U.S. Capitol Archives photo of the bronze of Marcus Whitman in Statuary Hall
The martyrdom of Marcus Whitman, like the nobility of the Lost Cause, was taught to American school children for a century. The thumbnail of the story: The doctor/preacher convinced a president to safeguard Oregon for the United States rather than Britain, then was murdered by Cayuse Indian savages, who massacred him, his wife Narcissa and 11 other souls in 1847.
Facts. The Whitmans were young Calvinist missionaries from New York’s “burnt-over district,” origin of America’s Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. In 1836 they joined fur traders on their spring trek over what became the Oregon Trail. Narcissa’s dispatches demonstrated to America that emigration to the West by wagon was possible for the fairer sex. In the wake of Andrew Jackson’s Panic of 1837 and growing competition from slave labor, White farmers were anxious to continue moving west.
The Cayuse, a tribe centered in the Walla Walla Valley of present-day Washington, gave the Whitmans land for a farm and mission and initially were curious about the preacher’s Calvinist ideas on heaven, hell and original sin. The Whitmans’ fellow travelers/proselytizers, Henry and Eliza Spalding, settled among the Nez Perce, along the Clearwater in present-day Idaho, across the Blue Mountains.
In the fall of 1842, Whitman left his wife (in the care of Hudson’s Bay Company factor John McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver, 250 miles down the Columbia) and crossed the continent. He stopped briefly in Washington before hurrying to Boston, there to convince the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had sponsored his faltering enterprise, to reverse its decision to cut off support. On his return in 1843, Whitman led a wagon train of emigrants from St. Louis to the Oregon Territory. By then, many Americans believed the fertile Willamette Valley (from which I buy most of my produce) was paradise. A growing stream of farmers made the trek. Their numbers helped convince the British that retaining claim to Oregon, jointly administered under an 1818 treaty, was impractical. In 1846 President James Polk and the crown peaceably settled the border at the 49th parallel.
The emigrants brought rounds of European diseases, especially measles, which killed perhaps 30 of 50 Cayuse in a nearby village in the fall of 1847. Dr. Whitman seemed able to cure White children, but the natives had no defense. Under Cayuse law, failed medicine men were executed, plus the Cayuse suspected Whitman was poisoning the victims. Whitman’s friends were expropriating Indian lands, and his brand of spirituality had long lost appeal. Tensions steadily rose on account of his operations and practices; Whitman never learned the native tongue, and the Whitmans ignored warnings to leave. On November 29, a band of Cayuse attacked the mission, at the time occupied by about 50 Oregon Trail emigrants, and killed the Whitmans.
After a kangaroo trial, five Cayuse were hanged in Oregon City in 1850. Rather than calm relations, the American system of justice whetted the emigrants’ appetite for slaughtering natives and stealing their land, abetted by the government’s custom of making treaties (in particular the Waiilatpu treaty of 1855) and then abrogating them.
Meanwhile Henry Spalding, not present at the massacre, invented a story about Whitman: His purpose in traveling east in 1842 had been to convince President John Tyler to obtain Oregon for the United States, and Whitman’s massacre was an element of a conspiracy between the Hudson’s Bay Company and Catholic priests to save the territory for Britain. (Never mind that the Hudson’s Bay Company had begun relocating to Vancouver Island in 1843 and in 1846 shuttered Fort Vancouver; Spalding’s hatred of Catholics fit the national mood.) Spalding refined his tale in succeeding decades. Picked up by The New York Times and others for whom the story served their own purposes, it became a chapter in history books and Manifest Destiny.
In Walla Walla, Stephen Penrose, president of Whitman College, knew the truth but exploited the myth’s fundraising potential. Locals saved the mission site, which in 1939 came under the National Park Service. In 1953 a bronze of Whitman was installed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol; college alumnus and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave the keynote, extolling the myth. The statue remains.
Whitman obelisk, atop a bluff on the grounds of the Whitman Mission Site in Walla Walla
Blaine Harden, a former Washington Post reporter and native of eastern Washington, performed in an elementary school play about the Whitman story. In his 2021 narrative, Murder at the Mission, Harden writes that the doctor/preacher “had appeared in an opera, poems, hymns, children’s books, radio plays, movies, and the stained-glass windows of churches from Spokane to Seattle.” The myth survived correction of the historic record, developed in the 1890s by Chicago educator William I. Marshall, who dug into the archives of the American Board in Boston and of newspapers in the Oregon Territory (where Spalding was universally regarded as a liar). Eventually Whitman College relegated its heroic statue of Marcus Whitman to an obscure corner of the campus.
My aim in a tour of the Whitman Mission National Historic Site was to see whether the National Park Service has caught up with the facts. It is a work in progress. The 25-minute docudrama, produced in 2015, corrects the record. But on the mile-plus walk around the grounds, narrative panels erected in the 1970s remain. They tell the story from the perspective of the Whitmans and White emigrants, in the style familiar to Park Service narratives from coast to coast: line drawings of people and places accompanied by text. One panel depicts the moment the Whitmans were killed: Marcus lies in a pool of his own blood as Narcissa, fatally shot, clutches her breast. “One tragic day changed everything.”
A laminated placard attached to each panel reads:
This panel includes one-sided representations of history and perpetuates harmful stereotypes. These depictions were wrong when created and are still wrong today. Truthfully telling this history requires the inclusion of multiple perspectives. We are updating these signs in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. How does learning a new perspective change how you view things?
We are in a moment that some of us, led by politicians like Ron DeSantis, would Whitewash our narratives. But history, like science, is a process of discovery.
We were not witnesses to the Whitman Mission. I appreciate the historical excavations that began 130 years ago, and the Cayuse and other tribes who contribute to my understanding of this nation’s founding. These narratives are there for anyone to consider—unless the Whitewashers succeed.
For example. A few miles from the mission site, on the grounds of the Walla Walla County Courthouse, a statue of Christopher Columbus is inscribed:
Italy’s illustrious son who gave to the world a continent. We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led the way to this new world as the most epoch making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.
So wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. (The Web says so, according to Freakonomics.) Also: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” a variation attributed to Mark Twain, who may have said it. In 1820, the Portland (Maine) Gazette published “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on.”
Which brings me to the season, following Oregon’s long legislative session, in which representatives extol triumphs on our behalf. Take Rep. Kevin Mannix (please), who wrote an op-ed in his hometown rag, Keizertimes, about the estate tax bill he fathered. Mannix claimed the bill would save family farms, which is how opponents of the estate tax have framed their campaign for decades.
I called the publisher, who printed my counterpoint in the next issue. Then Capital Press, one of a network of online and print papers throughout the state, published an editorial praising Mannix’s bill, which by then the governor had signed. I first saw it in the Bend Bulletin. The Capital Press managing editor returned my phone message. I told him that his reporter had written a decent he-said/she-said story on the bill but didn’t have a clue what was in it, because of course very few understand tax law, and in my experience young reporters haven’t learned how to ask questions. (I pause here for embarrassing memories of my own inexperience.) Within an hour of submission, my op-ed was online and scheduled for print.
I hope I don’t chase this one lie all summer. Text follows.
Estate tax law is a boon for billionaires
The July 20 editorial (“Death tax exemption will save Oregon farms”) continues the obfuscation of Rep. Kevin Mannix, whose original estate-tax bill had zero to do with “family farms” and in its final version has little relation to them.
Mannix and the Capital Press appear to share a cause: abolishing the estate tax, cleverly labeled the “death tax.” Of course, dead people don’t pay taxes, their heirs do. Only 4% of Oregonians who die each year have their estates taxed by the state. It is an American idea, in its present design created during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency: inhibit permanent aristocracies seeded by Gilded Age fortunes.
I’ve followed estate tax policy since 1997, when Congress created a benefit for family businesses for the same reason advocates claim for SB 498, the bill the governor just signed. Farmers have long been the poster child for the estate tax, which Congress has gutted since 2001. Because the estate exemption is now $26 million for married couples, less than 0.1% of estates pay any federal tax.
As the editorial concedes, Oregon farms, fisheries and forest businesses are protected by a 2007 state law: The “natural resources credit” allows an estate of up to $15 million to pass tax-free to children a portion of the estate represented by the natural resource business—if the business constitutes at least half the estate’s value. Its purpose is to ensure that family farms can be passed to the next generation untaxed, provided the children continue operations. Around 50 estates use the law annually; a handful of them exceed $5.5 million, according to the non-partisan Legislative Revenue Office (LRO).
Mannix originally proposed that anyone who bought $15 million in “natural resource” businesses late in life—Nike’s Phil Knight, for example—could pass it tax-free to an expanded set of heirs. The heirs would have no obligation to continue the business; they could sell it immediately and owe no estate tax. That’s not a heritage farm.
In the bill’s final version, the relatives would be required to maintain the business for five years. But one might ask: On what planet is $15 million a “small farm”? Reports LRO, the average natural resource business claiming the credit is worth less than $2 million. In 2020, only 2% of all estates had a value exceeding $10 million.
Advertised as a simplification of current law, SB 498 would instead create an alternative that would allow the children of billionaires tax-free inheritances. At an initial cost of $7.5 million a year, about one-fifth of the expenditure would benefit currently eligible claimants of the natural resource credit; the rest would go to estates now ineligible. Out of 45,000 deaths in Oregon annually, 170 estates could use it—less than 0.4%.
Advocates contend the current credit is cumbersome. But so is the alternative under SB 498, which is too weedy to detail in this space. Suffice to say it simplifies in some ways and complicates in others. That’s the nature of any law that bestows exceptions to tax rates: it’s complicated. Accountants will study the two regimes and decide which is of greater benefit to a client, thus increasing their billings. (Any small business that doesn’t have an estate planner is pound-foolish.)
Oregon has a zero-sum tax system: If one person’s taxes are cut, another person’s will increase, or the state will cut services to offset the revenue loss. Viewed alone, “The estate tax is unfair,” some say. Others reply, “The kids of billionaires ate from silver spoons—you would raise my taxes to coddle them?” The real question: Why did the Senate Finance Committee, which held six hearings on estate tax bills, devote so much energy to reducing the taxes of Oregon’s wealthiest children?
In my decades in D.C., I interviewed members of Congress daily as a reporter, met with staff and occasionally members as a lobbyist, and dug deep into policy as an analyst. As a citizen in Oregon, I do all three. When I started lobbying the legislature five summers ago, I compared the two venues to major and minor league baseball. The minors are more fun: beer is cheaper, seats closer, players less polished. An Oregon legislative session is about the length of a baseball season, and its rhythm is similar. There’s practice (reading and writing), and there’s performing (testifying and lobbying). On the last Sunday in June, it finally ended.
It is hyperbole for an interest group to claim it achieved a particular outcome. Many ingredients go into Salem Sausage over a six-month session. For my cadre of volunteers, Tax Fairness Oregon, I testified 20 times before committees and had scores of meetings with legislators and staff. TFO’s often-lonely critiques of bad bills (how we spent most of our time) perhaps gave a committee chair the backbone to say no to colleagues. I drove one bill from its introduction to the governor and watched helplessly as another bill I’d carried died.
TFO had four priorities in January, two of them concerning subsidies for business. One was to minimize the resurrection of a research and development tax credit; the other involved reforming the authority the legislature grants localities to reduce business property taxes in exchange for, you know, making money. For the other two priorities, the strategies were mine to devise and execute: “disconnect” from the 2017 federal Opportunity Zones provision, which gives investors and landowners tax benefits; and eliminate the tax credit auctions that fund a slice of Opportunity Grants for low-income college students.
How’d we do?
The business lobby promoted the R&D credit as critical to Oregon’s effort to attract semiconductor companies and to the national effort to rebuild domestic manufacturing. Never mind that legislators rushed through $210 million to persuade the Biden administration that it deserved a piece of the pie being dispensed to build chips. Also: Ignore administration guidance warning states that handouts to companies would not boost their applications for federal subsidies.
TFO bête noire Mark Meek, chair of Senate Finance
Early in the session, a former legislator who works with us, Phil Barnhart, told Senate Finance Committee Chair Mark Meek why the R&D credit had been allowed to sunset six years ago (it made no difference to the businesses that took it). I followed Barnhart, testifying to its ineffectiveness at the state and federal level. Demonstrating that TFO has no vote, the next day Meek championed a robust R&D in another committee stacked with industry supporters. It was an indication of how the session would go, as Meek, a freshman Democrat and the only challenger to unseat an incumbent in either chamber, smiled a lot while promoting Republican priorities.
After debate that ran through four committees until the last week of the session, the R&D credit, in HB 2009, is modest, and it will be available only for semiconductor research. Intel, the state’s biggest private employer, will spend on research whatever it would have spent on research. The provision is a waste, but considering the drumbeat to give away more, it could have been worse.
The Oregonian spent the past year documenting abuses of the Enterprise Zones program: secret deals between county governments and corporate beneficiaries and the absurdity of giving tax breaks for Amazon and UPS warehouses (which must be near their customers) and tech data-storage centers (which take advantage of cheap Columbia River power and water). Because of Oregon’s system of equalizing school funding across the state, rural counties can give away property tax revenue to businesses for up to 15 years, and the state school fund reimburses them. The localities are made whole, while the leak in statewide funding drains K-12 elsewhere. The education unions brought political heft to our critique, even as many lawmakers backed their counties and the businesses that suck at the government teat.
House Revenue Chair Nancy Nathanson and committee Republican Greg Smith devised reforms, many of them on lines we had proposed. One would have slashed a subsidy that goes almost entirely to wealthy Washington County to compensate it for huge tax breaks it gives to Intel, Nike and other big employers. The county reps in Salem defended it like Patrick Henry defended liberty; the payments survived unchanged.
All those issues were wrapped in one bill, bound for the governor. It eliminates some tax breaks and requires some of businesses to make up for taxes with fees for K-12. It requires measured public disclosure of pending tax abatements. Overall, it resolved a vociferous debate for another eight years.
My bitter loss was the legislature’s failure, as in 2020, to “disconnect” from Opportunity Zones. I had spent five months meeting with nearly every Democrat in the House and most in the Senate to gather support. I had talked with local officials and developers, gathering evidence that O Zones failed to do what supporters promised: create economic benefit in poor areas in return for tax benefits to rich investors. I testified on HB 3039 and went head to head with the business lobby, while allies from 2020 were mostly engaged elsewhere. I was giddy when the disconnect—effectively requiring investors to pay taxes on O Zone profits just like any other capital gains—was written into HB 2009 as introduced by Nathanson and Speaker Dan Rayfield. Their intention was that the investor class pony up a little for all the generosity otherwise bestowed. But in the backroom with Nathanson, Meek said no.
Downtown Portland from the Ritz-Carlton, financed by investors receiving tax benefits for projects in “distressed communities.” The condo/hotel/retail complex opens in August.
I had erred: I relied on earlier conversations with Meek. A real estate agent, he had opposed my bill in 2020, when he was in the House. This time he had told me he understood the federal provision was a waste. I was so focused on the House that I assumed Speaker Rayfield’s support would carry the day. Meek changed his mind.
Speaking of the rich, Meek held a half-dozen hearings on bills to reduce the estate tax. The worst of them was SB 498, which in its original version would open a loophole for hobby farmers—people who diversify their portfolios with “natural resource property” (a tax carveout for small farms, fisheries and timberlands)—to exclude part of their holdings from the estate tax. I testified twice as the bill went through multiple permutations. Meek worked with Republicans, settling on one that allows billionaires to exclude up to $15 million from the estate tax.
Pause here to note: On May 3 Senate Republicans had walked out of the session, protesting two bills that had passed the House, one dealing with abortion and transgender rights, the other gun control. Because the House and Senate require a two-thirds quorum to do business, and Republicans control more than a third, and the session constitutionally may last no longer than 160 consecutive days, the minority can run out the clock. It has used that leverage to force the majority to abandon bills for five consecutive sessions. But last fall, Oregon voters, by 68%, passed an initiative intended to curtail the weapon: It bars legislators from running for reeelection if they have 10 “unexcused” absences. Eleven of 13 Republican senators are so barred because of their walkout this year.
The two-thirds quorum does not apply to committees, which continued to meet with simple majorities. Often the two Republicans on the five-member Finance Committee continued to show, and Meek accommodated them. After six weeks, Senate Democrats cut a deal to get Republicans back on the floor. Among the rumored concessions: a vote on the estate tax bill.
When The Oregonian reported on the deal, it named the estate tax bill as an element—and misstated current law and SB 498. I emailed the reporter, warning him against buying the GOP’s unexamined claim that it would save family farms—which are protected under a 2007 law TFO helped fashion. A second story again got the facts wrong. With my colleagues, I spent a day in Salem during the final fortnight lobbying against the bill, with some effect. SB 498A split the Democratic caucuses: 9 of 17 senators and 20 of 34 representatives present—including Nathanson—voted against it on the floors. I drafted a memo to the governor asking her to veto it and rounded up more powerful opponents; the bill awaits her decision.
Frequent TFO ally Nancy Nathanson, chair of House Revenue
We had one unalloyed victory that would not have happened had I not identified it: a provision by which the state sells $14 million a year in tax credits, the proceeds of which fund Opportunity Grants, patterned after federal Pell Grants. I asked the Department of Revenue, which runs the annual auctions: who bought them? DOR interpreted the records as confidential taxpayer information. I asked for a second opinion; the attorney general agreed with me. The auctions have cost students $3.8 million in grants over the past four years, the money instead going to in-the-know taxpayers who bought the tax credits. It made no sense for the state to use a wasteful financing mechanism rather than appropriate all the money out of the budget like any other program.
Under current law, another round of auctions was scheduled for December. I sought amendment to a routine bill, SB 129, to end the auctions immediately, instead of extending them another six years. Over months, I reminded leaders of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee to increase funding to make up for the auctions. (It did, from $200 million to $300 million).
The amended bill unanimously passed two committees, in March and June. In the final week, the Senate approved it 25-0, the House 45-7. The seven nays came from Republicans. Perhaps US Bank whispered in their ears: it had profited $1.29 million over two years by buying tax credits.
Committees heard dozens of other bills on which we spoke. Most of the time we said: This is dumb, and it died or was amended. Occasionally we said: Sounds okay, and it passed. Sometimes we said: This is outrageous, and it was sent to the governor. But our points were acknowledged.
As when I opposed motherhood and apple pie in a Senate Finance hearing on SB 540. The bill would exempt $17,500 in military pensions from income tax for individuals younger than 63. Advocates said the bill, which would cut taxes by up to $1700 ($17,500 multiplied by the top marginal income tax rate), would spur new retirees with in-demand skills to move to Oregon. I testified: For those already living here, isn’t it just a gift? Who’s going to disrupt their family and move to Oregon for an obscure tax benefit worth maybe $1700? What revenue would then pay for the services those residents require?
It’s dangerous to cross words with patriots. Upon finishing our testimony, Chair Meek contended that a room full of veterans “would be very insulted by what you just said.” I chuckled, familiar with being a witness hostile to the gravy train.
Meek’s committee sat on the bill for three months, then as a performative gesture passed it three days before sine die. The next day, I wrote the Ways and Means Committee, which had just appropriated $220,000 to study veterans retirement taxation: Shouldn’t the left hand know what the right hand is doing? Meek’s gift to veterans died.
The image, from an Oregon Legislature committee hearing, represents what I’m thinking most times I testify about some poorly designed bill that would give away taxpayers money. Generally I try to look more dignified.
Actually, last week I testified in favor of THREE bills that would save taxpayers’ money, and the image is from one of them, explained below. Three strikes! It may never happen again.
My cadre of dedicated volunteers in Tax Fairness Oregon picks two or four ideas each session we want turned into law. We have no bandwidth for more, because we spend so much of our energy testifying against stupidity—bills that raid the state treasury for dubious purposes, or perhaps for good purposes but via bad mechanisms. I’ve spoken against a dozen this session.
For example, the House and Senate tax committees, where we focus our attention, have held three hearings on bills that would raise the exemption for the estate tax. Currently $1 million, that’s a million tax-free for people who won the birth lottery and stand to inherit assets from their parents (or others who took a shine to them), paid for by the rest of us, most of whom will never know anything like a million dollars no matter how many Powerball tickets we buy. It’s a perennial issue. Generally we get one courtesy hearing in each Democratic-controlled committee, but this year a new Senate chair has scheduled a fourth hearing. Like the others, the bill up this week would foist the cost onto the general treasury.
Last week I testified against two other bills that would give away our money; both would exempt from tax part or all the pensions of military retirees. Advocates said enactment would encourage said retirees, most of whom might be 40 years old and have admirable job skills, to move to Oregon. I did the math (we always do the math) and opined that $1500 or $3000 a year in tax savings would hardly inspire anyone to pull up stakes. Legislators have the prerogative to do what they want, I said, but they ought to be clear why they’re doing it. If it’s to be nice to vets, then what about retired cops, or teachers? Their pensions are taxed. Same rookie Senate chair responded: “If we had a room full of veterans here, they would be very offended by what you said.” No doubt, I thought but didn’t say. Most of the time I speak, the rest of the room is begging you to open our wallets.
But I digress. This post is about good news.
Opportunity Zones
Two of the three bills I advocated are more or less my creation. On one, I was the lead guy, back in 2020, in a coalition that convinced the chair of the House tax committee to champion our idea: impose state income tax on profits from Opportunity Zone investments, the 2017 provision Congress designed to benefit millionaire investors by giving them several kinds of tax breaks for mostly real estate projects in low-income areas. The 2020 bill died. First, pseudo-Democrats who think trickle-down economics works demanded the bill be diluted. Then, on the day it was scheduled for a floor vote, minority Republicans walked out, denying the two-thirds quorum to conduct business, and they never returned. The session ended weeks early.
After the Covid pause in 2021 and 2022, I got another legislator to introduce the same bill, and I’ve been lobbying legislators for three months, largely by myself. Our coalition partners are for it, as they were three years ago, but they have higher priorities this session.
Anyway, the committee chair—our sponsor in 2020—held a hearing last week. It drew little attention. Only the state’s top business lobbyist and I testified. The lobbyist offered belief, as in: “We believe that the bill would disincentivize Opportunity Zone investments in Oregon.” In my 11-minute presentation (starting at 8:30 of this video stream), I offered evidence: the statement of an Oregon developer who is building an office/retail/restaurant/residential complex in a poor Portland suburb; he said O Zone enticements don’t work in target neighborhoods because their returns are too low compared to high-profile projects like the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel/retail/condo that will open downtown in a few months. Because most O Zone investments are out of state, and because Oregon can’t tax non-residents who invest in Oregon O Zones, the bill would have a vanishingly small effect on Oregon investors’ calculations or on O Zone projects in state.
My opposition among Democrats runs like that of a veteran legislator who told me: “Don’t tell me this is a bad tire, tell me about a good one.” I don’t think it’s my job to educate you about other economic incentives that give you something to support. I’m simply telling you this one doesn’t work. And I keep making the rounds.
Opportunity Grants
The other bill was the subject of the hearing from the image. (I noted it in my last post.) The bill would increase funding for grants to low-income college students for exactly the same cost to the state. Magic!
For five years, the state has financed a sliver of $200 million in Opportunity Grants funding through auctions of tax credits. The people who buy the tax credits at a discount take some of the money that would go to students. It’s the dumbest tax provision I’ve encountered in five years of reading the Oregon tax code. My proposal is to switch the funding from tax credit auctions to the regular appropriations process, which would provide grants to an additional 300 students a year. Not a big deal. Unless you’re one of those students.
That bill has a smoother path. Last month, I got one committee to amend it how I wanted it, ending the auctions earlier than under current law, and then pass it, unanimously. The second committee held a hearing on it Friday; after a vote it would head to both floors and then the governor’s desk, knock on wood. I’ll keep working it, too.
This is Dylan and Nick, students at Oregon State and Oregon. We had just testified in the Capitol on a bill that, as I recommended be amended, is the next step in securing more efficient funding for the state version of Pell Grants. I estimate our chance of passage of my proposal—one I began developing a year ago—at 80%. (It is really hard to pass a bill.)
I had testified before three other committees earlier in the day, each of them considering bills that would make things better or worse for the state’s residents. It was the most satisfying workday I’ve had in my formerly paid profession in 29 years, since I was an aide in Congress.
My first hearing of the day was supposed to consider an amendment that the committee chair had directed be drafted per my suggestions in a hearing two weeks ago. The bill would hand out $1,000 to every qualifying volunteer firefighter (Oregon has about 8,000), ostensibly to aid recruitment and retention. The problem is that a few counties—the legislature hasn’t asked for a list, so we don’t know which counties—lack the money to pay for training and equipment, so their volunteers are expected to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for serving their fellow citizens.
The counties lack the money because of decisions the legislature and the voters have made over the past 30 years to slash taxes that fund local governments. Property taxes are essentially frozen (plus a 3% annual increase) because of a voter initiative in the 1990s. The legislature has eliminated most taxes timber companies used to pay, reasoning that growing trees is just like growing strawberries; we don’t tax strawberries, so we shouldn’t tax timber harvests. (Which allows forest owners, most of which are corporations, to treat their property as an asset of no value other than fruit.) And Oregon has no sales tax, a prime local revenue source in many states.
I wouldn’t expect any legislator to take on Oregon’s disastrous tax code. But just one might search for a solution to the firefighter shortage rather than issue press releases. Instead, legislators propose handouts for shortages of all kinds of workers, especially in the rural areas where voters routinely reject local tax initiatives. Every session, my colleagues in Tax Fairness Oregon, the 20-year-old group of volunteers who read every bill looking for tax giveaways, testify against handouts that don’t work.
When I arrived, the chair said he would not take up my amendment to jigger with the handout because the sponsor refused it. But he allowed me to testify. I told the committee, whose jurisdiction includes emergency response, that it lacked the information needed to devise an effective solution to the problem the bill pretends to address: Which counties don’t pay for firefighter training? The committee will refer the unchanged bill to another committee, and I’ll repeat the argument.
Next I testified on a bill that would raise the exemption for the state estate tax. It was the second time in two weeks I had testified on a bill to give heirs tax-free inheritances:
“Some 15 estate tax bills have been introduced this year. Their sponsors attend to those who won the birth lottery and stand to inherit more than $1 million [the current estate tax exemption]. If we housed our citizens, paid our teachers appropriately, supported our police forces adequately, had a mental health service system not ranked 50th among the states, subsidized colleges the way we did 40 years ago so that graduates didn’t carry crushing debt burdens, and provided a functioning criminal justice system with constitutionally required public defense attorneys, we might relate to their concern. But compared to any other crying need in our society, these bills don’t rank.”
Next, a bill to provide grants to rural newspapers in information deserts. For an hour witnesses told the committee that without informed citizens, democracy dies. A high school student said he loved journalism because growing up in rural Oregon, he hadn’t been allowed to watch the news or read the newspaper. I was there to testify against another part of the bill that would give tax credits to publishers of non-profit community newspapers—because the provision wouldn’t work. But the sponsor announced that provision would be struck, so I limited my remarks to my story: I have always been a reporter; my first job after college was working at a community paper in rural Virginia; a decade later I began the transition to tax policy analysis—a job I’m still doing, as a volunteer, three decades later. Here I was speaking about a bill to support that kind of newspaper because of my expertise in tax.
In between, I continued meeting with legislators to build support for a bill saving the state $25 million a year by disconnecting from the most outrageous federal tax giveaway ever (“Opportunity Zones”).
The college grants bill would extend a law under which sophisticated taxpayers can buy, at a discount, the tax credits that fund the grants. The auction proceeds go to the grants fund; the discount goes into the pockets of the tax-credit buyers. In this way, the buyers have siphoned $3.7 million from students over four years. My proposal, which I’ve been explaining to the chairs of the six committees involved, would kill the auctions and fund the grants in the traditional way, through appropriations, which already provide 85% of the money. The chairs appear to be on board. (“This is dumb,” said the chair at the top of the hierarchy.)
If students can get a few more grants every year (actually several hundred) for the same money because I spent weeks getting legislators to join hands, that alone will have been worth my last five winters working the building.
Matt Gaetz visits Democrats on the House floor before day three of the speaker stalemate
The House Republicans’ conundrum won’t end with the selection of a speaker, whether Kevin McCarthy or someone else. Their problem is fundamental to their narrow majority, and its origin dates back more than 30 years.
I became a professional congressional observer in 1986. Weeks into starting as a reporter in the Capitol, in 1989, I sat in the press gallery as the ceiling lights intensified above Speaker Jim Wright, who rose in the well to defend himself over ethics missteps that today would seem quaint. Charges centered around possibly improper gifts Wright had received from a Fort Worth developer and profits from a vanity book of speeches that allegedly were sold in bulk in lieu of speaking fees, which the House had recently banned. Democrats held a 73-seat margin, but they forced Wright out.
Backbencher Newt Gingrich, elevated two months before to party whip, had instigated Wright’s downfall. His theatrics during “special orders,” when any member could get on C-SPAN after the day’s floor business, had drawn the condemnation of Wright’s predecessor, Tip O’Neill—and built his profile. Sixteen months after Wright resigned, Gingrich led a revolt against a budget deal negotiated by George H.W. Bush’s aides with the bipartisan, bicameral leadership, which had joined hands to raise taxes, cut expenditures and impose fiscal discipline. Gingrich’s fringe revolt forced the leadership to go left for liberal votes in reaching a second compromise, which Bush signed. The House GOP’s mutiny contributed to Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.
After GOP leader Bob Michael announced his retirement in 1994, Gingrich became heir apparent and succeeded to the speaker’s chair in 1995, when Republicans took both chambers for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. His style—all opponents were corrupt—set the tone for the next two years, and his hubris led to government shutdowns that helped doom Bob Dole’s 1996 challenge to Clinton. (Voters have consistently blamed Republicans for shutdowns, but Donald Trump embraced the tactic, becoming the first president to close the government over spending battles.)
Gingrich, whom his caucus overthrew after the Clinton impeachment boomeranged against the GOP in the 1998 elections, was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, who enshrined a practice that on major issues, no bill would go to the House floor without majority Republican support. Compromise with the minority was out.
The next stage in where we are now was the 2003 redistricting of the Texas delegation engineered by Tom DeLay. The House Republican whip got the GOP five more seats mid-decade (and in the process was convicted of laundering corporate campaign contributions, a conviction overturned on appeal). That presaged the gerrymandering roadmap that followed 2010 state legislative elections, in which the GOP turned what had been an art into a science.
After the Supreme Court opined in 2019 that it had no role in defending democratic representation from the legislative partisans who drew district lines to maximize majority-party advantage, the Republican Party arrived at the logical conclusion. It cannot expect to increase its majority beyond what we see today: four seats, thanks to extreme gerrymandering in Texas, Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin (offset to a tiny proportion by Democrats in Illinois).
Thus we have a House of Representatives that is broadly reflective of the electorate—Republicans won a slim majority of votes in November nationwide—but many districts are represented by extremists who cannot compromise, because compromise would cost them in their primary contests.
In his floor speech defending himself, Jim Wright accused his colleagues of “mindless cannibalism,” a note of self-pity following a unanimous ethics committee report on his malfeasance. Three decades later, Republicans have dethroned three of their own speakers (Gingrich, John Boehner, Paul Ryan) and balked at handing the mace to a fourth.
But when this act is over, the anti-McCarthy faction will find it hard to impose its will. Some members demand a return to “regular order,” allowing amendments to bills on the floor. The faction complains about gargantuan spending bills, which leaders assemble because separate bills addressing sets of government agencies can’t get the votes to pass. For example, a top item for the radicals: retracting the hiring, authorized in 2022, of tens of thousands of IRS agents to audit the rich—and answer taxpayer calls. But most Americans want someone to pick up the phone when they call their government.
The solution, since the Supreme Court is unmoved, is for the parties to recognize that gerrymandering destroys effective government. Voters and courts in California, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Virginia and elsewhere have agreed. But because the GOP base believes that effective government is an enemy as much as the other party, I’m not holding my breath.
Headquarters, Malheur National Willdlife Refuge, Harney CountyO
Oregon’s polarized election results reflected those of other states but with the twists that typify the state’s distinctions, seen in four ballot questions as well as contests for office. From them I infer our political values and democratic health: we are split.
As a history student, I was most interested in a question the legislature referred to voters: “Amends Constitution: Removes language allowing slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.” Sitting at my dining table with a two-page ballot and the state’s book-length voters guide, I blackened the yes oval and moved on. But when the results came in, I thought: Where did this clause, similar to the Thirteenth Amendment, come from?
Ratified in 1865, it reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The language of the amendment—and of Oregon’s 1857 territorial constitution—originated in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, under which the Confederation Congress set rules for the admission of what became the five Great Lakes States. (The anti-slavery provision was proposed by Thomas Jefferson in the 1784 version of the Ordinance,[*] but the Congress removed it.) After Congress inserted the language into the Thirteenth Amendment, the former slave states found their loophole to rebuild their Peculiar Institution in another form: “involuntary servitude” as punishment for a growing list of crimes. Most of the nation has followed the model since.
A national campaign seeks to eliminate that loophole from the constitutions of 25 states. Colorado acted first, in 2018, when 66% of voters approved the clause: “There shall never be in this state either slavery or involuntary servitude.” Nebraska (68%) and Utah (80%) followed in 2020.
This year Vermont (89%) and Tennessee (80%) were decisive. In Alabama, 77% approved “no form of slavery shall exist in this state; and there shall not be any involuntary servitude” buried in a constitutional rewrite. Louisiana’s legislature watered down a similar proposal by making clear that “involuntary servitude” in its prison system was A-OK, and the original sponsors urged voters to reject it. They did.
In Oregon, the reform passed with 55%.
No campaign opposed the amendment, though the Oregon Sheriffs Association submitted a statement against it in the voters guide. “Oregon Sheriffs do not condone or support slavery and/or involuntary servitude in any form,” but the measure “creates unintended consequences for Oregon Jails that will result in the elimination of all reformative programs and increased costs to local jail operations.” The full statement, 300 words, contends that passage would invalidate prison work programs—an interpretation at odds with the legislative resolution (sponsored only by Democrats, opposed by 11 of 33 Republicans) that referred the question to the ballot. Lawyers suggest that requiring inmates to work for no pay may violate the prohibition of involuntary servitude, but little case law has developed.
Why was the margin so thin? Oregon barred slavery from its founding. Its White fathers, predominantly from border states, also forbade Black people, slave or free, to settle here. I have written of Oregon’s particular racism, which remains evident in myriad ways. Did opponents object to the removal of the slavery language, or to unpaid labor? Was it tied to “wokeness”? Did GOP legislators signal opposition? Or did some voters simply align the question with Portland liberals and a legislature they feel antagonizes them?
My table shows results for governor and the ballot questions in its 36 counties. (For governor, I calculated the voting shares of only Democrat Tina Kotek and Republican Christine Drazan, omitting counts for other candidates, including Betsy Johnson, a conservative former Democratic senator who ran as an independent and received 8.6%.) As in other states, differences between urban and rural were stark. The slavery question followed the vote for governor: Urban majorities voted overwhelmingly for Kotek and for “abolition.”
Ditto a petition initiative enacting a firearm permit process and outlawing magazines of more than 10 bullets, now among the strictest gun laws in the country. It passed with 50.7% statewide but was rejected by majorities in 30 counties. Several sheriffs have proclaimed that they won’t enforce it, the latest episode in a nationwide movement among elected sheriffs who assert they are judges as well as executives. (The law, effective 30 days after the election, is the subject of a challenge in federal court).
My pie chart illustrates that four counties account for 52% of the vote. Kotek drew 64% from those four. Twenty-five counties combined have less than the population of Multnomah (Portland). Fifteen have fewer than 15 people per square mile. The urban voters of metro Portland across three counties—plus fast-growing Bend, the university towns of Eugene and Corvallis and the resort communities in Lincoln and Hood River counties—comprise a solid if narrow Democratic majority.
Another perspective: The second congressional district, encompassing nearly three quarters of the state’s 96,000 square miles, has one-sixth of the population—about 706,000 people. By contrast, Multnomah, with 413 square miles, has 820,000.
The second district’s estrangement from the Capitol in Salem has taken flight with a two-year-old campaign to secede from Oregon, the project of Mike McCarter and his “Citizens for Greater Idaho.” Majorities in 11 counties east of the Cascades (5% of the state’s population) have approved ballot measures calling on county commissions to talk about it (execution would require approval of the two state legislatures and Congress). Two counties did so in November. Three have rejected versions of the question—Douglas and Josephine in southwest and Wallowa in the northeast corner. A second try in Wallowa this year failed to gather required petition signatures.
Congressional districts after the 2020 census. Source: Legislative Policy and Research Office
Counter to the narrative, majorities in 34 counties, representing 99.75% of all voters, approved a constitutional amendment that disqualifies a legislator from running for reelection upon 10 “unexcused absences.” Organizers of the initiative were prompted by GOP walkouts that truncated legislative sessions three of the past four years; the quorum is two-thirds, rather than the simple majority almost everywhere else at every level of government. (Proponents opted against changing the quorum to simple majority—it didn’t poll well—but tossing legislators who don’t show up for work did.)
The fourth ballot proposal, referred by the legislature, adds to the constitution a directive that the state ensure access to “cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care as a right.” As I also favor motherhood and apple pie, I voted yes, as did 50.7% of my fellow citizens. Results matched those of the gun measure by virtually the same margins in the same counties.
For all four questions and the vote for governor, support correlated with population density. Harney is Oregon’s largest and least dense county. Voter support of all measures ranked near the bottom. A year ago its voters passed the Idaho initiative, 1,567 to 917. They don’t like much that’s happening in state government.
Oregon has had its civil conflicts. Harney encompasses the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where separatists (White Nationalists? Right-wing terrorists?) occupied its headquarters complex in 2016 (only one of those indicted on federal conspiracy charges was a state resident). Proud Boys, many from Clackamas (and Washington State) made Portland a target of violence during the Trump presidency, and his administration deployed militarized federal agents to Portland against the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protestors. The second district’s one-term representative, a mild-mannered lawyer with 12 years in the legislature, voted with the GOP’s election-denial caucus hours after rioters shit on the floor of the House. Cliff Bentz told his hometown newspaper, “I wanted people to understand they were being heard. These people are so angry about being left out.”
Its national reputation to the contrary, Oregon is not terribly liberal. Despite Democrats’ best efforts to gerrymander after the census, they will hold 58% of the seats in the 60-member House and 57% in the 30-member Senate—a working majority but short of the three-fifth margin required to raise taxes, much less the two-thirds quorum to stay in session. (I doubt the prospect of being disqualified from a $33,000/year job will affect the minority’s calculations on critical issues.) Democrats were greedy in redistricting the House of Representatives and ended up biting their nails over two seats and losing one, leaving their margin at 4-2, which is where they would have been with a fairer process.
On questions of values, which is what we call on government to answer, it’s unrealistic to expect a majority to moderate because a minority see issues through a mirror. Health care should be a right, and guns should be controlled, say a bare majority. (When I am awakened by gunfire across my street on Thanksgiving night, I want government to act.) Voting is how we answer divisive questions. Now and then, a minority takes up arms (see Nathaniel Bacon, Daniel Shays, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Confederacy).
Last year the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center polled Oregonians on the Idaho movement. By 43% to 34%, respondents thought the outcome would be negative for seceding counties (23% had no view). Two-thirds said secession was unlikely. Not surprisingly, a plurality of rural voters said counties should be able to secede (44% to 40%), and three in four Republicans agreed. A slightly narrower ratio of Democrats said the opposite.
My analysis focuses on urban/rural, using counties as the measure. But counties are arbitrary administrative units of the state. I could parse something else, such as educational attainment. Census data finds that in the first and third congressional districts, in which Portland predominates, 45% of residents have college degrees. In the second, 29%. The results at the ballot box, reflecting recent political realignment, are similar. Or view by party registration: Democrats 34%, Republicans 24%, unaffiliated/other 35%. Democrats have an edge, but only that.
As speaker of the Oregon House, Tina Kotek ruled with an iron hand. As governor by 3.5 percentage points, she has her political task cut out for her.
Downtown Portland, 50 miles from Mt. Hood
[*] Jefferson chaired a committee that proposed conditions for governments formed out of the Northwest Territory (west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi rivers), among them: “That after the year 1800 of the Christian æra, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty.” The clause was removed in deliberations of the Confederation Congress.
Illustration of the Ritz Carlton “Owners Lounge” on the eighth floor
The other day I took a tour of Portland’s Ritz Carlton, the 35-story, five-star hotel and condo to be completed next spring. The condo units, on the upper floors, are selling from $1.3 million for one-bedrooms to $10 million for penthouses. How my friend got on the invite list, she doesn’t know, but she invited me along.
Marketing, our hosts said, is aimed at aging boomers who want to add a downtown residence to their places to hang, hotel accommodations they own rather than rent. (The condo fee is $1-1.10 per foot—say $2500 for a 2400-square-foot two bedroom.) The other market is DINKs (double-income-no-kids) who want a little flash and a lot of amenities. As a sales “ambassador” told us, “people who’ve made it and want to show it.” Sixteen of 138 units have sold.
I’ve been following the Ritz story for three years (and wrote about it then), because its owners are beneficiaries of the signature accomplishment of the GOP Congress during Donald Trump’s first two years. While researching testimony I gave to the Oregon legislature in 2020, I obtained an investment prospectus.
The 2017 “Trump tax bill” featured a provision known as “Opportunity Zones,” the latest iteration of a 30-year-old idea that emerged during the Bush pere administration (which I covered as a tax policy reporter). The idea was that, given sufficient tax incentives, wealthy investors would erase poverty by lifting downtrodden areas with new developments. The reality was something different, as the right-wing Heritage Foundation found in a 2019 study:
“Academic and government studies consistently show place-based development programs fail to increase employment, raise wages, or advance general economic opportunity for targeted residents because they have not addressed the main causes of poverty.”
Yeah, well, alleviating poverty was the pitch, but that’s not what Opportunity Zones are about. They’re about giving the rich tax-free investments. They do so through “Opportunity Funds,” whose managers scour the nation’s 8700 “Opportunity Zones,” census tracts so designated because they met certain poverty criteria. Investors can sell assets, put the money in these funds and delay paying discounted capital gain tax on their old investments for years, then pay nothing on gains from the new investments if held 10 years.
Thus, only rich people can play. Minimum investment is typically six figures.
These new investments work only if the 10-year after-tax returns are greater than investments that don’t have the tax advantages. So investors are drawn only to sure-win projects in downtowns where land is tight. Portland (at least before the pandemic) was such a place. Opportunity Funds invested in New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, L.A., Seattle—you get the idea (research shows that’s where the money has gone). Places that were expensive and guaranteed to get more so, with returns better than the typical 10-12% appreciation of other real estate assets.
Winners and losers
If you owned chunks of land in these and other cities, Opportunity Fund managers came calling. That’s what happened in Portland, where a family real estate business, Downtown Development Group, owns many tracts. One of them was “Block 216,” otherwise vacant land leased to about 50 food carts, small businesses that are incubators for the city’s riotously creative food scene.
In this case, the Ritz project was organized in 2016. Because Congress attached few rules, and because the Trump Treasury Department was run by rent-seekers looking to increase wealth for themselves and associates rather than prevent abuse, the Ritz project was able to reorganize into a new entity in 2019 so that investors could take advantage of the tax benefits.
Who won? The Goodmans, who own the land, which suddenly was of greater value than it had been before Congress bestowed tax benefits; the investors, who stood to receive those tax benefits; and the fund managers, who took their piece.
Who lost? The food cart owners, employees, and customers. Also other renters—business owners and residents—who will find themselves priced out of a more expensive downtown because Congress gave the land greater value.
This is Portland’s trade: out go quirky, bar-going, cart-patronizing lower-rent folk; in come millionaires who don’t have to leave the premises for anything. The Ritz will have an eighth-floor deck, an “owners lounge” where you can gather with your neighbors to make business deals (this was part of the pitch). You can walk your lap dog there and never have to hit the street. Similar projects are on the way.
Opportunity Zones are set to expire at the end of 2026, meaning new investors have until then to take advantage of their tax benefits. Expect an extension to be part of some must-pass legislative vehicle if Republicans retake Congress.
To complement the narratives I posted here over the fall, I selected 63 shots from my drive east from Portland to Independence, Missouri, sometimes more and other times less following the Oregon Trail, in reverse. The Trail, which branched into routes to California and Salt Lake, was the passageway for hundreds of thousands of Americans to settle the West beginning in the late 1830s. An exploration of some of its well documented segments was the first section of my 56-day transcontinental drive.
I’ve used Flickr for years. It’s not terribly intuitive. To see the pics, you have to click on the image of the Gorge, which opens the Flickr page. To see the captions, you have to scroll below each pic. But Flickr includes all the data from the photos, including a mapped location.
On a sunny afternoon in November, I walked up to the Lincoln Memorial and felt a lump rise in my throat, as it has on this transcontinental trek in other places that represent human triumph and suffering: South Pass in Wyoming, where the Oregon Trail overlanders crossed the Rockies; Monroe Elementary in Topeka, from which sprang Brown v. Board; the plain below Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, site of Pickett’s Charge. Reading the Second Inaugural (for the hundredth time) and turning to look at the Washington Monument, my eyes welled. This is my sacred temple, my favorite public site in the world, one that leaves me awed in contemplation of the purpose of life, the wonder of creation and the demands of Shiva.
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Three days later I stood at the Jefferson Memorial. It is a beautiful structure that makes me smile. Jefferson’s words are similarly inscribed on its walls. Among them:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Jefferson addresses my intellect, a step removed from experience. But Lincoln touches my heart because his words are imbued with suffering.
From these quotations, I began to form an essay on my visits to these two presidents’ homes. On my way east from Portland, I had spent a day walking around Springfield, Illinois. After Washington I was headed to the University of Virginia, where I had learned to write first drafts at The Cavalier Daily and craft second drafts through the history department. Following a newspaper staff reunion, I would spend a day at Monticello, and then think of a third president’s home.
Jefferson’s Monticello and ‘Academical Village‘
The morning after arriving in Charlottesville, I accompanied Sheryl, my college friend of more than four decades, on a walk around the Grounds. First stop was the Memorial to Enslaved People, the 4,000 or so who built and maintained Jefferson’s “Academical Village” from 1817 to 1865. After a decade of student agitation, research, planning and fundraising, the memorial was dedicated in April. It sits between the Rotunda and the Corner, the commercial strip adjacent to the Grounds, and so it is an unavoidable site for any student or visitor. Constructed in the shape of an open shackle, the memorial includes a timeline and the names of those enslaved.
Slave quarters under Pavilion III
When we walked into the Rotunda, a guide introduced herself and led us on a 90-minute tour of unearthed facts about the university’s embrace of slavery. (The tour is part of freshman orientation.) Ahana, a first-generation Indian-American born in Manhattan, took us to a garden behind one of the 10 pavilions that face the Lawn. A thousand times had I walked through the archways connecting the Lawn and the gardens and never imagined that slaves lived in the basements of the pavilions, the homes of the professors. In Jefferson’s majestic design, an observer on the Lawn is unaware the pavilions even have basements.
Jefferson similarly designed Monticello: A visitor would have to go looking for the slave quarters and workshops in subterranean wings off the mansion. Out of sight, out of mind.
Slavery was largely out of mind until my last tour of Monticello in 2005. It was completely out of mind when I was a student in the late 1970s. Fawn Brodie had published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History in 1974, the first modern account of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. Around the history department, the vibe was still aligned with resident professor emeritus Dumas Malone’s largely hagiographic biography of Jefferson, the fifth volume of which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. White people would learn later that Jefferson’s rape of Hemings was common knowledge in the Charlottesville neighborhoods where their descendants lived.
The Monticello narrative has shifted so much since the Thomas Jefferson Foundation launched its oral history project in 1993 that I hardly recognized the place. From the get-go, tour guides provide a nuanced portrait of the slave-owning drafter of the self-evident truths that has long been available in written studies but not so much at his plantation. Guides on the house tour sketch the Hemings family, including the six children born into slavery fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha Wayles; Martha’s father, John Wayles, fathered six children borne by Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings; Sally was her youngest.
Mulberry Row tour guide Justin
On the hour-long tour of Mulberry Row, the center of Big House life and industry for enslaved and paid labor, our guide Justin explained how the chattel system in America developed after 30 enslaved Africans were dropped off in Jamestown in 1619. I did not expect he would articulate the purposes of the slave code Virginia enacted in 1662. It designated slavery as hereditary through one’s mother—a break from England and the colonies, where one’s status was determined by the father. The system, Justin explained, was designed to drive a wedge between the interests of enslaved Blacks and White peasants for the benefit of the elite.
I almost blurted to my fellow tourists: And nothing has changed. The aristocracy is still using race to divide the working class.
I advance it, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
How else to square slavery with the self-evident truths?
. . . . aristocrats (the great planters), half-breeds (yeomen who had married into aristocratic families), pretenders (men of wealth not belonging to established families), a solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not venturing to join them, and last and lowest, a seculum of beings, the overseers.
A final anecdote from Justin’s tour: When Jefferson’s paid White craftsmen wrote to warn him that the overseer of his nail factory was drinking his wine, stealing his stores and savagely beating his slaves, Jefferson conceded that the man was harsh, but that he could not imagine an overseer who could better serve his purposes.
Having experienced the Reeducation of Monticello, I thought: What of the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home near Nashville? I had never been there, but had it updated its presumably hagiographic narrative?
The Hermitage
Full disclosure: To me Jackson is a villain. He inherited Jefferson’s moribund faction and built it into the Democratic Party, which asserted White Supremacy until Franklin Roosevelt began the long peeling away. At a formative period of our development, he helped extinguish the Era of Good Feelings; displaced Indians and ignored the Supreme Court’s decision to stop doing so (“Let him enforce it”); solidified slavery as a proper relationship between Black and White after post-revolutionary ambivalence; and destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, which led to the Panic of 1837 (and propelled emigration over the Oregon Trail).
Lining the entrance to the Hermitage visitor center hang banners with handsome portraits of Jackson and underneath: “Statesman,” “Legend,” “Hero.” Uh oh. How about the museum present its narrative and leave the judgment to us? I was not encouraged by the stacks of books on a forward table: Jon Meacham’s biography, American Lion, and A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror. A few other biographies and texts on the Indians’ narrative lined the thinly stocked shelves in the rear, but Jackson as “the people’s president” is the museum’s message.
The 17-minute film was frustrating. Meacham, the journalist who writes popular narratives, and several historians offer assertions and place Jackson in his context, but no one articulates why he’s critical to our history. I wondered how I would compose an alternative.
The biographical presentation in the museum is cursory: highlights from birth through the Battle of New Orleans. There are prominent photographs and accompanying narratives of his most trusted enslaved people. The room about his presidency is closed because of Covid-related staffing shortages, perhaps because this is Tennessee, whose governor has followed the DeSantis model of prevention.
Things looked up when our “VIP” tour guide showed up. Tony, the staff preservationist, started as a tour guide; now 50, he’s had one employer in his adult life. Out on the front balcony an hour into our walk, Tony paused in describing the house and its artifacts to urge us to read. He observed that historiography changes over time, and he summarized 27-year-old Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Pulitzer-winning Age of Jackson (1946) in the context of the Cold War: Jackson as a democrat who took power from the elite that had presided over the government from its founding, and who thought the Second Bank of the United States put too much power in a central, corrupt authority. Jackson imbued the presidency with power to set policy that Madison had not contemplated. He vetoed more bills (12) than all his predecessors combined, and he drove Congress to his will by claiming an electoral mandate.
The two knocks against Jackson in our time, Tony said, were his advocacy of slavery and prosecution of various wars against Indians and their removal by civilian authorities throughout his administration. But the 1838 Trail of Tears—the military’s forced march of the Cherokees—occurred under “another administration.” That would be his second vice president and successor, Martin Van Buren, who in my view was the architect of Jackson’s divide-and-conquer control of Congress.
Part of the 1804 Hermitage, later slave quarters
Tony’s house tour and the grounds’ display panels were extensive in their interpretation of a slave plantation. Jackson followed the South’s boom-and-bust economic model: In flush years, buy more land and slaves; in downturns, accumulate debt. Jackson ultimately acquired about 1,000 acres and 150 slaves. The Hermitage website is clear-eyed: Jackson’s purpose was to make money from King Cotton, “which ruled the daily lives of the enslaved.”
Although a minor sector within larger southern society, this elite plantation aristocracy controlled the majority of wealth and power in a primarily agricultural-driven landscape. Their cash crop was cotton, and “King Cotton” ruled with a heavy hand throughout southern plantations.
The Andrew Jackson Foundation has undertaken terrific archeology, and it explains particulars of the Hermitage economy and Jackson’s slave management (unlike Jefferson, he broke up no families). The work has been smoother because the plantation passed from the family to the Ladies Hermitage Association, Nashville women dedicated to preserving it. By contrast, Monticello and its artifacts passed out of the Jefferson family (to pay off debts) before coming into institutional preservation. The furnishings in the Hermitage were there when Jackson died in 1845 or are exact reproductions.
Also unlike Monticello, the foundation lacks an endowment and Second Gilded Age sugar daddies. David Rubenstein, who funded Monticello’s visitor center among other patriotic philanthropies, has not similarly financed the Hermitage (Tony told me they’ve worked connections). It relies on visitor fees, modest gifts, and the occasional appropriation from the state legislature.
I come away less certain of Jackson’s legacy. I have long considered him a great president. He transformed the nation, furthering Jefferson’s Atlantic-to-Pacific vision and setting the course for Manifest Destiny: John Tyler’s annexation of Texas and James Polk’s conquest of the southwest and peaceful settling of the northwest border with Britain. He forged the political consensus among Whigs as well as Democrats that that the United States was a country for White people. From that consensus sprouted both the abolitionist movement and John Calhoun’s theory of nullification, though Jackson was a staunch Unionist and considered Calhoun (his first vice president) a traitor. At the end of our tête-à-tête, Tony admitted he didn’t like Jackson because he believes in republican government. So do I.
I move from our seventh president to our 16th and the context in which he saved the union from the inevitable clash over slavery his predecessors had set up.
Like Jefferson and Jackson, Lincoln was a product of his place and occupation. He was not a planter but a lawyer, and his travels on the judicial circuit put him in touch with ordinary concerns. Before he was 20, he had piloted a flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, observing trade—and slavery—along the way. He came to maturity in a growing city, the new state capital. His emergence as an opponent of slavery fit a state whose concern was the threat posed to free White labor by the expansion of the Peculiar Institution on Illinois’ borders. His party, the Whigs, favored diversified economic development over territorial expansion, and Lincoln railed against Polk’s Mexican War.
Lincoln’s Springfield
Lincoln home on 8th Street
In the state capital, Lincoln’s image is everywhere: government buildings, park squares, commercial establishments. The National Park Service has restored a four-block area to the period Lincoln lived in it, from 1844 to 1861. The neighborhood sets a scene for people of means, and by the time Lincoln lived here, seven years after he’d moved from New Salem and received his law license, he had some. I took a tour of his house with two other tourists led by a volunteer named Ken, who noted that its kitchen was bigger than the log cabin Abe lived in as a boy. Several adjacent houses are open for exhibits. Among the vacant lots is that of Jameson Jenkins, a Black conductor of the Underground Railroad who gave the president-elect a ride to the train station for his journey to Washington.
Up the street is the old state capitol, restored to its appearance when Lincoln served in its House. I walked through the chamber in which he delivered the “house divided” speech as the Republican candidate for Senate in 1858. In it he argued that his opponent, Senator Stephen Douglas, architect of the Compromise of 1850, had conspired with Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger Taney (author of Dred Scott) to allow the expansion of slavery into free states. A capitol employee noted that Lincoln had rehearsed it with friends in the library; all urged him not to give it—too radical. Indeed, the legislature reelected Douglas. But the national response was electric, and it propelled the obscure, self-taught lawyer and former one-term representative to the presidency.
Two miles north of the Capitol is Oak Ridge Cemetery, site of Lincoln’s tomb. At the ground level of a stair-stepped pyramid, I pushed open an imposing, black steel door. A tour guide sat alone and answered my questions. Yes, his casket was opened in 1901 during a crypt renovation directed by Robert Todd Lincoln; a worker brought along his 14-year-old son; Fleetwood Lindley, the last person to see the body, recounted the experience shortly before his death in 1963. My guide said it was well preserved, Lincoln’s face colored bronze, like the statues that line the four corners and entry of the tomb. The body lies in a steel vault inside poured concrete, 10 feet below ground, behind a marble wall; those of Mary Todd and their four children are sealed in a wall toward the center of the tomb. In a thousand years, archeologists will surmise that this was an important pharaoh. I mull how he saved us from despotism by imposing it.
Lincoln rewrote the Constitution and our underlying compact: by refusing to accept secession, denying habeas corpus, suppressing free speech, and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. He pushed Congress to replace the Three-Fifths Compromise with the Thirteenth Amendment, which set the stage for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth. (For more than two decades, the Rehnquist and Roberts Supreme Courts have been chipping away at the latter two.)
Another sculpture in town depicts the 1908 Springfield “Race Riot.” After the sheriff smuggled two Black men accused of high crimes out of town for their safety, a White mob lynched two innocent Black men and burned homes and businesses in violence that went on for days. Subsequently, Mabel Hallam, a White woman who had accused George Richardson of rape, confessed she’d sought to cover up an affair with a White man. Joe James, 17, the other Black suspect, was convicted of murder and executed. The violence, covered nationally, contributed to the founding of the NAACP the following year.
White men still lynch Black men; recently we saw one on a homemade video in Brunswick, Georgia. Police, acting on our behalf, kill Black people daily. Republican-controlled state legislatures spent 2021 trying to ban the teaching of The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” now a book, in public schools. This month in Virginia, a private-equity tycoon based his campaign for governor on denying race as a formative factor in our history and contemporary life. I had thought my former home state had turned the corner after rejecting the dog whistles of statewide Republican candidates for the last 12 years. But this fall, while the statue of Robert E. Lee finally was removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, Glenn Youngkin campaigned, successfully, against “critical race theory.” Our politics as Newton’s third law:
We are still wearing the coat that fitted us as children, and the aristocracy is still using race to divide the working class.
Transformational Citizenship 