Tag: American Politics Page 1 of 2

Benjamin Franklin and Slavery: A Complicated Legacy

On May 7, 2026

Few figures in American history are as celebrated — or as contradictory — as Benjamin Franklin. Founding Father, inventor, diplomat, and philosopher. Franklin is remembered for just about everything except the uncomfortable truth that he was also, for much of his life, a slave owner. His relationship with slavery is a study in the slow, painful moral evolution of a brilliant but flawed man — one who spent decades benefiting from the institution he would spend his final years fighting to abolish.
The Slaveowner
Franklin was a slave owner beginning around 1735, and he owned enslaved people until at least 1785 when he freed two slaves after his return from France. Over the course of his life, there were up to seven named slaves in the Franklin household, including Peter, his wife Jemima, their son Othello, and George, John, and King.
Franklin’s complicity in slavery extended beyond personal ownership. As editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin benefited financially from advertisements for runaway slaves and slave auctions that were paid for by slave owners and traders. He also used his printing press to publish content that supported the slave trade and, as a British colonial agent, sought to have the British government accept Georgia’s slave code. In short, slavery wasn’t just a private matter for Franklin — it was woven into his professional and financial life. At the same time, he printed Quaker antislavery tracts, a sign that his professional role placed him at the intersection of both pro‑slavery commerce and early antislavery movements.
What little we know about how Franklin treated his enslaved people comes mostly from letters and financial records. In part this is because northern slaveholders kept fewer detailed records of slave families, births, and deaths than large southern planters. His enslaved servants lived within his household and were integrated into domestic routines, a common arrangement in urban slavery that still left them legally and socially unfree.
When Franklin traveled to London in 1757, he brought two enslaved men, Peter and King, who lived and worked at 36 Craven Street. Peter remained with Franklin until their departure in 1762, but King ran away sometime in 1758 and was later found living in Suffolk, having been taken in by a Christian woman who taught him to read and write. The fact that King fled at the first opportunity tells its own story about the nature of slavery, whatever Franklin’s personal demeanor may have been.
His Evolving Written Views
Franklin’s early writings on slavery were at best ambivalent and at worst openly racist. In his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin argued that slave labor wasn’t economically efficient in part because enslaved people pilfered from their owners, writing that “almost every Slave [being] by Nature a Thief.” His concern about slavery in this period was largely economic rather than moral — he worried that it would hurt poor white laborers and enriched a wealthy elite, not that it was a profound violation of human dignity.
By the 1760s, something began to shift. His perspective began to change following a 1759 visit arranged by his friend Samuel Johnson to one of Dr. Bray’s schools for Black children. He also met Anthony Benezet, who had started a school in Philadelphia and would later co-found the Abolition Society. By 1763, Franklin wrote that African “shortcomings” were not inherent but came from lack of education, slavery, and negative environments — and that he saw no difference in learning ability between African and white children.
While in London in the 1760s, he supported black education projects and in 1770 anonymously published “Conversations between an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an American,” a piece that criticized both the slave trade and the broader institution. In 1782 he circulated “A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands,” condemning the African wars that fed the trade, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the “numbers that die under the severities of slavery,” arguing that even sugar was morally tainted by blood.
By the late 1780s, Franklin’s language had become openly abolitionist. In 1787 he signed a public antislavery appeal declaring that the Creator had made “of one flesh, all the children of men,” and in 1789–1790 he wrote essays insisting that slavery was an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” He also argued that formerly enslaved people needed education, moral instruction, and employment to make the transition from bondage to full participation in civil society.
This was a meaningful intellectual leap for the era. Franklin was moving from a view of enslaved people as economic units toward recognizing their common humanity and the role that oppression itself played in creating the inequalities he had previously attributed to nature.
Franklin the Constitutional Convention and the Three-Fifths Compromise
By the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Franklin. then 81 years old, was a delegate from Pennsylvania. The Three-Fifths Compromise — which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and taxation — was one of the most contentious issues at the Convention. The compromise was formally proposed by delegate James Wilson and seconded by Charles Pinckney.
Franklin’s specific role in the Three-Fifths Compromise itself is limited. His more direct contribution to the Convention’s structural debates was to the Great Compromise about proportional representation and spending rather than the slavery count.
Notably, just weeks before the Convention began, Franklin signed a public antislavery appeal stating that “the Creator of the world” had made “of one flesh, all the children of men.” Yet he ultimately signed a Constitution that embedded protections for slavery, including the Three-Fifths Compromise and a provision preventing Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808. Franklin’s acquiescence reflected his broader pragmatic calculation, shared by many Northern founders, that preserving the Union required compromise with the slaveholding South, even at a terrible moral cost. This is partly speculative — Franklin left few direct written statements about his reasoning on this specific tradeoff at the Convention.
The Abolitionist
Whatever compromises Franklin made at Philadelphia, the years that followed saw him embrace abolitionism with increasing conviction and urgency. In 1787, he began serving as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery — the oldest abolitionist organization in the country — which had originally formed in 1775 and was reorganized and incorporated by Pennsylvania in 1789.
In 1789, Franklin wrote and published several essays supporting abolition, including a public address dated November 9th of that year in which he called slavery an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” He called for practical support for emancipated people, including education and employment — ideas that were radical for the time and would remain largely unaddressed for generations.
His final public act was perhaps his most consequential. On February 3, 1790, Franklin signed a petition to the first Congress on behalf of the Abolition Society, asking lawmakers to “devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People” and to “promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race.” The petition was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and referred to a committee, which ultimately concluded that the Constitution prevented Congress from acting on the matter until 1808.
Franklin died in April 1790, just weeks after these debates, leaving a legacy that combined early complicity in slavery with later, forceful advocacy for abolition and Black education. As part of his will, he directed all remaining enslaved people in his household be freed upon his death, although it is unclear if he still owned slaves at the time and this may have been a symbolic declaration that he hoped others would follow. His life illustrates both the pervasiveness of slavery in colonial America — even among its most famous reformers — and the possibility, however belated, of moral and political transformation on the issue.
What to Make of It All
Franklin’s association with slavery resists easy conclusions. He spent roughly four and a half decades owning enslaved people, profiting from the slave trade through his newspaper, and diplomatically defending slavery when it served colonial interests. His evolution toward abolitionism was real, but it was also late — and driven partly by visits to schools for Black children and Quaker friendships rather than a spontaneous moral awakening.
At the same time, his final years represent one of the most prominent Founding Fathers publicly and passionately challenging the institution while other contemporaries remained silent or actively defended it. As historian David Waldstreicher has cautioned, Franklin’s antislavery credentials have sometimes been “remembered backwards” and exaggerated — but that doesn’t mean the later evolution wasn’t genuine.
What Franklin’s story offers isn’t a story of redemption so much as a realistic portrait of moral growth under the weight of self-interest, social norms, and political pragmatism. He was, as one observer put it, a man who showed himself to be “thoughtful, open, teachable” — eventually. The tragedy is how long it took, how few followed his lead, and how much damage was done in the meantime.

Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT.

Sources:
                Benjamin Franklin House – Franklin and Slavery
https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-franklin-and-slavery/

                Benjamin Franklin House – The Philadelphia Household 1735–1790
https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/franklin-and-slavery-the-philadelphia-household-1735-1790/

                Online Library of Liberty – Benjamin Franklin and Slavery, Part One
https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2023-07-05-ealy-franklin-slavery-part-one

                Benjamin Franklin Historical Society – Slavery and the Abolition Society
http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/slavery-abolition-society/

                National Archives – Benjamin Franklin’s Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress
https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/franklin

                Penn & Slavery Project – Benjamin Franklin
https://pennandslaveryproject.archives.upenn.edu/2025/07/09/benjamin-franklin/

                Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life – Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the Founders
https://commonplace.online/article/benjamin-franklin-slavery/

                U.S. History – Ben Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America
https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/essays/franklin_race.htm

                Wikipedia – Benjamin Franklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

                Wikipedia – Three-Fifths Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

                Britannica – Three-Fifths Compromise
https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise

                U.S. Senate – Equal State Representation and the Great Compromise
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/equal-state-representation.htm

                Wikipedia – Connecticut Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

                Teaching American History – The Constitutional Convention: The Three-Fifths Clause
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-constitutional-convention-the-three-fifths-clause/

“86” — A Little Number With a Big History

By John Turley

On May 2, 2026

In Commentary

Fifty some years ago when I was in the Marines, we used the term “86” to refer to something that should be ignored or discarded—in the colorful vernacular of the Corps, “shit canned”. That’s trashed to you civilians. The Marines have never been known as a peaceable lot and we had many colorful euphemisms for doing grievous bodily harm, but “86” was never among them.

So why is “86” suddenly everywhere in the news? Blame James Comey. The former FBI Director posted a beach photo on Instagram showing seashells arranged to spell out “86 47” — and the internet promptly exploded. Republicans argued it was a death threat against the 47th president. Comey said it simply meant he wanted Trump removed from office. That dispute has brought a piece of century-old American slang back into the spotlight, so it’s worth taking a look at what the term means and where it came from.

The Short Answer

Eighty-six is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of,” or “to refuse service to.” It most likely comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. This was part of a broader diner code that included: 13 “the boss is around,” 81 “glass of water,” and 95 “customer left without paying”. Over the decades it evolved from a kitchen noun into a verb with broader reach, and today it shows up everywhere from restaurant kitchens to Twitter and now worldwide headlines.

The Longer Answer

Here’s the honest answer: nobody knows for certain. Its etymology is unknown, but it seems to have been coined in the 1920s or 1930s. There are many theories about its origin — one article enumerates 18 possibilities, and another suggests there are “about 86 theories about 86.”

While the leading contender is the mundane diner option, there are several other more or less plausible and frequently more colorful options.

The most linguistically grounded explanation is that “86” is simply rhyming slang. The most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for “nix.” That’s the same “nix” meaning to reject or say no.

One of the more colorful stories involves a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Chumley’s, a bar with multiple entrances including one at 86 Bedford Street in New York. The story goes that the bar was supposedly warned by police before raids. Customers were told to “86 it” — meaning leave through the Bedford Street exit while cops came through the other door. It’s a great story, and if it’s not true it should be.

How It Evolved

First appearing in the early 1930s as a noun, it did not take long for the word to broaden its use beyond the realm of the soda counter. In the 1950s the word underwent some functional shift and began to be used as a verb — initially meaning “to refuse to serve a customer,” and later taking on the slightly extended meaning of “to get rid of; to throw out.”

It was quickly adopted and members of the military services who love slang, shortcuts, and inside terminology. It may just be a coincidence that Article 86 of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice concerns Absence Without Leave, or AWOL.

By the 1970s it had moved well beyond the restaurant world. In the 1972 film The Candidate, a media adviser says to Robert Redford’s character, “OK, now, for starters, we got to cut your hair and eighty-six the sideburns.”

Where It Stands Today

These days, people use “86” when they cancel plans, dump something, or boot someone from a chat. Social media picked it up — Twitter and TikTok users will “86 a trend” or “86 a person” in a heartbeat.

In professional kitchens and bars, it remains “everyday lingo” — one hospitality industry veteran called it “probably the most overused word in hospitality.”

The Comey controversy also resurrected an older, arcane, and darker shade of the term. According to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, “to 86” can alternatively mean “to kill, to murder; to execute judicially.” That said, Merriam-Webster notes this use is infrequent, and they do not include this sense due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.

The bottom line is that “86” is one of those wonderfully slippery pieces of American slang that started in a noisy kitchen, picked up mythology along the way, and is now flexible enough to mean anything from “we’re out of the salmon” to a loaded political statement — depending entirely on who’s using it and who’s listening.

Or, perhaps this entire tempest is just the response of one thin skinned man to his pathologic fear of seashells.

From Minstrel Stage to State Law: The History of Jim Crow

By John Turley

On April 27, 2026

In History

Source: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Few phrases in American history carry as much weight as Jim Crow. It is shorthand for a century of systematic racial oppression — separate schools, separate water fountains, disenfranchisement and even terror. But the term itself has an origin that is both surprising and telling: it began not in a courthouse or a legislature, but on a minstrel stage in the 1820s, as the punchline of a song-and-dance act performed by a white man in blackface.

Jump Jim Crow: The Birth of a Slur

The story starts with Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, a struggling white actor from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who would go on to become one of the most famous entertainers of his era. Around 1828, Rice developed a stage character he called Jim Crow — a singing, dancing, shuffling caricature of a Black man, performed in blackface makeup made from burnt cork and wearing ragged clothes. The precise inspiration for the character is disputed and has, as historians put it, been lost to legend. Rice claimed to have based it on a disabled enslaved stableman he observed singing and dancing to amuse himself, though the time, place, and truth of this claim have never been verified.

What is not disputed is the impact. Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” routine was a sensation. By 1832 he had turned the character into his signature act, touring from Louisville to Cincinnati to Philadelphia to New York, playing to sold-out houses. He eventually took the show to London and Dublin, where audiences were equally enthralled. Rice became known as “Jim Crow Rice,” the self-proclaimed “Father of American Minstrelsy.”

The character Rice created was deliberately degrading — a dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish caricature built to confirm the worst racial stereotypes white audiences held about Black Americans and to reinforce a racial hierarchy that portrayed Black people as naturally suited to servitude and exclusion from the rights of citizenship. He and his imitators spread these images across the country. By 1838, the term “Jim Crow” had crossed from the stage into everyday speech as a collective racial slur for Black people. The minstrel show had given American racism a catchy name.

It is worth pausing on the cultural mechanics of what minstrelsy did. It was not just entertainment — it was propaganda. Rice and his many imitators, including the wildly popular Christy Minstrels (for whom Stephen Foster wrote songs), systematically presented Black Americans as subhuman, unworthy of social participation, and fundamentally inferior and ridiculous figures. These depictions played to a stereotype that reinforced racial prejudice among white audiences and softened their moral resistance to segregation and violence long before those policies were ever written into law.

Reconstruction and Its Violent Undoing

The Civil War ended in 1865 with the abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction era that followed was a genuine, if incomplete, experiment in racial equality. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery, granted citizenship, and extended voting rights to Black men. For a brief window, Black Americans served in state legislatures and held federal office across the South.

That window slammed shut in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South as part of a political compromise. Southern white Democrats — calling themselves “Redeemers” — systematically retook their state legislatures using violence, voter fraud, and paramilitary terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts. Republican officeholders were run out of town or worse. Black voters were lynched as a warning to others.

Once back in power, Southern legislatures began passing the laws that would become known as Jim Crow — a name borrowed directly from Rice’s minstrel slur. The term had traveled from the stage to common speech and then into the legal codebook and reflected the same racist assumptions embodied in the minstrel character: that Black Americans were inherently inferior and should occupy a subordinate social and legal position.

Beginning with Florida in 1887, states required railroads to maintain separate cars for Black and white passengers. Similar laws quickly spread segregation to schools, restaurants, hospitals, theaters, cemeteries, parks, waiting rooms, and virtually every other point of public contact between the races. Many facilities were marked with signs reading “White” and “Colored” to emphasize the exclusion of Black citizens. The laws varied by state but shared a common goal—racial separation and political exclusion.

Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Blesses Segregation

In 1892, a group of Black and mixed-race citizens in New Orleans organized a deliberate legal challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. They recruited Homer Plessy — a man who was seven-eighths white but legally classified as Black under Louisiana law — to board a whites-only train car and refuse to move. He was arrested on cue, and his case wound its way through the court system to the United States Supreme Court.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court ruled 7-1 that racial segregation was constitutional as long as the separate facilities were nominally equal. The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, stated that the constitution should be color blind and warned prophetically that the decision would prove as pernicious as the Dred Scott ruling. He was right. The “separate but equal” doctrine became the legal foundation for a total apartheid system across the South — and, in many respects, well beyond it.

In practice, of course, the facilities were never equal. Black schools were chronically underfunded, with inferior buildings, used textbooks, and far lower teacher salaries. Black hospitals, where they existed at all, were understaffed and under-equipped. “Separate but equal” was a legal fiction that everyone understood as a polite cover for second-class citizenship.

Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states rewrote constitutions or passed amendments to systematically disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests administered by white registrars, grandfather clauses, and outright violent intimidation. African Americans who had briefly held political power during Reconstruction effectively disappeared from public life.

The Long Arm of Jim Crow: Life Under the System

For the better part of a century, Jim Crow was not merely a set of legal rules — it was a total social order enforced by custom, economic pressure, and the ever-present threat of violence. A Black man who looked a white man in the eye too long, or failed to step off the sidewalk, or was accused of anything at all, could find himself facing a lynch mob. Between Reconstruction and World War II, thousands of Black Americans — men, women and even children — were lynched, often publicly and festively, with onlookers smiling while posing for pictures with the victim. Law enforcement often did nothing and at times even actively participated.

The Great Migration — the mass movement of Black Americans from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities beginning around 1910 — was driven in large part by Jim Crow. Millions fled to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles in search of something approaching equal treatment. What they often found instead was a northern variant: informal segregation through redlining (systematic denial of mortgages in Black neighborhoods), discriminatory hiring, and residential segregation enforced by real estate covenants and social pressure.

The Legal Dismantling: Brown, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act

The legal edifice of Jim Crow began to crack in 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Directly overturning Plessy, the Court held that segregated schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. The ruling did not end segregation — Southern states resisted fiercely, and desegregation proceeded at a glacial pace well into the 1970s — but Brown pulled the legal rug out from under “separate but equal.”

The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s — marked by sit-ins, freedom rides, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and countless acts of individual courage in the face of brutal repression — built the political pressure that forced legislative action. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the machinery of Black disenfranchisement in the South, sending federal examiners into states with histories of discrimination to ensure that Black citizens could actually register and vote. By 1965 the majority of the formal Jim Crow laws had been overturned.

The Vestiges: Jim Crow’s Long Shadow

Ending Jim Crow legally is not the same as ending its consequences — or, as some argue, its functional successors. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, in her landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow, argues that mass incarceration has emerged as a new system of racialized social control. Black Americans are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white Americans. A felony conviction — often stemming from drug offenses prosecuted far more aggressively in Black communities despite similar rates of drug use across races — carries a cascade of legal disabilities: loss of voting rights in most states, exclusion from public housing and many jobs, and ineligibility for certain federal benefits. Nearly 30% of Black men carry felony records.

The racial wealth gap stands as perhaps the most stubborn vestige of a century of legal exclusion. The median Black family holds roughly one-tenth the wealth of the median white family — a gap driven not by individual choices but by generations of legally enforced exclusion from homeownership, inheritance, and wealth-building opportunities. Redlining — the systematic denial of mortgages in Black neighborhoods by federally-backed banks — was official federal policy from the 1930s through the 1960s and left neighborhood segregation patterns that persist visibly today.

Voting rights remain contested territory. The Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing election laws. Since then, a wave of new restrictions — voter ID laws, aggressive voter roll purges, reduced polling locations, and aggressive felony disenfranchisement — has fallen disproportionately on Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters. As of April 2024, 19 states require photo identification to vote, a requirement critics note functions as a modern poll tax for those who lack access to the required documents.

Residential segregation, too, endures. American neighborhoods and, by extension, their schools remain largely segregated by race — a product not of individual choice but of policies like redlining, racially restrictive housing covenants, and “white flight” that were actively promoted by governments at every level. These patterns mean that school quality, which is largely tied to local property tax revenues, continues to diverge sharply by race.

Conclusion

The arc of Jim Crow runs from the absurd to the tragic: from a white comedian in burnt-cork makeup doing a shuffling dance routine, to a legal apparatus that stripped millions of Americans of their dignity, their rights, and their lives for a century. The name itself tells you what the architects of segregation thought of their project — it was always a contemptuous slap in the face of Black Americans.

While the formal system was legally dismantled between 1954 and 1965 — which is rightly understood as a profound achievement — the legal end of Jim Crow is not the same as justice, and it is not the same as equality. The wealth gap, the incarceration gap, the voting access gap, and the education gap all bear the fingerprints of a system that successfully kept Black Americans subordinate for generations.

Understanding Jim Crow fully requires tracing it from its shameful origins in a minstrel song, through its deadly flowering as a legal regime, to its present-day aftereffects. The name may have disappeared from the law books, but the consequences have not and some critics of the current administration see the dismantling of DEI as an indirect form of Jim Crow revival or neo-segregation. They believe that race-neutral language is being used to reproduce racial inequality without openly naming race. This is sometimes described this as “Jim Crow 2.0” or “colorblind Jim Crow” and should be no more acceptable than its more blatant ancestor.

Sources

1. Wikipedia — Thomas D. Rice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_D._Rice

2. Wikipedia — Jim Crow (Character): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_(character)

3. Wikipedia — Jump Jim Crow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_Jim_Crow

4. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University — Who Was Jim Crow?: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/who/index.htm

5. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University — The Origins of Jim Crow: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/origins.htm

6. Britannica — What Is the Origin of the Term “Jim Crow”?: https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-origin-of-the-term-jim-crow

7. Britannica — Jim Crow Law: https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law

8. National Archives — Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson

9. Wikipedia — Plessy v. Ferguson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

10. Wikipedia — Jim Crow Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

11. PBS — Jim Crow & Plessy v. Ferguson: https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/jim-crow/

12. Howard University School of Law — Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras: https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/blackrights/jimcrow

13. American Battlefield Trust — The Jim Crow Era: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/jim-crow-era

14. Michelle Alexander — The New Jim Crow (Introduction Excerpt): https://newjimcrow.com/about/excerpt-from-the-introduction

15. Economic Policy Institute — Voter Suppression Rooted in Racism: https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-voter-suppression/

16. American Academy of Arts and Sciences — Somewhere Between Jim Crow and Post-Racialism: https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/somewhere-between-jim-crow-post-racialism

17. Yale Macmillan — History of Minstrel Shows and Jim Crow: https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc/history-minstrel-shows-and-jim-crow

The Accidental Footnote: Heel Spurs, the Vietnam Draft, and American Inequality

By John Turley

On April 17, 2026

In Commentary, History, Medicine, Politics

If you’ve ever winced taking your first steps out of bed in the morning, you may have already made an involuntary acquaintance with heel spurs — or more precisely, with the condition that often travels with them. The term itself sounds alarming, and for a brief but colorful stretch of American political history, it became something far more charged than a footnote to podiatry. But before we get to the politics, it’s worth understanding what a heel spur actually is, because the medical reality is both more mundane and more complicated than the caricature.

What Exactly Is a Heel Spur?
A heel spur is a small bony outgrowth — technically called a calcaneal spur — that extends from the underside of the heel bone (the calcaneus). It forms at the spot where the plantar fascia — the thick ligament running the length of your foot from heel to toe — attaches to the heel bone. The spur is not, despite what the name implies, a sharp spike. It is typically smooth and rounded, though it can still cause irritation if it presses into surrounding soft tissue.

The image depicts a comparison between a healthy foot and one with a prominent foot ulcer, highlighting the condition's visible effects.

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Heel spurs affect about 10% of the population, making them one of the more common foot conditions around, though most people who have one don’t know it. The spur develops gradually — usually over months or even years — as the body deposits calcium in response to chronic stress at that heel attachment point. Think of it less as damage and more as your skeleton’s attempt at reinforcement.

What Causes Them?
The underlying driver is repetitive mechanical stress on the foot. Heel spurs are particularly associated with strains on foot muscles and ligaments, stretching of the plantar fascia, and repeated small tears in the membrane covering the heel bone. Athletes who do a lot of running and jumping are especially prone.

But you don’t need to be an elite runner to develop one. Walking gait problems — particularly overpronation, where the foot rolls inward — place uneven stress on the heel with each step. Worn-out or poorly fitted shoes, which fail to absorb shock or support the arch, compound the problem. Obesity increases the mechanical load on the heel. Occupations that require prolonged standing or walking on hard surfaces put the plantar fascia under constant tension. And as people age, tendons and ligaments lose their elasticity, making the tissues more vulnerable to micro-tears and the subsequent bony repair response.

Heel spurs are also closely connected to a condition most people have heard of: plantar fasciitis. The two are related a but not identical. Plantar fasciitis is inflammation of the plantar fascia itself, usually from overuse. A heel spur can develop as a downstream consequence of that inflammation — the body lays down extra bone in response to the ongoing stress at the fascia’s attachment point.

Symptoms — or the Lack Thereof
Here’s the part that surprises most people: the majority of heel spurs cause no symptoms at all, and many are discovered incidentally on X-rays taken for other reasons. Only about 5% of heel spurs are estimated to be symptomatic.

When a heel spur does produce symptoms, the experience is heavily intertwined with plantar fasciitis. The classic description is a sharp, stabbing pain on the bottom of the foot first thing in the morning, or after any prolonged rest. Many people compare it to stepping on a tack. Paradoxically, this pain often eases somewhat after walking around for a few minutes, only to return after extended time on the feet or after another rest. It’s that “worse in the morning” quality that tends to be the giveaway.

Other symptoms, when present, can include localized swelling, warmth, and tenderness along the front of the heel, as well as increased sensitivity on the underside of the foot. It’s worth noting that the pain associated with a heel spur is not generally thought to come from the bony spur itself, but from the irritation it causes in the surrounding soft tissue — tendons, ligaments, and bursae.

How Is It Diagnosed?
Diagnosis typically begins with a physical exam. Your doctor or podiatrist will ask about when the pain started, what activities preceded it, and what makes it better or worse. They’ll examine your foot for tenderness at specific points, assess your range of motion, and check foot alignment and press on key areas to locate the source of pain.

Imaging confirms the picture. An X-ray can clearly show the bony spur and is the most commonly used test. That said, the size of the spur on an X-ray doesn’t necessarily correspond to how much pain a patient is experiencing — a small spur can be quite painful while a large one may cause no trouble at all. In more complex cases, an MRI may be ordered to assess the soft tissues more closely and evaluate whether plantar fasciitis or another condition is also in play.

Treatment Options
The reassuring news is that the vast majority of cases resolve without surgery. More than 90% of patients improve with nonsurgical treatment. The catch is that conservative management requires patience — improvement typically takes weeks, and more stubborn cases can take months.

The cornerstone of treatment is rest and reducing the activities that provoke pain. This doesn’t necessarily mean completely stopping exercise; low-impact alternatives like swimming, cycling, or rowing allow you to stay active while giving the heel a break from impact. Icing the bottom of the foot after activity helps manage inflammation. Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications like ibuprofen or naproxen can provide relief, though they’re intended for short-term use.

Footwear matters enormously. Supportive shoes with good arch support, cushioning, and a slight heel rise reduce the strain on the plantar fascia. Custom orthotics with molded insoles designed to redistribute pressure across the foot are often recommended, particularly for people with gait abnormalities or flat feet. Physical therapy can be part of the treatment plan, focusing on stretching the calf muscles and plantar fascia, strengthening the foot’s intrinsic muscles, and correcting biomechanical issues.

For cases that don’t respond to these initial measures, the next tier of treatment includes corticosteroid injections to reduce inflammation at the spur site, and extracorporeal shockwave therapy — a non-invasive procedure that uses sound waves to stimulate healing in chronically inflamed tissue. Surgery is reserved for the minority of cases where conservative treatment fails after nine to twelve months. Possible complications include nerve pain, infection, scarring, and — with plantar fascia release — the risk of foot instability or stress fracture. Most orthopedic surgeons regard surgery as a last resort.

Are Heel Spurs Debilitating?
For most people, the honest answer is: no. Heel spurs are a common condition with a favorable prognosis, especially with early diagnosis and appropriate management. Many people live with heel spurs for years without ever knowing it, and even those who develop pain typically find substantial relief with conservative treatment within four to eight weeks.
That said, the pain at its worst — particularly in conjunction with plantar fasciitis — can be genuinely disruptive to daily life. Athletes may find their training significantly limited. People who spend long hours on their feet at work may struggle with sustained discomfort. And a small percentage of patients do end up with prolonged, treatment-resistant pain that affects mobility. So, the more accurate framing might be: heel spurs have the potential to be significantly uncomfortable and functionally limiting during flare-ups, but with proper treatment most people recover well and return to normal activity.

Heel Spurs and the Vietnam-Era Draft
Which brings us to an improbable chapter in heel spur history. During the Vietnam War era, heel spurs became — for at least one famous case — a ticket out of military service. Understanding how that worked requires a brief detour into the draft system of the 1960s and 1970s, and what it meant to receive a medical deferment.
According to the National Archives, of the roughly 27 million American men eligible for military service between 1964 and 1973, about 15 million were granted deferments — mostly for education, and some for mental or physical problems — while only 2,215,000 were actually drafted into service—another eight million volunteered. Some of those who later served had previously had deferments. The system was sprawling, complex, and — as was widely acknowledged even at the time — deeply unequal.
Roughly 60% of draft-eligible American men took some sort of action to avoid military conscription. There were many routes: college deferments, fatherhood, conscientious objector status (170,000 men received those alone), National Guard enlistment, and medical exemptions. Medical deferments covered a wide range of conditions — from serious chronic illness to conditions that, in a different context, most people would consider minor. Flat feet, poor eyesight, asthma, and yes, bone spurs all appeared on the list of potentially disqualifying ailments.
The system was known to favor men with access to money, education, and well-connected physicians. American forces in Vietnam were 55% working-class and 25% poor — reflecting those who didn’t have the means to navigate the deferment labyrinth. A working-class kid from rural West Virginia was far more likely to end up in the Mekong Delta than the son of a New York real estate developer.

The Most Famous Heel Spur in American History
Which leads, inevitably, to Donald Trump. As confirmed by Selective Service records obtained and reported by multiple news outlets, Trump received five Vietnam-era draft deferments — four for college attendance at Fordham and the Wharton School, and a fifth in 1968, recorded as a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels. The medical classification left him disqualified for military service.

The circumstances surrounding the diagnosis have been contested ever since. Reporting by the New York Times included accounts from the daughters of a Queens podiatrist named Larry Braunstein, who alleged that their father had provided or vouched for the diagnosis as a professional favor to Trump’s father, Fred Trump — a landlord to whom Braunstein reportedly owed a debt of gratitude. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen also testified that Trump had admitted to fabricating the injury. Trump himself has maintained that the diagnosis was legitimate, stating that a doctor “gave me a letter — a very strong letter — on the heels.” The underlying medical records that would resolve the dispute are, conveniently, not publicly available; most individual Selective Service medical records from that era were subsequently destroyed.

It’s worth noting that Trump’s pattern — using legal channels, including a medical deferment of questionable validity, to avoid Vietnam service — was not unique to him. Historians have pointed out that numerous prominent figures on both sides of the political aisle received deferments of various kinds, including Joe Biden (asthma), Dick Cheney (student deferments), Bill Clinton (navigated the ROTC system), and George W. Bush (National Guard). The heel spur episode became politically charged in part because of Trump’s later hawkish rhetoric and his outspokenness in questioning the military service of others — most notably Senator John McCain, who spent years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

How Many People Got Heel Spur Deferments?
This is where the historical record hits a hard wall. No reliable statistics exist specifically for heel spur deferments. The Selective Service tracked broad categories — student deferments, hardship deferments, conscientious objector status, medical disqualifications — but it did not publish a breakdown by specific diagnosis, and most individual medical records from that era no longer exist.

What we can say is that bone spurs were a recognized medical disqualifier under Selective Service regulations, that medical deferments broadly were a commonly used — and commonly abused — avenue for avoiding service, and that the process was heavily influenced by access to sympathetic physicians. A man with means, connections, and a cooperative podiatrist had options that a man without those resources did not.

The honest answer, then, is that we don’t know how many men received deferments citing heel spurs specifically, and we almost certainly never will. The data either wasn’t tracked at that level of granularity or was long since destroyed. What we do know is that the condition became, for a time, a lens through which Americans examined something much larger: who serves, who doesn’t, and whether the systems meant to govern those decisions are applied fairly.

For most people, a heel spur is a manageable, if annoying, footnote in the story of their health. For at least one person, it became a footnote in the history of American politics.

Personal Note: I have heel spurs; I wish I’d known about them in 1967.

Images generated by author using AI.

Medical Sources
Cleveland Clinic — Heel Spurs overview
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21965-heel-spurs
WebMD — Heel Spur Causes, Symptoms, Treatments, and Surgery
https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/heel-spurs-pain-causes-symptoms-treatments
Hackensack Meridian Health — Bone Spurs in the Heel: Symptoms and Recovery
https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/en/healthier-you/2024/01/02/bone-spurs-in-the-heel-symptoms-and-recovery
OrthoArkansas — Heel Spurs
https://www.orthoarkansas.com/heel-spurs-orthoarkansas/
EmergeOrtho — Heel Bone Spurs: Causes, Symptoms, Treatment
https://emergeortho.com/news/heel-bone-spurs/
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons — Plantar Fasciitis and Bone Spurs
https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases–conditions/plantar-fasciitis-and-bone-spurs/
Vietnam Draft & Military Service Sources
History.com — 7 Ways Americans Avoided the Draft During the Vietnam War
https://www.history.com/articles/vietnam-war-draft-avoiding
Wikipedia — Draft Evasion in the Vietnam War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_evasion_in_the_Vietnam_War
Wikipedia — Conscription in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States
Students of History — The Draft and the Vietnam War
https://www.studentsofhistory.com/vietnam-war-draft
University of Michigan — The Military Draft During the Vietnam War
https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/draft_protests/the-military-draft-during-the-
Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 310 — Vietnam War Statistics
https://www.vva310.org/vietnam-war-statistics
Vietnam Veterans of Foreign Wars — Fact vs. Fiction: The Vietnam Veteran
https://www.vvof.org/factsvnv.htm
New York City Vietnam Veterans Plaza — Interesting Facts About Vietnam
https://www.vietnamveteransplaza.com/interesting-facts-about-vietnam/

Medical Disclaimer
The information provided in this article is intended for general educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. It should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Always seek the guidance of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read here.
If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 or your local emergency number immediately.
The author of this article is a licensed physician, but the views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the official position of any hospital, health system, or medical organization with which the author may be affiliated.

Lady Liberty: The Statue We Think We Know

By John Turley

On April 14, 2026

In Commentary, History, Politics

Collection of the author

Ask most Americans what the Statue of Liberty means and they’ll say the same thing: she welcomes immigrants. She is the “Mother of Exiles,” keeper of the golden door. That image is so deeply woven into the national identity that it has been quoted, protested, and debated for more than a century. The only problem is that it wasn’t what her creators originally intended.

The story begins in 1865, just weeks after the Civil War ended, at a dinner party near Versailles. The host was Édouard de Laboulaye, a French historian and president of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was one of France’s most passionate admirers of American democracy and was deeply moved by both Lincoln’s assassination and the abolition of slavery. He proposed that France present the United States with a colossal monument — one that would celebrate two things at once: the centennial of American independence and the end of slavery.

Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was at that dinner and took the idea and ran with it. Early models from around 1870 show Lady Liberty with her right arm raised — familiar enough — but in her left hand she holds broken shackles, not a tablet. The anti-slavery message was unmistakable.

That symbolism didn’t entirely disappear from the final design — it just got moved. According to the National Park Service, Bartholdi placed a broken chain and shackle at the statue’s feet, hidden beneath the copper drapery. Most visitors never notice it. The left hand now holds a tablet inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence.

Why the change? NYU historian Edward Berenson points to the political climate of the 1880s. By the time the statue was dedicated in October 1886 — more than 20 years after Laboulaye’s dinner — Reconstruction had collapsed, Jim Crow was spreading, and the country was trying to paper over sectional wounds by quietly forgetting the war’s racial roots. Nobody at the dedication mentioned slavery. The abolitionist origins were simply buried.

The statue was formally named Liberty Enlightening the World and the message broadened toward Franco-American friendship and American liberty in general rather than emancipation specifically.

Then came Emma Lazarus, and the second transformation. In 1883, a fundraiser struggling to pay for the statue’s pedestal asked prominent writers to donate works for an auction. Lazarus, a Jewish-American poet, initially declined as she was then deeply involved in aiding Jewish refugees fleeing wide-spread and organized violence in Russia. A friend persuaded her that the statue, sitting at the entrance to New York Harbor, would inevitably be seen as a beacon by arriving immigrants. She wrote “The New Colossus” — fourteen lines that reimagined Lady Liberty entirely, as a “Mother of Exiles” beckoning the world’s tired and poor to America’s golden door.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Strangely, the poem then vanished. It played no role at the statue’s 1886 dedication. Lazarus died in 1887, before Ellis Island even opened. It wasn’t until 1903 that a friend had the entire poem cast onto a bronze plaque that was mounted inside the pedestal——not engraved on the outside as many believe. By then, millions of immigrants had already sailed past the statue on their way to Ellis Island, and the association with immigration had taken hold in the public imagination.

The immigration meaning deepened through the early 20th century as the government used the statue’s image in campaigns to assimilate immigrant children, many of whom lived in ethnic enclaves in large eastern cities. Meanwhile, the abolitionist symbolism that had inspired the project in the first place faded almost entirely from public memory.

The broken shackles are still there, tucked under her robe, mostly invisible. Lady Liberty has been continuously reinterpreted for 160 years — by abolitionists, by a poet responding to a refugee crisis, by politicians, and by millions of people who looked up at that torch from the deck of a ship. Will Lady Liberty and her words continue to offer welcome and hope and be a source of national pride or is her meaning once again being rewritten as a symbol of American identity, dominance, and, perhaps, exclusion?

The Statue’s shackles and feet. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty NM, Public Domain

Sources

National Park Service – Statue of Liberty history: https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/statue-of-liberty.htm Library of Congress – Dedication and speeches: https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197394/ Cleveland, Grover. Dedication Address (1886): https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/cleveland.htm Smithsonian Magazine – History of the Statue of Liberty: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/statue-liberty-180970340/

The Art of Rigging Democracy: A Close Look At Gerrymandering

By John Turley

On April 13, 2026

In History, Politics

Wikimedia Commons: Elkanah Tisdale (1771-1835) (often falsely attributed to Gilbert Stuart), public domain

Picture this: It’s 1812 in Massachusetts, and Governor Elbridge Gerry has just approved a redistricting plan that creates such a bizarrely shaped legislative district that when a local newspaper editor saw it on a map, he thought it looked like a salamander. The editor sketched wings and claws onto the district, and someone quipped that it looked more like a “Gerry-mander” than a salamander. The term stuck, and more than two centuries later, we’re still dealing with the same problem that inspired that joke.
What Gerrymandering Actually Means
At its core, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district boundaries to give one political party or group an unfair advantage over its opponents. It’s a form of political manipulation that allows those in power to essentially choose their voters, rather than letting voters choose their representatives. Think of it as a sophisticated form of gaming the system—perfectly legal in many cases, but profoundly anti-democratic in spirit.
The mechanics are surprisingly straightforward. There are two main techniques: “cracking” and “packing.” Cracking involves splitting up concentrations of opposing voters across multiple districts so they can’t form a majority anywhere. Packing does the opposite—cramming as many opposing voters as possible into a few districts so they waste their votes winning by huge margins in just a couple of places, leaving the rest of the districts safely in your column. These techniques can be deployed together to engineer a decisive partisan advantage.
A History of Creative Mapmaking
The practice didn’t start with Gerry, of course. The Founding Fathers—for all their lofty rhetoric about representative democracy—weren’t above putting their thumbs on the electoral scales. But gerrymandering really came into its own in the 20th century as advances in census data, and statistics combined with the addition of newly available computing power made it possible to draw districts with surgical precision.
The 2010 redistricting cycle marked a watershed moment. Single-party control of the redistricting process gave partisan line drawers free rein to craft some of the most extreme gerrymanders in American history often down to the level of individual city blocks. Republicans, having won control of many state legislatures in the 2010 midterms, used sophisticated computer modeling to create maps that locked in their advantages for a decade. Democrats did the same where they had the power, though Republicans controlled more state legislatures and thus wielded greater gerrymandering capability overall.
The 2024-2025 Gerrymandering Wars
Here’s where things get really interesting—and deeply concerning. The situation has exploded into what some are calling “gerrymandering wars” following the 2020 census and a critical Supreme Court decision in 2019. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering constitutes a non-justiciable “political question” where federal court intervention is unsuitable. Translation: The federal courts won’t stop partisan gerrymandering because they claim there’s no objective standard to measure it.
This opened the floodgates. The Brennan Center estimates that gerrymandering gave Republicans an advantage of around 16 House seats in the 2024 race to control Congress compared to fair maps. But here’s the kicker: we’re not even done with this decade’s redistricting.
In an unprecedented move, President Donald Trump has pushed Republican state lawmakers to further gerrymander their states’ congressional maps, prompting Democratic state lawmakers to respond in kind. In August 2025, during a special session, Texas’s legislature passed a redistricting plan that weakens electoral opportunities for Black and Hispanic voters. California has threatened to respond with its own gerrymander, creating a tit-for-tat dynamic that could spiral out of control.
North Carolina provides perhaps the most dramatic example. After the state supreme court reversed its position on policing partisan gerrymandering, the Republican-controlled legislature redrew the map, and after the 2024 election, three Democratic districts flipped to Republicans—enough to give control of the U.S. House to the GOP by a slim margin.
The situation has gotten so extreme that both parties are now openly engaging in mid-decade redistricting—something that traditionally only happened after each ten-year census. California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Utah have all adopted new congressional maps in 2025, with new maps also appearing possible in Florida, Maryland and Virginia.
The Racial Dimension
It’s crucial to note that gerrymandering comes in two flavors: partisan and racial. While partisan gerrymandering is currently legal thanks to the Supreme Court, racial gerrymandering—drawing districts specifically to dilute the voting power of racial minorities—violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The line between the two can get blurry, though, since partisan voting patterns often correlate with race.
In May 2025, a federal court ruled that Alabama’s 2023 congressional map not only violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act but was enacted by the Alabama Legislature with racially discriminatory intent. Similar battles are playing out in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states. The legal landscape here is complex, with courts sometimes walking a tightrope between ensuring fair representation for communities of color and avoiding the creation of what could be challenged as racial gerrymanders.
What Can Be Done About It?
The most popular reform proposal is the creation of independent redistricting commissions—bodies of citizens (not politicians) who draw district maps according to neutral criteria. Currently, several states including Colorado, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia use redistricting commissions to draw congressional and state legislative maps, ranging from political commissions with elected officials to completely independent commissions that bar all elected officials from serving as commissioners.
Do they work? The evidence is mixed but generally positive. According to a Redistricting Report Card published with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, the states that had some form of commission drew “B+” maps on average, while states where partisans controlled the process drew “D+” maps. California’s independent commission is often held up as the gold standard, though it’s not perfect—even fairly drawn maps can produce lopsided results due to how voters cluster geographically.
Another proposal focuses on clear, enforceable criteria: compactness, contiguity, respect for existing political boundaries, and transparency in the mapping process. Advances in statistical analysis also make it possible to compare proposed maps against thousands of neutral alternatives to detect extreme outliers, a method increasingly discussed in academic and legal circles.
Federal legislation has been proposed repeatedly. The Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 would prohibit states from mid-decade redistricting and would require every state to adopt nonpartisan, independent redistricting commissions. Similar provisions were included in the “For the People Act” that Democrats passed in the House in 2021, but it died in the Senate. Getting such legislation through Congress would require bipartisan cooperation, which seems unlikely given that both parties see gerrymandering as a political weapon and they believe they can’t afford to unilaterally disarm.
Some reformers advocate for more radical solutions. Proportional representation systems, where the share of votes equals the share of seats, would end boundary-drawing battles altogether and make democracy more representative. Under such a system, if Democrats win 60% of the vote in a state, they’d get roughly 60% of that state’s congressional seats. It’s intuitive and fair, but it would require a fundamental restructuring of American electoral systems—something that’s probably not politically feasible in the near term.
State courts have emerged as a potential backstop. At least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, even though federal courts won’t touch them. This means that state constitutional provisions against gerrymandering could provide meaningful protection—though as North Carolina demonstrated, state court compositions can change, and with them, their willingness to police gerrymandering.
The Bottom Line
Gerrymandering represents a fundamental tension in American democracy: How do we draw districts fairly when the people drawing them have every incentive to rig the game in their favor? The problem has ancient roots but ultra-modern manifestations, powered by big data and sophisticated computer modeling that would make Elbridge Gerry’s head spin.
The current moment feels particularly precarious. With Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House and midterm elections traditionally being unfavorable for the party in power, the Republicans’ action amounts to a preemptive move to retain control of Congress. The Democrats threatened response could trigger an escalating cycle of partisan map manipulation that further entrenches our political divisions and makes elections less responsive to actual voter preferences.
Independent commissions offer a promising path forward, but they’re not a silver bullet. They work better than partisan control, but they can’t eliminate all the inherent challenges of translating votes into seats through geographic districts. More ambitious reforms like proportional representation could solve the problem more completely, but they face enormous political and practical obstacles.
For now, gerrymandering remains what that newspaper editor saw in 1812: a monstrous distortion of democratic principles, hiding in plain sight on our electoral maps. The question is whether we have the political will to slay the beast, or whether we’ll keep feeding it for another two centuries.

Sources:
Brennan Center for Justice – Gerrymandering Explained
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained

Brennan Center for Justice – How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house

American Constitution Society – America’s Gerrymandering Crisis
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/americas-gerrymandering-crisis-time-for-a-constructive-redistricting-framework/

ACLU – Court Cases on Gerrymandering
https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=gerrymandering

Stateline – State Courts and Gerrymandering
https://stateline.org/2025/12/22/as-supreme-court-pulls-back-on-gerrymandering-state-courts-may-decide-fate-of-maps/

Campaign Legal Center – Do Independent Redistricting Commissions Work?
https://campaignlegal.org/update/do-independent-redistricting-commissions-really-prevent-gerrymandering-yes-they-do

RepresentUs – End Partisan Gerrymandering
https://represent.us/policy-platform/ending-partisan-gerrymandering/

Senator Alex Padilla – Redistricting Reform Act of 2025
https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/watch-padilla-lofgren-introduce-legislation-to-establish-independent-redistricting-commissions-end-mid-decade-redistricting-nationwide/

Protect Democracy – How to End Gerrymandering
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/how-to-end-gerrymandering/

The Broken Promises: How America Treated Its Revolutionary War Veterans

By John Turley

On February 27, 2026

In Uncategorized

The story of how the Continental Army’s veterans were treated after winning independence reads like a betrayal. These men had endured Valley Forge, fought without pay — — often without food or clothing — risking everything for a revolution that promised liberty and opportunity. What many received instead was financial ruin, confiscated land, and a harsh lesson in how political power and economic class determined who really benefited from their shared sacrifice.

The Pay That Never Came

Let me start with the most basic broken promise — pay. Continental soldiers were supposed to receive regular wages, but the Continental Congress lacked the power to tax and relied on increasingly worthless paper money. By war’s end, many soldiers hadn’t been paid in months or even years. When they finally returned home, they carried IOUs called “certificates of indebtedness” rather than actual money.

The wealthy and well-connected quickly figured out how to profit from this situation. Speculators traveled through rural areas buying up these certificates from desperate veterans at pennies on the dollar. The soldiers, facing immediate debts and no income, often had no choice but to sell. When the federal government eventually redeemed these certificates at full value under Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan in the 1790s, it was the speculators who made fortunes, not the men who’d earned the money, suffered and won the revolution.

Pensions: Promised to Officers, Denied to Enlisted Men

The pension situation revealed the class divisions even more starkly. In 1780, Congress promised officers who served until the war’s end a pension of half-pay for life. Common soldiers received no such promise. When the officers’ pensions proved controversial and expensive, Congress “commuted” them in 1783 to a one-time payment of five years’ full pay — still nothing for the enlisted men who’d done most of the fighting and dying.

It wasn’t until 1818 that Congress finally created a pension for Continental Army privates, and even then, only for those in “reduced circumstances” — meaning you had to prove you were poor to get it. The maximum annual pension was $96, hardly generous compensation for years of service. Soldiers who had served in militia units were generally excluded. By contrast, officers had already received their commutations decades earlier and often held positions of economic and political power.

Land Bounties: Another Empty Promise

Land bounties represented another avenue where common soldiers got shortchanged. Various colonies and Congress promised land grants to encourage enlistment — typically 100 acres for privates, scaling up to 500+ acres for officers and thousands of acres for generals. But there were problems from the start.

First, much of the promised land was in frontier territories like the Ohio Country, which remained dangerous and largely unsurveyed for years after the war. Second, the process of claiming your land required navigating bureaucratic systems, paying surveying fees, and sometimes traveling hundreds of miles. Third, the land often turned out to be of poor quality or in disputed areas. The average veteran with little education, almost no money and absolutely no political influence was seldom ever able to take advantage of the land bounty.

Predictably, speculators moved in. They bought up land bounty warrants from soldiers who lacked the resources or knowledge to claim them directly. One study found that in Virginia, which promised the most generous bounties, speculators ultimately controlled vast tracts while many veterans received little or nothing.

The Tax Collector Cometh

Here’s where the story gets particularly cruel. While veterans struggled with unpaid wages and unredeemed promises, the new state governments faced their own financial crises. They’d accumulated massive war debts and needed revenue. Their solution? Property taxes.

In Massachusetts, the legislature imposed heavy taxes payable in hard currency — gold or silver — which almost nobody in rural areas possessed. The same certificates of indebtedness that soldiers were given by the government weren’t accepted for tax payments, even though the state owed them that money. Veterans who’d sold their certificates for a fraction of their value to pay immediate debts now faced tax bills they couldn’t pay. These policies were not accidental side effects; they reflected the priorities of creditor classes concentrated in coastal towns, who preferred regressive property taxes over inflation or debt relief for veterans.

When farmers and veterans couldn’t pay these taxes, local sheriffs seized and auctioned their property. In many cases, the buyers at these auctions were the same merchant elites and speculators who’d bought up the certificates. This wasn’t accidental — it was a systematic transfer of wealth and property from those who’d fought the war to those who’d financed it, avoided personal risk and now controlled state governments. Elites did not overtly confiscate veterans’ land through direct political targeting; instead, they relied on neutral-looking fiscal policy — strict tax collection, aggressive debt enforcement, and courts unsympathetic to insolvency — to transfer property legally. The effect was unmistakable; veterans who fought for independence lost their farms to satisfy debts incurred during or immediately after their service, while wealthier investors accumulated land and made financial gains.

The Massachusetts situation became particularly egregious. Between 1784 and 1786, thousands of foreclosure proceedings were filed. Veterans who’d survived the war returned to find themselves losing their farms and, in some cases, being thrown into debtors’ prison.

Shays’ Rebellion: When Veterans Fought Back

The breaking point came in 1786 with Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led hundreds of veterans and farmers in an armed uprising against foreclosures and debt courts. They physically prevented courts from sitting, trying to halt the cascade of farm seizures. They represented the soldiers who’d won independence and felt the new government had betrayed them.

The rebellion was suppressed by a militia funded by wealthy Boston merchants and creditors as the state treasury lacked ready cash to pay troops. This was a clear demonstration of how thoroughly economic power had concentrated among elites and sent shockwaves through the political establishment. To many rural farmers the suppression looked like creditors hiring an army to enforce unjust laws against impoverished veterans.

Interestingly, most of the rebels received pardons, and Massachusetts did eventually reduce some taxes and reform debtor laws. But the damage was done, and the pattern had been established.

The Class Divide in Revolutionary Benefits

The broader pattern is unmistakable. Officers, who were generally drawn from propertied classes, received pensions and larger land bounties, had the education and connections to navigate bureaucratic systems, and often held the political power to protect their interests. Common soldiers, usually farmers or laborers, received certificates they had to sell at a loss, faced tax collectors seizing their property, and had little political voice. They disproportionately bore the costs of the new fiscal order through unpaid or depreciated wages, lack of early pension support, and vulnerability to foreclosure, while many of the tangible financial benefits of their service migrated to wealthier elites.

Some historians argue this wasn’t conspiracy but circumstance — that the new nation genuinely lacked resources and that markets naturally concentrated certificates in wealthier hands. There’s some truth to this. The Continental Congress was genuinely broke, and state governments faced real fiscal crises.

But the specific policy choices — redeeming certificates from speculators at full value while rejecting them for tax payments, creating pensions for officers but not enlisted men, setting tax policies that required hard currency that poor farmers didn’t have — these weren’t inevitable, they were a choice. They reflected the interests of those who held power in state legislatures and the Continental Congress.

The Long Echo

The treatment of Continental Army veterans established patterns that would echo through American history: promises made during wartime, broken during peace; benefits flowing more generously to officers than enlisted men. Economic and political elites using legal mechanisms to transfer wealth from those who fought the revolution to those who financed it.

The first genuinely “service‑based” pension law that broadly covered surviving Continental soldiers — regardless of disability — did not arrive until 1818, three decades after the war, and it initially required proof of indigence, effectively screening out better‑off veterans and stigmatizing poorer ones. Not until the 1832 act did Congress move toward full pay for life for many surviving officers and enlisted men — including militia — based on length of service alone. But large numbers of veterans had already lost their farms, spent years in poverty, or died. The benefits came too late and too meagerly to undo decades of hardship. They were owed better.

Illustrations generated by author using ChatGPT.

Sources:

Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia — Veterans of the Revolutionary War https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/veterans-of-the-revolutionary-war/

This George Washington Presidential Library resource provides an overview of how Continental Army veterans were treated, including details on certificate speculation, payment issues, and the general economic struggles veterans faced after the war.

National Archives — Revolutionary War Pension Files https://www.archives.gov/research/military/war-of-1812/pension-files

While this link references War of 1812 pensions, the National Archives maintains extensive documentation on Revolutionary War pensions as well. The site explains the evolution of pension systems and eligibility requirements, including the 1818 act that finally provided pensions to enlisted men who could prove poverty.

Encyclopedia Virginia — Military Bounty Lands https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/military-bounty-lands/

This scholarly resource details Virginia’s land bounty system, which was among the most extensive. It documents how these bounties were promised, the challenges veterans faced in claiming them, and how speculators ultimately acquired much of the promised land.

American Battlefield Trust — Shays’ Rebellion https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/shays-rebellion

This article provides context on the 1786–1787 uprising in Massachusetts, explaining the economic conditions that drove veterans to armed resistance, the foreclosure crisis, and the rebellion’s impact on constitutional debates.

Massachusetts Historical Society — Shays’ Rebellion https://www.masshist.org/features/shays/

Russel Vought and the War on the Environment

By John Turley

On February 16, 2026

In Commentary, History, Politics, Science

Recently, there’s been a a lot of attention given to RFK Jr. and his war on vaccines. More potentially devastating than that is Russel Vought and his war on environmental science.
Russell Vought hasn’t exactly been working in the shadows. As the director of the Office of Management and Budget since February 2025, he’s been methodically implementing what he outlined years earlier in Project 2025—a blueprint that treats climate science not as settled fact, but as what he calls “climate fanaticism.” The result is undeniably the most aggressive dismantling of environmental protections in American history.
The Man Behind the Plan
Vought’s resume tells you everything you need to know about his approach. He served as OMB director during Trump’s first term, wrote a key chapter of Project 2025 focusing on consolidating presidential power, and has openly stated his goal is to make federal bureaucrats feel “traumatized” when they come to work. His philosophy on climate policy specifically? He’s called climate change a side effect of building the modern world—something to manage through deregulation rather than prevention.
Attacking the Foundation: The Endangerment Finding
The centerpiece of Vought’s climate strategy targets what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called “the holy grail of the climate change religion”—the 2009 Endangerment Finding. This Obama-era scientific determination concluded that six greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride) endanger public health and welfare. It sounds technical, but it’s the legal foundation for virtually every federal climate regulation enacted over the past fifteen years.
Just last week EPA Administrator Zeldin announced that the Trump administration has repealed this finding. This action strips EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act—meaning no more federal limits on power plant emissions, no vehicle fuel economy standards tied to climate concerns, and no requirement for industries to measure or report their emissions. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this action “will be the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
More than 1,000 scientists warned Zeldin not to take this step, and the Environmental Protection Network cautioned last year that repealing the finding would cause “tens of thousands of additional premature deaths due to pollution exposure” and would spark “accelerated climate destabilization.” Abigail Dillen president of the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice said “there is no way to reconcile EPA’s decision with the law, the science and the reality of the disasters that are hitting us harder every year.” She further said they expect to see the Trump administration in court. Obviously, the science is less important to Trump, Zeldin and Vought than the politics.
The Thirty-One Targets
In March 2025, Zeldin announced what he proudly called “the greatest day of deregulation in American history”—a plan to roll back or reconsider 31 key environmental rules covering everything from clean air to water quality. The list reads like a regulatory hit parade, including vehicle emission standards (designed to encourage electric vehicles), power plant pollution limits, methane regulations for oil and gas operations, and even particulate matter standards that protect against respiratory disease.
The vehicle standards are particularly revealing. The transportation sector is America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the Biden-era rules were crafted to nudge automakers toward producing more electric vehicles. At Vought’s direction, the EPA is now reconsidering these, with Zeldin arguing they “regulate out of existence” segments of the economy and cost Americans “a lot of money.”
Gutting the Science Infrastructure
Vought’s agenda extends beyond specific regulations to the institutions that produce climate science itself. In Project 2025, he proposed abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy and suggested the president should refuse to accept federal scientific research like the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA). The NCA, published every few years, involves hundreds of scientists examining how climate change is transforming the United States—research that informs everything from building codes to insurance policies.
According to reporting from E&E News in January, Vought wants the White House to exert tighter control over the next NCA, potentially elevating perspectives from climate deniers and industry representatives while excluding contributions made during the Biden administration. This is a plan that has been in the works for years. Vought reportedly participated in a White House meeting during Trump’s first term where officials discussed firing the scientists working on the assessment.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also been targeted. In February 2025, about 800 NOAA employees—responsible for weather forecasting, climate monitoring, fisheries management, and marine research were fired. Project 2025 had proposed breaking up NOAA entirely, and concerned staff members have already begun a scramble to preserve massive amounts of climate data in case the agency is dismantled.
Budget Cuts as Policy
Vought’s Center for Renewing America has proposed eliminating the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the EPA’s environmental justice fund, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. During the first Trump administration, Vought oversaw budgets proposing EPA cuts as steep as 31%—reducing the agency to funding levels not seen in decades. In a 2023 speech, he explained the logic bluntly: “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”
This isn’t just about climate, it is also about fairness and the recognition that environmental policies have had a predominately negative effect on low income areas. EPA has cancelled 400 environmental justice grants, closed environmental justice offices at all 10 regional offices, and put the director of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund on administrative leave. The fund had been financing local economic development projects aimed at lowering energy prices and reducing emissions.
Eliminating Climate Considerations from Government
Perhaps more insidious than the high-profile rollbacks are the procedural changes that make climate considerations disappear from federal decision-making. In February, Jeffrey Clark—acting administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) under Vought’s OMB—directed federal agencies to stop using the “social cost of carbon” in their analyses. This metric calculates the dollar value of damage caused by one ton of carbon pollution, allowing agencies to accurately assess whether regulations produce net benefits or defects for society.
Vought has also directed agencies to establish sunset dates for environmental regulations—essentially automatic expiration dates after which rules stop being enforced unless renewed. For existing regulations, the sunset comes after one year; for new ones, within five years. The stated goal is forcing agencies to continuously justify their rules, but the practical effect is creating a perpetual cycle of regulatory uncertainty.
The Real-World Stakes
The timing of these rollbacks offers a grim irony. As Vought was pushing to weaken the National Climate Assessment in January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires were devastating Los Angeles—exactly the type of climate-intensified disaster the assessment is designed to help communities prepare for. The administration’s response? Energy Secretary Chris Wright described climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world” at an industry conference.
An analysis by Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank, found that Project 2025’s proposals to gut federal policies encouraging renewable electricity and electric vehicles would increase U.S. household spending on fuel and utilities by about $240 per year over the next five years. That’s before accounting for the health costs of increased air pollution or the economic damage from unmitigated climate change.
Environmental groups have vowed to challenge these changes in court, and the legal battles will likely stretch on for years. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear many cases initially, though the Supreme Court will probably issue final decisions. Legal experts note that while Trump’s EPA moved with unprecedented speed on proposals in 2025, finalizing these rules through the required regulatory process will take much longer. As of December, none of the major climate rule repeals had been submitted to OMB for final review, partly due to what EPA called a 43-day government shutdown (which EPA blamed on Democrats, though the characterization is widely disputed).
What Makes This Different
Previous administrations have certainly rolled back environmental regulations, but Vought’s approach differs in both scope and philosophy. Rather than tweaking specific rules or relaxing enforcement, he’s systematically attacking the scientific and legal foundations that make climate regulation possible. It’s the difference between turning down the thermostat and ripping out the entire heating system.
The Environmental Defense Fund, which rarely comments on political appointees, strongly opposed Vought’s confirmation, with Executive Director Amanda Leland stating: “Russ Vought has made clear his contempt for the people working every day to ensure their fellow Americans have clean air, clean water and a safer climate.”
Looking Forward
Whether Vought’s vision becomes permanent depends largely on how courts rule on these changes. The 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA established that the agency has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act—the very authority Vought is now trying to eliminate. Overturning established precedent is difficult, though the current Supreme Court’s composition makes the outcome possible, if not likely.
What we’re witnessing is essentially a test of whether one administration can permanently disable the federal government’s capacity to address climate change, or if these changes represent a temporary setback that future administrations can reverse. The stakes couldn’t be higher: atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue rising, global temperatures are breaking records, and climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent and severe. Nothing less than the future of our way of life is at stake. We must take action now.

Full disclosure: my undergraduate degree is in meteorology, but I would never call myself a meteorologist since I have never worked in the field. But I still maintain an interest, from both a meteorological and a medical perspective. The Grump Doc is never lacking in opinions.

Illustration generated by author using Midjourney.

Sources:
Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow, “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 2026.[nytimes +1]
Lisa Friedman, “The Conservative Activists Behind One of Trump’s Biggest Climate Moves,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026.[nytimes +1]
Bob Sussman, “The Anti-Climate Fanaticism of the Second Trump Term (Part 1: The Purge of Climate from All Federal Programs),” Environmental Law Institute, May 7, 2025.[eli]
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Trump EPA Kicks Off Formal Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding,” EPA News Release, Mar. 13, 2025.[epa]
Trump’s Climate and Clean Energy Rollback Tracker, Act On Climate/NRDC coalition, updated Jan. 11, 2026.[actonclimate]
“Trump to Repeal Landmark Climate Finding in Huge Regulatory Rollback,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 2026.[wsj]
Valerie Volcovici, “Trump Set to Repeal Landmark Climate Finding in Huge Regulatory Rollback,” Reuters, Feb. 9, 2026.[reuters]
Alex Guillén, “Trump EPA to Take Its Biggest Swing Yet Against Climate Change Rules,” Politico, Feb. 10, 2026.[politico]
“EPA Urges White House to Strike Down Landmark Climate Finding,” Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2025.[washingtonpost]
“Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation,” Seattle Times reprint, Feb. 10, 2026.[seattletimes]
“Trump Wants to Dismantle Key Climate Research Hub in Colorado,” Earth.org, Dec. 17, 2025.[earth]
“Vought Says National Science Foundation to Break Up Federal Climate Research Center,” The Hill, Dec. 17, 2025.[thehill]
Rachel Cleetus, “One Year of the Trump Administration’s All-Out Assault on Climate and Clean Energy,” Union of Concerned Scientists, Jan. 13, 2026.[ucs]
Environmental Protection Network, “Environmental Protection Network Speaks Out Against Vought Cabinet Consideration,” Nov. 20, 2024.[environmentalprotectionnetwork]
“From Disavowal to Delivery: The Trump Administration’s Rapid Implementation of Project 2025 on Public Lands,” Center for Western Priorities, Jan. 28, 2026.[westernpriorities]
“Russ Vought Nominated for Office of Management and Budget Director,” Environmental Defense Fund statement, Mar. 6, 2025.[edf]
“Project 2025,” Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 backgrounder (as summarized in the Project 2025 Wikipedia entry).[wikipedia]
“EPA to repeal finding that serves as basis for climate change,” The Associated Press, Matthew Daly
https://vitalsigns.edf.org/story/trump-nominee-and-project-2025-architect-russell-vought-has-drastic-plans-reshape-america
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Vought
https://www.commondreams.org/news/warnings-of-permanent-damage-to-people-and-planet-as-trump-epa-set-to-repeal-key-climate-rule
https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-team-takes-aim-at-crown-jewel-of-us-climate-research/
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trump-administration-moves-to-repeal-epa-rule-that-allows-climate-regulation
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-epa-unveils-aggressive-plans-to-dismantle-climate-regulation/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-10/trump-s-epa-to-scrap-landmark-emissions-policy-in-major-rollback

When They Knew: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Buried Its Own Climate Science

By John Turley

On February 9, 2026

In Commentary, Politics

The story begins not with climate deniers casting doubt on new science, but with something far more troubling: companies conducting rigorous research, understanding exactly what their products would do to the planet, and then spending decades lying to the public. They treated science as an internal planning tool and then deployed public relations, front groups, and “manufactured doubt” to delay regulation and protect profits.

The Oil Industry’s Own Scientists Saw It Coming

In 1977, a scientist named James Black stood before Exxon’s management committee with an uncomfortable message. According to internal documents later uncovered by investigative journalists, Black told executives that burning fossil fuels was increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that continually rising CO2 levels would increase global temperatures by two to three degrees—a projection that is still consistent with today’s scientific consensus. He warned that we had a window of just five to ten years before “hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical”.

What happened next is remarkable for its precision. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Exxon assembled what one scientist called “a credible scientific team” to investigate the climate question. They launched ambitious projects, including outfitting a supertanker with custom instruments to measure how oceans absorbed CO2—one of the most pressing scientific questions of the era. A 2023 Harvard study analyzing Exxon’s internal climate projections from 1977 to 2003 found they predicted global warming with what researchers called “shocking skill and accuracy.” Specifically, the company projected 0.20 degrees Centigrade of warming per decade, with a margin of error of just 0.04 degrees—a forecast that has proven largely correct.

Exxon wasn’t alone. Shell produced a confidential 1988 report titled “The Greenhouse Effect” that warned of climate changes “larger than any that have occurred over the last 12,000 years,” including destructive floods and mass migrations. The report revealed Shell had been running an internal climate science program since 1981. In one striking document from 1986, Shell predicted that fossil fuel emissions would cause changes “the greatest in recorded history”.

Even industry groups understood what was coming. In 1980, the American Petroleum Institute (API) invited Stanford scientist John Laurmann to brief oil company representatives at its secret “CO2 and Climate Task Force”. His presentation, now public, warned that continued fossil fuel use would be “barely noticeable” by 2005 but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the API called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, publicly insisting there would be no negative consequences.

The Coal Industry Knew Even Earlier

If anything, the coal industry understood the problem first. A 1966 article in the trade publication Mining Congress Journal by James Garvey, president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., explicitly discussed how continued coal consumption would increase atmospheric temperatures and cause “vast changes in the climates of the earth.” A combustion engineer from Peabody Coal, now the world’s largest coal company, acknowledged in the same publication that the industry was “buying time” before air pollution regulations would force action.

This 1966 evidence is particularly damning because it predates widespread public awareness by decades. The coal industry didn’t stumble into climate denial—they entered it with full knowledge of what they were obscuring.

Major coal interests also had early awareness that carbon emissions posed regulatory and market risks, particularly for coal‑fired electricity, and they participated in joint industry research and strategy discussions about climate change in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, coal associations helped create public campaigns such as the Information Council for the Environment (ICE—even then a disturbing acronym), whose internal planning documents explicitly set an objective to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” and to target specific demographic groups with tailored doubt‑based messages.

According to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, these efforts often relied on “grassroots” fronts, advertising, and even forged constituent letters to legislators to undermine support for climate policy and to counter the conclusions of mainstream climate science, which even the companies’ own experts did not refute.

What They Said Publicly

The contrast between private knowledge and public statements is stark. While Exxon scientists were building sophisticated climate models internally, the company’s public messaging emphasized uncertainty. In a 1997 speech, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond told an audience at the World Petroleum Conference: “Let’s agree there’s a lot we really don’t know about how climate change will change in the 21st century and beyond”. They spread messaging that emphasized uncertainty, framed global warming as just a “theory,” and highlighted supposed flaws in climate models, even as their own scientists were using those models to make precise projections. The company and allied trade associations supported think tanks and advocacy groups such as Citizens For Sound Science, that questioned if human activity was responsible for warming and opposed binding limits on emissions, producing a stark discrepancy between internal scientific knowledge and external communication.

In 1989, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition—despite its environmental sounding name, the organization worked to cast doubt on climate science and block clean energy legislation throughout the 1990s. Electric utilities and coal‑linked organizations joined this coalition to systematically attack climate scientists and lobby to weaken or stall international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, despite internal recognition that greenhouse gases were driving warming.

Internal API documents from a 1998 meeting reveal an explicit strategy to “ensure that a majority of the American public… recognizes that significant uncertainties exist in climate science”.

In 1991, Shell produced a film, “Climate of Concern,” which stated that human driven—as opposed to greenhouse gas driven—climate change was happening “at a rate faster than at any time since the end of the ice age” and warned of extreme weather, flooding, famine, and climate refugees. They understood the science but tried to shift the blame.

According to a 2013 Drexel University study, between 2003 and 2010 alone, approximately $558 million was distributed to about 100 climate change denial organizations. Greenpeace reports that Exxon alone spent more than $30 million on think tanks promoting climate denial.

The Tobacco Playbook

The parallels to Big Tobacco’s strategy are not coincidental—they’re intentional. Research by the Center for International Environmental Law uncovered more than 100 documents from the Tobacco Industry Archives showing that oil and tobacco companies not only used the same PR firms and research institutes, but often the same individual researchers. The connection goes back to at least the 1950s. A report published in Scientific American suggests the oil and tobacco industries both hired the PR firm Hill & Knowlton Inc. as early as 1956.

A 1969 internal memo from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company stated plainly: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public”. This became the template. Create uncertainty. Emphasize what isn’t known rather than what is. Fund research that casts doubt. Attack the credibility of independent scientists. They formed organizations with scientific-sounding names that existed primarily to muddy the waters.

In one particularly brazen example, a 2015 presentation by Cloud Peak Energy executive Richard Reavey titled “Survival Is Victory: Lessons From the Tobacco Wars,” explicitly coached coal executives on how to apply tobacco industry tactics.

What makes the fossil fuel case particularly egregious is the temporal dimension. These weren’t companies caught off-guard by emerging science. They funded the research. They understood the findings. Their own scientists urged action. A 1978 Exxon memo noted this could be “the kind of opportunity we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind”.

Instead, when oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, Exxon pivoted from conducting climate research to funding climate denial. By the late 1980s, according to reporting by InsideClimate News, Exxon “curtailed its carbon dioxide research” and “worked instead at the forefront of climate denial”.

Where We Stand Now

Across the oil, gas, and coal industries, there is not a genuine scientific dispute inside companies but a divergence between what in‑house experts knew and what corporate leaders chose to communicate to the public and policymakers. This divergence mirrors the tobacco industry’s long‑running use of organized doubt. In both arenas, industry actors treated early recognition of harm as a legal and political threat and responded by investing in campaigns to confuse, delay, and reframe the science rather than addressing the risks their own research had identified.

The evidence trail has led to legal action. More than 20 cities, counties, and states have filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for damages caused by climate change, arguing the industry knowingly deceived the public. The European Parliament held hearings in 2019 on climate denial by ExxonMobil and other actors. The hashtags #ExxonKnew, #ShellKnew, and #TotalKnew have become rallying cries for accountability.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has explicitly compared the fossil fuel industry’s actions to the tobacco racketeering case that ultimately held cigarette makers accountable. As he noted in a Senate speech, the elements of a civil racketeering case are straightforward: defendants conducted an enterprise with a pattern of racketeering activity.

The difference between the tobacco and fossil fuel cases may be one of scale. As researchers Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in their book Merchants of Doubt, both industries worked to obscure truth for profit. But while tobacco kills individuals, climate change threatens entire ecosystems and future generations. The time to act is now.

Sources:

Scientific American – “Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

Harvard Gazette – Harvard-led analysis finds ExxonMobil internal research accurately predicted climate change
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/

InsideClimate News – Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02052024/from-the-archive-exxon-research-global-warming/

PBS Frontline – Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/investigation-finds-exxon-ignored-its-own-early-climate-change-warnings/

NPR – Exxon climate predictions were accurate decades ago. Still it sowed doubt
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148376084/exxon-climate-predictions-were-accurate-decades-ago-still-it-sowed-doubt

Science (journal) – Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

Climate Investigations Center – Shell Climate Documents
https://climateinvestigations.org/shell-oil-climate-documents/

The Conversation – What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words
https://theconversation.com/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words-170642

ScienceAlert – The Coal Industry Was Well Aware of Climate Change Predictions Over 50 Years Ago
https://www.sciencealert.com/coal-industry-knew-about-climate-change-in-the-60s-damning-revelations-show

The Intercept – A Major Coal Company Went Bust. Its Bankruptcy Filing Shows That It Was Funding Climate Change Denialism
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/16/coal-industry-climate-change-denial-cloud-peak-energy/

Center for International Environmental Law – Big Oil Denial Playbook Revealed by New Documents
https://www.ciel.org/news/oil-tobacco-denial-playbook/

Wikipedia – Tobacco industry playbook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_industry_playbook

Scientific American – Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/

Environmental Health (journal) – The science of spin: targeted strategies to manufacture doubt with detrimental effects on environmental and public health
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-021-00723-0

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – Time to Wake Up: Climate Denial Recalls Tobacco Racketeering
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/time-to-wake-up-climate-denial-recalls-tobacco-racketeering/

VICE News – Meet the ‘Merchants of Doubt’ Who Sow Confusion about Tobacco Smoke and Climate Change
https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-merchants-of-doubt-who-sow-confusion-about-tobacco-smoke-and-climate-change/

Union of Concerned Scientists – The Climate Deception Dossiers
https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/07/The-Climate-Deception-Dossiers.pdf

Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT.

The Founding Feuds: When America’s Heroes Couldn’t Stand Each Other

By John Turley

On February 6, 2026

In Commentary, History, Politics

The mythology of the founding fathers often portrays them as a harmonious band of brothers united in noble purpose. The reality was far messier—these brilliant, ambitious men engaged in bitter personal feuds that sometimes threatened the very republic they were creating. In some ways, the American revolution was as much of a battle of egos as it was a war between King and colonists.

The Revolutionary War Years: Hancock, Adams, and Washington’s Critics

The tensions began even before independence was declared. John Hancock and Samuel Adams, both Massachusetts firebrands, developed a rivalry that simmered throughout the Revolution. Adams, the older political strategist, had been the dominant figure in Boston’s resistance movement. When Hancock—wealthy, vain, and eager for glory—was elected president of the Continental Congress in 1775, the austere Adams felt his protégé had grown too big for his britches. Hancock’s request for a leave of absence from the presidency of Congress in 1777 coupled with his desire for an honorific military escort home, struck Adams as a relapse into vanity. Adams even opposed a resolution of thanks for Hancock’s service, signaling open estrangement. Their relationship continued to deteriorate to the point where they barely spoke, with Adams privately mocking Hancock’s pretensions and Hancock using his position to undercut Adams politically.

The choice of Washington as commander sparked its own controversies. John Adams had nominated Washington, partly to unite the colonies by giving Virginia the top military role. Washington’s command was anything but universally admired and as the war dragged on with mixed results many critics emerged.

After the victory at Saratoga in 1777, General Horatio Gates became the focal point of what’s known as the Conway Cabal—a loose conspiracy aimed at having Gates replace Washington as commander-in-chief. General Thomas Conway wrote disparaging letters about Washington’s military abilities. Some members of Congress, including Samuel Adams, Thomas Mifflin, and Richard Henry Lee, questioned whether Washington’s defensive strategy was too cautious and if his battlefield performance was lacking. Gates himself played a duplicitous game, publicly supporting Washington while privately positioning himself as an alternative.

When Washington discovered the intrigue, his response was characteristically measured but firm. Rather than lobbying Congress or forming a counter-faction, Washington leaned heavily on reputation and restraint. He continued to communicate respectfully with Congress, emphasizing the army’s needs rather than defending his own position. Washington did not respond with denunciations or public accusations. Instead, he handled the situation largely behind the scenes. When he learned that Conway had written a critical letter praising Gates, Washington calmly informed him that he was aware of the letter—quoting it verbatim.

The conspiracy collapsed, in part because Washington’s personal reputation with the rank and file and with key political figures proved more resilient than his critics had anticipated. But the episode exposed deep fractures over strategy, leadership, and regional loyalties within the revolutionary coalition.

The Ideological Split: Hamilton vs. Jefferson and Madison

Perhaps the most consequential feud emerged in the 1790s between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, with James Madison eventually siding with Jefferson. This wasn’t just personal animosity—it represented a fundamental disagreement about America’s future.

Hamilton, Washington’s Treasury Secretary, envisioned an industrialized commercial nation with a strong central government, a national bank, and close ties to Britain. Jefferson, the Secretary of State, championed an agrarian republic of small farmers with minimal federal power and friendship with Revolutionary France. Their cabinet meetings became so contentious that Washington had to mediate. Hamilton accused Jefferson of being a dangerous radical who would destroy public credit. Jefferson called Hamilton a monarchist who wanted to recreate British aristocracy in America.

The conflict got personal. Hamilton leaked damaging information about Jefferson to friendly newspapers. Jefferson secretly funded a journalist, James Callender, to attack Hamilton in print. When Hamilton’s extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds became public in 1797, Jefferson’s allies savored every detail. The feud split the nation into the first political parties: Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. Madison, once Hamilton’s ally in promoting the Constitution, switched sides completely, becoming Jefferson’s closest political partner and Hamilton’s implacable foe.

The Adams-Jefferson Friendship, Rivalry, and Reconciliation

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson experienced one of history’s most remarkable personal relationships. They were close friends during the Revolution, working together in Congress and on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence (though Jefferson did the actual writing). Both served diplomatic posts in Europe and developed deep mutual respect.

But the election of 1796 turned them into rivals. Adams won the presidency with Jefferson finishing second, making Jefferson vice president under the original constitutional system—imagine your closest competitor becoming your deputy. By the 1800 election, they were bitter enemies. The campaign was vicious, with Jefferson’s supporters calling Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character” and Adams’s allies claiming Jefferson was an atheist who would destroy Christianity.

Jefferson won in 1800, and the two men didn’t speak for over a decade. Their relationship was so bitter that Adams left Washington early in the morning, before Jefferson’s inauguration. What makes their story extraordinary is the reconciliation. In 1812, mutual friends convinced them to resume correspondence. Their letters over the next fourteen years—158 of them—became one of the great intellectual exchanges in American history, discussing philosophy, politics, and their memories of the Revolution. Both men died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with Adams’s last words reportedly being “Thomas Jefferson survives” (though Jefferson had actually died hours earlier).

Franklin vs. Adams: A Clash of Styles

In Paris, the relationship between Benjamin Franklin and John Adams was a tense blend of grudging professional reliance and deep personal irritation, rooted in radically different diplomatic styles and temperaments. Franklin, already a celebrated figure at Versailles, cultivated French support through charm, sociability, and patient maneuvering in salons and at court, a method that infuriated Adams. He equated such “nuances” with evasiveness and preferred direct argument, formal memorandums, and hard‑edged ultimatums. Sharing lodgings outside Paris only intensified Adams’s resentment as he watched Franklin rise late, receive endless visitors, and seemingly mix pleasure with business, leading Adams to complain that nothing would ever get done unless he did it himself, while Franklin privately judged Adams “always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Their French ally, Foreign Minister Vergennes, reinforced the imbalance by insisting on dealing primarily with Franklin and effectively sidelining Adams in formal diplomacy. This deepened Adams’s sense that Franklin was both overindulged by the French and insufficiently assertive on America’s behalf. Yet despite their mutual loss of respect, the two ultimately cooperated—often uneasily—in the peace negotiations with Britain, and both signatures appear on the 1783 Treaty of Paris, a testament to the way personal feud and shared national purpose coexisted within the American diplomatic mission.

Hamilton and Burr: From Political Rivalry to Fatal Duel

The Hamilton-Burr feud ended in the most dramatic way possible: a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804, where Hamilton was mortally wounded and Burr destroyed his own political career.

Their rivalry had been building for years. Both were New York lawyers and politicians, but Hamilton consistently blocked Burr’s ambitions. When Burr ran for governor of New York in 1804, Hamilton campaigned against him with particular venom, calling Burr dangerous and untrustworthy at a dinner party. When Burr read accounts of Hamilton’s remarks in a newspaper, he demanded an apology. Hamilton refused to apologize or deny the comments, leading to the duel challenge.

What made this especially tragic was that Hamilton’s oldest son, Philip, had been killed in a duel three years earlier defending his father’s honor. Hamilton reportedly planned to withhold his fire, but he either intentionally shot into the air or missed. Burr’s shot struck Hamilton in the abdomen, and he died the next day. Burr was charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey and fled to the South. Though he later returned to complete his term as vice president, his political career was finished.

Adams vs. Hamilton: The Federalist Crack-Up

One of the most destructive feuds happened within the same party. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were both Federalists, but their relationship became poisonous during Adams’s presidency (1797-1801).

Hamilton, though not in government, tried to control Adams’s cabinet from behind the scenes. When Adams pursued peace negotiations with France (the “Quasi-War” with France was raging), Hamilton wanted war. Adams discovered that several of his cabinet members were more loyal to Hamilton than to him and fired them. In the 1800 election, Hamilton wrote a fifty-four-page pamphlet attacking Adams’s character and fitness for office—extraordinary since they were in the same party. The pamphlet was meant for limited circulation among Federalist leaders, but Jefferson’s allies got hold of it and published it widely, devastating both Adams’s re-election chances and Hamilton’s reputation. The feud helped Jefferson win and essentially destroyed the Federalist Party.

Washington and Jefferson: The Unacknowledged Tension

While Washington and Jefferson never had an open feud, their relationship cooled significantly during Washington’s presidency. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, increasingly opposed the administration’s policies, particularly Hamilton’s financial program. When Washington supported the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1795—which Jefferson saw as a betrayal of France and Republican principles—Jefferson became convinced Washington had fallen under Hamilton’s spell.

Jefferson resigned from the cabinet in 1793, partly from policy disagreements but also from discomfort with what he saw as Washington’s monarchical tendencies (the formal receptions and the ceremonial aspects of the presidency). Washington, in turn, came to view Jefferson as disloyal, especially when he learned Jefferson had been secretly funding attacks on the administration in opposition newspapers and had even put a leading critic on the federal payroll. By the time Washington delivered his Farewell Address in 1796, warning against political parties and foreign entanglements, many saw it as a rebuke of Jefferson’s philosophy. They maintained outward courtesy, but their warm relationship never recovered.

Why These Feuds Mattered

These weren’t just personal squabbles—they shaped American democracy in profound ways. The Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry created our two-party system (despite Washington’s warnings). The Adams-Hamilton split showed that parties could fracture from within. The Adams-Jefferson reconciliation demonstrated that political enemies could find common ground after leaving power.

The founding fathers were human, with all the ambition, pride, jealousy, and pettiness that entails. They fought over power, principles, and personal slights. What’s remarkable isn’t that they agreed on everything—they clearly didn’t—but that despite their bitter divisions, they created a system robust enough to survive their feuds. The Constitution itself, with its checks and balances, almost seems designed to accommodate such disagreements, ensuring that no single person or faction could dominate.

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