Tragedy and Farce: Dealing with President Donald Trump

In 2005, we gathered up all of our college credits and enrolled to complete our baccalaureate degrees. It is no surprise that academia is politically progressive and bringing with me a more open mind I learned a lot mostly about paying attention to questions. What is an art? What is a science? What is proof? What is evidence? What is a theory? 

I read The Art of the Deal soon after it was published, courtesy of my local branch library in Lansing, Michigan, and I was impressed: you can always make something attractive to someone else. Over the years, perceptual check marks tagged the news about Donald Trump’s real estate projects and then his television shows, but he was always only somewhere between Lee Iacocca and Madonna. Then he got serious.

 

Donald Trump was always a Democrat because of his involvements in real estate with planning & zoning commissions and labor unions. So, when he ran for the Presidency, it was clear to me from Day One that his concern was only for the best of all possible marketing. 

In my estimation, he did not want to face Hillary Clinton in the primaries where he could be beaten and discarded early on. Instead, he chose the Republican party because he knew that he could take out the lightweights such as Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, and Carli Fiorina. Even if he lost to Clinton in the general election, he still would have run as a major party candidate and earned a place in history. He was greatly helped in 2016 by Robert Mercer who brought him Steve Bannon. (See "Jim Simons and the Quants" on NecessaryFacts.) Bannon convinced Trump to broadcast a narrative that would resonate with the untapped reservoir of available voters. 

 

Just ahead of the 2016 general election, Michael Moore
warned Democrats (and others) why Donald Trump
would be elected.

Just ahead of the 2016 election, Michael Moore spoke to several groups, warning them of how and why Donald Trump was going to win by tapping into the unvoiced angst of the masses. 

"Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, 'If you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them'," said Moore.

It is the art of the deal, a mass mediated hyper-reality in which the broadcaster Donald Trump played to the people what they told him that they wanted to hear. 

Donald Trump treated Marine Corps General James N. Mattis as if Mattis were an Apprentice. And Mattis was not the only one to be summarily fired. Nonetheless, on the second and now third time around, Trump still had the support of people who never thought that he would betray them. Of course, you can only betray your friends because your enemies already do not trust you. Trump had the support of anti-communist Venezuelans in Miami. Having lived here since fleeing Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro, they had businesses and homes. And then came the revocation of protections against deportation. Just ahead of the 2024 election, Donald Trump stood on a stage in Detroit with leaders of the Arab community, and they believed that he agreed with them. 

 

Those of us who advocate for laissez-faire capitalism easily point to the fact that successful marketing impels toward a common benevolent morality because you have to get along with other people. But there are businesses that succeed “one customer at a time” because there is always a (new) sucker born every minute. 

 

And then there is the “long con,” the somewhat complicated confidence game, portrayed in the 1973 movie, The Sting. In any negotiation, the Art of the Deal can involve offering terms that you do not mind abandoning as the cost of gaining the next and more important advantage. Donald Trump’s wavering and waffling upsets traditionalist markets because uncertainty is uncomfortable to most people. 

"An entrepreneur is born with the mentality to take risks, though there are several important characteristics: courage, faith in yourself, and above all, even when you fail, to learn from failure and get up and try again."  - Sheldon Adelson, 2013

Scientists and entrepreneurs live with the unknown and therefore with uncertainty. Einstein was married three times and retracted what he called his biggest mistake twice because he was wrong about being wrong. Get over it and move on. Donald Trump is willing to abandon a resource or a plan and try something new, something else. It is the very definition of pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. 

He has filed four bankruptcies. As the insurance magnate, Thomas Caldecot Chubb said, when his clerks were panicked because a ship had gone down with an insured cargo, “If there were no losses, there would be no premiums.” Investors sometimes suffer losses and at the level of  The Trump Organization  all investors practice their own due diligence. So, Donald Trump accepts the losses—2200 points on the Dow Jones for Friday, April 5, 2025—but what are the premiums that he expects? President Trump assures us that in the long run, this all will be good for America. 

• Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States. 
• “Made in America” is not just a tagline—it’s an economic and national security priority of this Administration. The President’s reciprocal trade agenda means better-paying American jobs making beautiful American-made cars, appliances, and other goods.
• These tariffs seek to address the injustices of global trade, re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people.-- White House Fact Sheet for April 2, 2025.

 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than
2200 points before settling for a 1600-point tumble

The economy is the active total of trillions of individual choices. Perhaps no stochastic theory is sufficient to predict the next fashion craze but it is possible to analyze the past, to explain it, and to test that theory against other (different) facts, especially when those are submitted as predictions to allow falsification of the theory.

 

The rubrics of the early 20^th century—broad socialisms and fascisms, anti-democratic coups and attempted coups, the contraction of international trade, the Great Depression, and ultimately, World War II and the Cold War—were not isolated events, unrelated to each other, causeless or chaotic and complicated beyond comprehension. 

 

The Roman senate continued to vote on consuls who really were emperors as the coinage was debased, plagues swept the population centers, earthquakes proved impossible to rebuild from, foreign hordes invaded the outer districts and then Italy. Decline and retreat affected the philosophers at Athens, the scholars at Alexandria, the jurists at Rhodes. In those days, all of that took lifetimes over generations, and each day seemed very much like the previous day. We understand it now by compressing the retrospective.

 

In high school history, I learned that the real “American revolution” took place in the minds of people between 1756 and 1775, when the leading thinkers and writers expressed the understanding that the Bill of Rights of 1689 would never be allowed to them. The events after the July 1776 were the War for Independence. 

The failed Continental dollar and the ephemeral money issued by new States (in paper and copper) presaged the Alien and Sedition Acts. In France, the same kinds of events ultimately brought regicide, the Directorate, the failed assignat paper money, and then Napoleon Bonaparte, initially as First Consul, and inevitably as the Emperor. Again, though, it took 20 years and through each of those 7000 days, people lived their own lives as best they could under the circumstances—which is always true.

 

Now we communicate at the speed of light with images and sounds enhancing and eclipsing words. Centuries, decades, lifetimes, days, hours, all are compacted into minutes and seconds as historical events become daily news and then hourly updates. 

 

It may become history that cash inflows to the government from President Trump’s tariffs, coupled with his drastic cuts to the federal workforces (both salaried and subsidized) will balance the federal budget and reduce the federal deficit while cutting direct taxes, and all of that will allow the general economy to expand and extend. It may be that a later round of deal-making will bring among nations a broad reduction in all tariffs.

 

However, reality cannot be cheated. I believe that the likely outcome will be an economic depression and eruptions of armed conflicts all of which President Trump will declare to be fake news, insisting that prosperity and peace are here and we are enjoying them.

 

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

...

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. 

Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Baggins for Marx/Engels Internet Archive 1995, 1999; Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain, 2006, Mark Harris, 2010. --https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf

 

Pamela Graves was my professor for Modern Europe
at Eastern Michigan University. She taught me that history
is a science and we write it in the past tense.

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

When Did the “Great Depression” Begin? 

Venture Capital 

Capitalist Culture

The Remarkable Story of Risk 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Where are the Augurs?

Originally, the Romans were seven hilltop villages under Etruscan domination. The nominally Roman deities Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan were Etruscan. The Romans eventually ascended, absorbing their Tuscan, Latin, Samnite, and Greek neighbors.

The words in red come from Latin. This is based on a poster
in a classroom at Lincoln High School in Cleveland where
Nida Glick taught Latin for many years before my time.
(During WWII, she was a cryptologist. See her biography at
 https://www.military.com/coast-guard/lt-cmdr-nida-glick-uscgr.html )

The Roman Senate was only the topmost assembly. While the Roman Senate was culturally conservative, it also could be fickle when making and repealing laws. As the republic matured over decades, lifetimes, and centuries, young men ascended through increasingly responsible (and therefore powerful) appointments in public service. Being the moneyer for two years let you get your name out there for people to see, typically by honoring the public service of an ancestor.

 

Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington (left)
and Horatio Greensnborough's George Washington (right).
Washington was called "The Father of His Country" by
people who had been educated to read Latin.

When political conservatives insist that we are a republic and not a democracy, they are glossing over some contextual facts. It is true that in the Athenian assembly citizens voted directly—and they could change their collective minds. If a law remained in force, it was transcribed from painted words on wood to being carved in stone. It is also true, though, that the assembly voted to install officials in charge of the harbor, the mint, etc. On the other hand, Rome had a different tradition. 

 

Imperial Rome continued the fiction of being a republic and not a kingdom. The emperor (imperator: military commander-in-chief) was the “first citizen” and one of two consuls, and often granted the title “father of his country. ” Around the head on the obverses of many denarius coins of the empire the abbreviation PP stands for Pater Patriae: father of his country. But it refers to a deeper tradition of privilege (privis + legis = private law), when the senior elder of a family held life-and-death ownership over everyone on the farm. 

The coins of Roman emperors also give their years of consulship: COS III, for example, meaning that the Senate had re-elected them to their third term of office. Silver coins generally came from the private holdings of the imperator. The Senate issued the official copper coins of the government. The abbreviation SC meant Senatus Consulto. 

Copper sestertius of Marcus Aurelius.
Minerva with Owl and S C.

Some political conservatives claim to be Constitution originalists who insist that today we should return the intentions of 1789. At that time, political parties were private associations, not public institutions. Even when parties first erupted, conservative Anglophile Federalists versus liberal Francophile Republicans, the Vice President and President were elected separately and could be from different parties. 

This one-ounce silver commemorative issued by the
U.S. Mint would have spoken well to ancient Romans
with both the personification Libertas and the eagle of Jupiter  
carrying olive branches and its mottoes and legends: 
Liberty, United States,
E Pluribus Unum.
The numerals would be foreign to them
but they could sound out the letters.

Today, the VP is still the President of the Senate but seldom sits there, giving over the daily work to a president pro tempore, chosen by the Senate. You have to wonder what life would be like with President Donald Trump and President of the Senate Kamala Harris. President Harris (her proper title under the original Constitution) would vote as a senator in case of tie balloting. 

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Etruscans and Americans 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

The Mercury Dime 

Pencil Notes: Reflections on Henry Petroski’s "The Pencil"

“Yet, perhaps in part because specialization was no doubt as common in ancient times as it is today, the written history of engineering is sparse. Even the most able and articulate of ancient engineers, whether they were known as artisans, craftsmen, architects, or master builders, might have had no more time or inclination or reason to articulate what it is they did and how they did it than do some of the most able of today’s engineers.” – page 17

That is why they hire technical writers. To me, it is a right-brain/left-brain situation. Engineers tend to be right brain thinkers. Technical writers bring that with them, also, the ability to read, edit, and create drawings, whether architectural plans or software flowcharts. Ultimately, though, the images get verbal explanations. That may explain why so many technical writers are women: the left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected by the corpus collosum, which tends to be more highly developed in females than in males.

 

It is difficult to be certain how this or that better design for a brush, plow, house, or sword evolved from its predecessors, for the process was at best sketched metaphorically in pencil and seldom if ever copied in pen. It is because of this that the ideas and artifacts of technology—the processes and products of engineering—are so very different from the creations and theories of literature, philosophy, and science. … The classics, even if superseded in factual or theoretical sophistication are considered models of thinking from which one can today still benefit by emulation, or at least inspiration. […] Curators of technological artifacts, industrial archaeologists, and historians of technology represent rather new careers…” – pages 20-21

1. First, that is why we have industrial archaeology now, to recover and understand those earlier activities and artifacts. 
2. Second, we have lost some mathematics. Richard P. Feynman wanted to demonstrate to his class how Newton proved Kepler’s laws, and he wanted to do it in Newton’s own language. He could not. Feynman could not recreate the geometry that was fundamental to the Principia. We have become so dependent on algebra and calculus that we have forgotten the admittedly more cumbersome tools of earlier mathematics.
3. We also lost the machinery of the Antikythera Mechanism. It would be almost 1500 years before clocks were again so complicated, accurate, and precise.
4. Fourth, and to Petroski’s point, antiquarians do inform the present. Though we had advanced past the hand-hammered methods of coinage, it is famous that President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to give America coinage as compelling as that of the ancient Greeks. 

Professional Coin Grading Service "Coin Facts" website
TOP: Half Dollar of Charles Barber imitating the work
of Oscar Roty for France. BOTTOM: Something better. 

“[Sir Isaac Newton’s] seashore metaphor allows that one shell (theory) may be prettier (more elegant) than another, and perhaps the searcher becomes less fond of the old shells as prettier ones are found, but the implication is still that the truths are whole in the ocean and it is just a matter of time before they are found thrown up on the shore.

“While pencils may be helpful in formulating abstract theories of motion and gravitation, abstract theories do not make pencils.” – page 74.

 

The history of modern physics may refute that. The mathematics describing atomic and nuclear processes energy became the design specifications. We did not tinker our way to nuclear power.

 

Of all the revelations and insights here, I was captivated by the story of Henry David Thoreau (Chapter 9: An American Pencil-Making Family). We recently watched the most recent remake of Little Women (Greta Gerwig director). We see Jo March’s ink-stained fingers and we watch her on the floor, scribbling in pen. But we all also know that the family was connected with the Transcendentalists, among them Henry David Thoreau. But who knew that his family made pencils? In his list of supplies taken to Walden Pond, mostly likely written with the pencil he carried, Thoreau omitted the pencil. Thoreau also billed himself as a surveyor and civil engineer, two professions that even in 1840 depended on good, reliable graphite pencils. 

 

I wrote here last week about the passage on pages 223-225 describing how engineers often were trained to draw by copying architectural treatments. It is, of course, how architects learned to draw. That opened up a new vista on an early passage in The Fountainhead. That being as it may, it is nonetheless true that to learn science, we recreate the important experiments of the past. We just do not slavishly recreate them with archaic beakers, wires, and flyball governors. I believe that it is a valid criticism of physics in particular, stated in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that we are handed science as a completed artifact and do not trouble ourselves much with discarded paradigms—or why we discarded them. (My review for this blog is here.)

 

“One desirable quality is often gained at the expense of another, for how the properties of complicated materials will change with changing ingredients and methods of preparation, whether they be pencil leads or concrete, is not always easily predictable. While a new mixture might give a stronger material, it might also give a more brittle one that will be greatly weakened by a small crack.”—page 236

 

“The stories of the Munroes and the Thoreaus and their pencils illustrate in microcosm the often conflicting objectives of real-world engineering and business: making pencils as fine as possible as an end in itself; making pencils better in quality or price than other pencil makers; making pencils secretly in order to have an advantage over the competition; making pencils overtly to conceal a more profitable business; making pencils for the social and cultural good of artists, engineers, and writers of all kinds. There is no such thing as pure engineering, whether in the artifact or in the abstract—for that would be nothing but irresponsibility or a mere hobby. Engineering, far from being applied science is scientific business.” – page 276-277.

It reminded me of the discussions among Austrian economists over what entrepreneurship essentially is. (See NecessaryFacts here.) Being rationalists  they seek one or a few axioms from which all of the remainder can be derived by pure reason. Do entrepreneurs bring new inventions to market? Do they arbitrage risk? Do they carry goods from where they have lower value to where they are valued more? Do they drive each other out of business by any means possible? Do they find cooperation where others find conflict? Do they take advantage of the unwary or do they profit from intelligent decisions? Mises pointed out at some length that the entrepreneur can be so self-centered that they invest all of their resources in a lost cause when a rational person would just get any good-paying job and keep it. There is no such thing as pure entrepreneurship unless it is a hobby. 

 

In 1933 [the Lead Pencil Institute] has ten members who together manufactured 90 percent of all American pencils. Thus the institute effectively represented the entire industry, which at that time included thirteen firms. They were roughly in order of size: Eagle Pencil Company, New York, N.Y.

Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, Brooklyn, N.Y.

American Lead Pencil Company, Hoboken, N.J.

Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, Jersey City, N.J.

Wallace Pencil Company. Brentwood, Mo.

General Pencil Company, Jersey City, N.J.

Musgrave Pencil Company, Shelbyville, Tenn.

Red Cedar Pencil Company. Lewisburg, Tenn.

Mohican Pencil Company, Philadelphia, Pa.

Blaisdell Pencil Company, Philadelphia, Pa.

Richard Best Pencil Company, Irvington, N.J.

Empire Pencil Company, New York, N.Y.

National Pencil Company, Shelbyville, Tenn.

(Page 293)

 

I found it disappointing that Petroski quoted John Middleton Murray at length on the poetry of being a pencil, but never mentions “I Pencil” by Leonard E. Reed.

 

The old meets the new. These pencil extenders are built
from STL files provided to 3-D printers

“Who today but a frugal draftsman would use a pencil down to such a stub? But our pencils, unlike many of those of the Victorians, have lead from end to end, and some engineers and draftsmen, when a good pencil’s stub is too small to hold even in a pencil extender, have been known to cut away the last of the wood case and use the left in their compasses.” – page 354

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Imaginary Numbers are Real but Pegasus is not 

Forbidden Planet 

Spoken American Grammar 

The Map that Changed the World 

World War II Sweetheart Dance (2019)

We had a great time at the Texas Military Forces Museum Valentine’s dance. This year, we prepared by taking dancing lessons. I signed us up for membership and four Thursday nights of foxtrot with Austin Ballroom Dancing, a social club organized as a not-for-profit. In addition, we attended their open dances on alternate Saturday nights and also accepted an invitation to dance to a live band at a City of Austin senior center on Friday nights. It all helped. 

The evening was in 1940s style, with the Sentimental Journey Orchestra playing the music of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and others. They were fronted by The Memphis Belles trio. About a third of the 150 attendees were dressed in era style. The event included a silent auction and a “Heads or Tails” contest to win a ride in a tank and fire a howitzer at the next reenactment.  

America’s entry into World War II shifted our culture. By the end of the war, nearly a tenth (8.7%) of the total population was in the military. And that does not count those in the Red Cross, USO, and other support groups. 

World War II was brewing long before the UK and France declared war on Germany in response to the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The Fortified Forties followed the Thrifty Thirties. The worldwide economic downturn created an easy podium for demagogues of the left and right. Both sides declared that capitalism was dead. 

Leaders were everywhere. We all know the easy names: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco. Other dictatorships ruled in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, Portugal, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Turkey was a one-party state especially tied to modernization and liberalization away from traditional Islamic culture. France proved that for them democracy was a failed experiment. In practice the French were embarrassingly cooperative with the Nazis until the success of D-Day made everyone a lifetime member of the underground. Adolph Hitler does not appear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but Benito Hoover does, along with Mustafa Mond, Polly Trotsky, Lenina Crowne, and Bernard Marx. (For background on Huxley’s choices of character names based on Alfred Mond, Mustafa Atatürk, and others, see, for example, Shmoop here.) The future was collective. And the fact is that collectivism brings war. 

America gave the President a third term and the New Deal attempted broad government initiatives. However, American cultural traditions of individualism, self-assertion, private enterprise, and rule of law within a constitutional framework that promised both majority rule and individual rights were the stable foundation that withstood the shocks of war. (The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter is reviewed here.)

That political tradition was necessarily accompanied by culture of innovation. The inventions of the 19^thcentury easily led to utopian predictions of material progress and prosperity. However, ultimately, the American Century was defined by innovations in entertainment. Life has meaning when we have the liberty to pursue happiness. Winning World War II on the basis of our industrial capacity was necessary but not sufficient. Our cinema and music conquered the world. There was a war on, but the music was swing. Gershwin defeated Wagner.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

2LT Frances Y. Slanger: American Nightingale 

The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson 

The Wise Men 

World War II Sweetheart Dinner and Dance (2017) 

Veterans Day 2018 on Martha's Vineyard

Visiting family ahead of the Thanksgiving travel rush, I celebrated Veterans Day on Martha's Vineyard. My first undergraduate school was the College of Charleston, founded 1770. But despite Rutledge, Heyward, and Lynch, among many others including the humble Jackson family, conservative Charleston was mostly Tory during the Revolution. If you want to start a revolution, you need to go to Massachusetts.

His marker was added for the SAR by the DAR. Hers was from the
Coastal Defence Chapter of the DAR.

“Early in the Revolution Island attitudes were at least neutral if not favorable toward the Crown. The Islanders’ unmatched whaling skills were prized by the British, as they watched lucrative profits return to England. As such, the Vineyard enjoyed an administration of benevolent neglect from abroad. As early as 1775, however, as the British began closing nearby ports and occasionally coming ashore to requisition livestock, Islanders hardened their hearts towards the lobsterbacks.” 
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2010/07/02/behind-birth-vineyard-revolution

Oak Hill Cemetery was the scene of a morning memorial.

“The most infamous and humiliating chapter in Vineyard history occurred on Sept. 11, 1778, the terrible Grey’s Raid, when ruthless British Maj. Gen. Charles Grey unleashed the full brunt of British Naval intimidation on the beleaguered Island with nearly 40 ships and over 4,000 troops. It was a bloodless pillage but a pillage nonetheless, as Islanders were forced to march 10,574 sheep, 315 cattle, innumerable bales of hay and 229 arms to present-day Vineyard Haven. Unsatisfied with these ill-gotten spoils, Grey’s men then scoured the countryside, looting house and field.”

 https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2010/07/02/behind-birth-vineyard-revolution

Previously on Necessary Facts

Do You Know Your Military?

Rebels: A Well-Regulated Militia

Plenty of Time When We Get Home

Atheists in Foxholes

Rebels: A Well Regulated Militia

Rebels: A Well Regulated Militia by Brian Wood is a graphic novel that explores the lives of otherwise ordinary folk caught up in the extraordinary drama of the American Revolution. The main characters are fictional representations of real people. Historical figures pass through the narratives to add credence to the portraits of farmers, villagers, slaves, and natives. These stories span a lifetime, from the 1750s to 1800s, bringing the reader to Vermont, the Ohio frontier, the Carolinas, and the city of Boston.

Rebels: A Well Regulated Militia by Brian Wood
with Andrea Mutti, Matthew Woodson,
and other illustrators,
Collections of Rebels #1 through #10 inclusive
(Milwaukee: Dark Horse Comics, 2016). 

 Anyone who can tell you much about the American Revolution is likely to be a political activist. Radicals, whether conservative or progressive, identify with the struggle for rights and independence, even as they find fault with it. On the left, the fact that the leaders were well-to-do merchants and lawyers explains the incomplete recognition of rights, the eventual three-fifths compromise, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and other betrayals of democracy. From the far right, libertarian science fiction author L. Neil Smith, who penned a set of Lando Calrissian stories, has an alternate universe in which Alexander Hamilton escaped to Prussia following a failed federalist coup to make George Washington king of America, leaving the republic to the true republicans.

Here, in essays apart from the graphic novel, author Brian Wood explains that he is a socialist. His passions for the commoner feed the compelling histories. The contextual events are real: Vermont’s war against New York, Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and the Cowpens. The men and women who fought and suffered and died or survived are inventions of the author. 

“Creating Seth Abbot was partly to give myself a break – a fictional character allows us to tell the story we all want to tell without being trapped by historical facts and having my hands tied narratively. I mean, the Green Mountain Boys were real, as was Ethan Allen and the “noble train of artillery,” but I wanted to be control of the personal narrative of the main character. Seth needed to be a sort of everyman. I also wanted to be able to filter some of my own stories of Vermont childhood, the history that excites me, and the locations I know personally into that narrative.” – “Interview: Brian Wood Returns to Rebels with the Next Generation,” by Jeffrey Renaud in CBR Exclusives here. 

Within the ten stories is the continuing drama of Seth Abbott and his wife Mercy Abbott. He leaves her behind as he goes off to fight. The second time, he does not know that she is pregnant. He returns five years later. 

Among Seth Abbott’s adventures is his leading the team that brought the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights. In that story, Brian Wood’s socialist preferences lead him astray. He draws Henry Knox as a soft sycophant, a bookseller with no military or other practical experience. A bookseller he was. He was also a street tough, a hoodlum who acquired the trappings of culture and sold them successfully until Boston was occupied. That remaining so, we slog through the mountain snow and valley mud with the farmers who hauled the cannons. For them, it was just more hard work. As one veteran told me about his view of Army life compared to his home life, “In other words, the Army was a lot like Tuesday.”  

Jane Franklin Mecom promises to tell the story of
rebel printer Silence Brght

“We actually have Washington in the story in issue No. 4 along with Benedict Arnold,” he revealed. “Later in the year we’ll see Jane Mecom, Ben Franklin’s sister. I think it’s a good idea to drop these people in from time to time for context, but part of the point of ‘Rebels’ is to not re-tell the same stories everyone’s heard about these famous people, but to find the untold stories, the stories behind the folktales, and tell those instead. So you can expect famous cameos, but no more than that. Those public figures of 18^th century America are often referred to as “patriots” — a term that has been misused, misappropriated and/or misunderstood in recent years,” he said. Exclusive preview: “‘Rebels’ writer Brian Wood explores the Revolutionary War” Hero Complex LA Times May 12, 2015 here. 

Brian Wood invented Sarah Hull and her husband, Captain Samuel Hull. She is the “Molly Pitcher” whose service to her country included hauling water for the cannons and for the men who fired them, and then loading and firing those guns with them.  The real Sarah Hull was just as interesting. 

"But if we paid you, we would have to pay all the women who served."

“Sarah Hull, the wife of Major William Hull, was one of those women who followed their husbands to the camp, resolved to partake their dangers and privations. She was with the army at Saratoga, and joined the other American ladies in kind and soothing attentions to the fair captives after the surrender. She was the daughter of Judge Fuller, of Newton, Massachusetts, and was born about 1755. At the close of the war she returned home; and when her gallant husband was appointed general of the county militia, did the honors of his Marquée, and received guests of distinction with a grace, dignity, and affability that attracted general admiration.” “Sarah Hull” at AmericanRevolution.org here. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money as Speech and Press 

The Science of Liberty 

Politics and the Inverse Square Law 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

Senator Thomas Hart Benton

After thirty years as Missouri’s U.S. Senator, Thomas Hart Benton’s fall from power was immediate and complete. His loyalty to his values made him a subject for John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

(An earlier edition was published by the Georgia Numismatic Association’s, GNA Journal as “The Senator Who Fell From Grace with the South.”)

State Historical Society of Missouri

Thomas Hart Benton was born at Harts Mill, near Hillsboro, N.C. on March 14, 1782. His father died in 1791, leaving behind claims to land in Tennessee where Thomas settled the family. Mostly self-taught, he earned admission first to Chapel Hill College and then to William and Mary College where he studied law. Returning to Tennessee, he was admitted to the bar in 1806. In 1809 he won election to the state senate, serving one term.

When the War of 1812 broke out, Andrew Jackson tapped Benton to be his aide-de-camp. Jackson mustered 2500 men marching them from Nashville to Natchez, claiming that he would seize Mobile and Pensacola. Instead, Secretary of War John Armstrong disbanded the army. Jackson hired transportation and led them back to Nashville. Benton's petitions to the War Department finally garnered a reimbursement on expenses for Jackson.

As the army ended its campaign, Thomas's younger brother, Jesse, challenged William Carroll to a duel. Carroll asked Jackson to be his second. Jackson declined. On Monday, June 14, 1813 at six o'clock in the morning, Jesse Benton suffered a bullet wound to both cheeks of his buttocks. Hardly fatal, it was painful and embarrassing; and Thomas Benton blamed Jackson. Benton felt that Jackson should have prevented the dual by persuasion. (Although punishable now under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in the 19th century duelling per se was not contrary to the Rules of War published by Congress. See A Treatise on the Military Law of the United States: Together with the Practice and Procedure of Courts-martial and Other Military Tribunals by George Breckenridge Davis, John Wiley & Sons, 1913, on Google Books here.) 

In early September 1813, the Bentons had their revenge. They ambushed Jackson, John Coffee, and Stockley Hays at the Old Nashville Inn. Thomas Hart Benton pulled a horseship on Jackson. Jesse Benton shot Jackson twice, leaving him with a ball and a slug. Jackson's return fire and the Bentons’ answering barrage all failed. Coffee, Hays, and a bystander, James Sitler, rushed in and overpowered Jesse. In the fracas, Thomas fell backwards down a flight of stairs. The battle ended. (Although the ball was removed, Jackson carried the slug for the rest of his life.) When Jackson and Benton met face to face again in 1823, their common vision and political goals made them allies. They erased the ten years of enmity with a handshake.

Benton was instrumental in developing the West. He introduced bills to distribute lands in ways that allowed true settlement by farmers while thwarting speculators. He advocated for the pony express, the telegraph, interior highways, the opening of the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, and transcontinental railroads. He even hoped that explorers of the far northwest would find a land route to India. 

Bentonian Mint Drop
Hard Times Token
Stacks Bowers at coins.com

The “Bentonian Currency Mint Drop” tokens lampooned Benton's faith in hard money. According to historian William Graham Sumner, Benton was “...the strongest bullionist in the administration circle.” Benton said that gold was the best protection for the middle class, the merchant, farmer, and tradesman. He said that none of them could expect by their honest labor to become rich overnight whereas paper money allowed eastern speculators to do just that.

"New York, Deveau Liberty Head and Mint Drop Hard Times Token.
This token typically receives the Hard Times Designation of HT-251.
The obverse text reads 'PB&S Deveau’s
156 Chatham Square N. York' "
Deveau’s was a shoe store.
From Stacks Bowers via coins.com

To bring American gold into line with the international gold-silver ratio, Benton introduced the legislation that lowered the fineness of the Half Eagle $5 gold coin to from .9167 to .8992 for the issues of 1834-1839. Working with Sen. William McKendree Gwin of California, he introduced a bill to establish branch Mint at San Francisco. Benton's power made him chair of many important committees, including Indian Affairs, Military Affairs, and Foreign Relations. He authored the resolution to expunge from the Senate Journal the resolution of censure against Andrew Jackson.

A westerner and a southerner, Benton's ultimate loyalty was to the Union. Not even his passion for the West - John Fremont was his son-in-law - would allow him to go along with the Compromise of 1850, hammered out by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. To Benton, it was a surrender to the fire-eaters who threatened dissolution of the Union if they were not allowed to extend slavery into the West.

Yet, though personally opposed to slavery, Benton was no abolitionist. So, when he fell from grace with the South for this stand, he had no friends in the North, and no friends at home in Missouri. The first U.S. Senator to serve five consecutive terms, Thomas Hart Benton suffered a humiliating defeat in 1850. After losing his senate seat, Benton won a single term in the House of Representatives from 1853 to 1855, but his political career was over. He retired to Washington DC to write his autobiography. Benton died on April 10, 1858.

When he was on the rise and powerful, Benton's name christened towns and counties in the West and South: Fort Benton, Montana; Benton County, Iowa, Benton County, Oregon, and Benton County, Washington. After his fall, Benton County, Alabama, became Calhoun County. Benton County, Florida, reverted to Hernando County. However, after the Civil War, Brunson Harbor, Michigan, was renamed Benton Harbor in his honor. 

“During his years as a senator, Benton became concerned that the issue of slavery would divide the country. He had pushed for Missouri to be admitted as a slave state, viewing the abolition of slavery as dangerous to the union and harmful to blacks.Around 1835 Benton slowly began to change his views. While he did not view slavery as wrong or wish to abolish it completely, he did not want to see it spread into the territories.  

“In 1849 Benton traveled around Missouri delivering speeches on slavery. In Jefferson City, he declared, “My personal sentiments, then, are against the institution of slavery, and against its introduction into places in which it does not exist. If there was no slavery in Missouri today, I should oppose its coming in.”Benton spent his last session in Congress speaking against slavery. This change in position cost Benton much support, and he lost the 1851 senatorial election.”

– The State Historical Society of Missouri here:  https://shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/b/bentonsenator/

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