Puerto Rico, 1900
Philadelphia North American, Rep. : The present condition of Puerto Rico would have been absolutely incredible and inconceivable to Americans of two years ago. We thought we knew our own hearts, and we should have said with entire confidence that wherever our flag went it would go as a messenger of benediction. Has a year and a half of empire stripped us of all the fine feelings of humanity with which we went into war for Cuban liberty, and turned us into a race of mercenary oppressors?Ex-Attorney-General Smith, of Indiana
“It is conceded that Puerto Rico constitutes part of the territory of the United States and that our title to it was acquired under the treaty making power of the constitution ; and it follows, therefore, that the moment the title passed from Spain to the United States the constitution extended itself over every part of the island. Any attempt by congress to segregate the constitution and extend a part of its provisions to our island possessions is a violation of the letter and spirit of that instrument, amounting almost, if not quite, to an overt act of treason. We took these people from choice, not compulsion, and by that act we extended to them the protection of our constitution. If we have made a mistake in adding this territory to our country it is not too late to correct it. “
(The Conservative [[microform].] (Nebraska City, Neb.), 22 March 1900. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. On the Puerto Rico tariff bill, 1900)
Willkie presidential campaign reprint 1940 (erroneously attributed to 1910 at source)
(The diamond drill. (Crystal Falls, Iron County, Mich.), 19 Nov. 1910. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. Reprinted by Willkie for President, Small Business Mens Committee, Akron, Ohio)
Pick an article…click on link below the page for a larger view
(The herald and news. (Newberry S.C.), 18 Oct. 1904. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. An honest ballot and lynching)
Assuming facts not in evidence…
(The day book. (Chicago, Ill.), 29 Sept. 1913. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. “…the soldiers stood at attention while the lynching proceeded.”)
Science and government agencies and optimism, oh my.
(Dearborn independent. (Dearborn, Mich.), 27 Nov. 1920. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. Hurricanes Robbed of Their Destructive Power)
That’s an interesting look back at history, Dee, thanks! That’s rather a sad story about poor little Mrs. Gussie Washburn—yet another victim of patriarchy!
Glad we didn’t live back then. The present is bad enough.
We live in the times we live in, so of course every new tragedy, every injustice, every bit of ugly we see strikes us hard. It should; that’s part of our humanity. But I find it oddly, almost perversely, comforting to know that we’re not the inventors of the latest evil. We are, however, the latest in the vanguard of activists, of justice-seekers, of those who speak out and speak up. Personally, it’s why I’ll never be a political purist. To be a purist implies that there is a solution that will solve everything. I, on the other hand, believe in that arc of history…forward together, not one step back. Even though it seems like we’re currently racing backwards, the resistance indicates to me that there’s a lot of strength and power in “forward together.”
Hi, Diana! Those who keep wanting to take us back to the “good old days” need to start reading history books.
Good morning, Pond Dwellers, and thanks, DoReMi, for the look back in time. Im still trying to wake up here. A foggy morning but an afternoon high of 64 expected. That works.
Thanks for the post at the Orange. This double duty stuff is much appreciated.
I added you to a DM on twitter this morning. Just a heads up.
Thanks, I’ll go look.
I’m not seeing anything…
You are now… :)
Afternoon meese…Thanks Sher…Love the history lesson today…We all knew history was supposed to teach us lessons we could look back on so we would not make the same mistakes again. Seems like there was 63 million morons in the country that didn’t heed the warnings of past years and need some schooling.
Come to find out most of them were Republicans with a small spattering of them that will never learn as they only needed to go back to 2000 to see the lesson of not voting or voting 3rd party.
{{{DoReMI}}} – very much thanks for the double duty. I’ve always tried to learn from history. For those of us not at the top of the supremacy pyramid the “good ol’ days” sucked. There is no utopia where everything is perfect for everybody, world without end amen. But it is definitely possible as history shows and we have proved to keep working towards that “more perfect union” where we establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But it takes community effort by whatever name to do it.
Even though I’m a ghost at DK I have gone and read your diary there. I know you are compiling a list to try and carry the work forward as a team effort. Since I cannot comment there I’d like to make a few comments here about what I did and why i did it that way. (Community needs only part of what i did since that’s what your diary is about.) Originally I was just carrying the link of Aji fundraiser diaries that had fallen off the sidebar into various community diaries. Then Aji would tell me to help someone else. So I’d write a fundraiser diary for them and carry that link forward as well. If i ran across someone in trouble myself, I’d “vet” by checking their profile page, diaries, and comments to do the best i could to verify real person and not another “nephew” situation. After a while i ran out of time to write the standalone diaries, most of which fell off the sidebar within 2 hours and some in as little as 30 minutes, and started what became the community needs list – the person’s name hot-linked to their profile page, a thumbnail sketch of the problem, target to be raised, and where to send the money.
i tried different formats. Mopshell created the banners for me – to quickly identify a community needs comment to be read or skipped as wished – Ojibwa invited me to do the longer, more detailed lists as full diaries via the Street Prophets community twice a week in hopes of getting more eyes on them. I tried just carrying the link to those diaries into the various community diaries – but people didn’t click on the links so I did the helping humpday and sharing saturday full diaries and carried the links forward but also carried the most urgent folks forward in the daily comments. If people had visited a 2x-weekly full diary, I wouldn’t have needed to do that. So that’s the evolution. Basically many of the suggestions are things I tried and didn’t work. If a team can make them work – goddess bless.
moar {{{HUGS}}} and always Healing Energy. To everybody.
Hey bfitz! Nice to see you. I’m hoping if we start a new group and we’re able to get some folks from other sites to join, then they will get it in their stream and, if nothing else, rec and keep it viable.
Michael popped in yesterday. Nice his TO is over.
Thank you bfitz; this is incredibly helpful. I fear to some extent we will be reinventing your wheel and finding the same apathy to the needs that you did…nevertheless, we will persist. We really don’t have a choice, do we? There are a lot of people who are quick to say, “You should….” (although less in the village than elsewhere) while not adding, “…and so I will help this way.” There’s no reason DK should be any different than any other large organization, where 5% carry the load for the other 95%. So we’ll see what happens (although I have far less confidence in my ability to pull this together than I am projecting at l’Orange!) If we can at least accomplish having a group, rather than one individual, responsible for this, at least it means there will be less floundering if someone gets banned.
And by the way, you nailed the underlying point I was going for today. Patriarchy and white supremacy rock if you’re a white male; not so much for anyone else. We’re not quite in Lysistrata territory these days, but I am encouraged that so many women, in particular, are feeling empowered to take back their autonomy. And I will continue to see Hillary’s influence in that; her “loss” will always be painful, but it showed women that playing the [man’s] game didn’t work, so it’s time to invent new rules.
We can invent all the new rules in the world but as long as men retain most of the power, they will simply ignore our new rules.
I don’t think HRC lost by playing the man’s game. I think she went into the arena and fought the good fight against a rising tide and a crapload of cheating. And even against all that, she came close enough to scare the Patriarchy white (if you’ll pardon the expression). That’s why she makes such an effective standard bearer even now.
{{{MomentaryGrace}}} – I agree – it has never been that men were smarter or stronger but they had all the power and wealth. Heck it’s less than a century since married women retained their property upon marriage. I’m not sure when the change came but I know at least in AR in the 1950s the moment a woman married any property she had owned passed immediately to her husband. He could sell it or give it to his mistress and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Women have to be twice as smart and work three times as hard to win a man’s game – and Hillary did just that. But men also frequently cheat – and the Rs did just that. But we know who won. That little fact tells women to follow Hillary – and guard against cheating next time. moar {{{HUGS}}}
And I should have started with, “Love this diary. Let history lay its lessons bare before us. There are truths for those who look with seeking eyes.” ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
{{{DoReMI}}} – there are always folks like you and me who see a need (Momma used to call it see a responsibility lying around) and try to fill it. As you can see, I didn’t know what I was doing when I started – I just kept trying stuff until I found something that worked at least part of the time. I was doing a job that needs a team. And used to have a team back in the DK4 days. If you look at the list of members for the Community Fundraisers community and count up the ones who aren’t on DK at all any more plus the ones who are only around occasionally you can see why we used to be capable of so much more than just the piddly amount i was able to do. With DK5 each person actually needs a team – like the Aji team – coordinating with other folks’ teams to not ‘step on each other’ but to post regular standalone diaries daily or weekly depending on how urgent the issue is AND some way to carry the diary links forward. But other than the Aji team (who were also the PDNC team) that hasn’t happened in years. sigh. moar {{{HUGS}}} and thank you.
Yep, I was aware of the fact that most of the suggestions were things you tried, but I decided to keep my yap shut and let people work it out if they were willing to try. Keep my yap shut except for annoying cat memes of course. :)
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥{{{{{{{{{{{{{bfitz}}}}}}}}}}♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
I love your cat memes. And yeah – I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year telling well-meaning people that I’d already tried that. I hope that folks do keep at it. It’s the work that’s important.
I hope folks manage to keep at a few other things I did. You can’t “pin” anything to the sidebar at DK so the only way to keep reminding people about the Kos Katalogue is to put the link in community diaries. There are a bunch of folks in there for whom a couple of sales means the difference between making it or not. I was going to say coming to me but that’s sort of out the window now. Also the Eyes on the Prize Team Blue – there’s information all over the site, but I was the one compiling it into (relatively) simple lists of which Dem was running where with a hot-link to the campaign website. Hope someone will step up for Ojibwa to cover the Wednesday and Saturday Street Prophets – even if they go back to being simple Coffee Hour diaries and not Helping Humpday/Sharing Saturday diaries. Oh well. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Really like the diary. I need to be reminded on occasion that it’s not much fun for the people who aren’t at the top of society. Lynchings are one thing I’m not sorry to see disappearing into the mists of time.
{{{Mvgal92691}}} – yeah, Hollywood History is the propaganda we’ve been fed since we could first focus on a TV or movie screen. It takes years to peel that off and find the ugly putrid underlying hate. But there is hope. We’ve come a long way. Right now it doesn’t feel like it, but we have. And having done it once, we can recover lost ground much more quickly than when we had to carve the path in the first place. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Hi folks. I made a special effort to figure out how to get on the site (I’ve tried before and failed) and this time it worked (I had to hit the reset password about 500 times — slight exaggeration — but it finally came through).
I wanted to be able to interact with you all, particularly you bfitz!
I don’t have the hang of things here yet and it will probably take a while since I can’t afford to spend too much time here, but at least I now have access.
bfitz — you should know that you are a major organizing issue at Daily Kos. People who were not even part of The Village are joining in. You’ve touched so many lives!
Hi, Tamar!
You have a Moose user account but you do not appear to be logged in using it – this comment was being held in moderation as from a “non-user” account. The “reset password” from the WordPress login does not work properly for all browsers which may be contributing to your problems. Look at this FAQ for more information:
If you are seeing the blue “you need to log in…” messages under each comment, you are not logged in. You can continue to post comments as a guest but we should try to sort out your login information so you don’t need me to release all of your comments!
As Admin, I can log you off of all your devices (that helps start fresh in case one of your devices has a bad cookie) and then reset the password and email it to you. The Moose admin email account is wordpress at motleymoose.net for password resets and for communications with the Admin.
Let me know what you want to do!
Yes, please go ahead! Thank you so much for this. As usual with any website new to a person, it’s a struggle to understand how it all works.
So when I get your email, I go to the login, put in my email and the password you sent me?
One thing I don’t understand is that up on the top right of this page it says “Howdy, Tamar”
I thought that meant I was logged in but I guess it doesn’t.
p.s. I have the “fierce” button and just successfully fierced a couple of comments. I don’t see a blue “you need to log in” under my comments.
p.p.s. above the comment (or reply) box, it says “Logged in as Tamar. Log out?”
Doesn’t that mean I am logged in?
Yes, you are logged in! I have no idea why it held your comment in moderation, then.
We don’t have to do anything. Thanks for persevering!
maybe there’s a little creature in the program that is suspicious of anyone coming from Daily Kos these days, given how badly treated bfitz was!
{{{Tamar}}} – I am so glad you made it over here. moar {{{HUGS}}}