Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

President Trump recently stumbled, in his usual word-salad way, into a subject to which I have given a good deal of thought over a period of decades (I once tried to write a book about it.) On May 1, on Sirius XM radio, Trump said:  "People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?" Trump said in an interview with The Washington Examiner that also aired on Sirius XM radio. "People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?" This much already is confusing. "People" in general "don't ask" that question? Sorry, but a lot of people do ask, and a lot of people, of varying levels of well-informed to ignoramus, have sought to answer it and have argued with one another's answers. I can only understand Trump here if he is saying, "People in my circles generally don't ask it, or haven't until quite recently, or I haven't paid attenti...

1.        George Washington (1788-96).Got the experiment with the new constitutional structure going. Jefferson and Hamilton, two cabinet members, famously argued over the extent of federal powers, and the propriety of a national bank. 2.        John Adams (1796-1800). Often called the “father of the American navy.” Built up the Navy in the face of the conflict between England and France, and their competing claims to control trade in the North Atlantic. 3.        Thomas Jefferson (1800-1808). Founder of the Republican-Democratic Party. Later shortened its name to “Democratic.” Still around – oldest political party in the world. 4.        James Madison (1808-16). He allowed the charter of the Bank of the United States, Hamilton’s bank, to expire unrenewed. But he was soon forced to create a new one, the so-called Second Bank, in order to finance a new war w...

Much of what we know or think we know about Nat Turner, and the slave rebellion to which he gave his name, derives from a single written source, a pamphlet by Thomas Ruffin Gray.  In a recent research paper for UC Berkeley, Christopher Tomlins has discussed "whether a hastily-written twenty page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable...."  Tomlins starts with the basics: beginning very early in the morning on August 22, 1831. Turner led a group of blacks, most of them slaves (Billy Artis was the free man in the group) in massacring the whites in slave holding families that morning. The massacre occupied them for 12 hours, the rebellion after that consisted of repeated confrontations with militia. By the afternoon of August 23, Turner was the only member of the group who had neither been killed nor captured. He eluded authoriti...

By way of concluding this round-up, I'll address two decisions that themselves addressed the relationship between the United States and its territory, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I'll also finish my discussion (begun earlier this year, well before this 'round-up series) of a controversy over US policy on the Mexican border and on the deportation of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Further, I'll say something about the ability of Indian tribes to maintain their own reservation-based courts, which courts can hear at least some controversies involving persons who are not residents thereof. All these controversies speak in their various ways to the idea of sovereignty, which underlies not only the US constitution, but any nation state's constitution, written or implicit. Tribes and Reservations Reservations are the sovereign territory of the recognized tribe. Obviously the Choctaws are not sovereign in quite the full-throated sense in which the United...

Meg Jacobs has written Panic at the Pump, a history of the 1970s energy crisis in the US which, in her view, destroyed post New Deal liberalism, bringing a generation of small-government conservatives to power. There were two distinct oil shocks: the first arising from the Yom Kippur War and the resulting embargo (1973-74), the second from the fall of the Shah in Iran (1979). I haven't read the book, except for brief excerpts available online. I notice it here only as a work likely to prove of interest for my astute and ever-curious readers. Here's one of those brief excerpts:"[T]he embargo stunned Americans, as if they had come under a surprise attack, if not an outright act of war, because of the serious implications for the economy and the country's security. By 1973, Americans relied on oil for almost half of their energy needs, and each day imports made up an expanding portion of the country's supply." Imports, the author says, were 36% of US oi...