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A number of US cities and towns—from New York City, Cincinnati and Cleveland to Chilton County AL and a number of counties in Pennsylvania—have had a history of electing their city councils or county governments by one of several proportional representation electoral methods. But only one US state has ever used a proportional method to elect its state legislature. That’s the state of Illinois.

For 110 years until 1980, Illinois used a method called cumulative voting to elect its state House of Representatives. Instead of single-seat "winner take all" districts, in which legislators were elected one district at a time, cumulative voting in Illinois used three-seat districts, and a candidate needed only 25% of the popular vote to win one of the three seats. Cumulative voting, which is known as a “semi-proportional” voting method, is designed to foster broad representation, more voter choice and less bitter partisanship. Illinois’ experience with this method has a lot to teach us about how to address the severe crisis of American democracy.

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Fortunately when I worked for the Center for Voting and Democracy (now known as FairVote), we conducted a project interviewing a number of former Illinois state legislators who had been elected by cumulative voting. We intended to make a documentary but our ambitions were bigger than our budget, so the documentary never happened.

But myself and a couple of others poured through the hours and hours of raw video footage, and what we heard was illuminating. Some of these state legislators went on to become members of Congress, US Senators, federal judges and law professors. Among the list were well known names like US Senators Paul Simon and Carol Mosely Braun (the first black woman elected to the Senate), US representatives Abner Mikva, John Porter and more.

But before many of them found political fame in higher office, first they all had been elected to the Illinois House of Representatives by cumulative voting. Below are excerpts from the transcripts of these interviews, presenting some of the insights from these savvy leaders about the impacts of cumulative voting and how it improved representation, increased bipartisanship and reduced bitter partisan warfare between Democrats and Republicans.

When we conducted the interviews, many of the former legislators were then elder statesmen and stateswomen, most of them retired, so with fewer political axes left to grind. It was a joy to listen to their illuminating reminiscences. What these former legislators had to say about Illinois’s use of this system speaks directly to our national dilemmas regarding toxic partisan polarization, declining voter interest, low competition, poor representation, and a loss of political ideas.

Indeed, as a result of using cumulative voting in three-seat districts, Illinois enjoyed bipartisan representation from all parts of the state, including frequent sightings of now extinct species – Chicago Republicans, as well as downstate Democrats, all of them elected, as if by some kind of democratic magic, in strongholds of the opposing party.

Here are some excerpts from these revealing interviews, grouped by major themes.(Note: while cumulative voting technically is a semi-proportional representation method, in Illinois it was often known simply as ‘proportional representation’)

BIPARTISAN REPRESENTATION IN ALL PARTS OF THE STATE; LESS URBAN/SUBURBAN SPLIT

Congressman Abner Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave a voice to a critical minority so that Democrats in the [heavily GOP] suburbs had a spokesperson from their district who they could rally around and generate some party activities. Similarly, in Chicago you had Republican representatives and these Republican outposts in a city that was dominated by the Democratic Party.”

Lee Daniels, Republican, former Speaker of the House in Illinois:  “I thought proportional representation worked well. I thought it gave a guarantee of minority representation. In the Republican caucus, frequently we had Republican legislators talking about the needs of the city of Chicago. Today, generally speaking, there are very few [elected] Republicans that come from the city of Chicago so that the views of the city are very difficult to be communicated within our [party] caucus.”

Daniels, who served in the state legislature for thirty years, was elected under both a three-seat PR system and a single-seat, winner-take-all system, and speaks with great conviction about the advantages of proportional representation.

Congressman John Porter, Republican: “I thought it led to a much more independent and cooperative body that was not divided along party lines and run by a few leaders on each side. And it allowed individual legislators to work with members on both sides of the aisle in, I think, a very collegial atmosphere.”

Harold Katz, Democrat, former representative from the Chicago north suburb of Glencoe, a heavily GOP area: “The House [under proportional representation] was a very exciting place. It seemed to be the center of activity in the state capital. It was like a symphony, really, with not just two instruments playing, but a number of different instruments going at all times.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Between us we represented just about every organized point of view within the district. And that’s something that you can’t do with just one representative. If you represent the Democrats, the Republicans will feel voiceless; or you represent the organization, then the independents will feel voiceless. Or represent the conservatives, and the moderates will feel voiceless. Whereas with this multimember district, and particularly with proportional representation, it made it possible to give a legitimacy to the delegation that you don’t have with single-member districts.”

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What these former state legislators experienced with proportional representation is that nearly every Illinois three-seat district benefitted from two-party representation. Both parties won seats in all parts of the state. As a result, Republicans didn’t ignore cities, and Democrats didn’t ignore Republican strongholds. Illinois was not carved up into a balkanized red and blue partisan checkerboard.

In fact, for many years the Speaker of the House was a Democrat elected from heavily GOP DuPage County. When you only need 25 percent of the vote in a three-seat district to win a seat, Democrats in conservative areas and Republicans in liberal areas could win one of those seats. Congressman Porter was so impressed by his experience of PR in Illinois’s state government that he began working with other members of Congress to bring proportional representation to elections for the federal House of Representatives.

MORE CIVILITY and REDUCED POLARIZATION

Both Republicans and Democrats saw other advantages to cumulative voting that addressed the dilemma of partisan bitterness, polarization and regional balkanization.

Giddy Dyer, Republican, female state legislator: ““I think the lack of civility began when we did away with [proportional representation] and the multimember districts. Because now, it’s just like two armies in full regalia fighting each other. There’s just total squashing of many good ideas.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: “By its nature the system encouraged moderate viewpoints to be brought to bear. There’s a great deal more independence for each member than there is under the present system.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat from Chicago: “This idea of balkanizing the state that way, it’s not healthy. [Proportional representation], I think, helped us synthesize some of these differences, made us realize even though we were different than the downstaters, different than the suburbanites, that we also had a lot in common that held us together as a single state.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: In Illinois’s three-seat districts with PR, “we operated in a less partisan environment because both parties represented the entire state.”

Giddy Dyer, Republican state legislator:  “I get back to the reason it’s so important to have some Republican representatives from the city of Chicago is that they, many of them, had children in the Chicago public schools, and rode the CTA [metro transit system], and cared about Chicago’s problems. And now, it seems to be polarized, between the city, the suburban ring, and downstate.”

IDEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY WITHIN THE PARTIES — INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES BEAT THE PARTY MACHINES

Illinois’ experience showed that cumulative voting allowed for a broader spectrum of representatives, not only bipartisan but also within each party. A liberal three-seat district would elect two Democrats and one Republican, but the two Democrats often would be two different types of Democrats—a liberal Democrat and a moderate Democrat, or an independent Democrat and a machine Democrat.

It was the same with the Republicans. Voters all over the state, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, had a vote that counted for something. Judge Abner Mikva was an independent Democrat who ran against the Democratic Party machine in Chicago. He said that under proportional representation, because a candidate needed to win only 25% of the popular vote, legislators were not so beholden to monied interests and political machines. You could run independent of the political machine.

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave the opportunity for outsiders like me to win a seat. I never could have gotten elected if the party could have simply beat me one-on-one. I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Giddy Dyer, GOP state legislator, who had to fight her own party’s machine to get elected:  “My county chairman was from the other branch, the right-wing branch of the Republican Party, and I would never have been, quote, asked to run by that county chairman. So when I decided to run, I really had to form my own campaign committee and not depend on the party for any help…And Gene Hoffman in the neighboring district was in the same situation. He was a schoolteacher, and very strong on education, and from the moderate wing of the party, and he had to build his own organization to run.”

In Judge Mikva’s Chicago district, one Democrat represented the Daley machine, Mikva represented a more independent Democratic perspective, and the dean of the John Marshall Law School was the elected Republican.

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “You ended up with more independent people in the legislature. They weren’t that responsible to a particular political party. Paul Powell couldn’t dominate all of the downstate Democrats because Paul Simon could get elected thanks to proportional representation. Richard Daley couldn’t command all of the Cook County Democrats because Tony Scariano, Bob Mann, and others got elected…The representatives in both parties had a lot more freedom. Everybody understood that you didn’t have to toe a particular party line, or you didn’t have to kowtow to a particular leader. So it generated a lot more independence within the legislature…it really gave the local, legitimate parochial concerns better presence and better voice than they have now.”

Because a candidate only needed support from 25% of the voters in a three-seat district, this had campaign finance implications. Independent candidates could run and win without a lot of money or the backing of the party machine. A candidate could run a grassroot campaign on a shoestring budget.

Congressman Mikva: “You could appeal to a much smaller set of voters. That involves a much smaller amount of money being spent on them…advertising, media, so on.”

Campaign finance reformers should take note that grassroots candidates were able to win because money played a much-reduced role since a winning candidate only needed to reach the 25% victory threshold.

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BETTER FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Proportional representation didn’t serve only political minorities like Republicans in liberal areas and Democrats in conservative areas. It also helped women and racial minorities win representation.

Emil Jones, black Democratic president of the state senate: “The district I was elected from was a district that comprised only about 20 percent of African American constituencies. So, what I did was I organized the African American community. And, the other three candidates, they split the white vote. And I received a certain percentage of the white vote, and I ran second and won.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, longtime House majority leader:  “As a result of proportional representation, my district became the first in Illinois history to send two women from the same party to the state legislature, myself and Carol Moseley Braun.”

Currie was the longest serving woman in the Illinois legislature, serving for 40 years, twenty-two years as House majority leader.

Adeline Geo-Karis, a Republican legislator elected under both PR and winner-take-all systems:  Proportional representation “made it easier for women and minorities to get elected.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, former House majority leader: “In the days of proportional representation, we had African Americans representing majority white districts, and white representatives coming from districts that were predominantly African American.”

PR even helped elect black Republicans, but now the Republican Party in Illinois—as in the rest of the nation—is mostly lily-white.

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When you listen to these Illinois legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, one quality stands out: their belief that the other side deserved representation. They took seriously the Golden Rule of Representation: “Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” They believed doing so was good for their state’s welfare and good for the political and legislative process.

Compare that view to national politics today, to the down-and-dirty, zero-sum "winner take all" game it has become in this age in which hyper-partisan leaders will do whatever it takes to beat the other side. The current battle over mid-decade redistricting is just the latest tragic fiasco as our representative democracy tumbles over the cliff’s edge into the dark deep fissures of post-democracy

Indeed, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson wrote that the rolling coalitions which formed in the Illinois House “often helped lead to centrist pragmatic policies.” The Chicago Tribune has opined that “many partisans and political independents have looked back wistfully at the era of cumulative voting. They acknowledge that it produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics.”

BYE BYE CUMULATIVE VOTING…

So if cumulative voting in three-seat districts was so great, what happened? Why did Illinois get rid of it in 1980?

It was the dawn of the Reagan “government is the problem” era, and the Illinois state legislature, failing to take the temperature of the times, foolishly voted itself a hefty pay increase. With a populist battle cry of “get rid of the politicians,” an opportunistic politician sponsored what was known as the Cutback Amendment—a statewide ballot measure that sought to “cut back” the size and cost of state government by shrinking the number of elected politicians by a third. Little recognized, unfortunately, was that the ballot measure also did away with cumulative voting (today, under many state’s initiative process, combining repeal of cumulative voting with a reduction in the number of legislators would likely be a violation of the “single subject” rule).

But the return to winner-take-all, single-seat districts quickly led to the by-now-familiar litany of problems: little competition, partisan polarization, “if you win I lose” winner-take-all dynamics, regional balkanization, low voter turnout, and so on. It virtually wiped out the Democratic Party in DuPage County and other conservative areas, and killed the GOP in Chicago and many other cities. It led to so many lopsided, one-party districts that ever since then nearly half of Illinois’s House races have been uncontested by one of the major parties because everyone knows who will win those races. This is the legacy of "winner take all" elections in Illinois, indeed in all 50 states.

The return of "winner take all" elections in Illinois also has led to an alarming concentration of power in the hands of the “Four Tops” – no, that’s not a Motown singing quartet, that’s the majority and minority leaders in both the House and the Senate. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Pearson, the Four Tops now “use the cudgel of the potential loss of campaign cash to dictate the issues to be considered and how a member should vote. The formation of a true bipartisan coalition now is rare.”

The Illinois story strikes at the very heart of Americans’ notions of “representation.” Millions of “orphaned voters”—Republicans living in Democratic areas, Democrats in Republican areas, and third-party supporters and independents everywhere—usually do not have a voice. But in Illinois under proportional representation, Republican legislators were elected in the blue liberal cities, as were Democrats in the red conservative areas. Independents, moderates, and the wings of the parties had a place at the table; so did women and minorities. In Illinois, purple America had a home.

A federal bill called the Fair Representation Act (H.R.4632) has been introduced in the 119th U.S. Congress by Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Don Beyer, which would implement proportional representation for electing the US House of Representatives. Instead of cumulative voting, the FRA would use an even better method known as proportional ranked choice voting (also known as “single transferable vote”). PRCV has all the benefits of cumulative voting but it also has other desirable features, such as ranked ballots that prevent spoiler candidates, split votes and wasted votes that can sometimes happen with cumulative voting.

The various 50 US states are often laboratories for innovation and experimentation for each other. The Illinois experience with proportional representation has a lot to teach us as we grapple with the demanding challenges that our failing democracy is facing.

Steven Hill  @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social

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This June, 152 years ago, one of the most stirring calls for universal suffrage and representative democracy took place in a federal courtroom in Ontario County in the Finger Lakes region of western New York. What transpired was a criminal trial that, though the defendant was found guilty, blazed a mighty stroke for women’s rights that eventually prevailed and has immeasurably benefited society. Somebody should make a movie about this trial and these events. It has the drama of Lincoln written all over it. Mr. Spielberg, are you listening?

Imagine going to vote last November for president, and making your way to your local polling station to engage in that most sacred of duties and privileges. Voting is the foundation of our democracy, it is the primary act that separates our form of governance from a kingship or dictatorship. So imagine instead of having your vote accepted and counted, you were arrested, taken into custody, threatened with imprisonment, tried in a kangaroo court, and fined.

That’s what happened to suffragist Susan B. Anthony when she tried to vote for president in 1872. She was subsequently arrested and tried by the patriarchy of the times. Her case, The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony, was picked in 2013 as one of "10 Trials that Changed the World" by the American Bar Association.

In the latter half of the 19th century a number of courageous women fought for their human rights, especially the right to vote as they saw that act as the foundation for all other rights. The lioness of them all was Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony was like an itinerant preacher traveling cross-country from town to town, promoting women’s rights wherever she could find an audience. Arguably she became America’s best-known woman; at one of her debates in Illinois with a male professor, the opera house venue was filled to capacity, with every seat, the aisles, galleries, and stage occupied and the streetcars bringing throngs of spectators from many adjoining towns. She had an acid wit laced with humor; when her male sparring opponent stated that, because women don’t vote they were “thankfully free from the corrupting influence of politics,” she retorted that it would not “contaminate women any more to vote with men than to live with them.”

A year before her arrest, Anthony traveled on the new transcontinental railroad to California, lecturing at major towns along the way. In impassioned speeches she questioned why it should be a crime for women to vote. She was noted for her skills as not only an orator but also an organizer, lobbyist, publicist and author. She published a weekly newspaper which was read from Washington DC to San Francisco to France. She brought the skills and drive of a political agitator to her work, and her indomitable spirit made her one of the best-known women in the country.

This was during a time when the nation could be described as a kind of Taliban America, (including the widespread prevalence of male beards). Not only were women not allowed to vote or to hold political office, but they also couldn’t easily own property, obtain a higher education, had few employment opportunities, and it was still frowned upon that women would dare to speak in public.

But Anthony and her suffragist cohorts were not deterred. They relentlessly looked for ways to push the sexist status quo the next step toward greater equality. The same fervor for equality that had successfully motivated anti-slavery activism – which Anthony also had fought for -- also spurred a growing movement for women’s rights, which resulted in the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, formed by Anthony and other leaders.

So when the election of 1872 approached, with tepid women’s rights supporter President Ulysses Grant running for reelection on the Republican Party ticket, Anthony and her fellow conspirators hatched a plan to push on the pressure points of the system. Oh, were they clever. This was civil disobedience at its finest.

“Give us our own constitutional amendment, thank you”

The National Woman Suffrage Association previously had tried to get explicit references to the voting rights of women added to the 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution, which were passed, along with the 13th amendment, as part of the effort to ban slavery and bestow citizenship and voting rights to ex-enslaved men. The 14th amendment, which had gone into effect in 1868, read, in part:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens…No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The 15th amendment in 1870 explicitly forbade the denial of the right to vote based on race, but not on gender. Spurred on by the horrors of slavery and the barbarity of the just-concluded civil war, the white male guardians of the day believed that gender must be subordinated to race in their considerations.

Initially, Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women leaders had opposed the 15th amendment unless they could get a promise for a 16th amendment granting women the right to vote. When that didn’t work, Anthony and her fellow suffragists adopted a new strategy: they would test the meaning of those amendments, and how the amendments might be interpreted to apply to the rights of women.

They believed that the 14th Amendment, which now defined U.S. citizenship, protected a woman’s right to vote. The women reasoned that the rights of U.S. citizenship, or, in constitutional language, “the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” included the right to vote. If the 14th Amendment’s definition of U.S. citizenship included women, and the states were barred from depriving U.S. citizens of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, it followed that states could not exclude women from voting.

At least, that was their legal interpretation. Which virtually no one in a position of power shared, at least not initially. So Anthony and other women around the country set about trying to establish, through test cases in the federal courts, that the amendments had redefined citizenship and rights in a way that women were protected by the federal government in their right to vote. Women suffragists sought to validate their interpretation either through a declaratory act of Congress that would enforce their interpretation of the Amendments, or through a favorable decision in federal courts. This was a novel legal and activist strategy.

Election day disobedience

So on November 1, 1872, a few days before the presidential election, Anthony walked with her three sisters to a voter registration office in a nearby barber shop in their hometown of Rochester, NY, and demanded to be registered. Anthony quoted the 14th Amendment to the election inspectors to justify their demand, and threatened to sue the inspectors personally if they refused. Anthony expected to be denied registration, since woman in other parts of the US had been halted in their attempts. But in the ensuing confusion, and after Anthony and her sisters took oaths of legal responsibility, the poll inspectors allowed them to complete the voter registration process.

Being a whiz of a skilled publicist, Anthony immediately headed to a newspaper office to tell a reporter what had just happened. News of their registration appeared in the afternoon newspapers, with some locals calling for the arrest of the inspectors who had registered the women. Other women in Rochester heard the news and began to register, bringing the total registered almost to fifty. A small feminist rebellion was breaking loose, courtesy of these unruly Ladies.

On Election Day, November 5, 1872, in the first district of the Eighth Ward of Rochester, New York, Anthony and 14 other women from her ward showed up to vote. They were spoiling for trouble.

Anthony and the others did not expect that they would actually be allowed to vote, but her success at registering raised the hope that lightning might strike twice. When their right to vote was challenged by an election inspector, the women insisted on taking an oath stating that they were qualified to vote. The election inspectors were now in a difficult position. They were at risk of violating state law if they turned the women away because state law did not give them the authority to refuse the ballot to anyone who took the required oath and was registered to vote. Federal law, however, made it illegal to receive the ballot of an ineligible voter, so either way the inspectors were in the hot seat. The inspectors, either in their confusion or in solidarity, decided to allow the women to vote.

So…moments later, Susan B. Anthony voted for the first time in her life. Indeed, all 14 of the women were allowed to vote for president as well as for members of Congress. After she voted, Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, excitedly reporting, "Well I have been & gone & done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket!"

Even for Anthony, the veteran agitator, these were all rather unanticipated developments, according to Professor Ann D. Gordon, a historian of the women's movement and editor of the six-volume Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Sometimes history moves forward that way, by accident. But it only happens if people are bold enough to take a risk.

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Arrested for the act of voting

Nine days after the election, U.S. Commissioner William Storrs, an officer of the federal courts, issued warrants for the arrest of Anthony and the fourteen other women who voted in Rochester. The women were charged with voting for members of the U.S. House of Representatives “without having a lawful right to vote,” in violation of section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870. Three days later, on November 18, 1872, a deputy federal marshal called on Anthony at her home, and asked her to accompany him to police headquarters to see the commissioner.

“What for?’ she demanded.

‘To arrest you,’ he said.

‘Is that the way you arrest men?’

‘No.’

Anthony then demanded that she should be arrested properly, and held out her wrists to be handcuffed. The officer declined, saying he did not think that would be necessary. But he took her into custody.

All of the arrested women were held to $500 bail, and everyone posted bail except Anthony, who refused. So the authorities authorized the U.S. marshal to place her in the Albany County jail. But she was never actually held there, instead she was released.

Big mistake. The government officials, who viewed all of this as a nuisance, had no idea of the ruckus they were in for. Anthony now mobilized all of her talents as an agitator and clever polemicist for use as a criminal defendant. She turned this episode into an enormous opportunity to generate publicity for the suffrage movement, and to put America’s half-a-loaf representative democracy itself on trial.

She cleverly prepared for her trial by lecturing in every village and town of Monroe County from which jurors would be chosen, asking and answering the question, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” (link to her speech here) Anthony consciously and publicly tried to “taint” the prospective jury pool with her appeals to their humanity and understanding. But the government fought back, responding by moving her trial to another county!

So Anthony did the same in the new county. She stirred the pot of controversy and sensation, playing to the newspapers. Editorials were written alternately praising or lambasting her and the suffragists.

Once her trial began, newspapers across the country started publishing daily reports. In some places, Anthony was hung in effigy and her likeness dragged through the streets. In other quarters, the popularity of the well-known Anthony was evident in favorable cartoons drawn by political cartoonists. One newspaper snidely opined that the wave of women voters “goes to show the progress of female lawlessness instead of the progress of the principle of female suffrage….[T]he efforts of Susan B. Anthony & Co. to unsex themselves and vote as men will be, so far as they are successful, both criminal and ridiculous.”

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America on trial, not Susan B. Anthony

The trial became known as The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony, but Anthony adroitly turned the US into the defendant instead of herself. The event was a great legal match, showcasing the defiant Anthony versus an exasperated federal judge, and pitting accomplished lawyers against each other. Throughout the trial, in her tireless efforts to win over the court of public opinion, Anthony lectured to audiences, quoting the 14th amendment’s clauses that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens” and “No State shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens,” arguing that:

“The only question left to be settled now, is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities."

She also drew attention to the inconsistent way that gendered words were used in the law. She pointed out that the New York tax laws referred only to "he", "him" and "his", yet taxes were collected from women. The federal Enforcement Act of 1870, which she was accused of violating, similarly used male pronouns only. She published pamphlets about the trial and distributed thousands of copies, some of which she mailed to newspaper editors in several states with requests to reprint them.

By June 1873, when the federal trial for The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony began in Canandaigua in Ontario County, 28 miles from Rochester NY, readers of newspapers everywhere understood that this was a battle over the civil rights claims of woman suffragists. The lawyers’ arguments and the rulings of Justice Ward Hunt filled several columns of the daily papers. Sitting in the audience was former president Millard Fillmore and other public notables.

Anthony requested to testify on her own behalf, but Judge Hunt silenced her. In a controversial moment, when it looked like the jury was sympathetic, the biased, imperious judge took the law into his own hands — shockingly, he actually directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict! That autocratic move probably was in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the accused the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

On the closing day of the trial, the judge finally asked Anthony if she had anything to say. She responded with "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage", according to Professor Ann Gordon. Repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, Anthony protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying "you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.”

She defiantly pointed out that even if the judge had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied her right to a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors. For women to get their right to a voice in government, she said, they must "take it, as I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every possible opportunity."

When Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 (about $2700 in today’s dollars), she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty” and she never did. Instead, Judge Hunt's biased instructions to the jury created a controversy within the legal community that lasted for years. In 1895, as a consequence, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal judge could not direct a jury to return a guilty verdict in a criminal trial. The New York Sun called for Hunt's impeachment, editorializing that he had overthrown civil liberties. In later years, the legal community would credit Anthony and her trial in establishing new awareness and subsequent precedent for protecting a defendant's rights in jury trials.

A legacy of righteousness

Susan B. Anthony was one stubborn woman. A woman with an attitude, as they say. She was a brilliant provocateur for the cause of equal rights, an Abbie Hoffman in a long dress. Following her trial, women would still not gain the right to vote for nearly another half-century. But this trial helped make women’s suffrage a national issue. And it was a major step in the transition of the women’s rights movement toward a strategic focus on the right to vote, which then easily expanded into fighting for other denied rights.

Anthony would not live to see the 19th amendment pass in 1920, legalizing women’s national right to vote. She died 14 years earlier in 1906, but at the time of her death women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, and several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had started allowing at least a few women members. Including colleges and universities, which had 36,000 women attending, up from zero a few decades earlier.

Susan B. Anthony’s dying words were “Failure is impossible” – a lesson for our times. Her entire adult life was a dedication to the human spirit, and proof that the arc of the universe sometimes bends towards justice. She was one of those brilliant, indomitable characters that appear every now and then in history like a fabulous comet streaking across the night sky, and who, by their words and deeds, inspire millions and move progress forward.

Who will be today’s heroes, as our democratic rights are once again eroded under Taliban-like attacks?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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April was a momentous month in the American Civil War. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union forces at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, marking the culmination of the war. Over the next two months, the remaining Confederate troops were defeated and surrendered by the end of May. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, after fleeing the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia on April 2, was captured in Georgia on May 10. He fared better than his Union counterpart, President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated by Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865.

The Civil War would prove to be the deadliest conflict in US history, with new estimates of 698,000 dead, both military and civilian. Victorious General Grant, after witnessing up close the war’s barbarity, ordered compassionate terms of surrender, allowing Lee’s men to keep their sidearms and their horses so that they would “be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” Lincoln himself had set a tone of reconciliation in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, only 41 days before his assassination, calling for a peace…

“…with malice towards none, with charity for all… to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Those were noble and magnanimous sentiments, the hallmark of a gracious victor. And so it appeared that the Union – the North – was victorious over the Confederacy – the South -- and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” had not perished from the earth, to use Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg phrasing. This is what schoolchildren have been taught for 160 years as a core part of our National Myth.

And yet…it’s a historical invention, meant to feed a belief system about the ever-evolving greatness of the United States of America.

To be sure, initially former black slaves in the South enjoyed a level of emancipation and enfranchisement they had never known. A number of them got elected to public office, began to own property and to benefit from the sweat of their own labor and the genius of their own minds. Initially, it was a time of great promise, with real potential for building a multi-racial society that, if successful, would have set the United States of America on a new and truly blessed course into a humanistic future.

But that’s not what happened. In fact this part of the National Myth, which narrates that the Union won and the Confederacy lost, is dead wrong. As myth goes, it ranks right up there with young America allegedly being a high-minded place where “all are created equal” despite the denigrated status of slaves, women and native Americans, and the daily use or threat of violence that enforced that regime.

Truth be told, the Civil War did not end in 1865. It continued for the next 11 years in the form of a bloody, vicious guerrilla insurrection across the South. Those former Confederate soldiers who had been shown such mercy by Lincoln and Grant traveled back home and, along with their white supremacist leaders, who led them and took over the Democratic Party in the South, began to regroup.

Over the next few years, vigilante campaigns by murderous gangs on horseback, now called names like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, terrorized and disenfranchised black voters and intimidated and even murdered black officeholders. They threatened white officeholders from the pro-civil rights Republican Party, and mounted armed coups against elected governments that made Donald Trump’s January 6 fiasco look like a Mickey Mouse operation. Before too long, both now-President Grant and the war-weary North lost their nerve and willingness to confront the resurging Confederate evil. Relentless subversions of racial justice were then sanctioned and ratified by a US Supreme Court ruling in 1875 and a political deal over the controversial US presidential election of 1876. By that point, vengeful and cruel white supremacy had once again reasserted itself as the new “Jim Crow” Confederacy.

The dream of a multi-racial society was dead, and it would not revive for another 90 years. Even then, the dream struggled and faltered, two steps forward one step back, as the tribalism of race has continually re-asserted itself in one form or another throughout American history. It is still with us today, still lurking like chattering skeletons in our national closet.

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Another April day…in Colfax, Louisiana

The real story of what happened in that post-Civil War period to undermine racial progress can be ascertained by jumping into a time machine and zooming back to April 1873. A disputed gubernatorial election in Louisiana became the spark to light the powder keg that caused national politics to re-explode. Although the GOP candidate for governor emerged victorious, his foes refused to concede the election. For months, both Republican and Democrat candidates claimed to be governor, even holding competing inaugural celebrations.

After a federal judge ruled in favor of the Republican slate, a pitched battle ensued for not just political control but proto-military dominance of various parts of Louisiana. One of those contentious places was Grant Parish in the Louisiana heartland, which had become a hotbed of former Confederate insurgents. While Grant’s Republican Party was the liberator of slaves, the Democratic Party – ironically today’s party of civil rights -- was the vehicle for reasserting white supremacy. To prevent a takeover of Grant Parish, black Republican leaders surrounded the courthouse in Colfax, the county seat, threw up earthworks and trenches around the building, and dug in with 130 or so men for what was to come. They held the town for several weeks and requested troops for reinforcement from the Republican governor.

But the ex-Confederates and their white Democrat allies counter-mobilized with the help of inflammatory propaganda from the white-dominated local media. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, a mob of several hundred whites on horseback, armed with rifles and a cannon, opened fire on the badly outnumbered courthouse defenders, blasting away for several hours. Completely outgunned, the black defenders finally ran up a white flag of surrender. They were told to throw down their weapons and come outside. Instead of a surrender and acts of mercy, like Grant once had showed to soldiers just like these Confederates, what happened next was mass murder.

The white paramilitary group killed every black man they could find, including those hiding in the courthouse, and chased down and killed those attempting to flee. They dumped some bodies in the nearby Red River. One body was charred beyond recognition, another man's head beaten to a pulp, another had a slashed throat, others shot in the head from close range, execution-style. Heaps of dead black bodies were scattered everywhere, from the courthouse all the way through town to the river boat landing. Historians guesstimate from available evidence that 150 Blacks and three whites were killed that Easter Sunday, April 1873. The Colfax massacre has been described as the worst instance of racial violence during the Reconstruction era.

The publicity about the Confederate victory at Colfax spread like wildfire, launching the proliferation of new white paramilitary organizations. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." This was just the beginning of the horror to come. Domestic terrorist groups used violence, murder and intimidation to win election after election and slowly retake the South. In August 1874, the White League threw out Republican officeholders in Coushatta, Louisiana, assassinating six whites and five to 15 freedmen (the number is disputed) who were witnesses in what has become known as the Coushatta massacre. Although twenty-five men were arrested, none were brought to trial.

Then on September 14, 1874, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana led a coup attempt of thousands of whites, many of them former Confederate soldiers, who barricaded the streets of New Orleans, overpowered a black militia and attacked the racially integrated Metropolitan Police Force which was led by James Longstreet, a respected former Confederate general. They occupied City Hall and the state house, killing more than 20 people. The mutineers announced that the Republican governor was overthrown. President Grant had to dispatch 5000 troops and three gunboats, and only this federal military intervention reinstated the rightful governor.

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And then…judicial injustice

But that wasn’t the end of the injustice. Besides being a slaughter ground of white on black racial violence and electoral thuggery, the South during so-called “reconstruction” was also a hellhole of rampant judicial prejudice. It was nearly impossible to get a local court to convict white perpetrators for the most heinous acts.

The Colfax massacre gained national headlines from Boston to Chicago. Only one black man had survived, and he served as one of the Federal government's chief witnesses against the indicted attackers in the ensuing criminal trials. Various government forces spent weeks rounding up members of the paramilitary perpetrators, and a total of 97 men were indicted for Colfax. In the end, only nine men were charged and brought to trial for violations of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which had been championed by President Grant to provide federal protection for civil rights of freedmen under the 14th Amendment (the “equality amendment,” passed in1868). That law was passed to protect Americans against actions by terrorist groups such as the Klan.

If justice is supposed to be blind, what happened next is an example of justice with no eyes to see. There were two jury trials, both in 1874. In the first, one man was acquitted and a mistrial was declared in the cases of the other eight. In the second trial, a federal jury found three men guilty of sixteen charges, but the presiding judge later dismissed the convictions.

The federal government appealed the second case and it was heard by the US Supreme Court as United States v. Cruikshank in 1875. In a bizarre twist, the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act applied only to actions committed by the state, and was not applicable to actions committed by individuals or private conspiracies. This meant that the federal government could not prosecute cases such as the Colfax killings, and plaintiffs had to seek protection inside the state’s (in this case Louisiana’s) court jurisdiction. Since the state courts were in the pockets of the white Democratic politicians, no justice would be found there. In the end, Louisiana did not prosecute any of the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre.

Not only that, this notorious ruling legitimized the post-Civil War unraveling of legal justice for black Americans throughout the South. For it not only exonerated massive crimes and cold-blooded murder but established a federal legal precedent that would protect Klan-type activity everywhere. What Cruikshank showed was that, ten years after the Civil War, the supremacy of states’ rights had come roaring back with a vengeance.

According to an investigation in 1875, “2,141 Negroes had been killed by whites in Louisiana and 2,115 wounded” since the end of the Civil War, yet no one had been punished for those crimes. Such violence, when combined with the failure of the police and the courts to enforce the law, served to intimidate voters and officeholders alike. By terrorizing freed slaves as well as white Republicans throughout the South, white supremacists repressed voting all during the 1870s and 80s. On numerous occasions, elected officials were dragged from their homes and in some cases murdered in the streets; elections that resulted in racially-integrated governments were overturned at the point of a rifle.

Terror and disenfranchisement became the primary methods that white Democrats used to gain control of Southern state after state. Following the hotly disputed presidential election of 1876, which led to a deal to withdraw all federal troops from the South, this became the playbook to dismantle civil rights gains all across the South.

The Confederate victory was complete. Cruikshank and the tainted presidential election of 1876 established the precedents, as well as the necessary political conditions, to launch the brutal Jim Crow apartheid regime that would dominate US politics for the next 90 years.

And today?

So who really “won” the Civil War?

What should we learn from this vicious and dehumanizing history? The most important lesson is the most disturbing: that the South won the Civil War, not the North. In the end the “blue helmet” peacekeepers -- the federal troops protecting black civil rights – pulled out. They left the different tribes of the South alone to brutally fight it out. Black civil rights got to enjoy a few brief “golden years,” during which black officeholders, business leaders, farmers, families and schoolchildren made impressive gains toward integration into a new America straining toward a national vision of “charity for all.” And then, under the constant pressure of Southern white brutality and insurrection, as well as the failure of the North (which suffered from its own brand of racism) to remain steadfast in its commitment to equality and justice, the election deal of 1876 to remove the federal troops snuffed it all out.

Looking back down the long tunnel of history, it’s clear that what Southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote is prophetically true: "The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the massacre in Thibodaux, Louisiana in 1887 by white plantation owners, politicians and their paramilitaries, who murdered hundreds of black sugar cane workers and their families for going on strike, the most violent labor dispute in US history; to the massacres and lynchings of blacks by whites in more than three dozen US cities after World War I, including Chicago, Washington DC, St. Louis, Baltimore and Omaha, after black military veterans returning from the war tried to assert their labor rights, resulting in the murder of hundreds of black Americans; to the mass slaughter in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June 1921, when whites burned to the ground the prosperous black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering hundreds and burying them in forgotten mass graves, only recently excavated; to the genocide in Rosewood, Florida on New Year's Day,1923, when a white mob of 300 men murdered dozens of black men, women and children, completely torching the town into oblivion and wiping it forever off the map, only recently excavated.

That straight line then connects to the ugly stain of Sheriff Bull Connor's clubs, fire hoses and police attack dogs used to enforce racial apartheid in the South, and Democratic governor George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block desegregation of schools in the 1960s; to the brutality unleashed on civil rights marchers in Selma, Birmingham and elsewhere, the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; to the present-day incidents of white nationalist and police violence perpetrated on people of color, with the FBI reporting that white supremacists pose a “persistent threat of lethal violence” that has produced more fatalities than any other category of domestic terrorists since 2000; to attempts to suppress minority communities from voting in recent elections.

Donald Trump, the latest in the line

And then there is Donald Trump. From propagating his ludicrous birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming President Barack Obama was not born in the US, and then stoking the same birther theory against Kamala Harris, to his false accusations of the Central Park Five, mostly African American teenagers, as being responsible for the 1989 rape of a white woman despite their innocence; to his attacks against a judge who Trump said could not be impartial because he was “Mexican,” to his comments following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that implied moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them; his claim to have done more for blacks than Abraham Lincoln, and then hinting that the “end result” of Lincoln’s actions ending slavery were “always questionable;” to Trump’s defense of Confederate symbols and opposing their removal from the public sphere, which is tantamount to defending Nazi symbols in Germany, Donald Trump has consistently invoked this toxic race-based legacy that is threaded all the way back to Colfax and beyond, throughout his career.

His frequent attacks against immigrants, even those in the US legally, by spewing things like they are "poisoning the blood of our country," echoes language often used by racial supremacists who fixate on “blood and soil” purity (“Blut und Boden,” Blood and Soil, was a Nazi slogan expressing the nationalist ideal of racial purity united with geographic dominance). Trump even used similar race-baiting attacks against Republican candidate Nikki Haley, of East Indian ethnicity, during the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. And Trump's blatant disregard of Supreme Court and lower court rulings over his administration’s recent unlawful kidnapping of an immigrant to a jail in El Salvador and refusing to repatriate him back to the US, and shipping to that Salvadoran jail other immigrants alleged to be terrorists without any legal due process or evidence beyond the presence of body tattoos, is reminiscent of the random use of imprisonment as an intimidation and polarization tactic during Jim Crow.

These are just a few examples of things Trump has said and done as he tries to bait certain demographics of voters. Some defend Trump by saying his bark is worse than his bite, or that he is just a show man entertainer playing to his audience. But the baiting only works because of this centuries-old legacy founded on maintaining racial tribalism and white supremacy amidst the antiquated institutions of divisive "winner take all" politics. Whatever his motivations, Trump is tapping into a toxic, hateful legacy, which he knows perfectly well. He is a master at dancing along these wedge issue lines of controversy and conflict to achieve political success, even as he rips apart the country by fanning these flames instead of displaying a different, more Lincoln-esque type of leadership, trying to promote national and tribal healing and unity.

Donald Trump’s entire political career has basically been one long, race-baiting Willie Horton ad, always provoking white voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police and subsequent nationwide protests, Black Lives Matter was used as a stand-in for Willie Horton. More recently, the “immigrant horde” at the border is serving nicely in this scapegoating role. In such a race-marinated climate rooted in a past of white supremacy, a campaign rally for a major presidential candidate could feature speakers attacking black and brown Haitian immigrants, loudly making unverified claims that immigrants are eating pets, belittling Jews and Palestinians, and transgender people and immigrants. In such a environment of race-based suspicion, even learning about this bloody history and cruel legacy -- such as via the 1619 Project -- is threatening to some white people and has provoked a backlash.

During a time of advancement of illiberal democracies and authoritarian governments, even the world’s “paragon of democracy” – the formerly “united” states of America – appears to have taken a perilous step too close to the cliff’s edge. But in fact, it never really left the cliff, from the civil war to Colfax to lynchings, to 1960s race wars to 2025. If you connect the dots that stretch just beneath the surface, going back two centuries of American life, you find racial animosity and white supremacy have been one of the major driving forces of US politics. Sometimes it fades for a time, goes subterranean, only then to reemerge. Donald Trump is the latest resurgence.

E Pluribus Unum – “out of many, one” – has transmogrified to E Unum Pluribus – “out of one, many.” America will continue to be bedeviled by these dark impulses and instincts until some patriotic leaders decide to step forward to help figure a way out of the tribal intolerance of our forever racially-intertwined lives, expressed so toxically via our “winner take all” political system.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Welcome to DemocracySOS, a newsletter detailing the failings of America’s “winner take all” democracy, as well as proposed solutions. If you like this issue of DemocracySOS, you can sign up here for more issues. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, give a gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member.

And now, let’s dive in.

A number of US cities and towns – from New York City, Cincinnati and Cleveland to Chilton County AL and a number of counties in Pennsylvania -- have had a history of electing their city councils or county governments by one of several proportional representation electoral methods. But only one US state, as far as I know, has ever used a proportional method to elect its legislature. That’s the state of Illinois.

For 110 years until 1980, Illinois used a method called cumulative voting to elect its state House of Representatives. Instead of single-seat "winner take all" districts, in which legislators were elected one district at a time, cumulative voting in Illinois used three-seat districts, and a candidate needed only 25% of the popular vote to win one of the three seats. Cumulative voting, which is known as a “semi-proportional” voting method, is designed to foster broad representation, more voter choice and less bitter partisanship. Illinois’ experience with this method has a lot to teach us about how to address the severe crisis of American democracy.

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Fortunately when I worked for the Center for Voting and Democracy (now known as FairVote), we conducted a project interviewing a number of former Illinois state legislators who had been elected by cumulative voting. We intended to make a documentary but our ambitions were bigger than our budget, so the documentary never happened.

But myself and a couple of others poured through the hours and hours of raw video footage. Some of these state legislators went on to become members of Congress, US Senators, federal judges and law professors. Among the list were well known names like US Senators Paul Simon and Carol Mosely Braun (the first black woman elected to the Senate), US representatives Abner Mikva, John Porter and more.

But before many of them found political fame in higher office, first they all had been elected to the Illinois House of Representatives by cumulative voting. Below are excerpts from the transcripts of these interviews, presenting some of the insights from these savvy leaders about the impacts of cumulative voting.

When we conducted the interviews, many of the former legislators were then elder statesmen and stateswomen, most of them retired, so with fewer political axes left to grind. It was a joy to listen to their illuminating reminiscences. What these former legislators had to say about Illinois’s use of this system speaks directly to our national dilemmas regarding toxic partisan polarization, declining voter interest, low competition, poor representation, and a loss of political ideas.

Indeed, as a result of using cumulative voting in three-seat districts, Illinois enjoyed bipartisan representation from all parts of the state, including frequent sightings of now extinct species – Chicago Republicans and downstate Democrats, all of them elected, as if by some kind of democratic magic, in strongholds of the opposing party.

Here are some excerpts from these revealing interviews, grouped by major themes.(Note: while cumulative voting technically is a semi-proportional representation method, in Illinois it was often known simply as ‘proportional representation’)

BIPARTISAN REPRESENTATION IN ALL PARTS OF THE STATE; LESS URBAN/SUBURBAN SPLIT

Congressman Abner Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave a voice to a critical minority so that Democrats in the [heavily GOP] suburbs had a spokesperson from their district who they could rally around and generate some party activities. Similarly, in Chicago you had Republican representatives and these Republican outposts in a city that was dominated by the Democratic Party.”

Lee Daniels, Republican, former Speaker of the House in Illinois:  “I thought proportional representation worked well. I thought it gave a guarantee of minority representation. In the Republican caucus, frequently we had Republican legislators talking about the needs of the city of Chicago. Today, generally speaking, there are very few [elected] Republicans that come from the city of Chicago so that the views of the city are very difficult to be communicated within our [party] caucus.”

Daniels, who served in the state legislature for thirty years, was elected under both a three-seat PR system and a single-seat, winner-take-all system, and speaks with great conviction about the advantages of proportional representation.

Congressman John Porter, Republican: “I thought it led to a much more independent and cooperative body that was not divided along party lines and run by a few leaders on each side. And it allowed individual legislators to work with members on both sides of the aisle in, I think, a very collegial atmosphere.”

Harold Katz, Democrat, former representative from the Chicago north suburb of Glencoe, a heavily GOP area: “The House [under proportional representation] was a very exciting place. It seemed to be the center of activity in the state capital. It was like a symphony, really, with not just two instruments playing, but a number of different instruments going at all times.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Between us we represented just about every organized point of view within the district. And that’s something that you can’t do with just one representative. If you represent the Democrats, the Republicans will feel voiceless; or you represent the organization, then the independents will feel voiceless. Or represent the conservatives, and the moderates will feel voiceless. Whereas with this multimember district, and particularly with proportional representation, it made it possible to give a legitimacy to the delegation that you don’t have with single-member districts.”

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What these former state legislators experienced with proportional representation is that nearly every Illinois three-seat district had two-party representation. Both parties won seats in all parts of the state. As a result, Republicans didn’t ignore cities, and Democrats didn’t ignore Republican strongholds. Illinois was not carved up into a balkanized red and blue partisan checkerboard.

In fact, for many years the Speaker of the House was a Democrat elected from heavily GOP DuPage County. When you only need 25 percent of the vote in a three-seat district to win a seat, Democrats in conservative areas and Republicans in liberal areas could win one of those seats. Congressman Porter was so impressed by his experience of PR in Illinois’s state government that he began working with other members of Congress to bring proportional representation to elections for the federal House of Representatives.

MORE CIVILITY and REDUCED POLARIZATION

Both Republicans and Democrats saw other advantages to cumulative voting that addressed the dilemma of partisan bitterness, polarization and regional balkanization.

Giddy Dyer, Republican, female state legislator: ““I think the lack of civility began when we did away with [proportional representation] and the multimember districts. Because now, it’s just like two armies in full regalia fighting each other. There’s just total squashing of many good ideas.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: “By its nature the system encouraged moderate viewpoints to be brought to bear. There’s a great deal more independence for each member than there is under the present system.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat from Chicago: “This idea of balkanizing the state that way, it’s not healthy. [Proportional representation], I think, helped us synthesize some of these differences, made us realize even though we were different than the downstaters, different than the suburbanites, that we also had a lot in common that held us together as a single state.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: In Illinois’s three-seat districts with PR, “we operated in a less partisan environment because both parties represented the entire state.”

Giddy Dyer, Republican state legislator:  “I get back to the reason it’s so important to have some Republican representatives from the city of Chicago is that they, many of them, had children in the Chicago public schools, and rode the CTA [metro transit system], and cared about Chicago’s problems. And now, it seems to be polarized, between the city, the suburban ring, and downstate.”

IDEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY WITHIN THE TWO MAJOR PARTIES

Illinois’ experience showed that cumulative voting allowed for a broader spectrum of representatives, not only bipartisan but also within each party. A liberal three-seat district would elect two Democrats and one Republican, but the two Democrats often would be two different types of Democrats—a liberal Democrat and a moderate Democrat, or an independent Democrat and a machine Democrat.

It was the same with the Republicans. Voters all over the state, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, had a vote that counted for something. In Judge Mikva’s Chicago district, one Democrat represented the Daley machine, Mikva represented a more independent Democratic perspective, and the dean of the John Marshall Law School was the elected Republican.

INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES AND LEGISLATORS BEAT THE PARTY MACHINES

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave the opportunity for outsiders like me to win a seat. I never could have gotten elected if the party could have simply beat me one-on-one. I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Mikva was an independent Democrat who ran against the Democratic Party machine in Chicago. He said that under proportional representation, because a candidate needed to win only 25% of the popular vote, legislators were not so beholden to monied interests and political machines. You could run independent of the political machine.

Giddy Dyer, GOP state legislator, who had to fight her own party’s machine to get elected:  “My county chairman was from the other branch, the right-wing branch of the Republican Party, and I would never have been, quote, asked to run by that county chairman. So when I decided to run, I really had to form my own campaign committee and not depend on the party for any help…And Gene Hoffman in the neighboring district was in the same situation. He was a schoolteacher, and very strong on education, and from the moderate wing of the party, and he had to build his own organization to run.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “You ended up with more independent people in the legislature. They weren’t that responsible to a particular political party. Paul Powell couldn’t dominate all of the downstate Democrats because Paul Simon could get elected thanks to proportional representation. Richard Daley couldn’t command all of the Cook County Democrats because Tony Scariano, Bob Mann, and others got elected…The representatives in both parties had a lot more freedom. Everybody understood that you didn’t have to toe a particular party line, or you didn’t have to kowtow to a particular leader. So it generated a lot more independence within the legislature…it really gave the local, legitimate parochial concerns better presence and better voice than they have now.”

With Illinois’s cumulative voting method, independent candidates could run and win without the backing of the party machine or a lot of money because they only needed support from 25% of the voters in the three-seat district. Related to this, using cumulative voting in three-seat districts had campaign finance implications, because a candidate could run a grassroot campaign on a shoestring budget.

Congressman Mikva: “You could appeal to a much smaller set of voters. That involves a much smaller amount of money being spent on them…advertising, media, so on.”

Campaign finance reformers should take note that candidates were able to run grassroots campaigns without the backing of their party machines or huge amounts of private campaign financing. Money played a much-reduced role because a winning candidate only needed to reach the 25% victory threshold.

BETTER FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Proportional representation didn’t serve only political minorities like Republicans in liberal areas and Democrats in conservative areas. It also helped women and racial minorities win representation.

Emil Jones, black Democratic president of the state senate: “The district I was elected from was a district that comprised only about 20 percent of African American constituencies. So, what I did was I organized the African American community. And, the other three candidates, they split the white vote. And I received a certain percentage of the white vote, and I ran second and won.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, longtime House majority leader:  “As a result of proportional representation, my district became the first in Illinois history to send two women from the same party to the state legislature, myself and Carol Moseley Braun.”

Currie was the longest serving woman in the Illinois legislature, serving for 40 years, twenty-two years as House majority leader.

Adeline Geo-Karis, a Republican legislator elected under both PR and winner-take-all systems:  Proportional representation “made it easier for women and minorities to get elected.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, former House majority leader: “In the days of proportional representation, we had African Americans representing majority white districts, and white representatives coming from districts that were predominantly African American.”

PR even helped elect black Republicans, but now the Republican Party in Illinois—as in the rest of the nation—is mostly lily-white.

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When you listen to these Illinois legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, one quality stands out: their belief that the other side deserved representation. They took seriously the Golden Rule of Representation: “Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” They believed doing so was good for their state’s welfare and good for the political and legislative process.

Compare that view to national politics today, to the down-and-dirty, zero-sum "winner take all" game it has become in this age in which hyper-partisan leaders will do whatever it takes to beat the other side.

Indeed, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson wrote that the rolling coalitions which formed in the Illinois House “often helped lead to centrist pragmatic policies.” The Chicago Tribune has opined that “many partisans and political independents have looked back wistfully at the era of cumulative voting. They acknowledge that it produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics.”

BYE BYE CUMULATIVE VOTING…

So if cumulative voting in three-seat districts was so great, what happened? Why did Illinois get rid of it in 1980?

It was the dawn of the Reagan “government is the problem” era, and the Illinois state legislature, failing to take the temperature of the times, foolishly voted itself a hefty pay increase. With a populist battle cry of “get rid of the politicians,” an opportunistic politician sponsored what was known as the Cutback Amendment—a statewide ballot measure that sought to “cut back” the size and cost of state government by shrinking the number of elected politicians by a third. Little recognized, unfortunately, was that the ballot measure also did away with cumulative voting (today, under many state’s initiative process, combining repeal of cumulative voting with a reduction in the number of legislators would likely be a violation of the “single subject” rule).

But the return to winner-take-all, single-seat districts quickly led to the by-now-familiar litany of problems: little competition, partisan polarization, “if you win I lose” winner-take-all dynamics, regional balkanization, low voter turnout, and so on. It virtually wiped out the Democratic Party in DuPage County and other conservative areas, and killed the GOP in Chicago and many other cities. It led to so many lopsided, one-party districts that ever since then nearly half of Illinois’s House races have been uncontested by one of the major parties because everyone knows who will win those races. This is the legacy of "winner take all" elections in Illinois, indeed in all 50 states.

The return of "winner take all" elections also has led to an alarming concentration of power in the hands of the “Four Tops” – no, that’s not a Motown singing quartet, that’s the majority and minority leaders in both the House and the Senate. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Pearson, the Four Tops now “use the cudgel of the potential loss of campaign cash to dictate the issues to be considered and how a member should vote. The formation of a true bipartisan coalition now is rare.”

The Illinois story strikes at the very heart of Americans’ notions of “representation.” Millions of “orphaned voters”—Republicans living in Democratic areas, Democrats in Republican areas, and third-party supporters and independents everywhere—usually do not have a voice. But in Illinois under proportional representation, Republican legislators were elected in the blue liberal cities, as were Democrats in the red conservative areas. Independents, moderates, and the wings of the parties had a place at the table; so did women and minorities. In Illinois, purple America had a home.

A federal bill called the Fair Representation Act has been introduced by Rep. Don Beyer and Rep. Jamie Raskin which would implement proportional representation for electing the US House of Representatives. Instead of cumulative voting, the FRA would use an even better method known as proportional ranked choice voting (also known as “single transferable vote”). PRCV has all the benefits of cumulative voting but it also has other desirable features, such as ranked ballots that prevent spoiler candidates, split votes and wasted votes that can sometimes happen with cumulative voting.

The various 50 US states are often laboratories for innovation and experimentation for each other. The Illinois experience with proportional representation has a lot to teach us as we grapple with the demanding challenges that our failing democracy is facing.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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With the Worldwide Wrestling Federation rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden slowly building to a crescendo, it’s becoming increasingly clear that democracy itself is up for reelection this November.

Americans – indeed the world – are not used to thinking of the United States in such fragile terms. Despite our many national flaws, we have long been one of the world’s inspirations for representative democracy. But the fact that Trump is this close to another grab for the apple reveals that there is something dark and disturbed within the American soul. As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

Indeed, this 230-year-old experiment in democratic governance has been a crucial part of an epic journey of democratic emergence all over the world, punctuated by stories that have long been filled with both heroism and defeat.

In the wake of the 2008-10 economic collapse of historic proportions, and then the pandemic-induced collapse in 2020, democratically-elected governments have taken their share of blame for their struggles. Some pundits have even gone so far as to suggest that authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Israel and India will own the future. Some have audaciously declared that democracy is no longer central to human progress, indeed that democracy is overrated and becoming irrelevant in this AI-saturated, social media-polarized, un-brave new world we are entering.

Could this be true? I have spent much of my professional life writing about democracy and representative government, including ways to improve our democratic practices. So I have become seized with an urgency to investigate this charge. Part of my philosophical journey has led to visits to the ancient nascencies of democracy, to see if they might reveal some secrets to me. Would I find that the democratic roots had withered, like a formerly glorious but now rotten tree? Or would I find inspiration from these places, and from the democratic heroes who had struggled there, and whose brave and noble shoulders we are standing upon today?

Ancient Athens, birthplace of democracy

I travelled first to the ancient beginnings, to the place where western democracy originally broke ground, as far as historians can tell. To Athens, Greece, and more specifically to the Agora, the 2500 year old cradle of the democratic spirit.  Located at the base of the Acropolis and just across the rail tracks from the cafes and tavernas of the Monastiraki district, the ancient Agora site today is only a few sparse acres and hemmed in by a modern city. But its importance looms large in the western canon. 

A few of the Agora’s ancient buildings have been reconstructed, but most of the site is still in ruins, with stubs of columns, old walls, and headless busts poking out from the earth that long ago swallowed them. You have to use your imagination a bit to visualize it. “Agora” means “gathering place,” and this spot was a crucial intersection for a throbbing polis that began over two thousand years before the first settlers reached what would become the United States.

Physically the Agora was a large public square flanked on several sides by major civic buildings, inside of which merchants sold their goods and services from shops and stalls amid the colonnades. It was a beehive of commercial activity, with everything from fruit and livestock to perfume, hardware, money-changing and slaves trading hands. Looking up at one of the busts on display, that of a bearded Mediterranean with a sharp nose and steely gaze, I am mesmerized by the thought that “if I walked past this guy walking down a street in New York today, he would fit right in.” Anatomically, stylistically, coiffure-wise, he looks modern and hip. And his quotidian concerns might not have been all that different — work, family, duty, social life, entertainment, a tasty glass of vino…

But his understanding of democracy would have been quite different. The Agora also was where Athenians gathered for the exchange of ideas as well as goods. Among the hive of stalls, a ferment of debate over philosophy, ethics and politics unfolded on a daily basis. Philosophers, statesmen, orators and dramatists, little known outside Athens at the time but who were to become giants of the western canon, traded ideas and policies at the Agora. Pericles, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Alcibiades, Aristides and Themistocles were regulars. Socrates was a constant presence there. “He was always on public view,” wrote the historian Xenophon, “for early in the morning he used to go to the walkways and gymnasia, to appear in the agora as it filled up, and to be present wherever he would meet with the most people.”

This hotbed of intellectual and commercial bustle was fed by a particular innovation in human organization that had appeared on the scene just a few years before. After several million years of human anatomical evolution, and a few tens of thousands of years of social evolution, at a certain moment in history something ground-breaking appeared, a revolutionary game changer:  democracy.

Though it must be said that even Athens had its antecedents. 2000 years before (c. 2700 BCE), the ancient popular assemblies of Mesopotamia – in Syria, Iraq and Iran today – spread west to Phoenician cities such as Byblos on the modern day Lebanese coast. These proto-democratic bodies functioned as the first (that we know of) kind of popular counterweight to kingly power. From Byblos it was just a two millennium hop and a skip across the Mediterranean-Aegean Seas to Athens. So the ancient assemblies of Syria-Mesopotamia are like fossilized remains buried beneath the ruins of Athens. That’s the truer origin story of democracy.

But Athens found its way there eventually. Around 508 B.C. the nobleman Kleisthenes organized Athens into 10 tribes. Each of the tribes was empowered to choose by lot fifty of its citizens who together comprised a 500 member Boule (Senate).  The Boule prepared legislative bills to be voted on directly by an Assembly of All Citizens (Ekklesia of the Demos). Some 30,000 adult males of Athenian birth were eligible to vote out of a total population of around 250,000 men, women, and children, free and unfree. Of those 30,000, perhaps 5,000 might regularly attend one or more meetings of the Assembly of All Citizens, of which there were at least forty a year in Aristotle’s day. Those at the Assembly did not elect representatives to vote on their behalf, they voted directly on legislation and executive bills. It was the type of direct democracy people power later emulated in New England town meetings.

I stood there before the sparse skeleton of one building, the meeting place of the 500 member Boule. This edifice once stood in a row of administration buildings on one side of the main square. Next door are the remains of one of the more significant public buildings of the Agora, known as the Tholos. Originally an enclosed circular structure with six interior columns, today all that is visible is the circumference of the foundation. But it was the headquarters of the 50 citizens who served as administrators for 35 days — after which they were replaced by citizens from another tribe.

By the end of the year’s rotations, representatives from all 10 tribes had a turn in the administration. Since all sides rotated leadership, this reduced petty partisanship and special interests trying to prevent the other side from governing. Perhaps Kleisthenes, who is considered the father of ancient Athenian democracy, understood something essential about how to avoid the balkanization and polarization that plagues U.S. democracy today — rotation of power ensured compliance with the golden rule of politics, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” because you know that those over whom you were lording today would soon lord over you.

Not far from these buildings stood a pedestal once decorated with bronze statues of the mythical heroes of each of the 10 tribes. On the sides of this pedestal hung wooden boards with announcements for the citizens of Athens, including legal decrees coming up for a vote, forthcoming lawsuits, lists of citizens conscripted into the army, civic or honorary distinctions and the like -- their version of Twitter, I thought, a central kiosk or internet message board.

At the time, Athenian democracy was cutting edge stuff, but all was not so copacetic from a modern standpoint. Women were totally excluded, this was a men’s club; foreigners, especially unfree slave foreigners, were also excluded. The citizen body was a closed political elite with a small electorate, similar to America at its founding in 1789 when only white men of property could vote and many of the framers owned slaves who they agreed would be counted as 3/5 of a free person. And of course, Athenian democracy showed its capacity for injustice when it condemned Socrates to death in 399 B.C. just because he asked too many annoying questions to those elites in power. “Corruption of the youth” was the charge. The site of the jail where the pesky inquisitor  (“the gadfly,” as Plato described him) was imprisoned and suffered his sentence -- death by hemlock poison -- also is located here, occupying an out of the way corner from the central square of the Agora.

I had come to this ancient place to see if these old stones and walls would talk to me. Standing there in the dusty middle of what is left of the Agora, scanning the column nubs and half statues that look like rows of broken teeth, I was visited by the ghosts of the past that were warning about the present. Nothing can be taken for granted, each generation must renew its democratic faith and commitment.

Down the tunnel of time, I thought I could hear the distant cacophony of traders and merchants hawking their wares, and see the ghosts of Pericles’ entourage pushing through the crowds, and spy Socrates off to one side with a knot of impressionable young males gathered round (one of them looking like Plato).  I felt momentarily dizzy, lost in contemplation of democracy’s centuries-long sojourn.  Beyond Athens, Europe’s ancient cradle is scattered with nascencies and power spots that mark the ebb and flow of the democratic tide that eventually led to American shores.

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The Roman Republic “trumpifies” into civil war

There must have been something in the Mediterranean air around 500 B.C., because contemporaneously with Kleisthenes’ new code, ancient Rome took its first halting steps toward becoming a democratic republic. It began with the overthrow of a monarch, also around 508 B.C., followed by the launch of the structures that became the Roman Republic.

The Roman version of the Greek Agora was the Forum, which for centuries was the center of day-to-day life, the site for elections and important speeches, commerce, as well as triumphal processions, criminal trials and gladiatorial matches. While the Republic and its representative democracy was dominated by wealthy families and eventually collapsed into dictatorship – another warning to our modern era – in one intriguing way it was more representative than any modern-day republics. That’s because it granted an explicit “representation quota” to its poorest citizens.

In the early Republic’s Centuriate Assembly (where all male citizens of military age were enrolled in one of five voting groups based on economic class), the poorest classes were able to have their say. While the voting was weighted in such a way that the wealthier elements could always outvote the poorest, at least the poor were at the political table.

In the middle Roman Republic, the poorer classes exclusively elected ten high-level leaders, called the tribunes of the plebeians, who could use their office to take up the causes of the poor. Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, each served in the plebeian tribunates of 133 BC and 121 BC, respectively, and championed causes such as land redistribution to poor rural farmers and reforms against political corruption. The more popular the Gracchi brothers became, the more they were viewed as a threat by the ruling class, and eventually both were brutally murdered (Tiberius was lynched in the Forum).

Nevertheless, even in the oligarchic Roman Republic, class was distinctly recognized and formally incorporated into the voting practices and institutions. Today, the idea of such affirmative action along class lines is ridiculed. Instead, poor people pretty much have opted out of politics in the United States, since there are no class quotas, no tribunes like the Gracchi brothers to speak for them, and little hope that a viable political party might arise that can represent their interests (the poor in Europe, however, vote in higher numbers due to different electoral rules of proportional representation that create multiparty democracies that offer more choices to voters).

Rome’s republic ebbed and flowed, reacting to the times, until it was subverted during a series of civil wars and finally collapsed into an empire when Caesar crossed the Rubicon at the head of his army. But it lasted in one form or another for 482 years. Considering that the American republic has been around for less than half that time, Rome provides a cautionary tale that democracy cannot be taken for granted, it must be renewed and re-nourished by each generation.

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Democracy’s future

Is an American Empire, run by a dictatorial emperor, in our future?

The shards I found in Athens, Rome and other early nascencies of democracy held a secret I wished to unlock, a pulsing in their mortar and fragments that I could feel when I touched my palms to their gritty surface.

In ancient Athens and Rome we can see the first proto-vestiges of key concepts that modern democracies have refined, such as separation of powers, divided branches of power and checks and balances, guided by constitutions and laws. These developments went hand in hand with, in fact were preceded by, the first development of writing in ancient Sumer around 3200 BC, and Hammurabi’s legal code around 1772 BC. It has been such a long march.

To me, it almost has the markings of a predestined progression. Then came the Magna Carta, 1215 AD…Wang Zhan’s wooden moveable type, 1290…the Islamic Golden Age, c. 1290… Gutenberg’s printing press, 1455…the Renaissance, c. 1490…parliamentary government in Britain, 1707…American Constitution, 1787…proportional representation, mid-19^th century…and more. Each new innovation built on top of what came before. Each was driven by a personal desire, to the point of longing, for dignity and respect. Each was inspired by the human condition, and sought to return the inspiration by improving the human plight. Not that all pioneers and practitioners were pure of heart and spirit, but the collective movement for democracy was.

It seems highly unlikely to me, then, that democracy and representative government are has-beens, soon to be viewed in the rear view mirror. No, they are works in progress. And that work will never be finished. “To Form a More Perfect Union,” after all. Democracy is precious, we must never give up on it. It is one of the essences of being fully human.

All that was revealed to me as I stood under a bright lapis lazuli Athens sky, gazing at the shards of what once was, marveling that western notions of governance and democracy all began here, at the Agora, 2500 years ago. That seems like a long time to we individual humans, but in the evolution of democratic consciousness, apparently it’s not anywhere near the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

In contemplating this very human trajectory, the words of poet T.S. Eliot come to mind: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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[Why only a day? Why not a month…for all International Women? They are, after all, half of the population…shouldn’t they get six months?

I digress…]

Sometimes I am moved to tip my hat to some of the remarkable humans who have walked the paving stones of history. Not all humans have been lying, thieving, sociopathic scalawags like Trump, or murderous, self-justifying psychopaths like Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Andrew Jackson (with Netanyahu slowly creeping up the list). Some people have been exemplary models of valor, dignity, generosity, consensus-building and problem-solving, stars in the dark firmament showing the true beauty that a human being is capable of.

The ones I typically admire are those who have overcome great adversity to accomplish remarkable feats, even heroic ones. The ones who had to fight for recognition of their humanity against the despots and bigots of their own time. In this era of “me me me” solipsism, I sit up attentively over the tales of people who have risked life and limb to advance their own humanity, and in the process marched the human race a step closer to its own.

Margaret Cochran Corbin, the first woman who…

Allow me to introduce you to Margaret Cochran Corbin, the first woman combatant to take a bullet for revolutionary America. Young America was seeking to throw off its colonial chains from Great Britain, and Margaret’s bravery in battle and fortitude in life are a tribute to our collective humanity, as well as our ongoing redefinition of femininity.

Margaret Corbin was not some delicate wallflower. Oh no, she reportedly could cuss and drink with the crustiness of any man. And she was a better shooter than Caitlin Clark, though her shot was of a different kind, and with a different kind of ball.

She was born in 1751 on the frontier of central Pennsylvania near Gettysburg. When she was a child the French and Indian War broke out, and the local Shawnee and Delaware tribes allied with the French and attacked English settlements to reclaim territory they had lost in the previous decades. Native warriors attacked her home, killing her father and kidnapping her mother who she never saw again. Margaret and her brother were adopted and raised by an uncle.

The hardships of Corbin’s young frontier life perhaps instilled in her the resilience that would serve her well during the Revolution when history came knocking.

When Margaret was 21 she married a farmer named John Corbin, who soon joined the Continental Army in 1775 and was promptly sent off to war. Like so many wives of Revolutionary soldiers, Margaret had to decide between staying behind and fending for herself on the frontier — the potential dangers including poverty, starvation and British attacks — or she could travel with her husband and other soldiers and endure all the hardships and dangers of life in a poorly equipped and barely disciplined Patriot army.

Camp followers

Margaret chose to stay with her husband and joined the ranks of the Continental Army’s camp followers. “Camp follower” was the name for all the women and children who traveled with the Army throughout the war. Life for these tagalongs was hard, most were the wives or daughters of soldiers. They were paid small wages to cook, sew and do laundry for the troops, and to care for the sick and wounded. They received meals from the Army’s rations and slept in the camps. Some of the women also aided the men in their duties, particularly artillerymen, where the wives observed and at times stepped in to lend a hand during drills and maintenance of the cannon. No one is certain about the number of camp followers, though some historians estimate as many as 20,000 over the course of the American Revolution.

The reputation of some camp followers raised a disapproving eyebrow, rumors circulating that some of the women were prostitutes. Soldiering was a rough and dirty business, and many of the women were rough-mannered and prone to swearing and drinking. General George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army, tried to limit the number of followers but even he recognized that they provided a number of indispensable services and that their presence kept many of his soldiers from deserting.

Margaret herself reportedly was gruff and strong, and at five feet eight inches tall she was as tall as many men. Her husband was a maltross – he assisted the gunners in loading and firing the cannon. Margaret reportedly fit right in among the cannon crew, both in size and temperament. One report says she dressed more like a man. Possessed with a forceful personality, she apparently made few friends among the women in camp, instead feeling more at home smoking and conversing with the other soldiers in her husband’s company who affectionately called her “Captain Molly” (many of these women were given the nickname Molly, including the more famous Molly Pitcher, whose real name was Mary Ludwig Hays and who carried water to thirsty soldiers and to cool the cannons when she became a camp follower two years later)

(S)Heroism at the battle of Fort Washington near New York City

In 1776, Margaret’s regiment marched to New York and was stationed at Fort Washington in northern Manhattan, the island on which New York City resides. When the British took control of the city, Fort Washington became the only American stronghold left on the island. The British attacked the garrison with 8,000 British and Hessian mercenary forces mounting a fierce charge. Margaret and other “Molly Pitchers” followed their husbands into battle to assist with carrying water and caring for the wounded.

As the Hessians moved up the hill toward the fort, John Corbin and most of his cannon team were strafed and killed. Rather than retreat to a safer location, Margaret, who had stayed alongside her husband, took over firing the cannon. Her aim was so deadly, and she inflicted so much devastation upon the attacking Hessians, that the enemy halted their advance to focus on eliminating her. They pointed over a dozen cannon on her position, raining down solid shot and grape shot.

It took hours of constant fighting for the Hessian troops to reach the top of the ridge (today known as Bennett Park, the highest natural point in Manhattan). Eventually Margaret was cut down by three musket balls and a well-aimed cannon blast. The hot metal balls ripped into her left shoulder and breast, nearly severing her arm while also carving into her jaw. Her cannon was the last to fall silent. Severely wounded, Margaret lay beside her cannon while the Hessian troops swarmed over the top of the ridge and pushed back the remaining Patriot riflemen (see the enactment painting at the head of this article).

Once the British captured the fort, they found Margaret by her cannon in critical condition. She was taken prisoner, along with a couple thousand of her fellow soldiers who were marched to makeshift prisons in New York City and onto prison hulks anchored in the harbor. Only 800 of them survived due to malnutrition and disease from the sordid prison conditions. British doctors treated Margaret for her severe wounds and saved her life, but her left arm was permanently paralyzed.

Margaret was eventually released by her captors and returned to Philadelphia. She was completely incapacitated and virtually unable to care for herself. And she was alone in the world, with no family support. She applied for financial help from the Pennsylvania government and in 1779 it granted her a measly $30 to cover her needs, but then passed her case on to Congress’ Board of War.

To recognize or ignore…

The Board had never recognized a female soldier before, much less granted a pension to a woman. Finally the Board decided that “as [Corbin] had [courage] enough to supply the place of her husband after his fall in the service of his Country, and in the execution of that task received the dangerous wound under which she now labors, the board can but consider her as entitled to the same grateful return which would be made to a soldier in circumstance equally unfortunate.” She was granted a lifelong monthly pension as a soldier in the Continental Army – but only half that of male combatants, a measly $3.30 per month. Nevertheless, that made her the first woman to be awarded a pension for military service.

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Post-war battle for recognition

The rest of her short life was a struggle. Her wounds incapacitated her for the rest of her life. She could not earn a living on her own and required assistance even for simple tasks, such as dressing and eating. In 1780 she was allowed to enroll in the Corps of Invalids, composed of disabled soldiers who were employed in garrisons, hospitals and prisons, and was eventually stationed in West Point, New York where she helped care for other wounded soldiers.

There she lived out the rest of her days, reportedly displaying a sharp tongue and quick temper. One contemporary account remembered her as “the famous Irish woman called Captain Molly…she generally dressed in the petticoats of her sex, with an artilleryman’s coat over.” Behind her back people referred to her as ‘Dirty Kate,’ but when face to face, she was saluted as Captain Molly and was held in high regard.

Margaret eventually succumbed to complications from her old wounds and died on a cold winter morning, January 16, 1800, aged 48. She did not receive full military honors upon her death, like other veterans, and was buried in a little cemetery where her inscriptionless grave quickly became overgrown and -- along with the memory of her heroics – forgotten to nearly everyone.

She rested there for 126 years until the New York State Society of Daughters of the American Revolution brought new interest in Corbin’s life. In 1926, after extensive research involving local historians and physicians, the body was exhumed and examined to confirm it was hers based on the injuries on her skeleton. The body was reinterred at the West Point Cemetery with full military honors, becoming one of only two Revolutionary War soldiers to be buried there.

The Daughters of the American Revolution erected the Margaret Corbin Monument over her new gravesite, to commemorate the bravery and patriotism of a remarkable woman. So too, Margaret Corbin is recognized in New York City at Fort Tryon, the renamed Fort Washington which she had defended so bravely along with her husband’s cannon crew. A tablet praises Margaret Corbin as the “first woman to take a soldier’s part in the war for liberty.”

But Margaret’s re-interment was not the final chapter of her life and story. In 2016, following an accidental disturbance of her gravesite, anthropologist Elizabeth DiGangi was asked to examine the bones. Dr. DiGangi announced that the bones “were biologically consistent with a tall, middle-aged man alive between the colonial period and the 19^th century. Therefore, the remains are not that of Corbin, but rather an unknown male.”

Oops. The authorities had buried (and reburied) the wrong person!

It has been said that in the fog of war, the first casualty is the truth. Including sometimes who is buried where. Though her remains are still lost, that does not detract from the heroism of her deeds. Tragically, Margaret Cochran Corbin fought to defend a document -- "All men are created equal" -- that didn't fully defend her.

Debra Sampson

And she wasn’t the only one. Debra Sampson also served in George Washington's Continental Army with valor and distinction – disguised as a man. She joined the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, and during combat "Robert Shirtliff" was shot in her thigh and sustained a sword gash on her forehead. Afraid that a doctor would discover her true identity, she fled the hospital and used a penknife to dig out the musket ball herself, and then sewed herself back up.

Debra’s identity was revealed eventually when she became dangerously ill and was taken to a hospital where she lost consciousness and the medical staff removed her clothes. She was then honorably discharged, after a year and a half of service, but she was withheld her army pay because she was a woman. Her leg never healed, and twenty years later she was a wife and mother, disabled by her war wound, and her petition for a veteran’s pension had long been ignored by Congress.

Another woman frustrated by the discrimination that she faced in a man’s world, Sampson once again was forced to don men’s clothing to seek opportunity and dignity: to earn income, she embarked on a lecture tour about her wartime service, including performing in her army uniform conducting military drills and a ceremony routine. After an intervention on her behalf by famous patriot Paul Revere, Congress finally granted her pension request as gratitude for being a disabled soldier.

These are just a couple of the many remarkable stories of everyday women struggling with courage, persistence and brilliance in late 18th century colonial America. A time when famous leaders like John Adams (husband of Abigail Adams: “Remember the Ladies…we are determined to foment a Rebellion”) and Thomas Jefferson were what passed for leading humanists, and even “colonial feminists.” But the Founder’s own words remain an indictment of the times and its narrow construction of women’s rights. Margaret Corbin and Debra Sampson were just as much pioneers as Jefferson and Adams, leaders of that generation’s “Me too” movement.  

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note. This article was published originally by The Fulcrum. It is Part I of a two-part article. Part II will be published soon.]

2023 has been a big 30th anniversary year for us. In 1993 we were married. FairVote, the organization we helped found, moved into its first office -- that is, a bedroom in our DC group house. FairVote earned its first sustained attention in the national press when Lani Guinier’s nomination to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division triggered a national conversation about the proportional representation voting systems that she had proposed in a brilliant series of law review articles.

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of a remarkable electoral reform triumph in New Zealand. In 1993, a citizen-led reform coalition pulled off a heroic upset in a referendum that replaced American-style winner-take-all elections with a “mixed member proportional” (MMP) system. We had a front row seat, as our leadership in America’s nascent proportional representation movement earned us an invitation to support the campaign with events, strategy sessions, and media interviews across the nation.

We wanted to mark this milestone with our reflections about what it takes to win such a transformative national change – and how best to translate those lessons into the very different world of politics of the United States. In this opening article, we’ll zero in on the New Zealand half of the story.

Importantly for those skeptical that a proportional system can be won in the United States, New Zealand was seemingly an impossible place to win reform. It was the world’s most quintessentially winner-take-all democracy – one with just a single national chamber of 99 legislators, elected by plurality, “first past the post” voting in single-member districts. Minor parties couldn’t get traction, and the people lacked a citizen initiative. The major party winning the most seats earned absolute power and typically would have little incentive to change the electoral rules. Even so, New Zealand changed to a fully proportional system in 1993. We’ll summarize the fortuitous string of events that made reform possible:

• Several close elections, combined with strong third parties, triggered controversial distortions in the share of votes cast for parties compared to seats won - including a “wrong-way outcome” where a party with fewer national votes gained control of government. That “votes-to-seats” controversy led the Labor Party to promise to set up a commission to examine electoral system reforms. After it took office, it turned the job over to Geoffery Palmer, a cabinet minister who took his job seriously. The result was the 1985-1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System.

• The Royal Commission earned great respect for its thorough, open-minded approach to analyzing options and ultimately recommended a change to mixed member proportional (MMP) - a method where half the seats are elected from U.S.-style single-member districts and half from “party lists” that are added to provide overall proportional representation in share of votes earned to share of seats earned. Forms of MMP are now widely used around the world, but at the time MMP was only used in Germany, where, under American occupation after World War 2, it had been adopted as a compromise between the district system familiar to Americans and the party list system familiar to Germans.

• The Royal Commission’s report might have ended up as a thoughtful but dusty read in university libraries. Instead, Labor prime minister David Lange in the 1987 elections misread his campaign debate prep notes and mistakenly promised a referendum on its MMP recommendation. After his re-election, his government ignored that promise.

• The National Party in its successful 1990 campaign seized on this broken promise and committed to hold a referendum. Because it was not supportive of change, however, the National government established a challenging multi-year process designed to kill or at least weaken reform efforts. It held a national two-question referendum in 1992 where New Zealanders first voted on whether to change the system at all, and then on which of five election methods to pick for a head-to-head referendum in 1993 against the current system.

• Fortunately, a brilliant group of proportional representation advocates came together and made a series of savvy tactical campaign moves. Central to its strategy was staying unified in backing the Royal Commission recommendation for MMP and messaging the case for change exceptionally well – such that a stunning 85% of New Zealanders in 1992 voted for change and 70% voted for MMP.

• Given that status quo defenders had a huge campaign spending edge in the 1993 “runoff referendum” – estimated to be greater than ten to one – those conditions still might not have been enough. Fortunately, the government paid for a major education campaign where the nation’s excellent political science community created a neutral baseline foundation of accurate information – one that helped weaken the impact of the slew of opposition ads seeking to demonize MMP.

• Voters were unusually ready for change because both major parties in the 1980s had acted to open up the nation’s historically closed economy over the objections of most of their voters. While ultimately a likely positive for the country, it disrupted many people’s jobs and triggered deep voter dissatisfaction. When the votes were counted, 54% voted for change, including an astounding 92% of young voters.

• Critically for the long-term preservation of MMP, a provision in the legislation triggered an automatic review and a second referendum to retain the system, but only after nearly two decades of use that gave the country time to settle into its new rules and for both major parties to experience winning under the new system. In 2011, voters comfortably retained MMP, and it is now essentially settled law.

While no system is perfect, MMP indeed has worked well:

• Voter turnout has been sustained at high and remarkably equitable levels across age groups, including 82% turnout in 2020. Evaluators of governance consistently rank New Zealand high internationally, such as Transparency International in 2022 ranking the nation second in the world for its exceptionally low levels of government corruption.

• Major parties are held accountable, and neither party is favored by the rules. With the National Party win in this fall’s election, putting conservatives in power until 2026, the major parties on the left and right will each have had 15 years running the country since the first MMP election in 1996. Minor parties also consistently earn their fair share of seats, at least one minor party nearly always has been a formal member of the governing coalition – including the Libertarian-like ACT party and the New Zealand First party in the upcoming National-led government.

• Women and indigenous New Zealanders are much more accurately represented. Two women prime ministers (Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern) have led the Labor party to four victories, and by 2022, women held more than half of all seats in parliament. New Zealand’s Maori people have also earned far fairer representation than in the winner-take-all era – rising from 8% of parliament in 1993 to 14% after the first MMP election in 1996 to more than 20% by the 2020’s.

• Proportional representation is now widely accepted and has spread within New Zealand. The proportional form of ranked choice voting (also called the “single transferable vote”) is used by all voters in health board elections and in many elections for mayor and city council, including in the capital city of Wellington.

Lessons learned

So what did we learn from our time there and what lessons did we bring to our work in the United States?

Our personal experience was life-changing and reinforced our youthful exuberance that national change was possible. During our whirlwind tour of the South and North Islands, we talked with journalists in every city and stayed in a new reformer’s home nearly every night, which allowed us to experience directly how a full political spectrum can rally around electoral reform, from left to middle to right. MMP campaign leaders like the late Rod Donald and Wellington’s Phil Saxby were brilliant at finding ways to make reform relevant to ordinary New Zealanders. Visits to restaurants and barber shops (yes, Rob had hair in 1993) would result in lively conversations with New Zealanders about their views on different voting methods. 

Seeing how MMP could win on the ballot helped prepare us to support the string of ballot measure wins for better election systems in the United States - primarily ranked choice voting (RCV). The fact that FairVote today has a staff of more than 30 people and annual budgets topping $7 million, and the fact that its spinoff RepresentWomen has achieved remarkable impact since its founding in 2018, has origins in the hope and determination inspired by New Zealanders.

At the same time, we quickly learned to adapt to the reality that the insularity of most Americans and their elected leaders made international uses of PR and RCV and successes like New Zealand’s win far less relevant for media and reform wins than ones that we can translate to our unique set of political circumstances. In the year after the referendum, our enthusiastic outreach about New Zealand’s win for MMP earned almost no traction. Yet a county’s discussion of lesser proportional models like cumulative voting could land us on the front page of the Washington Post, while our analyses about problems with non-majority outcomes in presidential elections and congressional landslides earned us prime spots on CSPAN and national oped pages.

In our next article, we’ll talk about how we have translated the aspirational goals of the New Zealand movement to embracing our challenge in the United States: to identify a path to national, state and local reform that can win and address our nation’s unique set of institutions, conditions, and challenges. For us, that has meant being catalysts for the current drive to bring ranked choice voting for all of our elections and its proportional form for elections with multi-winner districts.

Before turning to our next article, we doff our hats to New Zealanders. To be sure, MMP hasn’t favored one side of the partisan spectrum, perhaps disappointing American partisans who only support reform when it helps their side. Nor has MMP meant that every government does everything well. But it has indisputably helped the nation achieve effective governance, strengthen its core democratic foundations, and set a model for transformative change that remains an inspiration to reformers everywhere.

(Cynthia Richie Terrell is founder and executive director of RepresentWomen. Rob Richie was FairVote’s executive director and CE for 31 years and this year became a Senior Advisor)

Cynthia Richie Terrell and Rob Richie @CynthiaRTerrell and @Rob_Richie

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A few years ago, I was on a book tour for my book, Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age. Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, fifteen cities in only a few weeks — many of these capitals were birthplaces of democracy in their own right, where the battles of yesteryear still resonate today. Two steps forward, one step back. It was a whirlwind tour, exhausting yet exhilarating, and the title of that 1969 movie “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium” kept flashing through my brain.

Of all the cities I visited, one of the most captivating was Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic (also known as Czechia). It was still enjoying the fresh bloom of democracy that had blossomed some 20 years before during its peaceful Velvet Revolution. Along with similar revolts elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the countries of the Iron Curtain had thrown off the chains of Soviet-Russian occupation. BIG steps forward, circa 1989.

At that time, the world had been witnessing the remarkable events in Egypt and Tunisia known as the Arab Spring. I noticed that many people all over the world referred to these events as the Arab "Velvet Revolution" – not as the Arab "American Revolution," or the Arab "Fall of the Berlin Wall," but as the Arab "Velvet Revolution." Such was the hold that the Czech Republic, a land of only 10 million people, had on the imaginations of people all over the world.

The vestiges of a troubled past

Prague’s thousand-year-old history stretches one’s concept of time. A thousand years of human history, and attempts to take two steps forward without the one back. With kings and empires giving way century after century to usurpers and successors, only to see themselves defenestrated – literally "thrown out the window," an ancient Prague tradition for dealing with tyrannical leaders who overstepped their authority. Legend has it that some of them were tossed out the highest window of the medieval clock tower in the Old Town Hall that looms over the central square.

I had the privilege of interviewing Petr Pithart, a leader of the Velvet Revolution and the Czech Republic’s first Prime Minister post-1989. Then Pithart became a Senator, and in our interview he spoke freely and frankly about the communist legacy of corruption that had continued to plague Czechia, estimated to drain away approximately 15% of the Czech gross domestic product. Since then, various commissions as well as NGOs have targeted the no-bid contracts, sweetheart deals and other practices that have amounted to a partial theft of the Velvet Revolution’s promise. One small step forward.

In my estimation, an atmosphere of melancholy still hangs over Prague after all these many years, reflecting its history as a city of martyrs. Its Old Town Square (Staroměstskénáměstí) is dominated by a large monument honoring native son Jan Hus, a religious thinker who was burned at the stake in 1415 for espousing his beliefs. They actually did that kind of thing then, killed you over what you believed and said (in some places in today’s world, they still do). For centuries that statue has stood as a symbol of one who spoke truth to power and paid the ultimate sacrifice.

Within walking distance from the Hus statuary is a memorial to Jan Palach, the Czech student who committed suicide in January 1969 by setting himself on fire as a protest against the Soviet tanks that had invaded to put an end to the liberalizing reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968.

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The nearby Old Jewish Cemetery, with its twisted gravestones looking like rows of crooked skeleton teeth jutting out from layers of burial pits, is a constant reminder of the purges and pogroms that have targeted certain people with genocidal attention and intention. The charnel houses of Europe have been fully booked and overflowing for centuries.

Empires always have their victims, and there is the enormous Prague castle sitting on the hill overlooking the city, casting a shadow over the winding Vltava River and the famous Charles Bridge, dominating the spatial feng shui of the Prague valley. Since the 9th century, this is where the Kings of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperors, Nazi collaborators, Czech communists and now the president of the current Czech Republic all have installed their offices. The city has endured the suffering of the Protestant Reformation, the fratricidal Thirty Years’ War, Nazi invasion, communist occupation, capitalist consumerism and more.

Indeed, the fine hotel where I stayed on one of my trips to Prague is located on Bartolomejska, Bartholomew Street. This short alleyway and canyon of buildings was long a nest of the secret police, where communist authorities took their prisoners, many of whom were never heard from again. Disappeared. Two steps back. The very building in which my hotel resided, Number 9 Bartolomejska, was a former convent until the Communists ran out the nuns and turned the building into a dungeon. Prison cells were set up in the basement, offices loaded with interrogators and the church itself defiled as a shooting range.

Among the people who were jailed there – right there in my hotel’s basement – was a young playwright by the name of Vaclav Havel, who later became Petr Pithart’s more famous counterpart as the first Czech president of the post-1989 era. In the basement, there is a thick metal door indicating that the preserved closet-sized room was Havel’s former cell. The hallways of the three-floor hotel are lengthy and labyrinthine, dimly lit, and as I walked to my room each night I couldn’t help but reflect on how I felt like I was being swallowed down the passageway of a long dark throat that in days gone by had gobbled the hopes, aspirations, indeed the daylight, of so many innocent people.

The City of Hundred Spires

Prague today, comparably, seems bathed in light. It has assumed its rank as a quintessentially European capital, combining beautiful architecture and urban collage with winding alleyways and crisscrossed streets of the old town, whispering the tales of its storied past.

When gazing out from the gates of Prague Castle, high above the city, one can appreciate why the 19^th century mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano counted the towers in the city and gave it the name the City of Hundred Spires.

Today, I can attest that Prague is an energetic place, filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, filmmakers, music clubs and good inexpensive beer. It is ranked fifth among Europe’s 271 regions in terms of gross domestic product per inhabitant, achieving 172% of the EU average and ranking above Paris and Stockholm.

Czechia has become a regional auto manufacturing leader and energy exporter. Like everywhere else it was hurt by the pandemic, but it has emerged from that crisis in remarkably decent shape with an unemployment rate hovering around 3.5% for the whole country and only 2.6 percent in Prague (compared to 3.7% in the U.S.). It occupies a crucial geopolitical role in the heart of the European Union, a swing voter of sorts between East and West, sometimes joining with, other times spurning, its troublemaking neighbors, the populist Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Poland’s diminutive Jarosław Kaczyński, as they vex and poke their thumbs in the eye of EU rules and bureaucracy.

Czechia finds itself at the core of a fragilely peaceful and prosperous Europe, yet one foot drags behind as it still tries to shed vestiges of its communist past.

Two steps forward, one step back. It’s as if from the mulch of this corpse-filled history has sprung periodic blooms of new life and creativity. The national museum located across the famous Charles Bridge from Old Town Square houses the fine art of the most amazing Czech and East European painters that virtually no one outside of Czechia has heard of. Reflecting its history, the style of surrealism stands out, along with a Czech version of cubism. I was stunned walking through the galleries, interspersed with modern and contemporary artists mounting their riveting and provocative work, an amazingly eclectic mix of politics, cultural and historical eras.

Democratic contradictions, full steam ahead

Yes, when in Prague, one is surrounded by all these sorts of contradictions and more. And yet, cutting through the fog of memory is the fact that the Velvet Revolution amounted to a final triumph of a centuries-long struggle of truth and nonviolence over brute power and its lies. And it continues to inspire people all over the world.

Its governments have tended to alternate in power between classically European conservatives and the center-left (but keep in mind that the European center tends to be to the left of the Democratic Party in the US on many issues, so political leanings across the Atlantic are not so easily categorized). Its meandering trajectory of two steps forward, one step back has tracked that of Europe itself. Or, for that matter, the United States.

In its parliamentary elections in 2021, the 200 members of the Chamber of Deputies were elected from 14 multi-seat districts by open list proportional representation with a victory threshold of 5% for a political party to win seats. The final results saw the turning out of the incumbent populist prime minister in the closest parliamentary election in the history of the Czech Republic. The opposition parties, which ran on a pro-Western and pro-European center-right platform, focused on fiscal responsibility (in response to some national scandals) and closer relations with NATO. The opposition won a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and power was peacefully transferred. No January 6-type insurrections. That’s democracy, both feet forward.

The Czech Republic has come a long way from its troubled history, and that of Eastern and Central Europe, and with Prague only a day’s drive from Ukraine, and squeezed between right-wing populist Poland and Hungary, its liberal democracy will have to keep finding its own foundations of certainty among the uncertainty of the region, and the world.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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In celebration of International Women’s Day, I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into…the Founding Fathers and Framers of these here United States of America. Specifically, into the veneration with which they are still treated, over 240 years after they launched a new nation. In a way, it’s kind of touching, how we honor these traditions, and those men, and that history. There is much there to be proud of, if one is inclined to be proud of one’s nation.

But there’s also something odd about how, nearly a quarter of a millennium later, we hold up these very human male leaders and their 18th century handiwork for glorification. As a diverse nation, we lack a common religion so we worship our Constitution as the scripture that holds “We the People” together. Many Americans feel so deeply about the Founders’ creation that they proclaim themselves its true defenders and their opponents as misguided and even “un-American.” Many “originalists,” including certain political leaders and Supreme Court Justices, still try to read the original texts in a Biblical fashion, as if these were gods and we mere mortals who should not touch the hem of their document.

Yet when it comes to other aspects of this Holy Canon – uncomfortable and inconvenient facts — such as the fact that many of the Founders and Framers were slaveowners, that they enshrined Blacks as 3/5 of whites, that some of the Founders impregnated their female slaves, that they were the paterfamiliases of a patriarchal society in which their wives and daughters lived in their households as second class citizens, that they made treaties with the native peoples and then abrogated those treaties when it suited them, and used their superior military technology, including possibly the biological weapon of smallpox, to wipe out virtually all the original inhabitants – when it comes to all of that -- we modern types are supposed to give the Founders and Framers a big pass. We are supposed to understand their personal limitations “in the context of their times.”

Okay, I get that. But it is still troubling that apparently we value what they wrote and did in public, but don’t want to recognize what they said or did in private. The private realm is supposed to be out of the eye of public scrutiny.

The only problem though, is that the private realm is where inequality and patriarchy and racism begin. And where it is taught and imbibed and learned by each new generation.

I can’t help but muse on these things when I think about International Women’s Day (and having just ended Black History Month), and the fact that women still only hold about 28 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress, and still only make about 80 percent of what males earn for the same occupations, and still possess less wealth, influence and power – well, at that point I can’t help but think about where this stark level of inequality all started.

In America, of course, it began with the Founders and Framers.

So for International Women’s Day, I thought we would take a dive into what some of the leading Founders and Framers thought about not only women in general and their human rights, but the women in their own lives. Specifically, let’s go pay a close up visit with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

The American Enlightenment

Adams was perhaps the most influential of all Founders during the early years of the American Revolution, as a workhorse of the Continental Congress laboring on committee after committee, and as the leading figure helping the newly breakaway colonies cum states to write their own state constitutions. He later became the second president of the young United States, and his wife Abigail Adams is known as an early proponent of women’s rights, still quoted today with her “Remember the Ladies…we are determined to foment a Rebellion” letter written to husband John in 1776. The patronizing Adams, meanwhile, patted the “ladies” on the head and got back to the real work of founding a nation.

Thomas Jefferson needs no introduction. At least not the sanitized version of Jefferson. The sanitized Jefferson was third president, chief author of the Declaration of Independence, a genius of arts, letters and science, an architect, a farmer who incorporated the latest scientific breakthroughs into his husbandry, a true Renaissance man of the Enlightenment…but a parallel Jefferson also happened to be a slaveholder who fathered his own octoroon slave children and never freed them and other slaves during his lifetime, despite promises to do so, because he had to sell many of them to settle his debts. That Jefferson also held some the most deeply sexist views of women – including his women -- of any of the Founders.

As prize-winning historian Gordon Wood points out in his book Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, “Most 18^th-century marriages were not intellectual partnerships between equals…

Women rarely had an independent existence…In public records they were usually referred to as the “wife of,” the “daughter of,” or the “sister of” a male. Before marriage women legally belonged to their fathers, and after marriage they belonged to their husbands.… She could not sue or be sued, make contracts, draft wills, or buy and sell property. It went without saying that women could not hold political office or vote. They were considered to be dependent like children and were often treated like children by their husbands. Husbands might address their wives as “dear Child” but be addressed in return as “Mr.”

Jefferson, who came from the great wealth of Virginia’s aristocratic slaveholding society, married into even more wealth, into another slaveholding plantation family. He married Martha Wayles when he was 28 and she was 21. And Martha already had been widowed from a previous marriage to another wealthy scion. Wayles was a talented and devoted wife, a Southern belle wallflower who fit into the mold of the traditional patriarchal marriage.

How, according to Jefferson, should women behave?

“Sweetness of temper, affection to a husband, and attention to his interests,” Jefferson wrote to his eldest daughter, on the eve of her own marriage, “constitute the duties of a wife and form the basis of matrimonial felicity.” Wives, he said, must realize that their happiness depended “on the continuing to please a single person.” As a skill to be learned, Jefferson recommended seamstressing as the foundation of a woman’s domestic life, more valuable for women than the ability to read.

As historian Wood goes on to tell it, in Jefferson’s conception of the ideal marriage, even the husband’s failings should be shouldered by his wife. If the marriage developed difficulties, Jefferson advised his daughter, the wife must not “allways look for their cause in the injustice of her lord,” for “they may proceed from many trifling errors in her own conduct.” Above all, writes Wood

A wife must never communicate to others any want of duty or tenderness she thinks she has perceived in her husband, for “this untwists, at once, those delicate cords, which preserve the unity of the marriage engagement.” If third parties witness the failings of a marriage, “it’s sacredness is broken forever.”

Martha Jefferson apparently fulfilled her husband’s marital expectations and more. In his autobiography Jefferson called her “the cherished companion of my life” and the marriage apparently was a happy one. The widowed Martha already had one child when she married Jefferson, and then gave birth to six children in 10 years (though only two daughters reached maturity). Four months after the birth of her last child, weakened by her many pregnancies and other health issues, Martha Jefferson died. She was only 33 years old, and Jefferson was devastated.

On her deathbed, as the story goes, Martha made Jefferson promise that he would never marry again. Though he was only 39 years old and would live another 44 years, he never did re-marry. But when you are landed aristocratic gentry, and the owner of hundreds of slaves, many of them females, and have written things like sexual desire is “the strongest of all the human passions,” you don’t need to be married to have your pick of female concubinage and companionship. More about that in a moment.

John and Abigail

The marriage of John and Abigail Adams was quite different than Jefferson and his wife. John and Abigail had what was considered for that era more of an “equal” partnership. But therein lies the fallacy, for how “equal” could equal ever really be in 1776?

When they married, John was nearly 29 and Abigail not yet 20. John was an up-and-coming Massachusetts attorney from modest means and hard-working New England disposition, and also one of the most learned of the Founders. He studied Greek and Roman history and political theory and suffered from envy and anxiety which filled him with a will to succeed. Abigail was self-taught and brilliant, she read voraciously and taught herself French. She read many of the same works of history and poetry that John read, and tried to match him in citing and quoting from the classics and contemporary authors. As Wood describes it, “She aimed to be her husband’s intellectual partner, if not his equal.”

During John’s long periods away, either as an itinerant attorney riding the circuit courts or up-and-coming patriot of a burgeoning new country, attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and later serving as minister to England, France and the Netherlands, the couple wrote long letters to each other. About 1200 of them, all in all, their correspondence threading fluently between the quotidian details of Abigail’s single-handed management of their farm in his absence, including milking cows herself, to local news and rumors, to the politics of the Continental Congress and a rising nation, even political advice for her husband’s political career. Abigail was steady as a plow horse and could be dazzling as a comet. She quoted from a range of writers, including John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, books of ancient history and more. She had strong views about everything, including slavery, writing sympathetically about “those who have as good a right to freedom as we have” (Adams never owned slaves). Their correspondence reflected an unusual companionship for the times between “two friendly Souls,” as John put it.

But this was the late 18^th century, and even this most enlightened of female-male relationships had limits.

Let’s talk for a moment about that “Remember the Ladies…we are determined to foment a Rebellion” letter. It was not the radical statement of 18^th-century liberation that modern-day feminists have made it out to be.

The letter was written in late March 1776. The rebellious colonies were filled with not only talk of how to break away from England and its king, but also how to reform their new society with a new system of governance. Adams, Jefferson, indeed most of the Founders and Framers were almost as fearful of social disorder and the “Spirit of Levelling,” as Adams called it, as they were of the British army. Adams, indeed many of the Founders including Madison and Hamilton, were primed to think the worst about human nature, and they devised a governance system that revolved around the philosophy “the government that governs best, governs least.”

Adams became especially worked up by suggestions that the qualifications for who should be allowed to vote might be expanded. Don’t touch that issue, he warned a colleague in late May 1776, just two months after Abigail’s “Remember the Ladies” letter. Otherwise “There will be no End of it… New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote… every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice.”

Coming face-to-face with the anti-democratic tendencies of some of the Founders still comes as a bit of a shock at times. You see a quote that you had never read before, and wonder, “Wow, did he really say that?” Or, “Did he really do that?”

Jefferson, who at that time was married to his conventional southern belle, would never have considered for even a moment that their new nation should enfranchise women. He thought women were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” Instead, “they are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.” Women had “the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others.” Thirty-seven years later in 1813, Jefferson still believed that the participation of women in politics was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

So when Abigail wrote her famous letter on March 31, 1776, to modern advocates of equal rights it seems especially prescient:

“Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Those sound like fighting words. Abigail’s letter has inspired modern-day advocates of woman’s rights, who have placed her high in the pantheon of early matriarchs. But sadly John did not take his wife’s sentiment seriously at all.

“I cannot but laugh” at your ideas, he said in response. Poking fun at his earnest wife, he joked that the comprehensive system of masculine superiority was “little more than Theory… We have only the Name of Masters” who in actual fact are subjected to “the Despotism of the Petticoat.” Wood writes that Abigail’s “Remember the Ladies” letter was a style she had developed, in the face of her second class status and with a stubborn and sometimes acerbic husband, of using teasing and banter to broach difficult subjects.

But despite her complaints, Abigail did not seriously question the place of women in colonial society, and she did not have expectations to fundamentally transform the role of women. She wanted nothing more than to have her husband back from his travels, so that she could stop being the sole manager of the family farm and could resume what she thought of as her rightful role as wife and mother and occasional intellectual companion.

At the same time, Abigail certainly felt the equal of men, telling her sister in 1799 that she would “never consent to have our sex considered in an inferiour point of light.” She admitted that God and nature designed men and women differently, but that didn’t make them unequal: “If man is Lord, women is Lordess,” wrote Abigail.

You’ve got to admire her pluck, given the times. Wood concludes that, as John knew intimately Abigail’s feelings, and had read her sassy letter about women voting, it is not at all surprising that he should have warned his colleagues not to contemplate opening that Pandora’s Box by changing voting eligibility requirements.

Tom and Sally

Jefferson the widower, one of the “fathers” of his country, was surrounded by a racial churn in and among the plantations of Virginia that had a sexual component all its own. As an 18^th-century slaveholding Virginia planter, it would not have been unusual for Jefferson to have a black concubine, and such relationships were in evidence throughout the region. For visitors to Jefferson’s plantation Monticello, it would have been impossible to not notice that a number of the slaves in the household were mulatto.

Enter Sally Hemings. Amidst this controversy, which has been treated by the originalists as a national stain that must be wiped away through the hypnosis of denial, it is rarely mentioned that Sally herself was three-fourths white. Not only that, she was half-sister to Jefferson’s deceased wife!  Say what?

Martha Wayles Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, lost his own wife when Martha was only a month old. After losing two more wives, Wayles began living openly with one of his slaves, a mulatto named Betty Hemings whose own father was an English ship captain. Martha’s father and Betty Hemings had six children together, including Sally.

When John Wayles died, he left his son-in-law Jefferson a lot of property, including Betty Hemings and all her offspring. So the whole clan, all of them Martha’s half siblings, came and lived at Monticello. Over the next half century, more than eighty of Betty Hemings’ extended family – five generations of slaves – lived and worked at Monticello. By the time Jefferson died in 1826, one-third of the 130 slaves on his plantation were members of the Hemings’ genetic kin group.

Sally Hemings was for all intents and purposes white-skinned with “straight hair down her back,”  as numerous visitors to Monticello attested to. She was also 30 years younger than Jefferson. She gave birth to six and possibly seven of his children, with this father of the American Enlightenment. That means Jefferson’s own children by Sally were seven-eighths white, known as octoroons. Yet Jefferson never freed his own enslaved children during his lifetime, nor did he free mother Sally. Jefferson never acknowledged his slave children publicly or privately, apparently never taught them to read, he never gave them presents and did not leave them anything in his will, as other Virginia slaveholders with concubines did for their mulatto children and grandchildren.

Such was the mass hypnosis of that 18^th-century race supremacist patriarchy that the “enlightened” Jefferson, preaching the virtues of an agrarian democracy and yeoman landowner reciprocity, could not bring himself to free his own mostly white children. And such was the extreme white fear of blackness that even a mere pepper-pinch of black blood overwhelmed the whiteness. You have to ask yourself: why would someone who was seven-eighths white be treated as a black slave? What kind of a society — what kind of a man — would do that??? And to his own children???

As Southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.” History is a strange thing. We’re supposed to learn from it so that we don’t repeat it, but sometimes I wish we could tear it up so that we are not so chained to its long reach and limitations.

Surrounded by the fog of history, it’s all the more important that we honor important events like International Women’s Day and Black History Month. That’s when the fog rolls back a bit and the sun pokes through and we can better view these crucial stories of our nation’s history. These stories are a part of our collective story. Without them being known and acknowledged, our history looks like a frayed Constitution riddled with worm holes.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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In honor of Black History Month, I thought I would give a shout-out to the landmark debate between James Baldwin and William F Buckley that occurred on February 18, 1965, 58 years ago.

We all have personal heroes. One of mine is writer James Baldwin.

In a violent era of racial injustice, Baldwin was a bright beacon in the chiaroscuro of the dark storm. His penetrating words and deep insights about the nature of white supremacist America were delivered with artistry, dignity, compassion, poise and razor-sharp insights into the human being. His novels, essays, poems and plays helped to elevate public understanding of racial and sexual oppression.

But his signature style was his honest portrayal of his own personal experiences, which challenged Americans to uphold those universal and democratic values that allegedly were woven into the nation’s constitutional framework.

Gandhi said that arguments convince the rational mind, but that suffering convinces the human heart, that suffering opens up the heart. Baldwin’s incisive essays, gripping speeches and interviews, and majestically tragic novels, just like Martin Luther King’s marches and civil disobedience, embodied Gandhi’s spirit in a spellbinding way.

The year 1965 was to be a watershed in the battle for the soul and sanity of the Dis-United States of America. March 7, Bloody Sunday, saw two hundred Alabama State Troopers attack over 500 civil rights demonstrators, including future Congressman John Lewis, with horses, billy clubs and tear gas as the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; on March 8, 3500 Marines arrived – not in Alabama to protect and defend their fellow black Americans against unmitigated white violence – but in South Vietnam, becoming the first US combat troops in that exploding theater of colonial war.

For the rest of March, nonviolent protest marches led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other black leaders continued between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, first with hundreds and then with thousands. America and its vaunted ideals were standing at the precipice.

The political establishment lurched and twitched. In August, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, outlawing literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for widespread disfranchisement of African Americans. Days later, the Watts riots exploded in Los Angeles. A few days later, the Beatles performed at Shea Stadium in New York City. She loves you, yeah-yeah-yeah.

In the midst of all this amplified tension and cultural frisson, just before the onslaught of Bloody Sunday, Baldwin’s debate with Buckley riveted the public imagination. It occurred in Britain in a packed hall of the Cambridge Union at Cambridge University, a prestigious 150 year old debate society, which televised the event (here is a YouTube link to the debate, and below is the transcript). The air was crackling, the excitement was thick among the 700+ attendees, seemingly aware that something momentous was about to occur. On the BBC broadcast, the narrator sets the stage:

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the union so well attended. There are undergraduates everywhere: They’re on the benches; they’re on the floor; they’re in the galleries; and there are a lot more outside clamoring to get in.”

The two oratorical gladiators were asked to debate the subject: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” Baldwin stands after a brief introduction by the moderator, and his reticence and perhaps even fear feels palpable 58 years later, as he is surrounded by a sea of white faces. Baldwin was not exactly a militant voice like Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, or a preacher’s passionate voice like Reverend King; his was the demeanor of a quiet prophetic rage that had still retained enough innocence and disbelief that any human could treat another the way whites treated Blacks. And yet through the course of his speech, Baldwin refuses to let himself lose his own humanity. Indeed, he finds compassion even for his oppressors. Here, listen:

“I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there, because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered—you know, no one can be dismissed as—a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children… You know, after all, one’s got to assume, and he is visibly, a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.”

This is vintage Baldwin, summoning an inexplicable empathy for the pitiful overseers. For those of you who are familiar with him and his work, take 20 minutes to revisit his brilliance and mastery of narrative, in service to his prosecution of the charges of injustice and raw tribalism that marks and stigmatizes us all. For those of you who have never experienced James Baldwin, you are in for a real treat.

Baldwin’s remarks are followed by a standing ovation, and he won the debate over Buckley in a landslide, 544-164. For that moment, those white English youth were waking up to their privilege and to the horror of Black reality. Baldwin’s searing indictment of not only America but also Western civilization (again, echoes of Gandhi) remains to this day a memorable and mighty testimony to the power of individuals and mass movements to fight for a better world. I am inspired – and angered, because racism is still very much with us -- every time I watch this speech.

Baldwin stands and delivers at about the 13:50 mark after a brief introduction by the moderator, and his elocution lasts until about the 38:00 mark. When he finishes, to his seeming shock, he is treated to a rousing, standing ovation. In the 1960s and the years before, usually white crowds of this size meant terrible things for Black people. Am I imagining a degree of discomfort for Baldwin, surrounded at the end by a close-in throng of adoring white people? He had prosecuted nothing less than a lasting challenge to narratives of Western freedom and civilization as constructed by whites, and at least for that time and moment, the white people in the room seemed to get it.

So, for Black History Month, treat yourself to this: 

Transcript of address by James Baldwin, Cambridge Union, February 18, 1965

Good evening. I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah. For example, I don’t disagree with Mr. Burford that the inequality suffered by the American Negro population of the United States has hindered the American dream. Indeed, it has. I quarrel with some other things he has to say.

The other, deeper, element of a certain awkwardness I feel has to do with one’s point of view—I have to put it that way—one’s sense, one’s system, of reality. It would seem to me the proposition before the House, when I put it that way, is the American dream at the expense of the American Negro, or the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro—is a question hideously loaded, and that one’s response to that question—one’s reaction to that question—has to depend, in effect, on where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions which we hold so deeply as to be scarcely aware of them.

A white South African or a Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality which compels them to—for example, in the case of the French exile from Algeria, to offend French reasons from having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi or the Alabama sheriff who really does believe when he’s facing a Negro boy or girl that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity—of course, to such a person, the proposition which we are trying to discuss here tonight does not exist. And on the other hand, I have to speak as one of the people who’ve been most attacked by what we must now here call the Western or the European system of reality, what white people in the world—because the option of white supremacy, I hate to say it here, comes from Europe. That’s how it got to America.

Beneath then, whatever one’s reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered, as such, equal, or whether one civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate and, in fact, to destroy another. Now, what happens when that happens? Leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated—the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated—is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father’s authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything, because the past has disappeared, and his father has no power in the world. This means, in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering republic—and in the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better—every stick and stone and every face is white. And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too.

It comes as a great shock, around the age of 5 or 6 or 7, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.

The disaffection, the demoralization and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skins, begins there and accelerates—accelerates throughout a whole lifetime—so that presently you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are 30, you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, 24 hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s by that time you’ve begun to see it happening in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.

You are 30 by now and nothing you have done has helped you to escape the trap. But what is worse than that is that nothing you have done—and as far as you can tell, nothing you can do—will save your son or your daughter from meeting the same disaster and not impossibly coming to the same end.

Now, we’re speaking about expense. I suppose there are several ways to address oneself to some attempt to define what that word means here. Let me put it this way: that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially of the Southern states—could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed, and for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously—and this is not an overstatement—that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.

The Southern oligarchy, which has until today so much power in Washington and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.

In another way, this dream, and we’ll get to the dream in a moment, is at the expense of the American Negro. You watch this in the Deep South in great relief. But not only in the Deep South. In the Deep South, you are dealing with a sheriff or a landlord or a landlady or the girl at the Western Union desk, and she doesn’t know quite who she’s dealing with, by which I mean that if you’re not a part of the town, and if you are a Northern Nigger, it shows in millions of ways. So she simply knows that it’s an unknown quantity, and she wants to have nothing to do with it, because she won’t talk to you; you have to wait for a while to get your telegram. OK, we all know this. We’ve been through it, and by the time you get to be a man, it’s very easy to deal with. But what is happening in the poor woman, the poor man’s mind is this: They’ve been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible their lives may be—and their lives have been quite terrible—and no matter how far they fall, no matter what disaster overtakes them, they have one enormous knowledge in consolation, which is like a heavenly revelation: At least they are not Black.

Now, I suggest that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, that is one of the worst. I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there, because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered—you know, no one can be dismissed as—a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure that, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume, and he is visibly, a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.

This is being done, after all, not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity (a word we won’t examine too closely), with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, and which espouses the notion of the freedom of the world. And it is perfectly true from the point of view now simply of an American Negro, any American Negro watching this, no matter where he is—from the vantage point of Harlem, which is another terrible place—has to say to himself, in spite of what the government says (the government says we can’t do anything about it), but if those were white people being murdered in Mississippi work farms, being carried off to jail—if those were white children running up and down the streets—the government would find some way of doing something about it.

We have a civil rights bill now; we had an amendment, the 15th Amendment, nearly a hundred years ago—I hate to sound again like an Old Testament prophet—but if the amendment was not honored then, I don’t have any reason to believe that the civil rights bill will be honored now. And after all one’s been there, since before, you know, a lot of other people got there: If one has got to prove one’s title to the land, isn’t 400 years enough? Four hundred years? At least three wars? The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there—how is it conceivably a question now? And I suggest further, and in the same way, the moral life of Alabama sheriffs and poor Alabama ladies—white ladies—their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color, that the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it.

At the risk of sounding excessive, what I always felt when I finally left the country and found myself abroad, in other places, and watched the Americans abroad—and these are my countrymen, and I do care about them, and even if I didn’t, there is something between us; we have the same shorthand: I know, when I look at a girl or a boy from Tennessee, where they came from in Tennessee, and what that means. No Englishman knows that. No Frenchman, no one in the world knows that except another Black man who comes from the same place. One watches these lonely people denying the only kin they have. We talk about integration in America as though it were some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African, and you will see what I mean—and my grandmother was not a rapist. What we are not facing is the result of what we’ve done. What one begs the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history. I was there not only as a slave, but also as a concubine. One knows the power, after all, which can be used against another person if you’ve got absolute power over that person.

It seemed to me when I watched Americans in Europe that what they didn’t know about Europeans was what they didn’t know about me. They weren’t trying, for example, to be nasty to the French girl or rude to the French waiter. They didn’t know they hurt their feelings. They didn’t have any sense that this particular woman, this particular man, though they spoke another language and had different manners and ways, was a human being. And they walked over them with the same kind of bland ignorance, condescension, charming and cheerful, with which they’d always patted me on the head and called me Shine—and were upset when I was upset.

What is relevant about this is that whereas 40 years ago when I was born, the question of having to deal with what is unspoken by the subjugated, what is never said to the master, of ever having to deal with this reality, was a very remote possibility. It was in no one’s mind. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and neither did I—that I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice. Those were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree. If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true—that you belong where white people have put you.

It is only since the Second World War that there’s been a counter-image in the world. And that image did not come about through any legislation or part of any American government, but through the fact that Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world, and Africans had to be dealt with in a way they’d never been dealt with before. This gave an American Negro for the first time a sense of himself beyond a savage or a clown. It has created, and will create, a great many conundrums. One of the great things that the white world does not know, but I think I do know, is that Black people are just like everybody else. One has used the myth of Negro and the myth of color to pretend and to assume that you were dealing with, essentially, with something exotic, bizarre and practically, according to human laws, unknown. Alas, it is not true. We’re also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too.

What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish some kind of dialog between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. [What] I want to say, at the end, at the last, is that that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all—at least I’d like to think we are—relatively civilized, and we can talk to each other, at least on certain levels, so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment, or at least our politeness, has some effect on the world. It may not.

I remember, for example, when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in America, we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard and did not hear, and possibly will never hear, the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for 400 years, and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.

What is dangerous here is the turning away from—the turning away from—anything any white American says. The reason for the political hesitation in spite of the Johnson landslide is that one has been betrayed by American politicians for so long. And I am a grown man, and perhaps I can be reasoned with. I certainly hope I can be. But I don’t know, and neither does Martin Luther King—none of us know—how to deal with those other people whom the white world has so long ignored, who don’t believe anything the white world says and don’t entirely believe anything I or Martin say.

And one can’t blame them. You watch what has happened to them in less than 20 years. It seems to me that the city of New York, for example—this is my last point—it’s had Negroes in it for a very long time. If the city of New York were able, as it has indeed been able, in the last 15 years to reconstruct itself, tear down buildings and raise great new ones downtown and for money, and has done nothing whatever except build housing projects in the ghetto for the Negroes. And of course, Negroes hate it; presently the property does indeed deteriorate because the children cannot bear it. They want to get out of the ghetto. If the American pretensions were based on more solid—a more honest assessment of life and of themselves, it would not mean for Negroes when someone says “urban renewal” that Negroes are simply going to be thrown out into the streets, which is what it does mean now.

This is not an act of God. We’re dealing with a society made and ruled by men. If the American Negro had not been present in America, I am convinced that the history of the American labor movement would be much more edifying than it is. It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black; that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other; and that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country—until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it’s a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Imagine going to vote this November, and making your way to your local polling station to engage in that most sacred of duties and privileges. Voting is the foundation of our democracy, it is the primary act that separates our form of governance from a kingship or dictatorship. So imagine instead of having your vote accepted and counted, you are arrested, taken into custody, tried in a kangaroo court, and fined.

That’s what happened to suffragist Susan B. Anthony when she tried to vote for president in 1872. She was subsequently arrested and tried by the patriarchy of the times. Her case, The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony, was picked in 2013 as one of "10 Trials that Changed the World" by the American Bar Association. 

In the latter half of the 19th century a number of courageous women fought for their human rights, especially the right to vote as they saw that as the foundation for all other rights. The lioness of them all was Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony was like an itinerant preacher traveling from town to town, promoting woman’s rights wherever she could find an audience. A year before her arrest, she had traveled on the new transcontinental railroad to California, lecturing at major towns along the way. In impassioned speeches she questioned why it should be a crime for women to vote. She was noted for her skills as an organizer, lobbyist, publicist and author, publishing a weekly newspaper which was read from San Francisco to France. She brought the skills and drive of a political agitator to her work, and her indomitable spirit made her one of the best-known women in the country.

This was during a time when the nation could be described as a kind of Taliban America, including the prevalence of male beards. Not only were women not allowed to vote or to hold political office, but they also couldn’t easily own property, obtain a higher education, had few employment opportunities, and it was still frowned upon that women would dare to speak in public.

But Anthony and her suffragist cohorts were not deterred. They relentlessly looked for ways to push the sexist status quo the next step toward greater equality. The same fervor for equality that had motivated anti-slavery activism also spurred a growing movement for women’s rights, which resulted in the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, formed by Anthony and other leaders.

So when the election of 1872 approached, with tepid women’s rights supporter President Ulysses Grant running for reelection on the Republican Party ticket, Anthony and her fellow conspirators hatched a plan to push on the pressure points of the system. Oh, were they clever. This was civil disobedience at its finest.

“Give us our own constitutional amendment, thank you”

The National Woman Suffrage Association previously had tried to get explicit references to the voting rights of women added to the 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution, which were passed, along with the 13th amendment, as part of the effort to ban slavery and bestow citizenship and voting rights to ex-slaves. The 14th amendment, which had gone into effect in 1868, read, in part:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens…No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The 15th amendment in 1870 explicitly forbade the denial of the right to vote based on race, but not on gender. Spurred on by the horrors of slavery and the barbarity of the just-concluded civil war, the white male guardians of the day believed that gender must be subordinated to race in their considerations.

Initially, Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women leaders had opposed the 15th amendment unless they could get a promise for a 16th amendment granting women the right to vote. When that didn’t work, Anthony and her fellow suffragists adopted a new strategy: they would test the meaning of those amendments, and how the amendments might be interpreted to apply to the rights of women.

They believed that the 14th Amendment, which now defined U.S. citizenship, protected a woman’s right to vote. The women reasoned that the rights of U.S. citizenship, or, in constitutional language, “the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” included the right to vote. If the 14th Amendment’s definition of U.S. citizenship included women, and the states were barred from depriving U.S. citizens of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, it followed that states could not exclude women from voting.

At least, that was their legal interpretation. Which virtually no one in a position of power shared, at least not initially. So Anthony and other women around the country set about trying to establish, through test cases in the federal courts, that the amendments had redefined citizenship and rights in a way that women were protected by the federal government in their right to vote. Women suffragists sought to validate their interpretation either through a declaratory act of Congress that would enforce their interpretation of the Amendments, or through a favorable decision in federal courts. This was a novel legal and activist strategy.

Election day disobedience

So on November 1, 1872, a few days before the presidential election, Anthony walked with her three sisters to a voter registration office in a nearby barber shop in their hometown of Rochester, NY, and demanded to be registered. Anthony quoted the 14th Amendment to the election inspectors to justify their demand, and threatened to sue the inspectors personally if they refused. Anthony expected to be denied registration, since woman in other parts of the US had been halted in their attempts. But in the ensuing confusion, and after Anthony and her sisters took oaths of legal responsibility, the poll inspectors allowed them to complete the voter registration process.

Being a whiz of a skilled publicist, Anthony immediately headed to a newspaper office to tell a reporter what had just happened. News of their registration appeared in the afternoon newspapers, with some locals calling for the arrest of the inspectors who had registered the women. Other women in Rochester heard the news and began to register, bringing the total registered almost to fifty. A small feminist rebellion was breaking loose, courtesy of these unruly Ladies.

On Election Day, November 5, 1872, in the first district of the Eighth Ward of Rochester, New York, Anthony and 14 other women from her ward showed up to vote. They were spoiling for trouble.

Anthony and the others did not expect that they would actually be allowed to vote, but her success at registering raised the hope that lightning might strike twice. When their right to vote was challenged by an election inspector, the women insisted on taking an oath stating that they were qualified to vote. The election inspectors were now in a difficult position. They were at risk of violating state law if they turned the women away because state law did not give them the authority to refuse the ballot to anyone who took the required oath and was registered to vote. Federal law, however, made it illegal to receive the ballot of an ineligible voter, so the inspectors now also were in the hot seat. The inspectors, either in their confusion or in solidarity, decided to allow the women to vote.

So Susan B. Anthony voted for the first time in her life! Indeed, all 14 of the women were allowed to vote for president as well as for members of Congress. After she voted, Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, excitedly reporting, "Well I have been & gone & done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket!"

Even for Anthony, the veteran agitator, these were all rather unanticipated developments, according to Professor Ann D. Gordon, a historian of the women's movement and editor of the six-volume Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Sometimes history moves forward that way, by accident. But it only happens if people are bold enough to take a risk.

Nine days after the election, U.S. Commissioner William Storrs, an officer of the federal courts, issued warrants for the arrest of Anthony and the fourteen other women who voted in Rochester. The women were charged with voting for members of the U.S. House of Representatives “without having a lawful right to vote,” in violation of section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870. Three days later, on November 18, 1872, a deputy federal marshal called on Anthony, and asked her to accompany him to police headquarters to see the commissioner.

“What for?’ she demanded.

‘To arrest you,’ he said.

‘Is that the way you arrest men?’

‘No.’

Anthony then demanded that she should be arrested properly, and held out her wrists to be handcuffed. The officer declined, saying he did not think that would be necessary. But he took her into custody.

All of the arrested women were held to $500 bail, and everyone posted bail except Anthony, who refused. So the authorities authorized the U.S. marshal to place her in the Albany County jail. But she was never actually held there, instead she was released.

Big mistake. The government officials, who viewed all of this as a nuisance, had no idea of the ruckus they were in for. Anthony now mobilized all of her talents as an agitator and clever polemicist for use as a criminal defendant. She turned this episode into an enormous opportunity to generate publicity for the suffrage movement.

She cleverly prepared for her trial by lecturing in every village and town of Monroe County from which jurors would be chosen, asking and answering the question, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” So the government moved her trial to another county. Anthony did the same in the new county. She stirred the pot of controversy and sensation, playing to the newspapers. Editorials were written alternately praising or lambasting her and the suffragists.

Once her trial began, newspapers across the country started publishing daily reports. In some places, Susan B. Anthony was hung in effigy and her likeness dragged through the streets. In other quarters, the popularity of the well-known Anthony was evident in favorable cartoons drawn by political cartoonists. One newspaper snidely opined that the wave of women voters “goes to show the progress of female lawlessness instead of the progress of the principle of female suffrage….[T]he efforts of Susan B. Anthony & Co. to unsex themselves and vote as men will be, so far as they are successful, both criminal and ridiculous.”

America on trial, not Susan B. Anthony

The trial became known as The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony, but Anthony turned the US into the defendant, instead of herself. The event was a great legal match, showcasing the defiant Anthony versus an exasperated federal judge, and pitting accomplished lawyers against each other. Throughout the trial, in her tireless efforts to win over the court of public opinion, Anthony lectured to audiences, quoting the 14th amendment’s clauses that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens” and “No State shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens,” arguing that:

“The only question left to be settled now, is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities."

She also drew attention to the inconsistent way that gendered words were used in the law. She pointed out that the New York tax laws referred only to "he", "him" and "his", yet taxes were collected from women. The federal Enforcement Act of 1870, which she was accused of violating, similarly used male pronouns only.  She published pamphlets about the trial and distributed thousands of copies, some of which she mailed to newspaper editors in several states with requests to reprint them.

By June 1873, when the federal trial for The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony began, readers of newspapers everywhere understood that this was a battle over the civil rights claims of woman suffragists. The lawyers’ arguments and the rulings of Justice Ward Hunt filled several columns of the daily papers. Sitting in the audience was former president Millard Fillmore and other public notables.

Anthony requested to testify on her own behalf, but Judge Hunt silenced her. In a controversial moment, when it looked like the jury was sympathetic, the biased, imperious judge took the law into his own hands — shockingly, he actually directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict! That autocratic move probably was in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the accused the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

On the closing day of the trial, the judge finally asked Anthony if she had anything to say. She responded with "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage", according to Professor Ann Gordon. Repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, Anthony protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying "you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.”

She declared that even if the judge had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied her right to a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors. For women to get their right to a voice in government, she said, they must "take it; as I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every possible opportunity."

When Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100, she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty” and she never did. Instead, Judge Hunt's biased instructions to the jury created a controversy within the legal community that lasted for years. In 1895, as a consequence, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal judge could not direct a jury to return a guilty verdict in a criminal trial. The New York Sun called for Hunt's impeachment, editorializing that he had overthrown civil liberties. In later years, the legal community would credit Anthony and her trial in establishing new awareness and subsequent precedent for protecting a defendant's rights in jury trials.

Susan B. Anthony was one stubborn woman. A woman with an attitude, as they say. She was a brilliant provocateur for the cause of equal rights, an Abbie Hoffman in a long dress. Women of course would not gain the right to vote for nearly another half-century. But this trial helped make women’s suffrage a national issue. It was a major step in the transition of the women’s rights movement toward a focus on the right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony would not live to see the 19th amendment pass in 1920, legalizing women’s right to vote. She passed 14 years earlier, and her dying words were “Failure is impossible.” Her entire adult life was a dedication to the human spirit, and proof that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. She was one of those brilliant, indomitable characters that appear every now and then in history like a fabulous comet streaking across the night sky, and who, by their words and deeds, inspire millions and move progress forward.

Somebody should make a movie about this trial and these events. This has the drama of Lincoln written all over it. Mr. Spielberg, are you listening?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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A number of towns and small cities in the US have a history of using one of several proportional representation electoral methods designed to foster broad representation, more voter choice and decreased partisanship. But only one US state, as far as I know, has ever used a proportional representation method to elect its legislature. That’s the state of Illinois.

For 110 years until 1980, Illinois used a method called cumulative voting. Instead of single-seat "winner take all" districts, legislators were elected by three-seat districts and a candidate needed 25% of the popular vote to win one of the three seats. Illinois’ experience with this form of proportional representation has a lot to teach us about how to address the severe crises of US democracy.

Fortunately when I worked for the Center for Voting and Democracy (now known as FairVote), we conducted a project interviewing a number of former Illinois state legislators who had been elected by proportional representation. We intended to make a documentary, but our ambitions were bigger than our budget so the documentary never happened.

But myself and a couple of others poured through the hours and hours of raw video footage. Some of these state legislators went on to become members of Congress, US Senators, federal judges and law professors. Among the list were well known names like US senators Paul Simon and Carol Mosely Braun (the first black woman elected to the Senate), US representatives Abner Mikva, John Porter and more.

But before many of them found political fame in higher office, first they all had been elected to the Illinois House of Representatives by cumulative voting. Here, for the first time, we present some of the insights from these savvy leaders via excerpts from the transcripts.

When we conducted the interviews, many of the former legislators were then elder statesmen and stateswomen, most of them retired, so with fewer political axes left to grind. It was a joy to listen to their illuminating reminiscences. What these former legislators had to say about Illinois’s use of this system speaks directly to our national dilemmas regarding toxic partisan polarization, declining voter interest, low competition, poor representation, and a loss of political ideas.

Indeed, as a result of using cumulative voting in three-seat districts, Illinois enjoyed bipartisan representation from all parts of the state, including frequent sightings of now extinct species – Chicago Republicans and downstate Democrats, all of them elected in strongholds of the opposing party.

Here are some excerpts from these revealing interviews, grouped by major themes.

BETTER (AND BIPARTISAN) REPRESENTATION IN ALL PARTS OF THE STATE; LESS URBAN/SUBURBAN SPLIT

Congressman Abner Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave a voice to a critical minority so that Democrats in the [heavily GOP] suburbs had a spokesperson from their district who they could rally around and generate some party activities. Similarly, in Chicago you had Republican representatives and these Republican outposts in a city that was dominated by the Democratic Party.”

Lee Daniels, Republican, former Speaker of the House in Illinois:  “I thought proportional representation worked well. I thought it gave a guarantee of minority representation. In the Republican caucus, frequently we had Republican legislators talking about the needs of the city of Chicago. Today, generally speaking, there are very few [elected] Republicans that come from the city of Chicago so that the views of the city are very difficult to be communicated within our [party] caucus.”

Daniels, who served in the state legislature for thirty years, was elected under both a three-seat PR system and a single-seat, winner-take-all system, and speaks with great conviction about the advantages of proportional representation.

Congressman John Porter, Republican: “I thought it led to a much more independent and cooperative body that was not divided along party lines and run by a few leaders on each side. And it allowed individual legislators to work with members on both sides of the aisle in, I think, a very collegial atmosphere.”

Harold Katz, Democrat, former representative from the Chicago north suburb of Glencoe, a heavily GOP area: “The House [under proportional representation] was a very exciting place. It seemed to be the center of activity in the state capital. It was like a symphony, really, with not just two instruments playing, but a number of different instruments going at all times.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Between us we represented just about every organized point of view within the district. And that’s something that you can’t do with just one representative. If you represent the Democrats, the Republicans will feel voiceless; or you represent the organization, then the independents will feel voiceless. Or represent the conservatives, and the moderates will feel voiceless. Whereas with this multimember district, and particularly with proportional representation, it made it possible to give a legitimacy to the delegation that you don’t have with single-member districts.”

What these former state legislators experienced with proportional representation is that nearly every Illinois three-seat district had two-party representation. Both parties won seats in all parts of the state. As a result, Republicans didn’t ignore cities, and Democrats didn’t ignore Republican strongholds. Illinois was not carved up into balkanized red and blue partisan fiefdoms.

In fact, for many years the Speaker of the House was a Democrat elected from heavily GOP DuPage County. When you only need 25 percent of the vote in a three-seat district to win a seat, Democrats in conservative areas and Republicans in liberal areas could win one of those seats. Congressman Porter was so impressed by his experience of PR in Illinois’s state government that he began working with other members of Congress to bring proportional representation to elections for the federal House of Representatives.

REDUCED PARTISAN POLARIZATION AND BALKANIZATION

Both Republicans and Democrats saw other advantages to PR that addressed the dilemma of partisan polarization and regional balkanization.

Giddy Dyer, Republican, female state legislator: ““I think the lack of civility began when we did away with [proportional representation] and the multimember districts. Because now, it’s just like two armies in full regalia fighting each other. There’s just total squashing of many good ideas.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: “By its nature the system encouraged moderate viewpoints to be brought to bear. There’s a great deal more independence for each member than there is under the present system.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat from Chicago: “This idea of balkanizing the state that way, it’s not healthy. [Proportional representation], I think, helped us synthesize some of these differences, made us realize even though we were different than the downstaters, different than the suburbanites, that we also had a lot in common that held us together as a single state.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: In Illinois’s three-seat districts with PR, “we operated in a less partisan environment because both parties represented the entire state.”

Giddy Dyer, Republican state legislator:  “I get back to the reason it’s so important to have some Republican representatives from the city of Chicago is that they, many of them, had children in the Chicago public schools, and rode the CTA [metro transit system], and cared about Chicago’s problems. And now, it seems to be polarized, between the city, the suburban ring, and downstate.”

Intra-party diversity. Illinois’ experience showed that PR allowed for a broader spectrum of representatives, not only bipartisan but also within each party. A liberal three-seat district would elect two Democrats and one Republican, but the two Democrats often would be two different types of Democrats—a liberal Democrat and a moderate Democrat, or an independent Democrat and a conservative Democrat.

It was the same with the Republicans. Voters all over the state, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, had a vote that counted for something. In Judge Mikva’s Chicago district, one Democrat represented the Daley machine, Mikva represented a more independent Democratic perspective, and the dean of the John Marshall Law School was the elected Republican.

INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES AND LEGISLATORS BEAT THE PARTY MACHINES

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave the opportunity for outsiders like me to win a seat. I never could have gotten elected if the party could have simply beat me one-on-one. I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Mikva was an independent Democrat who ran against the Democratic Party machine in Chicago. He said that under proportional representation, because a candidate needed to win only 25% of the popular vote, legislators were not so beholden to monied interests and political machines. You could run independent of the political machine.

Giddy Dyer, Republican state legislator, who had to fight her own party’s machine to get elected:  “My county chairman was from the other branch, the right-wing branch of the Republican Party, and I would never have been, quote, asked to run by that county chairman. So when I decided to run, I really had to form my own campaign committee and not depend on the party for any help…And Gene Hoffman in the neighboring district was in the same situation. He was a schoolteacher, and very strong on education, and from the moderate wing of the party, and he had to build his own organization to run.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “You ended up with more independent people in the legislature. They weren’t that responsible to a particular political party. Paul Powell couldn’t dominate all of the downstate Democrats because Paul Simon could get elected thanks to proportional representation. Richard Daley couldn’t command all of the Cook County Democrats because Tony Scariano, Bob Mann, and others got elected…The representatives in both parties had a lot more freedom. Everybody understood that you didn’t have to toe a particular party line, or you didn’t have to kowtow to a particular leader. So it generated a lot more independence within the legislature…it really gave the local, legitimate parochial concerns better presence and better voice than they have now.”

With Illinois’s PR method, independent candidates could run and win without the backing of the party machine or a lot of money because they only needed support from 25% of the voters in the three-seat district. Related to this, using cumulative voting in three-seat districts had campaign finance implications, because a candidate could run a grassroot campaign on a shoestring budget.

Congressman Mikva: “You could appeal to a much smaller set of voters. That involves a much smaller amount of money being spent on them…advertising, media, so on.”

Campaign finance reformers should take note that candidates were able to run grassroots campaigns without the backing of their party machines or huge amounts of private campaign financing. Money played a much-reduced role.

BETTER FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Proportional representation didn’t serve only political minorities like Republicans in liberal areas and Democrats in conservative areas. It also helped women and racial minorities win representation.

Emil Jones, former African-American Democratic president of the state senate:

“The district I was elected from was a district that comprised only about 20 percent of African American constituencies. So, what I did was I organized the African American community. And, the other three candidates, they split the white vote. And I received a certain percentage of the white vote, and I ran second and won.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, served for forty years as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives:  “As a result of proportional representation, my district became the first in Illinois history to send two women from the same party to the state legislature, myself and Carol Moseley Braun.”

Currie was the longest serving woman in the Illinois legislature, and for twenty-two of her forty years, she was the House majority leader.

Adeline Geo-Karis, a Republican legislator elected under both PR and winner-take-all systems:  Proportional representation “made it easier for women and minorities to get elected.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, former House majority leader: “In the days of proportional representation, we had African Americans representing majority white districts, and white representatives coming from districts that were predominantly African American.”

PR even helped elect black Republicans, but now the Republican Party in Illinois—as in the rest of the nation—is virtually lily-white.

When you listen to these Illinois legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, one quality stands out: their belief that the other side deserved representation. They took seriously the Golden Rule of Politics: “Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” They believed doing so was good for their state’s welfare and good for the political process. Compare that view to national politics today, to the down-and-dirty, zero-sum game it has become in this age of Donald Trump in which hyper-partisan leaders will do whatever it takes to beat the other side.

Indeed, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson wrote that the rolling coalitions which formed in the Illinois House “often helped lead to centrist pragmatic policies.” The Chicago Tribune has opined that “many partisans and political independents have looked back wistfully at the era of cumulative voting. They acknowledge that it produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics.”

BYE BYE CUMULATIVE VOTING…

So if cumulative voting in three-seat districts was so great, what happened? Why did Illinois get rid of it in 1980?

It was the dawn of the Reagan “government is the problem” era, and the Illinois state legislature, failing to take the temperature of the times, foolishly voted itself a hefty pay increase. With a populist battle cry of “get rid of the politicians,” an opportunistic politician sponsored what was known as the Cutback Amendment—a statewide ballot measure that sought to “cut back” the size and cost of state government by shrinking the number of elected politicians by a third. Little recognized, unfortunately, was that the ballot measure also did away with cumulative voting.

But the return to winner-take-all, single-seat districts quickly led to the by-now-familiar litany of problems: little competition, partisan polarization, regional balkanization, low voter turnout, and so on. It virtually wiped out the Democratic Party in DuPage County and other conservative areas, and killed the GOP in Chicago and many other cities. It led to so many lopsided, one-party districts that ever since then, including most recently in 2020, nearly half of Illinois’s House races have been uncontested by one of the major parties because everyone knows who will win most races. This is the legacy of "winner take all" in Illinois, indeed in all 50 states.

The return of "winner take all" elections also has led to an alarming concentration of power in the hands of the “Four Tops” – no, that’s not a Motown singing quartet, that’s the majority and minority leaders in both the House and the Senate. According to the Tribune’s Pearson, the Four Tops now “use the cudgel of the potential loss of campaign cash to dictate the issues to be considered and how a member should vote. The formation of a true bipartisan coalition now is rare.”

The Illinois story strikes at the very heart of our notions of “representation.” Millions of “orphaned voters”—Republicans living in Democratic areas, Democrats in Republican areas, and third-party supporters and independents everywhere—usually do not have a voice. But in Illinois under proportional representation, Republican legislators were elected in the blue liberal cities, as were Democrats in the red conservative areas. Independents, moderates, and the wings of the parties had a place at the table; so did women and minorities. In Illinois, purple America had a home.

Despite the fact that a range of proportional representation voting methods are used in most established democracies around the world, as well as in a number of US cities (many of them put into place to settle voting rights lawsuits to facilitate diverse representation), PR has yet to make inroads into crucial levels of American government, especially in the Congress and state legislatures. Illinois used cumulative voting, but Ireland and Australia’s national Senate are elected using an even better method known as proportional ranked choice voting (those countries call it “single transferable vote”). P-RCV has all the benefits of cumulative voting but it also has other desirable features that prevent spoiler candidates, split votes and wasted votes that can sometimes happen with cumulative voting.

A bill called the Fair Representation Act, H.R. 3863, has been introduced by Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, which would implement proportional ranked choice voting for electing the US House of Representatives and for the most part get rid of the bitter process of redistricting. The various 50 US states are often laboratories for innovation and experimentation for each other. The Illinois experience with proportional representation has a lot to teach us as we grapple with the demanding challenges that our failing US democracy is facing.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Voting. It’s one of the most essential foundations of democracy. The right of the people to vote on who represents them in government was vehemently fought for in the American Revolution by those who founded the United States centuries ago. Of course, the founders excluded large numbers of people from this new democratic dream, including women, slaves, Indigenous people and those without property or who didn’t pay taxes. Only an estimated 10-20% of the American population was eligible to vote. Nevertheless, those flawed early days established an important principle for future generations. 

Yet we all know people today who, come election time, would rather do anything else than fill out their ballots and participate in politics. As someone with a deep passion for government and justice, it can be frustrating for me to hear that some don’t care enough to help maintain this crucial ritual of our democracy that is so fundamental to our freedom. 

When we take a step back, however, this apathy is not always caused by disinterest in politics. For some, the unwillingness to get out on election day is because of the tremendous effort needed to vote in certain areas. The number of hoops needed to jump through just to cast their ballot prevents people from exercising their right to vote.

Take Fulton County in Georgia. In this county, some voters had to wait up to nine hours in line at the polls in 2020, with non-white areas especially impacted. In Georgia during the 2020 primaries, a study from the Brennan Center found that non-white voters also had their ballots rejected at nearly two to three times the number of ballots from white voters. 

Many people are unable to take time off from work to vote in-person on election day. Lower income voters who cannot afford to miss work or find childcare must sacrifice their vote in order to survive. Voter suppression goes beyond race, though, and hurts Americans across the board. The intersections between identities such as gender, race, class, religion and ability are pivotal to understanding why existing voting laws and practices prevent different groups from having a voice through their votes. 

Even when people are able to get their ballots in to election officials, whether in person or through the mail, there’s no guarantee that their efforts will be worth their time and energy to vote. If their preferred candidate does not even make it through the primaries, they may not open their ballot when the general election comes around. 

Following the Reconstruction era through the Civil Rights movement, barriers to voting placed heavier burdens on Black people. These came in the form of poll taxes, literacy tests, and even physical violence when attempting to register or exercise the right to vote. Earlier this month, on August 6th, was the 57th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a piece of legislation that revolutionized voting protections for marginalized racial groups. The VRA outlawed racially discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests to allow broader access to the polls.

Following the passage of this law, Black people began gaining more seats in the House of Representatives, going from just 5 members in 1965 to triple that amount with 16 members only ten years later. Looking even further to other racial and ethnic minority groups, we’ve seen a steady increase in representation over the last 20 years across the board. Congress today is the most racially and ethnically diverse in our nation’s history. Overall, 26% of the House of Representatives and 11% of the Senate identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American. By comparison, when the 79th Congress took office in 1945, non-White lawmakers represented just 1% of the House and Senate; and today’s numbers represent a 97% increase over the 107th Congress of 2001-03, which had 63 minority members.

Despite this growing diversity, Congress remains less diverse than the nation as a whole: white Americans account for 77% of voting members in Congress, considerably more than their 60% share of the U.S. population.

Today, the barriers to voting look somewhat different. Nonetheless, the effect is quite similar to past discriminatory practices. Restricting voting registration, gerrymandering, and voter purges are all elements that make something that was intended to be our constitutional right feel like something we must fight for.  

“Restricting voting registration, gerrymandering, and voter purges make something that was intended to be our constitutional right feel like something we must fight for.”

How did we get here, despite the monumental step forward made in 1965 along with the VRA being reauthorized over multiple decades? The US Supreme Court ruling in 2013 known as Shelby County v. Holder made voting access in many states incrementally more restrictive. In this case, the Supreme Court overturned a provision in Section 5 of the VRA that required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass a federal review requiring preclearance before being able to pass new voting laws. The Roberts Court majority declared, despite an abundance of contrary evidence, that, “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”

In her stinging rebuttal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized information reported by Congress that found that there were more Department of Justice complaints against various election practices between 1982 and 2004 than between 1965 and the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA. Wrote Ginsburg, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

The post-Shelby era guts the VRA

After Shelby, new laws were passed that made voting for Black, Latinx, and eldery voters harder to access.

Starting with strict photo ID rules with limited options for acceptable identification in Texas, along with elimination of same-day voting registration in North Carolina, we have seen a number of ways that Shelby has undermined our democracy.   

Since Shelby in 2013, there has been a cycle of states implementing new legislation followed by advocacy groups attempting to challenge these laws in court. I myself was surprised to hear about very recent attacks to voting rights protections with another case in 2021. In Brnovich v. Demo­cratic National Commit­tee, the Supreme Court ruled that two Arizona voting laws, one that required any ballots from outside a precinct to be completely discarded and another that allowed only a voter’s caretaker or member of their family to return an early ballot on their behalf, were not in violation of Section 2 the VRA. As a result, the Court made it significantly more difficult to challenge restrictive voting bills. That in turn has made it easier for vulnerable voting groups to be discriminated against.

It’s no wonder that telling people to simply “go vote” to solve the issues they care about most is not an effective motivator for political participation. When people face barriers throughout the entire voting process, they lose faith in our system to represent them and their interests.

There are ways to fix this

We all may be thoroughly aware of the problems within our government, but not enough time and energy is focused on how to actually fix these. With voter suppression still prevalent today, we need modern solutions to build a 21st century democracy: one that is truly representative. 

One of the most important reforms needed is the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to codify these protections into law once again. Continuing to put pressure on legislators is a strong first step. While at the federal level there has not been much action from the Senate on getting this legislation passed, states can take matters into their own hands like New York did by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York. 

Also, voters can demand that their representatives support FairVote’s Fair Representation Act, which would greatly enhance the electoral viability of non-white voters everywhere by electing members of the US House of Representatives by proportional representation in multi-seat districts.

It’s important to contact your legislators at the state and local levels to express the importance of measures like these.

With many primary elections happening over the next month and the midterm elections in early November, knowing your rights as a voter is crucial. Be sure to review the American Civil Liberties Union’s Know Your Rights page to ensure your vote is counted and more importantly that your voice is heard. 

For this election cycle, if you’re feeling hopeless, overwhelmed, burnt out, or any other feelings, remember that you are voting for those who cannot vote. And for those who have to work on election day. And those who are not old enough to vote. And those who do not have the physical ability and accommodations they need to vote. Those who have been wrongfully disenfranchised. And those who decided over a hundred years ago, with the passage of the 15th Amendment granting African-Americans the right to vote, and 57 years ago with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, that the people deserve a say in who represents them.

As the late Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis once said, “The vote is precious. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society, and we must use it.” 

Alissa Bombardier Shaw @alissashaw_

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The struggle for women’s equal rights has been a long one, marked by noteworthy gains as well as tragic setbacks. A high point along this trajectory was the Seneca Falls Convention, July 19-20, 1848, the first women’s rights gathering in the US. Today I’m celebrating its 174th anniversary, in the shadow of the US Supreme Courts’ recent decision to overturn Roe, despite the unpopularity of bans on abortion and widespread support for women’s reproductive rights. That controversial 5-4 decision was a jolt to our nation, and it reminded me once again of the consequences we face when women are not fully represented in our government.

Prior to this decision of today's Black Robes, it was easier to forget that in the mid-nineteenth century, women were severely restricted in how we could participate in society and politics. We were barred from owning property, excluded from obtaining a higher education, we had restricted employment options, and of course we could not vote. Women were to be seen and not heard, rarely allowed to engage in public speaking. Women also had minimal roles within the church and other major institutions, and men had significant control over women’s activities and decisions, whether it be as fathers, husbands, lawmakers, bosses or religious leaders.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you are on, it's hard to avoid the fact that, following this decision by a male-majority Supreme Court, now decisions about women's reproductive rights will continue to be made by men at the state level, as they also outnumber women in elected and appointed positions. Historically, men have had significant control over the lives of women, and the recent decision as well as the new reproductive laws to come feel like a perpetuation of this control.…like we are still living in a history we thought was in the rear view mirror.

In 1848, women faced even bigger obstacles. As America lurched closer to a bloody civil war over slavery and racial equality, a Women's Rights Convention (as it was first named) gathered forward-looking thinkers of the time in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss and inspire each other over women’s rights. This convention, though small with only around 300 attendees, was an important catalyst for the women’s movement that was to gather momentum for the next seven decades until women gained the right to vote.

The convention was organized by five brave women who were active in the fight for civil rights. This included activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Mary M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright (the sister to Lucretia Mott) and Quaker Jane Hunt.

Stanton began the convention with these powerful words:

“We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love.”

What exactly took place on this day, 174 years ago? Stanton, who had grown tired and frustrated of being subjected to laws in which she had no say, as women did not yet have the right to vote, unveiled the Declaration of Sentiments which she, Mott, M’Clintock, and Wright drafted together. This declaration was modeled off the Declaration of Independence, though a significant distinction was made to affirm women’s equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.”

On the second day of the convention, the attendees, mostly women but also some men, voted on a series of 11 resolutions within the Declaration of Sentiments. The most controversial of these was the ninth resolution that encouraged women to take the initiative to establish the right to vote for themselves. This resolution sparked debate amongst the entire convention. It wasn’t until abolitionist Fredrick Douglass gave a powerful speech, expressing his support for women’s suffrage, that they were able to get enough votes to pass the resolution. In his newspaper entitled The North Star, Douglass later wrote about the intersection between the women’s rights and abolitionist movements:

“In respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for man…All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman...There can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is, that ‘Right is of no sex.’”

Douglass’s presence at this first women’s convention was a significant act of solidarity. Indeed, the antislavery movement as a whole was integral to establishing the women’s rights movement. Without the push for the abolition of slavery, women would not have had the framework to be successful to push for their own rights. Though there was a wide array of opinions on slavery from women, the issue was nonetheless pushed to the forefront of peoples’ lives leading up to the Civil War.

Some women rights advocates got involved first with the antislavery movement, including many of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention. Because of their involvement in the antislavery movement, women began noticing how women were also being oppressed (although in a much different way), and to draw parallels between the laws of slavery and the laws regarding marriage. The abolition movement brought a number of women into the center of politics, which in turn radicalized these women. Over time, women not only started to realize their own desire for equality, but they also learned the tools to be able to better make their arguments. Quaker women in particular began taking steps within their faith to challenge these norms.

Organizations like the American Anti-Slavery Society provided a platform for women to develop their public speaking and organizing skills. The antislavery movement emboldened women to stand up for what they believed in, just as those fighting for abolition did. The movement established arguments for equality because it demonstrated how one group of people (black people) should not be subordinated by another (white people); this allowed women to argue the same “equality principle” should apply to them. Without the antislavery movement, women may not have been empowered with the knowledge and courage to stand up for themselves.

For this anniversary, we are reminded of both how far we have come and how far we still have to go to achieve the ideals that the organizers of the convention dreamed of. It took 72 years following the Seneca Falls Convention for women to actually receive the right to vote. Now, women are still vastly underrepresented at all levels of government, business and other major institutions. But the anniversary of the convention also reminds us of the importance of collaboration, collective action, and perseverance in the fight for equality. At times where progress can feel hopeless, it is important to remember these words:

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

― Harriet Beecher Stowe

During a time where the oppression of women was so deeply entrenched and to an extent, normalized, remembering the courageous women who fought for equality empowers me. The Seneca Falls Convention means so much more than just a small group of people discussing women’s rights, particularly in this current moment where our rights are being threatened and the clock is being turned back toward the 19th century. This convention was an act of rebellion and a refusal to accept injustice. I look to groundbreaking events like these to inspire me, to recall the progress we have made, and to revitalize my hope for a better future in which full equality is actualized.

To learn more about how we can all work together to help build women’s political power and get more involved in the women’s rights movement, check out RepresentWomen’s Take Action page.

Alissa Bombardier Shaw @alissashaw_

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When Donald Trump and his co-conspirators tried to overthrow the presidential election in 2020, many Americans, as well as US admirers around the world, expressed shock and dismay. In a time of advancement of illiberal democracies and authoritarian governments, according to Freedom House, even the world’s “paragon of democracy” had taken a perilous step too close to the cliff. When President Joe Biden hosted his “Summit on Democracy,” along with wayward invitees Philippines, India, Pakistan and Brazil, a whiff of hypocrisy and schadenfreude hung heavy in the air.

Yet a deeper familiarity with US history reveals that America has not been immune to domestic coups and stolen elections. I am reading historian Ron Chernow’s Grant, a biography of the Civil War general and 18th president, Ulysses S Grant. Chernow details how the post-Civil War tensions between the defeated Confederates and northern Union victors resulted in a “reconstruction” constantly wrecked by southern insurrection and ex-Confederate attempts to overthrow racially integrated governments. On numerous occasions, elected officials were dragged from their homes and in some cases murdered in the streets; elections were overturned at the point of a rifle. At that time, Grant’s Republican Party was the liberator of slaves, and Grant boldly deployed the military in the postbellum South to enforce black’s newfound rights. The Democratic Party – today’s party of civil rights -- was the protector of white supremacy and enabler of murderous gangs on horseback of former Confederate soldiers who comprised the core of the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan and White League.

In November 1872, just around the time of President Grant’s reelection, a bitter and divisive race for governor of Louisiana occurred between US Senator William Pitt Kellogg, the Republican candidate backed by Grant, and Democrat John McEnery, an ex-Confederate battalion commander. “Although Kellogg emerged victorious,” writes Chernow, “his foes refused to concede the election.… For months, both Kellogg and McEnery claimed to be governor, holding competing inaugural celebrations. For Grant, the standoff presented a baffling dilemma.”

The election was thrown into the Louisiana courts for adjudication. At this time, the South was an extremely violent place where defeated Civil War veterans had returned home only to enact bloody mayhem against the black population and Republican politicians. For these Confederates, the Civil War had never ended, despite Lincoln and Grant’s compassionate terms of surrender, “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” The fact that some of the Republican officeholders were “carpetbaggers” who had moved to the south from the north, and corrupt besides, added to an already palpable sense of southern victimhood and injury. According to Chernow, even President Grant feared traveling to the south because of concerns over violence against him (the memory of Lincoln’s assassination seven years before no doubt still fresh).

In the aftermath of a disputed gubernatorial election, the Louisiana situation quickly deteriorated due to insurgent Klan activity. A prominent businessman, Joseph Hatch, informed President Grant that one night 20 men in disguise ringed his warehouse, emptied more than 100 shots into it, and threatened that unless his business “was moved, that in a Short time they would apply the Torch.” What was his offense? He was known to have voted for Grant, Kellogg for governor and the Republican ticket.

The Democratic candidate McEnery’s supporters had seized the police station, which along with other acts of violence (such as attacking men physically, and burning their homes to discourage them from voting during the previous election) signaled a wholesale breakdown of law and order. Finally Grant, who had been reluctant to show “any appearance of undue interference in State affairs,” was forced to react: “Instruct Military to prevent any violent interference with the state Government of La.”

With the beefed-up military presence, things calmed down some. But that lasted as long as it took for the insurrectionists to re-arm. After a federal judge ruled in favor of the Kellogg slate, “the powder keg of Louisiana politics exploded in April 1873,” writes Chernow. A pitched battle ensued for control of various parts of the state. One of those places was Grant Parish in the Louisiana heartland. Grant Parish had become a hotbed of former Confederate and Democratic Party insurgents. One plantation owner there threatened to expel blacks from homes they rented on his land if they voted Republican. Ballot box stuffing was common. Following the enfranchisement of former slaves, the total population of Grant Parish had a narrow majority of 2400 freedmen, who mostly voted Republican, and 2200 whites, who voted as Democrats. It was an electoral tinderbox.

William Ward, a former slave who had fought in the Union Army, was now a black Republican leader in Grant Parish. To prevent an expected takeover of the county seat of Colfax by a private white army led by Christopher Columbus Nash, a formerly imprisoned Confederate officer, Ward summoned his black supporters and they surrounded the Colfax courthouse. They threw up earthworks around the building, dug trenches and drilled their impromptu army to increase their readiness. They held the town for several weeks. Ward wrote to Governor Kellogg, seeking U.S. troops for reinforcement.

But the other side was mobilizing. To recruit men, Nash spread lurid rumors that blacks were preparing to kill all the white men and take the white women as their own. On April 8 the anti-Republican Daily Picayune newspaper of New Orleans inflamed tensions with the following headline:

THE RIOT IN GRANT PARISH. FEARFUL ATROCITIES BY THE NEGROES. NO RESPECT SHOWN TO THE DEAD

Such “fake news” attracted more whites from other parts of Louisiana to join Nash, most of them experienced Confederate veterans. Nash’s growing army also acquired a four-pound cannon that could fire iron slugs. As the Klansman Dave Paul said, "Boys, this is a struggle for white supremacy."

On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and most of them on horseback. They opened fire on Ward and his supporters, blasting away for several hours. With their cannon, they fired on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Completely outnumbered and outgunned, eventually the black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender. Nash called for those surrendering to throw down their weapons and come outside. Instead of a surrender, what happened next was mass murder.

The white paramilitary group killed every black man they could find, including those hiding in the courthouse. They also chased down and killed those attempting to flee. They dumped some bodies in the nearby Red River. About 50 blacks survived that afternoon and were taken prisoner. Later that night they were executed by their captors. Two state militia colonels sent with warrants to arrest the white leaders found the smoking ruins of the courthouse at Colfax, and many bodies of men who had been shot in the back of the head or the neck from up close, execution-style. One body was charred, another man's head beaten beyond recognition, another had a slashed throat, and almost all had from three to a dozen wounds. Heaps of dead black bodies were scattered everywhere, from the courthouse all the way through town to the river boat landing. Only one black man from the group, Levi Nelson, survived the massacre. He had been shot but managed to crawl away unnoticed. He later served as one of the Federal government's chief witnesses against those who were indicted for the attacks.

No one knows the exact number of murdered, but historians’ guesstimate, from available evidence and testimony, is that 150 Blacks and three whites were killed that Easter Sunday. Historian Eric Foner, a specialist in the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, described the massacre as the worst instance of racial violence during Reconstruction. In Louisiana, it had the most fatalities of any of the numerous violent events following the disputed gubernatorial contest. Foner wrote:

"Every election [in Louisiana] between 1868 and 1876 was marked by rampant violence and pervasive fraud….the Colfax massacre taught many lessons, including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority.”

And then…judicial injustice

But that wasn’t the end of the injustice. Besides being a slaughter ground of white on black racial violence and electoral thuggery, the South during so-called Reconstruction was also a hellhole of rampant judicial prejudice. It was nearly impossible to get a local court to convict white perpetrators for the most heinous acts.

The massacre in Colfax gained headlines in national newspapers from Boston to Chicago. Various government forces spent weeks trying to round up members of the white paramilitaries, and a total of 97 men were indicted. In the end, only nine men were charged and brought to trial for violations of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which had been championed by President Grant to provide federal protection for civil rights of freedmen under the 14th Amendment (the “equality amendment,” passed in1868). The law was supposed to protect Americans against actions by terrorist groups such as the Klan (the Grant administration also passed the Ku Klux Klan Act to combat the Klan and its copycat organizations as domestic terrorists).

The men were charged with only a single murder (plus charges related to a conspiracy against the rights of freedmen). There were two jury trials, both in 1874. In the first, one man was acquitted and a mistrial was declared in the cases of the other eight. In the second trial, a federal jury found three men guilty of sixteen charges; however the presiding judge, Joseph Bradley of the US Supreme Court (who participated in the federal retrial as a second judge while riding circuit, as justices did in those day), dismissed the convictions. He ruled  that the federal Enforcement Act they were charged under was unconstitutional (“void for vagueness”) and that the prosecution had failed to prove a “racial rationale” for the massacre. He ordered that the men be released on bail. Once free, those men promptly disappeared, with all involved learning (yet again) about Southern “justice.”

The federal government appealed the case and it was heard by the US Supreme Court as United States v. Cruikshank (1875). The Supreme Court, on which Justice Bradley also sat, adopted his previous rationale and ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 (which was based on the still-new 14th Amendment) applied only to actions committed by the state, and was not applicable to actions committed by individuals or private conspiracies. This meant that the Federal government could not prosecute cases such as the Colfax killings, and plaintiffs had to seek protection inside the state’s jurisdiction. Ten years after the Civil War, the supremacy of states’ rights had come roaring back with a vengeance.

This notorious ruling continued the greatest miscarriage of justice, for it not only exonerated massive crimes and cold-blooded murder but established a federal legal precedent that would protect Klan-type activity, and take the first major step toward establishing the brutal Jim Crow apartheid regime that would dominate US politics for the next 85 years.

This was just the beginning of the post-Civil War unraveling of racial justice for black Americans. Predictably, Louisiana did not prosecute any of the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre. President Ulysses Grant was enraged that the southern Democrats, who readily accused him of unwarranted federal intrusion, stood by in the face of such brutality and racism. The president wrote:

“Insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers…Every one of the Colfax miscreants goes unwhipped of justice, and no way can be found in his boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime.”

For Grant, an ex-general who had commanded armies and whose god-like words had meant death for tens of thousands of soldiers, and whose mighty elected office had declared martial law in certain southern states, his inability to protect the black freedmen from the persistence of Southerners’ racist evil haunted him during his presidency and for the rest of his life.

The publicity about the Colfax Massacre and subsequent Supreme Court ruling was like a gunshot heard ‘round the world, launching the proliferation of new white paramilitary organizations. In May 1874, Nash formed the first chapter of the White League, and chapters soon were formed in other areas of Louisiana, as well as in nearby states. Unlike the former KKK whose members wore hoods and operated in secret, the new groups sought publicity and operated openly. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party."

This was just the beginning of the terror to come. Domestic terrorist groups used violence, murder and intimidation to win election after election and slowly retake the South. In August 1874, the White League threw out Republican officeholders in Coushatta, Louisiana, assassinating six whites and five to 15 freedmen (the number is disputed) who were witnesses in what has become known as the Coushatta massacre. Although twenty-five men were arrested, none were brought to trial.

Finally, on September 14, 1874, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana led a coup attempt when thousands of whites, many of them former Confederate soldiers, barricaded the streets of New Orleans, overpowered a black militia and attacked the racially integrated Metropolitan Police Force which was led by James Longstreet, one of the foremost Confederate generals of the Civil War. They occupied City Hall and the state house, killing more than 20 people. The mutineers announced that Governor Kellogg had been overthrown. Grant dispatched 5000 troops and three gunboats, and only this federal military intervention reinstated Kellogg as the rightful governor.

According to an investigation in 1875 by Gen. Philip Sheridan, “2,141 Negroes had been killed by whites in Louisiana and 2,115 wounded” since the end of the Civil War, yet no one had been punished for those crimes. Such violence, when combined with the failure of the police and the courts to enforce the law, served to intimidate voters and officeholders alike. By terrorizing the freed slaves as well as white Republicans throughout the South, white supremacists repressed voting all during the 1870s and 80s.This became the primary method that white Democrats used to gain control of the Louisiana state legislature in the 1876 elections, and ultimately to dismantle Reconstruction all across the South following the hotly disputed presidential election of 1876, which led to a deal to withdraw all federal troops from the South.

Lessons learned: the South won the Civil War, not the North

What should we learn from this vicious and dehumanizing history? The most important lesson is the most disturbing. We are taught in school, by teachers and in all the history books, that the North won the Civil War. But that is not true, the South did. Because the Civil War did not end in 1865. It continued for the next 10 years in the form of guerrilla warfare, and in the end both President Grant and the war-weary North lost their nerve and willingness to confront Confederate evil.

Black civil rights enjoyed a few brief “golden years,” during which black officeholders, business leaders, farmers, families and schoolchildren made impressive gains toward integration into a new America straining toward a national vision of “charity for all.” And then, under the constant pressure of Southern racism and the failure of the North (which suffered from its own brand of racism) to remain steadfast in its commitment to equality and justice, the election of 1876 snuffed it all out. What came next was the most vicious system of racial apartheid, known as Jim Crow, and it lasted for the next 90 years.

William Briggs, author of “How America Got Its Guns: A History of Gun Violence in America,” and co-author Jon Krakauer have written:

“A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo., Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections.”

In Colfax, Louisiana, still to this day, stands a 12 foot obelisk monument in the local cemetery, two blocks off Main Street, honoring the whites who massacred Black Americans 149 years ago. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.”

That stings, even today. As Southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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