citizens grew steadily poorer, with many suffering from hunger.

Neuman’s thoroughly researched book is a grim read, with its vivid portraits of Venezuelans whose lives have been destroyed by the regime. Many have bare refrigerator shelves and are haunted by the fear that they won’t have food to feed their children their next meal. They suffer from gang violence and the prospect of torture and murder at the hands of the regime’s security forces.

A 2019 UN report expressed concern about thousands of killings by government officers, including the Maduro-created “Special Action Force,” and said people were penalized for speaking out and denied the right to a fair trial.

The Chavista leaders who are hanging on under U.S. control have incentives to paper over the excesses of the Maduro regime. But Delcy Rodríguez, who now nominally heads Venezuela’s government, and her brother Jorge, “were among the most visible and ardent defenders of Maduro and his government,” according to Neuman.

“Opinion polls show that Rodríguez is deeply unpopular among Venezuelans. In her first public appearance at a disaster site, she was heckled by angry survivors,” noted the Financial Times.

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Venezuela’s plight was made worse by U.S. policymakers, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who pressed for sanctions that proved disastrous for living conditions in Venezuela without achieving their goal of dislodging Maduro’s regime.

The U.S. was among dozens of nations that backed Juan Guaidó, the National Assembly president who for a time claimed to be the legitimate president of Venezuela after Maduro rigged the 2018 election. It turned out that the only way to oust Maduro was to physically seize him and put him on a plane to face charges in the U.S.

As Neuman pointed out, Trump’s foreign policy initiatives didn’t improve the life of the average Venezuelan, but they surely helped his political standing among the Cuban and Venezuelan emigres in Florida.

Among the revelations of Neuman’s book, which published in 2022, are his discussions with Venezuelans who continued to express faith in the Chavista cause. One of them is a former manager at an electric plant who was thrown out of his job by a political hack and falsely accused of sabotage.

“Here was a guy who’d seen the electrical grid that he’d worked for decades to build and sustain be ruined by bad management and corruption—with great suffering for ordinary people as the result,” wrote Neuman. “And yet he said that he’d still vote for the people who had done all that.”

He would continue to follow his false gods.

In January 2016, Donald Trump was leading the pack of Republicans seeking the party’s presidential nomination. Appearing at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, he said, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Now it is no longer incredible.

When the Germans began fleeing the victorious allied troops near the end of the war, they forced camp inmates to walk for miles to other camps. Pisar escaped and hid in the Bavarian woods. As his stepson U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recalled in 2020, he heard the rumble of a tank.

“Instead of an Iron Cross, he saw a five-pointed White Star,” Blinken said. “He ran to the tank. The hatch opened. An African American GI looked down at him. He got down on his knees and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother had taught him: ‘God Bless America.’”

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That soldier was Sgt. Bill Ellington, who served in the 761^st Tank Battalion, known as the “Black Panthers.” Formed in segregated Louisiana, the unit arrived in Normandy in October, 1944 and engaged in combat for a record 183 consecutive days.

Samuel Pisar went on to a career advising presidents and practicing law. His story inspired the remarkable new novel by Steven A. Holmes, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and my former colleague at CNN.

Steve joined me at Now It’s History to discuss Black Messiahs. The book wrestles sensitively with the racism that oppressed blacks in America as they joined the fight against the Nazi regime, which murdered six million Jews.

In our conversation, we discussed the challenges facing a lifelong journalist who turns to fiction for the first time, the real-life stories behind the novel and the ways Steve relied on his own life experiences to shape its characters.

I hope you enjoy the discussion — and go on to read the book.

John James Audubon stared at the caged bird.

“I watched his eye and observed his looks of proud disdain,” the artist wrote. The bird was more than three feet from beak to tail. Its wings could stretch as far as seven feet.

Audubon bought the golden eagle in 1833 for $14.75 from a museum owner who had gotten it from a trapper.

The bird had caught its toe in a fox trap. It carried the trap for more than a mile before the trapper caught up with it in the woods of New Hampshire.

Now what should Audubon do with it?

“At times I was half inclined to restore to him his freedom, that he might return to his native mountains,” Audubon wrote. “How pleasing it would be to see him spread out his broad wings and sail away towards the rocks of his wild haunts; but then . . . someone seemed to whisper that I ought to take the portrait of this magnificent bird, and I abandoned the more generous design of setting him at liberty.”

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Following that instinct carried a grisly fate.

Audubon disdained the illustrations of the day as scientifically correct but stiff, lacking in realism. To capture birds’ shapes, motions and colors, to make art full of life, Audubon found that he had to kill them. He placed dead birds in lifelike poses on pieces of wire he set into a pine board.

The truth was that this passionate lover of birds was also a prolific slayer of birds.

Audubon knew firsthand that nature was a relentless cycle of killing —“red in tooth and claw”, as Tennyson would later write, and the artist lived at a time when hunting was a major source of food.

Since 1782, a predator — the bald eagle — had stood for the young nation as the defining symbol on its Great Seal. As Richard Rhodes noted in his 2004 biography, Audubon praised eagles as “muscular, strong and hardy, capable of bearing extreme cold without injury and of pursuing their avocations in the most tempestuous weather.” That’s not a bad description of Audubon himself; the artist braved fierce conditions in his decades-long pursuit of the “Birds of America.”

Audubon arrived from France at the age of 18 in 1803, 27 years too late to share in the founding of the nation. Yet his achievement has a foundational quality: The 435 Birds of America engravings provided an unparalleled panorama of America’s natural world in the early 19^th century — a paradise he warned could not last.

Sold to a subscription audience and engraved on “double elephant” sized paper — at 26 by 38 inches, the pages are so big they take two people to turn — the images depict the birds at life size. To look at them is to encounter the endless variety, intricacy and symmetry of nature.

Even today, 175 years after his death, the name Audubon stands for the fight to preserve an imperiled environment.

That challenge has faced every succeeding American generation. Despite some spectacular successes in recent decades, the conservation movement is fighting an uphill battle.

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Lesson of the eagles

A 2019 study found that North America had lost more than a quarter of its avian population — amounting to 3 billion birds — over 50 years. A report last year pointed to continuing declines, with 42 species at risk as their populations shrink to dangerously low levels.

Perversely, President Donald Trump’s first administration significantly weakened enforcement of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Trump’s Interior Department changed the rules to exempt companies from enforcement action for industrial hazards that kill birds unless the deaths could be shown to be intentional. The second Trump administration reinstated the rule change, despite an adverse court ruling in 2020.

The history of America’s eagles provides a pertinent lesson. By 1963, the bald eagle population had dwindled to only 417 known nesting pairs in the 48 continental states, according to the American Eagle Foundation. The birds were victims of the pesticide DDT, which they consumed from their prey, and which thinned their eggshells, making them too fragile.

Eagle hunting and loss of habitat compounded the problem. But the banning of DDT and enforcement of legal protections for the birds led to a remarkable comeback, with more than 71,000 nesting pairs and a total population of more than 316,000 eagles. Golden eagles are only one tenth as numerous as bald eagles and their population is considered stable.

Audubon not only watched birds, he “caught, caged and killed them; skinned, dissected and measured their bodies; noted their weight and diet; lingered over their peculiarities, admired their beauties,” Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times. “His goal in all of this was to paint their portraits, to turn bird-watching into science, and science into art.”

After mulling the eagle’s fate, Audubon decided he would “take away his life with the least pain to him.” Consulting his family doctor for a method, Audubon covered the cage with blankets and put it into a closet with some burning coal.

He thought the bird would die of carbon dioxide and monoxide. Hours later, the artist raised the blankets. “There stood the eagle on his perch, with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me and as lively and vigorous as ever!”

Adding sulfur to the coal the next day did nothing but make the house smell awful. So Audubon went back to basics: “I thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead without even ruffling a feather.”

As Richard Rhodes recounted, the artist planned to depict the eagle capturing a fawn or a hare. In a way, the artwork would serve as a companion to his 1828 illustration of a bald eagle preying on a yellow catfish.

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The original golden eagle drawing stands out among Audubon’s work for two things. Rhodes pointed out that “one of the eagle’s talons cruelly pierces the hare’s eye, releasing a drop of bright-red blood.” Also, “in the lower left corner a buckskinned, long-haired, fur-capped woodsman shinnies across a fallen log bridging a sheer chasm—Audubon himself, with a gun and the golden eagle’s mate slung on his back.” For unknown reasons, that depiction of Audubon the hunter doesn’t appear in the golden eagle engraving that was published as part of Birds of America.

The work’s composition bears a resemblance to Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 painting showing Napoleon crossing the Alps, as art scholar Theodore Stebbins noted. Audubon often claimed with little evidence that he had studied under David, who was Napoleon’s court painter.

Chaos and order

Audubon was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the illegitimate son of a French planter and a chambermaid. His father sold part of his sugar plantation in the early years of the slave revolt that created Haiti and retreated to France with the six-year-old Audubon and his half-sister. The father would invest some of the proceeds in 284 acres of farmland in Pennsylvania.

France proved to be a scary place for young Audubon. As Rhodes wrote, blood flowed freely after the guillotining of King Louis XVI in 1793.

Tens of thousands of loyalist peasants rose up against the Revolutionists in the Vendée, the département that bordered Nantes below the Loire. Skeptics were criminals as far as the Committee of Public Safety was concerned. “We must rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice,” Saint-Just demanded in words that Robespierre endorsed. “. . . You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.”

Counterrevolution was not the worst of it; the worst was the Terror that descended on Nantes in October in the person of a nightmarish Representative, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, sent out from Paris bent on reprisal. … Deeming shooting and guillotining inefficient, he ordered victims by the hundreds tied together naked in pairs — “Republican marriage,” this indignity was called — loaded onto barges, gabarres, and the barges sunk mid-river in the Loire. “Sentence of deportation was executed vertically,” Thomas Carlyle reports Carrier writing with bloodthirsty sarcasm…. For months thereafter, says Carlyle, “clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the shoal-places.” The putrefying flesh contaminated the river to such an extent that the health authorities were forced to ban fishing. “Kill and kill,” Carrier was heard to rage, and “butcher children without hesitation.”

It’s not hard to imagine the trauma this inflicted on Audubon — or why studying birds appealed to the young boy as an escape. Rhodes noted that his father encouraged him in this hobby and presented him with a book of bird illustrations.

“A new life ran in my veins,” Audubon wrote. “I turned over the leaves with avidity; and although what I saw was not what I longed for, it gave me a desire to copy nature. To Nature I went, and tried to imitate her.”

To keep his son safe from conscription into Napoleon’s army, Audubon’s father sent him to America. His task was to preside over the Pennsylvania estate. He began to build an American identity, carefully erasing his true origin as illegitimate, not least because it would prevent him from inheriting anything from his father.

Audubon was not a modest man. He wrote of himself, “I measured five feet, ten and one half inches, was of fair mien, and quite a handsome figure; large, dark, and rather sunken eyes, light-colored eyebrows, aquiline nose and a fine set of teeth; hair, fine texture and luxuriant, divided and passing down behind each ear in luxuriant ringlets as far as the shoulders.”

He met and eventually married Lucy Bakewell, the daughter of an English country squire who had just moved into the Pennsylvania region at the time of Audubon’s arrival. Rhodes described her as “tall, slim, graceful, poised, modest and lovely to look at, with a turned-up English nose and smoky gray eyes” and also “intelligent, loyal, well read, musical, meticulous, a good horsewoman and an athletic swimmer.”

The Audubons would have a loving but at times tense marriage as they coped with the failure of his business ventures, his frequent travel for his artistic as well as commercial efforts and the strains of building a subscription business (with the help of his two sons) to finance Birds of America.

The constant, hazardous travel and the relentless salesmanship it took to sign up enough subscribers for Audubon’s masterwork make today’s marketing efforts by Substack writers seem tame.

Of course, Audubon was charging a lot more money for a subscription: As Ashley Rose Young wrote for the Library of Congress, Audubon signed up about 300 subscribers in advance for the Birds of America plates, which were published over a period of years. “These subscribers were almost entirely wealthy individuals, as a subscription cost about $1,000—roughly $35,000 in 2025 dollars.”

Audubon’s watercolors served as a guide for his London-based engravers, Robert Havell and Son, who employed colorists to complete the prints. The vividly toned birds have a hyper-realistic quality, set in their natural habitats.

Part of what made the book so compelling was its frank treatment of nature. “Audubon’s birds sing and scream, kill and get killed, eat and defecate,” Christoph Irmscher observed. “One of his best-known compositions, of the majestic wild turkey, displays (unnoticed even by those who study his work) a pile of poop in the lower left corner.”

Audubon’s careful documentation of his travels provides a revealing portrait of the American frontier in the early 19th century. On a trip to Kentucky, he was amazed by the huge flocks of passenger pigeons traveling through the region.

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“The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose,” recalled Audubon.

“They were beautiful birds with gray-blue backs and wings, black-spotted wing coverts, light brown-red breasts and throats with highlights along the lower neck of gold, red and emerald green,” Rhodes wrote. “They had small heads and slender necks and their bodies were elongated compared with the familiar rock pigeons of city streets…”

Attempting to estimate their numbers, Audubon soon concluded that there were more than a billion passenger pigeons. Rhodes wrote that a modern expert has put the number at about 3 billion, or “25 to 40 percent of all the breeding birds in America.”

The depiction of the species in an 1829 Birds of America engraving shows the female passenger pigeon feeding her more richly colored mate, as each clings to a tree branch.

Naturally, hunters saw the birds as an ideal target and killed them in huge quantities, particularly during 1816, when worldwide temperatures dropped and crops failed.

Audubon didn’t know the eventual fate of the passenger pigeon, but he foresaw the inevitable effects of America’s multiplying human population.

In 1826, he wrote in his journal of the threats to America’s natural environment:

Neither this little stream, this swamp, this grand sheet of flowing water, nor these mountains will be seen in a century hence as I see them now. Nature will have been robbed of her brilliant charms. The currents will be tormented and turned astray from their primitive courses. The hills will be leveled with the swamp, and probably this very swamp have become covered with a fortress of a thousand guns. Scarce a magnolia will Louisiana possess. The timid deer will exist no more. Fishes will no longer bask on the surface, the eagle scarce ever alight, and these millions of songsters will be drove away by man.

Relentless hunting kept shrinking the passenger pigeon population through the 19th century. “Then they disappeared altogether, except for three captive breeding flocks spread across the Midwest,” wrote Barry Yeoman for Audubon magazine.

At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died, aged 29, at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Was it all “a grand mistake?’

That’s the thesis of The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake, a 2010 book by Leland G. Stauber, a former associate professor of political science at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

The 292-page book makes a somewhat halting case that the 13 colonies’ Declaration of Independence from Britain got the United States launched on a wrong-footed basis that haunts us up to the present. Stauber wrote that America’s founding ideology was not only anti-British, but also opposed to “governmental authority in general.”

Thus the Articles of Confederation created a national government far too weak to meet the challenges the young nation faced. And the framers of the Constitution focused their energy on devising a government structure to prevent any president from exercising monarchical power rather than one that could act swiftly to solve social problems.

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Stauber granted that the Declaration’s key phrase — “all men are created equal” — established a principle that “has been a great inspiration and a potent political instrument for all efforts toward greater equality of rights and opportunities in society.” He also conceded that independence set America on a path toward popular government, even though it took a long while to achieve full voting rights for those without property, those who were not white and for women. Still the U.S. reached “universal adult white male suffrage” far earlier than in Europe and Canada.

History suggests, he argued, that like the other British colonies in the New World, the colonies would eventually have achieved independence. So the real question is whether the manner in which they did was the right one. “Would there have been major advantages for American society if the United States had followed something closer to the Canadian path of peaceful and gradual evolution…” He admitted that the question is somewhat “imponderable.”

In 1775, there were desperate attempts to resolve the dispute with London peacefully. As the New York Times reported, recently discovered letters show that founding father John Dickinson wrote to a British merchant proposing a compromise between the colonies and Britain. He also drafted the “Olive Branch Petition” sent by the Continental Congress on July 8, 1775. His peace efforts arrived too late, and the king refused to even read the petition. On August 23, 1775, George III had commanded his civil and military officers to “suppress such Rebellion.”

That rebellion had lasting consequences, Stauber argued. “Americans are more reluctant to use government for societal purposes than are Canadians, for Canada attained its independence from Britain by a gradual process that did not discredit governmental authority per se. Government was not mentally associated with ‘tyranny.’”

Slavery: What Britain did

Then there’s the question of slavery. Did the political dynamics of the confederation of the colonies — and the adoption of the Constitution — involve compromises that froze the issue in place for decades, ensuring that the U.S. ended slavery 32 years after the British Empire adopted the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 — and only then at the price of a bloody civil war. If the colonies had stayed under British rule, would slavery have been abolished sooner?

Slavery was very much on the table at America’s founding. In one draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson charged King George III with waging a

cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

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As Timothy Sandefur wrote for Reason, Jefferson watched as the Continental Congress deleted this attack on slavery in the days leading up to July 4, 1776.

“No records remain of who said what during these debates,” Sandefur noted, “although Jefferson recalled that Adams tirelessly defended every word in the draft, while Jefferson remained silent, as always. The ‘cruel war on human nature’ passage was eliminated ‘in complaisance [sic] to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it,’ he wrote, as well as some Northerners, who, although holding ‘few slaves themselves,’ were ‘pretty considerable carriers of them to others.’”

Jefferson’s hypocrisy, of course, was stunning. He owned hundreds of enslaved people and freed only a few.

The British law that abolished slavery took effect on August 1, 1834, though it only applied to children under the age of six. Others had to serve their former owners as apprentices for up to four years. According to the government of Canada, Britain’s abolition of slavery “laid a pathway to freeing over 800,000 enslaved Africans and their descendants in parts of the Caribbean, Africa, South America as well as Canada.”

For the next three decades, Canada would become a refuge for people fleeing slavery in the United States.

Counter Facts

Stauber treads carefully in making his case that the break with Britain was a mistake, often choosing to use questions rather than affirmative statements. For example: “Could a slower approach to complete independence have widened the options and opportunities for a more socially balanced development of the United States?”

He is right that these matters are worth discussing: “These are fundamental questions that are obscured by an enormous volume of pronouncements that appeal to patriotic emotions and cite sacred scriptures — as substitutes for thought.”

But where his argument begins to break down is in the dynamics of counter-factual history. The eminent historian David Hackett Fischer tackled that topic in his book, Historians’ Fallacies. He wrote about a 1931 book, If, or History Rewritten, that looked at such questions as what would have happened if John Wilkes Booth’s bullet had missed hitting Abraham Lincoln, or if Robert E. Lee had won at Gettysburg.

There’s nothing wrong with asking such fictional questions, Fischer wrote, “but they prove nothing…All historical ‘evidence’ for what might have happened if Booth had missed his mark is necessarily taken from the world in which he hit it. There is no way to escape this fundamental fact.”

Consequently, when Stauber looks at the history that followed the American Revolution, he is dealing with events, especially in the evolution of the British empire, that were partly shaped by the Declaration of Independence and the colonists’ successful war and might not have happened otherwise. The British empire after American independence was not the same as the empire would have been had it subdued or compromised with the colonists.

History isn’t a controlled experiment in which you can change one variable and run events a second time to see the difference it made. There’s no way to isolate the evolution of Canada, the independence of other British colonies and Britain’s abolition of slavery from whatever impact the American Revolution had on them.

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Stephen King’s fascinating novel 11/22/63 tells the story of a man traveling back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This is a spoiler: he succeeds, only to discover that the world turns out to be a far worse place as historical events develop very differently from the way they actually played out.

What still works

As for the American skepticism about governmental authority tracing back to the Declaration’s condemnation of King George III, we’re living through an era in which the checks and balances on a would-be authoritarian leader, too weak as they may be, are proving their worth.

In a smart post this week, Gabe Fleisher pointed out how different America would be today if the Supreme Court hadn’t issued some key rulings against positions taken by President Donald Trump. He argued that if Trump had appointed more pliant judges in his first term, he would now be free to tariff any country at any rate, send National Guard troops to major cities, deport migrants with no due process, force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates at his whim and redefine “the meaning of American citizenship.”

For all its limitations and wrong turns, the Supreme Court actually can stand in the way of unchecked executive power.

The United States developed a vibrant, and far from perfect, democracy after its break with Britain. It built the world’s biggest and most dynamic economy. It issued a founding credo that still commands our attention and should guide our action: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So on July 4, 2026, let’s celebrate America’s 250th.

(Thanks to Bob Keeler for calling my attention to Leland Stauber’s book.)

Lawless. If you had to sum up the second Trump presidency in a word, that would be it.

The Supreme Court implicitly confirmed that view on June 30 with its 6-3 ruling quashing Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day in office in 2025, that severely limited birthright citizenship.

Rejecting the racial test for citizenship imposed by what today’s court called the “odious” Dred Scott decision, the court’s majority relied on its 1898 landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. That ruling established for all time that children born in the U.S. are citizens. Birthright citizenship has firm roots in English common law, the opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out.

Citizenship entails “the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” the court found. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land’ … We keep that promise today.”

As the new best-selling book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan makes clear, Trump’s push to redefine citizenship despite the 14^th amendment to the Constitution is only one of dozens of his affronts to the basic ground rules of American government. But the truth is that you don’t have to read this briskly-told narrative to find that out.

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The book, which covers the first 13 months of the president’s second term, is full of revelations. In the long tradition of Washington insider narratives, going back to Bob Woodward’s 1987 book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Haberman and Swan conducted a huge number of interviews — more than 1,000 — while allowing their sources to speak on “deep background.” That means that “we could use the information but not identify who gave it to us.”

Many of those sources clearly felt free to dish on Trump’s often bizarre approach to governing — and to life. So there are scoops, but there aren’t a lot of surprises.

Through the eras of Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Biden, reporters were able to unearth behind-the-scenes anecdotes and dialogue that revealed a hidden side of the power elite, showing how their private strivings often clashed with the image they sought to project to the public.

With Trump, there is no distinction between backstage and the space in front of the curtain; what you see is what there is.

After decades of knowing Trump as a tabloid celebrity, a TV character and now a president twice over, Americans can no longer be shocked by what he does, though they can still be outraged by it. He doesn’t hide his enormous ego, his greed, his lack of empathy, his pettiness, his neediness and his list of self-aggrandizing projects, including the arch, the ballroom, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump passport….and on and on.

Paging through Haberman and Swan, an informed reader will be reminded of DOGE, the attacks on big media outlets, law firms and universities, the prosecutions of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney-General Letitia James, the bullying of Republicans in Congress, the campaign to unseat and unnerve Fed governors, the “Liberation Day” tariffs, the summary executions of alleged drug traffickers on the high seas, the two attacks on Iran and the abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

It’s too soon for a deep historical examination of these events’ consequences. Reading about them when the wounds are still fresh seems like voluntarily exposing yourself to unnecessary pain.

We find out that Trump munches on crabmeat snacks and candy, washing them down with Diet Coke, as he riffs on ways to expand his power and punish his perceived enemies. The book tells us who was sitting where in the Situation Room as administration officials discussed crises ranging from Iran to the Jeffrey Epstein files.

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Among the most compelling parts of the book is the section focusing on the riches that have flowed to the Trump family since the president became “crypto-friendly” and allowed his sons to take stakes in companies that either rely on favorable regulation or sell products to the government.

(For those who want to keep score, there’s a helpful tracker from the Center for American Progress that as of 10 a.m. EDT on June 30, put “Trump’s Take” at $2,664,058,340 and counting, reflecting “Cash and gifts received by Trump over the past 602 days.”)

Trump’s power to pardon anyone, combined with the Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidents immunity in their official duties and his absolute control of the Justice Department has created freedom of action that no other recent president has enjoyed.

12 hours of Watergate

When Vice President J.D. Vance suggested on June 25 that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” he presented it as a joke. But he wasn’t that far wrong. The furious norm-breaking of the Trump presidency has assailed Americans with so many potential scandals that any individual one doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

At the end of Regime Change, Haberman and Swan recount their March, 2025 interview in the Oval Office. They recall wanting to ask Trump if he thought there had ever been a president as powerful as he was now.

Rather than respond to that specific question, Trump pivoted to a story involving famed golfer Gary Player. Trump said he recently played golf with Player, who shot an impressive 71 at the age of 90.

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Through Player, Trump met a man he described as a historian who recently wrote a piece comparing the 45th U.S president to Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, the Caesars and William the Conqueror. The piece began by saying that Trump is “without question the most powerful man that the planet has ever known.”

Trump liked the argument, noting that those other leaders “didn’t have airplanes” and could only project their power locally. Then, referring to Hitler, Mao and Stalin, Trump said, “these leaders maintained power through fear. Who would ever do a thing like that?”

It turned out that the writer of the document Trump cited was not a historian, but Gary Player’s former caddy and a business executive, who later said he had been a lifelong student of history.

Haberman and Swan acutely assessed the significance of Trump’s comments.

“What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis,” the authors wrote, “but the way he inhabited it, the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture and detention … and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed, between those who liberated and those who enslaved. What mattered was that they had had huge power and that he had more.”

A few hours after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, it agreed on another resolution. The Congress appointed a committee of three men to create a seal for the United States of America.

The three were among the ablest members of the body that had committed to rebellion against Britain: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Adams, a bright and courageous Massachusetts lawyer, advocated persuasively for independence. Franklin, a Philadelphia printer, had gained fame for his writing, inventions and wisdom. Jefferson, a Virginia planter, thinker and politician, had drafted the Declaration of Independence.

For all their eminence, they were “peculiarly unqualified to suggest or compose a suitable design” for the seal, according to Richard S. Patterson and Richardson Dougall, the authors of The Eagle and the Shield: A History of the Great Seal of the United States.

Although the three consulted experienced Philadelphia artist and designer Pierre Eugene Du Simitière, they had about as much success in achieving their aim as President Donald Trump has had in turning Washington’s Reflecting Pool blue.

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Perhaps it was the breadth of their learning that doomed the process. Franklin proposed that the seal show Moses preparing to part the sea and drown Pharaoh. Adams wanted it to depict the “Judgement of Hercules” as the mythical hero chose a life of virtue over vice.

Jefferson vacillated, at first proposing a seal showing the Israelites in the desert on one side and Anglo-Saxon chieftains on the other, before endorsing a Moses-Pharaoh theme.

The designer Du Simitière suggested a heraldic motif referencing the home countries of the American settlers and the names of the 13 colonies. He also recommended using the motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), apparently taken from the title page of a London publication Gentleman’s Magazine.

According to Patterson and Dougall, the three-member committee gave its report to Congress on August 20, 1776. They proposed using Du Simitière’s conception for one side of the seal and a version of Franklin’s Moses-Pharaoh scene on the other side.

This proposal was a dud; Congress tabled it. And there would soon be far more important things to worry about than the design of a seal for the infant nation. In the Battle of Long Island on August 27, General George Washington’s Continental Army was routed by a superior British force and forced into the first of many retreats.

Worth a cask of wine?

In March, 1780, Congress appointed three lesser-known names to a new three-member committee to take up the matter of the seal: James Lovell, John Morin Scott and William Churchill Houston.

They recruited a former member of Congress, Francis Hopkinson, who took charge of the project. He claimed credit for designing the U.S. flag and seals for New Jersey, the University of Pennsylvania and for government departments. In return for his proposed design — which included a sword-wielding warrior, an olive-branch-armed woman and Lady Liberty — and for other design projects including the national flag, Hopkinson at first asked for a quarter-cask of wine in compensation. The next month, he changed his request, billing the government £2,700, including £600 for the design of the Great Seal. Congress didn’t pay him, possibly because he had been a government official at the time he did the work.

In 1782, Congress appointed yet a third committee of three on a “Device for a Seal of the U.S.” but the prime mover in finally achieving the goal was Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress. Thomson, together with congressional members Arthur Lee and Elias Boudinot, consulted William Barton on the design.

Barton’s proposal introduced the figure of an eagle which he described as the “symbol of supreme Power & Authority and signifies the Congress.” The report of the third committee went to Congress on May 9, 1782 and that body left the matter in the capable hands of Charles Thomson, Patterson and Dougall wrote.

Thomson’s life

“The name Charles Thomson is not widely known among the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.” So goes the undeniable opening of Lawrence Knorr’s introduction to Lewis Harley’s 1900 biography, The Life of Charles Thomson.

But Thomson deserves to be better known, if only for his involvement with the Declaration of Independence. “Few know that it was Thomson who helped edit the document, was the first to read it aloud, arranged for its distribution and printing, and affixed his name as the only other signer [aside from John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress] of the original document on July 4, 1776,” wrote Knorr. “Of course, the delegates signed the document the following month. Thomson signed as Secretary and not as a delegate. For that reason, he does not appear on many lists of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

Born in County Derry, Ireland, Thomson and five siblings were orphaned aboard ship when their father died within sight of the Delaware shore in 1739.

An avid student, Thomson became a teacher and gained the support of an influential friend, Benjamin Franklin. When he left teaching, Thomson built a fortune from an import business, where he chafed at Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act, and an ironworks that produced arms for the Continental Army. With a growing reputation for fairness and honesty, he had been chosen by the Lenape chief Tedyuscung to take notes of peace negotiations with the colonists.

Thomson was far-sighted. He wrote to Franklin in 1769 about Britain’s imposition of taxes on the colonies: “The people by examining have gained a fuller knowledge of their rights and are become more attentive and watchful against the encroachments of power…and as the property of land is parcelled out among the inhabitants and almost every farmer is a freeholder, the spirit of liberty will be kept awake and the love of freedom deeply rooted; and when strength and liberty combine it is easy to foresee that a people will not long submit to arbitrary sway.”

Similarly, he foresaw the threat to the nation posed by slavery. Writing to Jefferson in 1785, 76 years before the Civil War, Thomson observed, “This is a cancer that we must get rid of. It is a blot in our character that must be wiped out. If it cannot be done by religion, reason, and philosophy, confident I am that it will one day be by blood.” Jefferson, who owned about 200 slaves, wrote a denunciation of slavery into his original draft of the Declaration; his fellow members of Congress deleted it.

As a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Thomson was instrumental in persuading the people of the colony to join in the American Revolution, and it was in Philadelphia that the first Continental Congress convened in 1774.

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Returning to that city days after his wedding, Thomson was surprised to be summoned to Congress, where he was told he had been unanimously elected secretary, a post he held until 1789. That year, he traveled to George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon to tell the retired general that he had been elected the first president of the United States.

Getting it done

Thomson was “a man of high intelligence, self-disciplined, morally irreproachable, well read, a scholar and a learned man,” wrote Patterson and Dougall. While he knew little about heraldry, he knew how to get things done.

Once he was given responsibility for the seal project, he began sketching. “His major innovations were in promoting the eagle to a prominent position in the design, in placing a shield on the eagle’s breast (with chevrons on that shield), and in placing symbols of peace and war in the eagle’s talons,” noted Patterson and Dougall. Thomson made clear that it should be an “American eagle” and used the same Latin motto the first committee had proposed: E Pluribus Unum.

After consulting with Barton, who refined and expanded on the congressional secretary’s concept, Thomson submitted his report to Congress on June 20, 1782. Congress agreed to it that day. The six-year-long hunt for a seal was finally done.

In the final design, the eagle spreads its wings under 13 stars and behind a shield with 13 stripes. In one talon, the eagle grasps 13 arrows; in the other, an olive branch with 13 olives and 13 leaves.

As Patterson and Dougall added:

During the remainder of his period of service as secretary of Congress, Thomson enjoyed his responsibility as custodian of the seal and the designation he assumed as its “keeper.” When government under the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress came to an end in 1789, he tried to arrange a new position for himself under which he would retain control of it. When this failed he relinquished it reluctantly, delivering the die and press personally into the hands of President Washington.

After leaving government, Thomson embarked on an ambitious project. He spent 20 years translating the Bible from Greek to English. The book was published in 1808 by Jane Aitken, the first woman to publish the Bible in the U.S. Thomson died at the age of 94 in 1824.

Thomson’s friend Benjamin Franklin never succeeded in placing Moses on his country’s great seal. And perhaps in jest, he objected to the symbol that was chosen for his nation: the eagle.

Writing to his daughter about the eagle badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, Franklin noted that some people complained that the eagle looked too much like a turkey. He added:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perch’d on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him & takes it from him. With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly & drives him out of the District…

The bald eagle has symbolized the American republic since 1782. But it was only in December, 2024 that it finally won designation as the national bird, thanks to legislation signed by President Joe Biden. Trivia fans, remember that for your next contest.

On several levels, Brunson offered lessons in leadership that could be applied to any team, whether in sports, business or government.

For one thing, he personally took charge on the court, providing the offense that enabled the Knicks to come from behind in the closing minutes of a 94-90 game. He scored 45 points, including making 13 of his 15 free throws and 4 of his 7 shots from 3-point range.

The Knicks could have lost the game and still had either Game 6 or 7 to secure a championship. But Brunson played as if defeat was not an option: “I woke up this morning, not wanting to have to go home and play another game,” he said on Inside the NBA.

Yet his biggest contribution to the team’s victory happened on July 12, 2024. On that day, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN wrote, “In a largely unprecedented financial concession to give roster flexibility to a contending franchise, New York Knicks All-NBA guard Jalen Brunson has agreed to a four-year, $156.5 million contract extension -- $113 million less guaranteed than he is eligible to sign for a year from now -- his agent, Sam Rose of CAA, told ESPN on Friday.”

The deal would cost Brunson $37.1 million over the succeeding three years.

Who leaves that kind of money on the table in 2020s America?

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Brunson’s move enabled the Knicks to sign other strong players without hitting a salary cap that would have severely penalized the team and sharply reduced their chances of winning a championship. Other players, including Tim Duncan, Kevin Durant and LeBron James, have agreed to such moves, but none with such a large amount of money foregone, ESPN reported.

And of course, Brunson’s move was not entirely self-sacrificing. It could pay off big time if he remains healthy. He could make as much as $323 million in a 2028 contract extension, or $418 million in 2029.

There are a couple of family connections involved: Brunson’s agent Sam Rose is the son of Leon Rose, who was once Brunson’s own agent and is now president of the Knicks. Brunson’s father is Knicks assistant coach Rick Brunson.

Following Saturday’s win, the Brunsons appeared side-by-side on Inside the NBA.

Asked by Charles Barkley if he had foreseen his son’s epic performance, Rick Brunson said he thought Jalen would be “a good player,” but not this kind of superstar.

Jalen interjected, “I’ll be lying to you if I say that I saw this as well. But what he instilled in me as a kid. Like you never know what’s going to happen if you just continue to work hard. You never know when you focus on just winning — you’re not focusing on yourself, you’re not focusing on the individual accolades that you can get…”

“I actually believe this thing, I believe it’s all about the team, it’s all about our success.”

“If we win, everyone eats.”

“Today I invited myself to help open gifts from the Pets.com gift center,” began a holiday season 1999 tv commercial featuring the company’s Sock Puppet character, voiced by Michael Ian Black.

The 30-second spot ends with the puppet looking at Christmas stockings hung around a mantel and saying mournfully, “How could they do this to socks? Oh no, the horror!”

That year the Sock Puppet appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade; a Super Bowl ad would soon follow. On February 11, 2000, the company sold shares to the public for $11, raising a total of $82.5 million.

It was one month before the Nasdaq hit its dot-com era peak and slowly began an excruciating crash. Pets.com wouldn’t even survive until the next Thanksgiving Day parade. When the company shut down on November 7, 2000, the shares were trading for 22 cents.

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Investors who bought at the IPO asking price lost 98 percent of their money in 268 days. The Sock Puppet was sold off to an auto loan firm, reportedly for $125,000.

The Wall Street Journal quoted investment analyst Matt Stamski saying, “People were betting on ideas that were almost stillborn. It’s almost unprecedented to see an entire sector go from an idea to heavily funded to defunct in just a year and a half.”

In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to spot investment mania. Looking ahead, no one can safely predict when a stock market boom will end, or whether a particular company will succeed or fail.

SpaceX is about to go public in an era of high stock-market valuations, aiming to raise $75 billion in a sale that values the company at $1.77 trillion. Wall Street giants are falling over themselves to buy large chunks of the stock. The Wall Street Journal said BlackRock has submitted an order for at least $5 billion worth.

There’s no comparison between SpaceX and Pets.com. Elon Musk’s company launches partly reusable rockets into space and runs the very successful Starlink communications business, even though it doesn’t make a profit overall. Pets.com was wildly unprofitable.

But the Journal’s Spencer Jakab made a vital point about the astronomically high price of the impending public offering: “SpaceX will fetch a price/sales multiple of 92 times at the IPO price but doesn’t make a profit. For perspective, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, tech companies in the S&P 500 fetched an average multiple of seven times revenue.”

You may soon own some of SpaceX, if you hold ETFs or mutual funds that track the Nasdaq index. (The S&P 500 index has a one-year waiting period for inclusion and companies must be profitable.)

Later this year, two giant AI companies could go public: Anthropic and Open AI. It’s too early to tell whether their offerings will be as pricey as Musk’s.

FOMO

In May, 2004, Harvard Business School student Patrick McGinniss attempted to analyze the fraught behavior of his fellow students trying to manage their social lives at a time of many options. “First year, especially first semester can be a trying time socially,” he wrote in the student publication Harbus. “In this state of social flux, FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, weighs heavily on the psyche.”

Fear of Missing Out applies to a lot more than Harvard students having to decide whether to attend a sherry tasting. It explains much of what happens on Wall Street, where following the herd is a way of life for many.

Investment advisers risk losing their clients if they don’t recommend buying the top-performing stocks. On March 10, 2000, the day the Nasdaq hit a new high, New York Times business columnist Floyd Norris wrote:

As the number of shares that are rising has narrowed, pressure has grown on money managers to buy the stocks that are working and to shun the stocks that are not. That pressure has been intensified by mutual fund investors, who have pulled money out of many funds that have been poor performers while pouring cash into funds that have been rising.

‘’Right now, valuation measures are being thrown out the window,’‘ said Phillip Coburn, a strategist at Warburg Dillon Read. He said that the average price of technology stocks, using a measure that compares price-earnings multiples with earnings growth rates, is now twice what investors deemed reasonable only a couple of years ago.

Was this sustainable? Norris noted that Phillip Coburn thought it was: “Money managers are only being prudent when they load up on technology stocks. ‘Given the fact that I don’t see the end in sight, I don’t think they are being foolish,’‘ he said. ’They are being practical, and they are making money for their clients..’”

“The end” started to come over the next several months. By October, 2002, the Nasdaq index had fallen 77% — and it wouldn’t reach another record high until April, 2015.

The experienced analysts at Morningstar think SpaceX’s initial offering price, expected to be $135 a share, is way too high. They assess the value of the company at $63 a share, less than half of the price buyers will likely pay. They concede that if Musk’s moonshots — a fully reusable Starship and widespread development of orbiting data centers — materialize, the stock could be worth $154 a share. But they give that scenario only a 7 percent chance of happening.

Yet even if the moonshots are proven to be fantasies, SpaceX could still rocket higher than its $135 initial price. If enough people fear missing out on the riches they anticipate from Musk’s venture, they could bid the price of the stock far higher.

Still, if SpaceX shares do reach the stratosphere, enjoy it — and remember that the air is thin at that height, and the fall is a long way down.

The 295-foot long ship was one of five such vessels the Nazi regime commissioned to “circumvent the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, using maritime training as a front to quietly rebuild naval strength,” as Will Sofrin’s new book notes. The Germans named the ship the Horst Wessel, after the man who wrote the lyrics for the Nazi anthem and was treated as a martyr after his killing in 1930.

After Hitler’s death and the regime’s surrender in 1945, Allied officials began dividing up the German fleet among the victors. The superintendent of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy suggested obtaining Horst Wessel as a sail training ship for the academy’s cadets.

Eighty years later, the Eagle will be leading the parade of tall ships from around the world sailing up the Hudson River — as it did for the 1976 bicentennial — to mark America’s 250th anniversary. Sofrin told me he’ll be on board for the occasion.

The ship not only trains Coast Guard cadets, but serves as an ambassador for the United States around the world.

Sofrin tells the story in his new book, USCG Cutter Eagle: The Legacy of the Coast Guard’s Flagship, published by Lyons Press. As noted in my conversation with Will, the book weaves in the stories of officers and rank and file members of the Coast Guard who have served on the Eagle.

When the U.S. acquired the ship, it needed major repairs and a new engine. It also was short of the crew required to take it from Bremerhaven to the U.S., so its commander had to sail with many German crew members. Upon arrival, they were transferred to a prisoner of war camp and returned to Europe.

On the final leg of the journey, from Bermuda to New York, a storm brought 60-knot winds and huge seas.

As Sofrin recounted, the ship’s commander Gordon McGowan described the sound of the storm:

“There was the sharp tearing sound—the ripping of the fabric of the gates of hell. . . . This tapestry of sound bore the pattern of maniacal majesty.” The fore upper and lower topsails were the first to go. They exploded in a flash, leaving ribbons streaming. The ship hit 16 knots at this point…the fastest the ship had ever gone. This speed was estimated based on their observations of the prop shaft’s revolutions when the clutch was released—something they had studied on the voyage. At this point, the foresail and main upper topsail blew out. The mainsail and main lower topsail held.

Sofrin describes the risky maneuvers that were needed that day to keep the ship from disaster on its maiden voyage as the Eagle.

Sofrin’s book includes a history of the Coast Guard, which traces its roots back to the U.S. fleet of revenue cutters used to collect tariffs during the time of President George Washington. With this antecedent, the Coast Guard is even older than the U.S. Navy.

Why does the Coast Guard have a tall ship more than 150 years after the end of the Age of Sail?

Sofrin explains:

Sail training holds a vital place in the US Coast Guard and other military maritime forces around the world. Rooted in centuries of tradition, it is more than just a means of teaching seamanship; it also serves as a crucible for developing discipline, risk assessment management, teamwork, and leadership. Operating a sailing vessel demands precise coordination, clear communication, and a deep understanding of natural forces and human limitations. These challenges forge proficiencies in cadets and officers that translate directly into their roles aboard modern vessels. For the Coast Guard, sail training aboard Eagle is a rite of passage, instilling respect for the sea and seamanship principles that remain relevant.

Life on the Eagle has changed significantly since June, 1976, when the first women cadets were admitted to the Academy. In 1980, 14 women were in the graduating class, along with 140 men.

In 1984, several women played key roles in preserving lives when the Eagle was almost knocked down. A storm front struck it during a race of tall ships heading from Bermuda to Halifax, Nova Scotia; remarkably no one was killed aboard Eagle in that episode. The ship righted itself and suffered no damage. Several hours later, a squall capsized the 115-foot British ship Marques. The tall ship sank within a minute. Only nine of the 28 people on board survived.

The Eagle has become a symbol of the United States. It sailed to Australia for that nation’s 1988 Bicentenary and to St. Petersburg, in Russia, in 1996.

Presidents and world leaders have come aboard. But perhaps the most notable visitor mentioned in the book was a singer and songwriter.

The captain of the Eagle, Ivan Luke, “had long been a devoted ‘Parrothead,’ a nickname famously associated with die-hard fans of Jimmy Buffett, his music, and his easygoing, tropical lifestyle,” wrote Sofrin. “From the moment Captain Luke took command of Eagle, he set his sights on a personal goal: to get Jimmy Buffett aboard the ship…After years of reaching out, Luke finally succeeded in bringing Buffett aboard. It was a surreal and meaningful moment for the captain, as he blended his love of the sea with the soundtrack that had accompanied much of his sailing life.”

Buffett sailed on Eagle on a short loop from Salem, Massachusetts around Cape Cod. Aboard with his son, Buffett worked the lines, took part in drills and dined with the crew as well as in the officer’s mess.

Buffett’s grandfather, James Delaney Buffett, had been a steamship captain out of Newfoundland and was a big influence on Jimmy.

So when Buffett joined the Eagle’s captain (on harmonica) and a seaman (on guitar) for a jam session, they sang, among other songs, “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

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On the morning of November 25, 1783, the last of the defeated British troops left the soil of New York City. It was the end of a seven-year-long occupation. Yet as the redcoats headed to their ships on that cold day, the royal flag still flew over Fort George at the tip of Manhattan.

The United States of America had won its war of independence against Britain at Yorktown two years earlier. Now the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, ushered in a transition to peace.

When General George Washington and 800 troops reached the fort at the Battery, they discovered that the “flag had been nailed to the staff, the halyards taken away, and the pole itself besmeared with grease; obviously to prevent or hinder the removal of the emblem of royalty, and the raising of the Stars and Stripes.”

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As James Riker wrote a century later, “gun…

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On March 23, 1903, Lizzie Magie applied for a patent to protect a board game she had invented.

The “Landlord’s Game” enabled players to buy and sell properties with play money. Railroads were located in the center of each side of the board. One of the corner spaces said, “No trespassing. Go to Jail.” The opposite corner was the Jail. Players who passed the corner marked “Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages” received $100. Magie’s patent was granted in 1904.

Three decades later and without credit to its original inventor, Parker Brothers made “Monopoly” one of the most popular games of all time. Players who passed Go collected $200 and while “go to jail” was still a dreaded space, people could always hope to pick up a “Get out of jail free” Chance card.

In 16 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has turned that card into an operating philosophy for the Justice Department — with one difference: It’s get out of jail free — and collect $200.

The rioters wh…

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Toledo posted dashcam video of the falling material on Reddit, and told Gothamist, “If I would have been one or two more seconds further forward, instead of that piece of concrete hitting the front of the car, it could have come through the windshield, and I wouldn’t be speaking to you.” (Officials said it wasn’t falling concrete, but lighter material and dust.)

Six days later, actual falling concrete injured a driver on the same road, the Trans- Manhattan Expressway, which connects the Cross Bronx Expressway to the George Washington Bridge. The driver was taken to a hospital. According to the New York Times, Port Authority officials are planning a project to “fortify the overpasses.”

The two expressways are among the most heavily trafficked roads in the country. D…

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In 1901, Lipton’s Shamrock II challenged Columbia again and lost all three races.

In 1903, his Shamrock III lost all three races against a new American yacht.

In 1920, Lipton’s Shamrock IV won twice before losing the final three races.

In 1930, Lipton’s Shamrock V lost every race against the U.S. contender.

Despite five successive defeats, the self-made multimillionaire from Glasgow was contemplating a sixth shortly before he died in 1931. Lipton, whose tea brand survives to this day, handled his defeats with grace, earning the admiration and sympathy of Americans — so much so that they raised a fund which gifted him a spectacular gold trophy by way of consolation.

Lipton never gave in to the temptation to bad-mouth hi…

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On June 19, 1924, a foursome of U.S. senators delayed their golf game on the fairway of the Chevy Chase Club outside Washington while one searched for a lost ball. The next group of players, led by Dr. James F. Mitchell, asked the senators if they could play through.

Senate minority leader Joseph T. Robinson objected. As an argument brewed, he punched the doctor in the “eye, knocking him backward over a bench,” the New York Times reported.

Robinson wasn’t hurt physically but the incident was something of a political black eye. The senator from Arkansas was angling for the Democratic presidential nomination that summer.

In July, the country club’s governors voted unanimously to expel Robinson, after he refused to apologize. Robinson had to wait four years to get onto his party’s national ticket: he ran as Al Smith’s running mate in 1928, another year of defeat for the Democrats.

The golf course confrontation enhanced Robinson’s reputation as a brawler and …

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When British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the U.S. in 1998 to meet with President Bill Clinton, his fellow Labour Party MP Gwyneth Dunwoody sensed an opportunity.

She called on the prime minister to demand the return to the U.K. of the stuffed animals that inspired the characters in Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne’s immortal children’s book. The author bought the bear from London’s Harrods department store as a first-birthday gift for his son, Christopher Robin, who would become the central human character in the stories.

Pooh and the others were then residing at the Donnell Library, part of the New York Public Library system. “I saw them recently and they look very unhappy indeed,” Dunwoody said. “I am not surprised, considering they have been incarcerated in a glass case in a foreign country for all these years.”

She compared the imprisoned Pooh and friends to the frieze from the Parthenon that Britons stubbornly retain despite requests from Greece for its return.

“Just like the Greek…

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On the last Saturday in April, 1979, President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter met in the Oval Office with one of the people who helped put them in the White House: pollster Patrick Caddell.

The 28-year-old former campaign aide had developed a back-channel connection to Rosalynn, who fretted about the president’s failing political fortunes. Her husband was at first reluctant to meet with Caddell, according to one of his former White House staffers, but on that day, “Jimmy Carter began to come under his spell.”

We know that because of former White House domestic adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat’s thousand-page memoir, President Carter: The White House Years. Eizenstat was not only a trusted aide to the president but also an industrious note-taker, who documented Carter’s single term in microscopic detail.

What happened after the Saturday Oval Office meeting was extraordinary.

As an oil shortage following Iran’s Islamic …

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Pope Gregory VII’s register for the year 1075 includes a set of 27 “dictates” that set out a sweeping view of papal authority.

Popes can depose emperors, the document asserted. They can free people from an obligation to follow immoral leaders. No one can judge a pope. His name must be recited in church. And the pope is the only figure whose feet must be kissed by kings.

Leave it to France’s Cardinal Richelieu, the minister to King Louis XIII, to come up with the appropriate riposte six centuries later. If the attribution to him is correct, the cardinal quipped, “We kiss the pope’s feet — and bind his hands.”

The struggle between popes and secular leaders for pre-eminence has been going on for a very long time. But it has been a while since it surfaced in as crude a form as it did, according to the Free Press, at a January Pentagon meeting attended by Pope Leo XIV’s U.S. representative. In the National Catholic Reporter, Aleja Hertzler-…

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At the age of 15, Hugo Grotius so impressed Henry IV, king of France, with his intelligence that the monarch declared him “the miracle of Holland.”

At 17, the budding Dutch legal scholar argued his first case. Soon he would be named Attorney-General of the provinces of Holland, Zealand and West Friesland. But Grotius chose the losing side in a 17th Century theological dispute that had explosive political ramifications.

That was why Prince Maurice of Nassau imprisoned Grotius, then in his mid-30s, for life at Loevestein castle. The inmate’s clever wife Maria gained permission to move into the castle. As the vigilance of the guards gradually waned, Maria saw an opportunity. She told the wife of the warden that Hugo was sick from overwork and vowed to …

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