Showing posts with label 13th Amendment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 13th Amendment. Show all posts
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Celebrating Juneteenth: The Untold Story of Neo-Slavery in the United States (repost)
This looked rather interesting:
Did you know that the so-called Emancipation Proclamation issued by Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln legally did not free one slave?
Did you know that the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not totally abolish slavery, but presented a way for it to legally continue?
Did you know that up until the 1980s there were still Blacks being held in the Deep South by private families as slaves?
Did you know that the American Gulag/Prison Industrial Complex is legally considered slavery?
Did you know that the treatment of the unlawful detainees held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay is very similar to the treatment of slaves in America?
Well, now you know and knowing is only have the battle. Read on:
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/
A Different Kind Of Slavery: New Atlanta Museum Will Honor Wealthy Citizens Who Used Water Boarding, Whipping, False Imprisonment, Forced Labor & Prisoner Murder To Rebuild The City After The Civil War
"Guards Had Recently Adopted For Punishment Of The Workers The 'Water Cure,' In Which Water Was Poured Into The Nostrils And Lungs Of Prisoners"
"Guards Holding Long Horse Whips Struck Any Worker Who Slowed To A Walk Or Paused"
"If You Ain't Dead, I Will Make You Dead If You Don't Go To Work,"
"Forced Workers In His Coal Mines Could Never Be Whipped Too Much"
March 29, 2008 By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, Wall St. Journal
At the center of a massive new real-estate development in Atlanta, an $18 million monument designed to honor 2,000 years of human achievement is nearing completion.
When it opens this summer, a museum inside the Millennium Gate also will pay special tribute to the accomplishments and philanthropy of some of the founding families of modern Atlanta.
Organizers say plans for the exhibit don't include one overlooked aspect of two of the city's post-Civil War leaders: the extensive use of thousands of forced black laborers.
The builders of the 73-foot archway say the museum is too small to convey every aspect of the city's founders and that it's appropriate to focus on the positive aspects of these men.
In this adaptation from his new book, "Slavery by Another Name," Douglas A. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, chronicles how companies owned by these two men used forced labor to help rebuild Atlanta -- a practice that was widespread through the South.
Millions of bricks used to make the sidewalks and streets of Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods -- many of them still in use today -- came from a factory owned by James W. English, the city's former mayor, and operated almost entirely with black forced laborers.
Many had been convicted of frivolous or manufactured crimes and then leased by the city to Mr. English's company, Chattahoochee Brick Co.
Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor.
Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests.
With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations.
Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude.
At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia, according to a 1905 report by the federal Commissioner of Labor.
Beginning in July 1908, a commission established by the Georgia Legislature convened a series of hearings into the state's system of leasing prisoners to private contractors. Meeting early every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating heat, the panel called more than 120 witnesses over three weeks to give testimony in the state Capitol's regal Room No. 16.
Joel Hurt, who one guard said believed the forced workers in his coal mines could never be whipped too much, was also chairman of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank. Leveraging his interests in real estate and mines worked by prisoners, Mr. Hurt was Atlanta's most energetic deal maker and buyout artist.
Accounts of Brutalities
Witness after witness -- ranging from former guards to legislators to freed slaves -- gave vivid accounts of the system's brutalities.
Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were left to die on the floor of a storage shed at a farm near Milledgeville.
Laborers who attempted escape from the Muscogee Brick Co. were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-long spikes turned inward -- to make it impossibly painful to run again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physically abusive.
Testimony described hellish conditions at Chattahoochee Brick and other operations owned by Mr. English, a luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the reviving city would have associated with human cruelty.
But by 1908, Mr. English -- despite having never owned antebellum slaves -- was a man whose great wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of thousands of men.
Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he served as a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in a prominent Georgia brigade. After the South's defeat, he went to Atlanta to establish himself in the business and politics of the bustling new capital of southern commerce. He led a drive to make the city the state capital of Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center. In 1880 he was elected mayor.
Presiding from an elegant home, Mr. English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a matching mustache, fostered a collection of enterprises that grew as Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin.
Chattahoochee Brick
The base of his wealth, Chattahoochee Brick, relied on forced labor from its inception, in 1878, and by the early 1890s, more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting heat of its fires.
By 1897, Mr. English's enterprises controlled 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in brick making, cutting crossties, lumbering, railroad construction and making turpentine.
Mr. English parlayed his industrial wealth to become one of the South's most important financiers as well. In 1896, he founded Atlanta's Fourth National Bank and became its first president.
Mr. English strenuously denied to the Georgia committee that any "act of cruelty" had ever been "committed upon a convict" under the control of himself or any member of his family. He insisted that he and his son were essentially absentee owners of the brick factory, having little to do with its daily operations.
"If a warden in charge of those convicts ever committed an act of cruelty to them," Mr. English said, "and it had come to my knowledge, I would have had him indicted and prosecuted."
Yet his testimony affirmed how Chattahoochee Brick -- like so many other Southern enterprises -- forced laborers to their absolute physical limits to extract modern levels of production using archaic manufacturing techniques.
Once dried, the bricks were carried at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and forth -- under almost continual lashing by Mr. English's overseer, Capt. James T. Casey.
Witnesses testified that guards holding long horse whips struck any worker who slowed to a walk or paused.
By the end of the century, the forced laborers churned out 300,000 hot red rectangles of hardened clay every day. Millions were sold to the Atlanta City Council to pave streets and line the sidewalks of Atlanta's flourishing new Victorian neighborhoods, according to company and city records.
The prisoners of the brickyard produced nearly 33 million bricks in the 12 months ending in May 1907, generating sales of $239,402 -- or about $5.2 million today. Of that, the English family pocketed the equivalent of nearly $1.9 million in profit -- an almost-unimaginable sum at the time.
A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most-intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens.
On Sundays, white men came to the Chattahoochee brickyard to buy, sell and trade black men as they had livestock and, a generation earlier, slaves on the block. "They had them stood up in a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would a mule," testified one former guard at the camp.
Another guard told the committee that 200 to 300 floggings were administered each month. "They were whipping all the time. It would be hard to tell how many whippings they did a day," testified Arthur W. Moore, a white former employee.
A rare former convict who was white testified that after a black prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work because of a grossly infected hand, the camp doctor carved off the affected skin tissue with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work.
Instead, Mr. Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, collapsed after the procedure.
The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard and whipped 25 times. "If you ain't dead, I will make you dead if you don't go to work," shouted a guard. Mr. Harris was carried to a cotton field. He died lying between the rows of cotton.
Similar testimony emerged from camps owned by Joel Hurt, the rich Atlanta real-estate developer and investor most remembered as the visionary behind the city's earliest and most-elegant subdivisions. Mr. Hurt was also the founder of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank -- the city's other pre-eminent financial institution.
The 'Water Cure'
In 1895, Mr. Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced-labor mines and furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. Guards there had recently adopted for punishment of the workers the "water cure," in which water was poured into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners. (The technique, preferred because it allowed miners to "go to work right away" after punishment, became infamous in the 21st century as "waterboarding.")
An elderly black man named Ephraim Gaither testified during the state's hearings as to the fate of a 16-year-old boy at a lumber camp owned by Mr. Hurt and operated by his son George Hurt.
The teenager was serving three months of hard labor for an unspecified misdemeanor.
"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking off," Mr. Gaither recounted.
"There was a young fellow, one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at the little negro and shot this side of his face off," Mr. Gaither said as he pointed to the left side of his face. The teenager ran into the woods and died.
Days later, a dog appeared in the camp dragging the boy's arm in its mouth, Mr. Gaither said. The homicide was never investigated.
Called to testify before the commission, Mr. Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic for any aspect of the sprawling businesses.
Another witness before the commission, former chief warden Jake Moore, testified that no prison guard could ever "do enough whipping for Mr. Hurt."
"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Mr. Moore told the panel.
In response to the revelations, Gov. Hoke Smith called a special session of the state Legislature, which authorized a public referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's nearly all-white electorate voted by a 2-to-1 margin to abolish the system as of March 1909. Without prison labor, business collapsed at Chattahoochee Brick. Production fell by nearly 50% in the next year. Total profit dwindled to less than $13,000.
The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners seemed a harbinger of a new day.
But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil War neoslavery was evolving -- not disappearing.
**********
MORE:
The World War II Effect:
"On The Eve Of World War II, Across The South, Many African-Americans Were Still Toiling As Coerced Laborers"
"There Still Existed No Federal Statute That Made Holding Slaves A Punishable Crime"
March 29, 2008 By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, Wall St. Journal
On the eve of World War II, across the South, many African-Americans were still toiling as coerced laborers.
Though states such as Georgia and Alabama no longer were leasing convicts to corporations, thousands of men still were forced to work for private enterprises.
But now, the practice was mainly carried out through informal arrangements with city and county courts.
Abusive sharecropping arrangements and the peonage system -- which allowed farmers to use bogus debts and the threat of violence to keep workers on their land indefinitely -- hung over millions of African-Americans.
Federal investigations into peonage, also known as debt slavery, were rare and ineffective. Although the antebellum version of slavery had been unconstitutional for decades, there still existed no federal statute that made holding slaves a punishable crime.
On Oct. 13, 1941, a man named Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in Alabama federal court to peonage. Mr. Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that officials wouldn't deal harshly with a white. He was correct. His penalty was a fine of $100 and six months of probation.
Less than two months later, Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Caught unprepared for war, U.S. officials frantically planned for a massive national mobilization and a crash propaganda effort.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed to advisors his worry that the mistreatment of blacks would be used in propaganda by Japan and Germany to undercut support for the war by African-Americans.
Attorney General Francis Biddle shared the president's concerns with his top assistants. Mr. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction -- effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Mr. Biddle, who hailed from an elite Northern family in Philadelphia, was shocked.
Mr. Biddle said that in an all-out war, in which millions of African-Americans would be called upon to serve, the U.S. government needed to take a stand: Those who continued to practice any form of slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment, had to be prosecuted as criminals.
Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Mr. Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.
He wrote: "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the attention of the United States Attorneys to the possibilities of successful prosecutions stemming from alleged peonage complaints which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke federal prosecution."
The Justice Department recently had formed its Civil Rights Section, created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized-labor efforts. It began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse -- issues more commonly associated with the term "civil rights" today.
Mr. Biddle wrote: "In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. ...Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes."
He ordered all Department of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in their written reports. Instead, they were to label every file "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."
In August 1942, a letter from a 16-year-old black boy arrived at the Department of Justice alleging that Charles Bledsoe -- the Alabama man who had received a $100 fine for peonage -- still was holding members of the teen's family against their will.
Despite Mr. Biddle's strong directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially saw no need to pursue the matter. The U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., Francis H. Inge, was similarly uninterested.
"No active investigation will be instituted," Mr. Hoover wrote to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge.
But seven months into World War II, with the nation anxious to mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's and Germany's propaganda machines, Mr. Berge directed Mr. Hoover to look further.
"In accordance with the request of the Attorney General that we expedite cases related to Negro victims, it will be appreciated if this matter is given preference," Mr. Berge wrote in a terse letter ordering Mr. Inge into action.
"Enemy propagandists have used similar episodes in international broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Mr. Berge continued. "There have been received from the President an instruction that lynching complaints shall be investigated as soon as possible; that the results of the investigation be made public in all instances, and the persons responsible for such lawless acts vigorously prosecuted. The Attorney General has requested that we expedite other cases related to Negro victims. Accordingly, you are requested to give the matter your immediate attention."
Mr. Biddle's civil-rights lawyers began to reassess the legal breadth of the constitutional amendments ending slavery, the Reconstruction-era statutes passed to enforce them and other largely forgotten laws, such as the antebellum Slave Kidnapping Act. That pre-Civil War measure made it illegal to capture or hold forced laborers in U.S. territory where slavery was prohibited.
As World War II progressed, the Department of Justice vigorously prosecuted U.S. Sugar Co. in Florida for forcing black men into its sugarcane fields. Sheriffs who colluded with the company were brought to trial.
Early in September 1942, a team of FBI agents, highway patrolmen and deputies descended on a remote farm near Beeville, Texas. There they arrested a white farmer, Alex Skrobarcek, and his adult daughter, Susie Skrobarcek.
The two initially were charged in a state court with maiming a mentally retarded black worker named Alfred Irving.
But a month later, lawyers at the Department of Justice drew a federal indictment alleging that the pair had held Mr. Irving in slavery for at least four years. They were accused of repeatedly beating the man with whips, chains and ropes -- so much so that he was physically disfigured from the abuse.
Signaling the significance of the case, a special assistant to Mr. Biddle actively participated in prosecuting the trial. The defendants were found guilty and sentenced to prison. Federal officials made clear that the case was intended to send a message: The U.S. government was finally serious about ending involuntary servitude.
"The Skrobarczyk trial and its conclusion undoubtedly will be said...to have given a decisive setback to the enemy propaganda machine...urging...negroes that their proper place in this conflict is with the yellow race," editorialized the Corpus Christi Times.
Two years later, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights recommended bolstering the antislavery statute to plainly criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal criminal code was dramatically rewritten, further clarifying such laws.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
**********
June 20, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice rose to power and influence against odds that must have seemed insurmountable at the time to a young black woman from Birmingham, Alabama. She was only eight years old when, in 1963, four young girls, including Rice's friend Denise McNair, were killed in her hometown by a bomb planted in their church by white supremacists. This week Secretary Rice pronounced herself, "...gratified, but not surprised", by Senator Obama's victory in the Democratic presidential primaries. She said, "As an American, it's a great thing. As a black American, it's a great thing." And she went on to express her belief that America is slowly but surely overcoming what she calls the country's "birth defect" of "racial inequality."
BILL MOYERS: But we're not there yet. Despite the success of Americans like Rice and Obama, we're still coping with the legacy of slavery and segregation. That's the subject of this broadcast, with my guests who think we may be at a defining moment in our history.
We begin with a preview of a moving film that will premiere next week on the public television series P.O.V. Be sure to watch it. You will see a story of how the descendents of one of America's first families discovered their own kin's complicity in the slave trade. "Traces of the Trade" is narrated by its producer and director, Katrina Browne.
KATRINA BROWNE: Every year my family would get together for July Fourth in Bristol, Rhode Island. It was a big deal 'cause Bristol boasts the longest running Fourth of July parade in the country. We'd watch the parade from the lawn of Linden Place. This big white mansion used to belong to my relatives. It's right in the center of town. This is me age two with my mother and grandmother. Here's me age three bossing my brother around.
KATRINA BROWNE: My DeWolf ancestors were known as the "Great Folk" in Bristol. There were professors and writers, artists and architects, and many Episcopal ministers. I was proud to be related to them. It never occurred to me to ask how we got so established.
KATRINA BROWNE: What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in US history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
BILL MOYERS: Katrina Browne asked members of her extended family to meet at Bristol's Episcopal church to begin a journey into the past.
KATRINA BROWNE: The church was pretty much new to me because I grew up in Philadelphia, where I was steeped in America's democratic ideals. In Bristol, it seems like the DeWolfs were the founding fathers. They were everywhere in the church; they even paid for the stained glass.
BILL MOYERS: Some in the family and even the town itself were reluctant for the story to be told.
KATRINA BROWNE: Linden Place was also concerned about our journey. The mansion was built in 1810 by George DeWolf, one of the two most prominent slave traders in the family. Linden Place stayed in family hands until 1989 when it was turned into a museum. Some museum board members were worried about advertising this connection of Linden Place to slavery. They didn't let us film inside. So we just passed by.
KATRINA BROWNE: Down at the harbor is James DeWolf's warehouse. This is where rum went out and sugar and molasses came in. James is the one who really masterminded the family take-over of all aspects of the trade. By the end of his life in 1837 he was supposedly the second richest man in the United States.
KATRINA BROWNE: At the Bristol Historical Society, tucked away in a corner on the second floor, there was a file cabinet, full of DeWolf papers. These eerie records revealed the details of the logical economic model that the DeWolfs developed from 1769 to 1820. Here's how they made it work.
KATRINA BROWNE: First they got the financing together. They recruited fellow townspeople to buy shares in their voyages and eventually started their own bank. They also started an insurance company to cover the risk. Rum was the prime currency of the slave trade, so James acquired a distillery from his father-in-law. The DeWolfs also purchased ships, mostly from builders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The ships took rum to the Guinea Coast to trade for Africans. "July 4th, 1795, bought nine prime slaves, one woman and eight men and paid for them tobacco, rum, hats, bread, mackerel." Many of the enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations that the DeWolfs established in Cuba. These plantations supplied sugar and molasses needed to make the rum back in Bristol. They also served as holding places for Africans while the DeWolfs waited for slave prices to go up at auction. "Havana, Sept. 11, 1806, John DeWolf of Bristol, Sale of 121 Negroes." Total income: 36,300 dollars, which today equals 553,000 dollars.
KATRINA BROWNE: The largest number of slaves were sold in Havana and Charleston. But Rhode Island slavers did business in more than 40 markets in the West Indies, North and South America. Rhode Island became the state most complicit in the American slave trade. Rum, Africans, sugar, rum. The efficient wheels of the Triangle Trade were set in motion again and again.
KATRINA BROWNE: And then there's one more detail. The slave trade was illegal for most of the time the DeWolfs were practicing it. To maneuver around the law, they secured a political favor from none other than President Thomas Jefferson, whose campaign they'd supported. Jefferson appointed their brother-in-law as Bristol's customs official. This man always happened to be looking the other way as DeWolf ships went in and out of harbor.
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When "Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and then back again to new England, where an orderly economy run by pious, church-going people prospered from their bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs struggling to come to terms with what they've learned about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb, facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men who fought and died to protect a way of life . Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have literally not been able to get this photograph out of my mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago, when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing series of pictures in these forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the farmer he was working for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And there were on the there were thousands and thousands of people who died under these circumstances over the span of the period that I write about in the book. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition, and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice would never had been heard, had you not discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just been freed from slavery. And now they have the opportunity to break away from the plantations where they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do. They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave black Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before of the 20th century, whites all across America have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's arrested, standing outside a train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't remember what the charge was by the time he brought him in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of a different crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of thousands of men working like a slave in these coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there are just two places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized, didn't this put African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk -- another reason is that anybody who raised these allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete excoriation among other white Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that there's an openness to a conversation about these things that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over again I've encountered people who've read the book, who e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale of things were. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say, "Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many of the African-Americans retiring today, were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be so much anger in the black community among, let's say, African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only your book, but about all of this, for research and so forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's website, www.slaverybyanothername.com.
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
Currently reading: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
Did you know that the so-called Emancipation Proclamation issued by Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln legally did not free one slave?
Did you know that the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not totally abolish slavery, but presented a way for it to legally continue?
Did you know that up until the 1980s there were still Blacks being held in the Deep South by private families as slaves?
Did you know that the American Gulag/Prison Industrial Complex is legally considered slavery?
Did you know that the treatment of the unlawful detainees held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay is very similar to the treatment of slaves in America?
Well, now you know and knowing is only have the battle. Read on:
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/
A Different Kind Of Slavery: New Atlanta Museum Will Honor Wealthy Citizens Who Used Water Boarding, Whipping, False Imprisonment, Forced Labor & Prisoner Murder To Rebuild The City After The Civil War
"Guards Had Recently Adopted For Punishment Of The Workers The 'Water Cure,' In Which Water Was Poured Into The Nostrils And Lungs Of Prisoners"
"Guards Holding Long Horse Whips Struck Any Worker Who Slowed To A Walk Or Paused"
"If You Ain't Dead, I Will Make You Dead If You Don't Go To Work,"
"Forced Workers In His Coal Mines Could Never Be Whipped Too Much"
March 29, 2008 By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, Wall St. Journal
At the center of a massive new real-estate development in Atlanta, an $18 million monument designed to honor 2,000 years of human achievement is nearing completion.
When it opens this summer, a museum inside the Millennium Gate also will pay special tribute to the accomplishments and philanthropy of some of the founding families of modern Atlanta.
Organizers say plans for the exhibit don't include one overlooked aspect of two of the city's post-Civil War leaders: the extensive use of thousands of forced black laborers.
The builders of the 73-foot archway say the museum is too small to convey every aspect of the city's founders and that it's appropriate to focus on the positive aspects of these men.
In this adaptation from his new book, "Slavery by Another Name," Douglas A. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, chronicles how companies owned by these two men used forced labor to help rebuild Atlanta -- a practice that was widespread through the South.
Millions of bricks used to make the sidewalks and streets of Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods -- many of them still in use today -- came from a factory owned by James W. English, the city's former mayor, and operated almost entirely with black forced laborers.
Many had been convicted of frivolous or manufactured crimes and then leased by the city to Mr. English's company, Chattahoochee Brick Co.
Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor.
Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests.
With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations.
Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude.
At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia, according to a 1905 report by the federal Commissioner of Labor.
Beginning in July 1908, a commission established by the Georgia Legislature convened a series of hearings into the state's system of leasing prisoners to private contractors. Meeting early every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating heat, the panel called more than 120 witnesses over three weeks to give testimony in the state Capitol's regal Room No. 16.
Joel Hurt, who one guard said believed the forced workers in his coal mines could never be whipped too much, was also chairman of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank. Leveraging his interests in real estate and mines worked by prisoners, Mr. Hurt was Atlanta's most energetic deal maker and buyout artist.
Accounts of Brutalities
Witness after witness -- ranging from former guards to legislators to freed slaves -- gave vivid accounts of the system's brutalities.
Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were left to die on the floor of a storage shed at a farm near Milledgeville.
Laborers who attempted escape from the Muscogee Brick Co. were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-long spikes turned inward -- to make it impossibly painful to run again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physically abusive.
Testimony described hellish conditions at Chattahoochee Brick and other operations owned by Mr. English, a luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the reviving city would have associated with human cruelty.
But by 1908, Mr. English -- despite having never owned antebellum slaves -- was a man whose great wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of thousands of men.
Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he served as a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in a prominent Georgia brigade. After the South's defeat, he went to Atlanta to establish himself in the business and politics of the bustling new capital of southern commerce. He led a drive to make the city the state capital of Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center. In 1880 he was elected mayor.
Presiding from an elegant home, Mr. English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a matching mustache, fostered a collection of enterprises that grew as Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin.
Chattahoochee Brick
The base of his wealth, Chattahoochee Brick, relied on forced labor from its inception, in 1878, and by the early 1890s, more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting heat of its fires.
By 1897, Mr. English's enterprises controlled 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in brick making, cutting crossties, lumbering, railroad construction and making turpentine.
Mr. English parlayed his industrial wealth to become one of the South's most important financiers as well. In 1896, he founded Atlanta's Fourth National Bank and became its first president.
Mr. English strenuously denied to the Georgia committee that any "act of cruelty" had ever been "committed upon a convict" under the control of himself or any member of his family. He insisted that he and his son were essentially absentee owners of the brick factory, having little to do with its daily operations.
"If a warden in charge of those convicts ever committed an act of cruelty to them," Mr. English said, "and it had come to my knowledge, I would have had him indicted and prosecuted."
Yet his testimony affirmed how Chattahoochee Brick -- like so many other Southern enterprises -- forced laborers to their absolute physical limits to extract modern levels of production using archaic manufacturing techniques.
Once dried, the bricks were carried at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and forth -- under almost continual lashing by Mr. English's overseer, Capt. James T. Casey.
Witnesses testified that guards holding long horse whips struck any worker who slowed to a walk or paused.
By the end of the century, the forced laborers churned out 300,000 hot red rectangles of hardened clay every day. Millions were sold to the Atlanta City Council to pave streets and line the sidewalks of Atlanta's flourishing new Victorian neighborhoods, according to company and city records.
The prisoners of the brickyard produced nearly 33 million bricks in the 12 months ending in May 1907, generating sales of $239,402 -- or about $5.2 million today. Of that, the English family pocketed the equivalent of nearly $1.9 million in profit -- an almost-unimaginable sum at the time.
A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most-intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens.
On Sundays, white men came to the Chattahoochee brickyard to buy, sell and trade black men as they had livestock and, a generation earlier, slaves on the block. "They had them stood up in a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would a mule," testified one former guard at the camp.
Another guard told the committee that 200 to 300 floggings were administered each month. "They were whipping all the time. It would be hard to tell how many whippings they did a day," testified Arthur W. Moore, a white former employee.
A rare former convict who was white testified that after a black prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work because of a grossly infected hand, the camp doctor carved off the affected skin tissue with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work.
Instead, Mr. Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, collapsed after the procedure.
The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard and whipped 25 times. "If you ain't dead, I will make you dead if you don't go to work," shouted a guard. Mr. Harris was carried to a cotton field. He died lying between the rows of cotton.
Similar testimony emerged from camps owned by Joel Hurt, the rich Atlanta real-estate developer and investor most remembered as the visionary behind the city's earliest and most-elegant subdivisions. Mr. Hurt was also the founder of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank -- the city's other pre-eminent financial institution.
The 'Water Cure'
In 1895, Mr. Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced-labor mines and furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. Guards there had recently adopted for punishment of the workers the "water cure," in which water was poured into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners. (The technique, preferred because it allowed miners to "go to work right away" after punishment, became infamous in the 21st century as "waterboarding.")
An elderly black man named Ephraim Gaither testified during the state's hearings as to the fate of a 16-year-old boy at a lumber camp owned by Mr. Hurt and operated by his son George Hurt.
The teenager was serving three months of hard labor for an unspecified misdemeanor.
"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking off," Mr. Gaither recounted.
"There was a young fellow, one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at the little negro and shot this side of his face off," Mr. Gaither said as he pointed to the left side of his face. The teenager ran into the woods and died.
Days later, a dog appeared in the camp dragging the boy's arm in its mouth, Mr. Gaither said. The homicide was never investigated.
Called to testify before the commission, Mr. Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic for any aspect of the sprawling businesses.
Another witness before the commission, former chief warden Jake Moore, testified that no prison guard could ever "do enough whipping for Mr. Hurt."
"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Mr. Moore told the panel.
In response to the revelations, Gov. Hoke Smith called a special session of the state Legislature, which authorized a public referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's nearly all-white electorate voted by a 2-to-1 margin to abolish the system as of March 1909. Without prison labor, business collapsed at Chattahoochee Brick. Production fell by nearly 50% in the next year. Total profit dwindled to less than $13,000.
The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners seemed a harbinger of a new day.
But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil War neoslavery was evolving -- not disappearing.
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MORE:
The World War II Effect:
"On The Eve Of World War II, Across The South, Many African-Americans Were Still Toiling As Coerced Laborers"
"There Still Existed No Federal Statute That Made Holding Slaves A Punishable Crime"
March 29, 2008 By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, Wall St. Journal
On the eve of World War II, across the South, many African-Americans were still toiling as coerced laborers.
Though states such as Georgia and Alabama no longer were leasing convicts to corporations, thousands of men still were forced to work for private enterprises.
But now, the practice was mainly carried out through informal arrangements with city and county courts.
Abusive sharecropping arrangements and the peonage system -- which allowed farmers to use bogus debts and the threat of violence to keep workers on their land indefinitely -- hung over millions of African-Americans.
Federal investigations into peonage, also known as debt slavery, were rare and ineffective. Although the antebellum version of slavery had been unconstitutional for decades, there still existed no federal statute that made holding slaves a punishable crime.
On Oct. 13, 1941, a man named Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in Alabama federal court to peonage. Mr. Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that officials wouldn't deal harshly with a white. He was correct. His penalty was a fine of $100 and six months of probation.
Less than two months later, Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Caught unprepared for war, U.S. officials frantically planned for a massive national mobilization and a crash propaganda effort.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed to advisors his worry that the mistreatment of blacks would be used in propaganda by Japan and Germany to undercut support for the war by African-Americans.
Attorney General Francis Biddle shared the president's concerns with his top assistants. Mr. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction -- effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Mr. Biddle, who hailed from an elite Northern family in Philadelphia, was shocked.
Mr. Biddle said that in an all-out war, in which millions of African-Americans would be called upon to serve, the U.S. government needed to take a stand: Those who continued to practice any form of slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment, had to be prosecuted as criminals.
Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Mr. Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.
He wrote: "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the attention of the United States Attorneys to the possibilities of successful prosecutions stemming from alleged peonage complaints which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke federal prosecution."
The Justice Department recently had formed its Civil Rights Section, created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized-labor efforts. It began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse -- issues more commonly associated with the term "civil rights" today.
Mr. Biddle wrote: "In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. ...Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes."
He ordered all Department of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in their written reports. Instead, they were to label every file "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."
In August 1942, a letter from a 16-year-old black boy arrived at the Department of Justice alleging that Charles Bledsoe -- the Alabama man who had received a $100 fine for peonage -- still was holding members of the teen's family against their will.
Despite Mr. Biddle's strong directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially saw no need to pursue the matter. The U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., Francis H. Inge, was similarly uninterested.
"No active investigation will be instituted," Mr. Hoover wrote to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge.
But seven months into World War II, with the nation anxious to mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's and Germany's propaganda machines, Mr. Berge directed Mr. Hoover to look further.
"In accordance with the request of the Attorney General that we expedite cases related to Negro victims, it will be appreciated if this matter is given preference," Mr. Berge wrote in a terse letter ordering Mr. Inge into action.
"Enemy propagandists have used similar episodes in international broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Mr. Berge continued. "There have been received from the President an instruction that lynching complaints shall be investigated as soon as possible; that the results of the investigation be made public in all instances, and the persons responsible for such lawless acts vigorously prosecuted. The Attorney General has requested that we expedite other cases related to Negro victims. Accordingly, you are requested to give the matter your immediate attention."
Mr. Biddle's civil-rights lawyers began to reassess the legal breadth of the constitutional amendments ending slavery, the Reconstruction-era statutes passed to enforce them and other largely forgotten laws, such as the antebellum Slave Kidnapping Act. That pre-Civil War measure made it illegal to capture or hold forced laborers in U.S. territory where slavery was prohibited.
As World War II progressed, the Department of Justice vigorously prosecuted U.S. Sugar Co. in Florida for forcing black men into its sugarcane fields. Sheriffs who colluded with the company were brought to trial.
Early in September 1942, a team of FBI agents, highway patrolmen and deputies descended on a remote farm near Beeville, Texas. There they arrested a white farmer, Alex Skrobarcek, and his adult daughter, Susie Skrobarcek.
The two initially were charged in a state court with maiming a mentally retarded black worker named Alfred Irving.
But a month later, lawyers at the Department of Justice drew a federal indictment alleging that the pair had held Mr. Irving in slavery for at least four years. They were accused of repeatedly beating the man with whips, chains and ropes -- so much so that he was physically disfigured from the abuse.
Signaling the significance of the case, a special assistant to Mr. Biddle actively participated in prosecuting the trial. The defendants were found guilty and sentenced to prison. Federal officials made clear that the case was intended to send a message: The U.S. government was finally serious about ending involuntary servitude.
"The Skrobarczyk trial and its conclusion undoubtedly will be said...to have given a decisive setback to the enemy propaganda machine...urging...negroes that their proper place in this conflict is with the yellow race," editorialized the Corpus Christi Times.
Two years later, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights recommended bolstering the antislavery statute to plainly criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal criminal code was dramatically rewritten, further clarifying such laws.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
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June 20, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice rose to power and influence against odds that must have seemed insurmountable at the time to a young black woman from Birmingham, Alabama. She was only eight years old when, in 1963, four young girls, including Rice's friend Denise McNair, were killed in her hometown by a bomb planted in their church by white supremacists. This week Secretary Rice pronounced herself, "...gratified, but not surprised", by Senator Obama's victory in the Democratic presidential primaries. She said, "As an American, it's a great thing. As a black American, it's a great thing." And she went on to express her belief that America is slowly but surely overcoming what she calls the country's "birth defect" of "racial inequality."
BILL MOYERS: But we're not there yet. Despite the success of Americans like Rice and Obama, we're still coping with the legacy of slavery and segregation. That's the subject of this broadcast, with my guests who think we may be at a defining moment in our history.
We begin with a preview of a moving film that will premiere next week on the public television series P.O.V. Be sure to watch it. You will see a story of how the descendents of one of America's first families discovered their own kin's complicity in the slave trade. "Traces of the Trade" is narrated by its producer and director, Katrina Browne.
KATRINA BROWNE: Every year my family would get together for July Fourth in Bristol, Rhode Island. It was a big deal 'cause Bristol boasts the longest running Fourth of July parade in the country. We'd watch the parade from the lawn of Linden Place. This big white mansion used to belong to my relatives. It's right in the center of town. This is me age two with my mother and grandmother. Here's me age three bossing my brother around.
KATRINA BROWNE: My DeWolf ancestors were known as the "Great Folk" in Bristol. There were professors and writers, artists and architects, and many Episcopal ministers. I was proud to be related to them. It never occurred to me to ask how we got so established.
KATRINA BROWNE: What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in US history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
BILL MOYERS: Katrina Browne asked members of her extended family to meet at Bristol's Episcopal church to begin a journey into the past.
KATRINA BROWNE: The church was pretty much new to me because I grew up in Philadelphia, where I was steeped in America's democratic ideals. In Bristol, it seems like the DeWolfs were the founding fathers. They were everywhere in the church; they even paid for the stained glass.
BILL MOYERS: Some in the family and even the town itself were reluctant for the story to be told.
KATRINA BROWNE: Linden Place was also concerned about our journey. The mansion was built in 1810 by George DeWolf, one of the two most prominent slave traders in the family. Linden Place stayed in family hands until 1989 when it was turned into a museum. Some museum board members were worried about advertising this connection of Linden Place to slavery. They didn't let us film inside. So we just passed by.
KATRINA BROWNE: Down at the harbor is James DeWolf's warehouse. This is where rum went out and sugar and molasses came in. James is the one who really masterminded the family take-over of all aspects of the trade. By the end of his life in 1837 he was supposedly the second richest man in the United States.
KATRINA BROWNE: At the Bristol Historical Society, tucked away in a corner on the second floor, there was a file cabinet, full of DeWolf papers. These eerie records revealed the details of the logical economic model that the DeWolfs developed from 1769 to 1820. Here's how they made it work.
KATRINA BROWNE: First they got the financing together. They recruited fellow townspeople to buy shares in their voyages and eventually started their own bank. They also started an insurance company to cover the risk. Rum was the prime currency of the slave trade, so James acquired a distillery from his father-in-law. The DeWolfs also purchased ships, mostly from builders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The ships took rum to the Guinea Coast to trade for Africans. "July 4th, 1795, bought nine prime slaves, one woman and eight men and paid for them tobacco, rum, hats, bread, mackerel." Many of the enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations that the DeWolfs established in Cuba. These plantations supplied sugar and molasses needed to make the rum back in Bristol. They also served as holding places for Africans while the DeWolfs waited for slave prices to go up at auction. "Havana, Sept. 11, 1806, John DeWolf of Bristol, Sale of 121 Negroes." Total income: 36,300 dollars, which today equals 553,000 dollars.
KATRINA BROWNE: The largest number of slaves were sold in Havana and Charleston. But Rhode Island slavers did business in more than 40 markets in the West Indies, North and South America. Rhode Island became the state most complicit in the American slave trade. Rum, Africans, sugar, rum. The efficient wheels of the Triangle Trade were set in motion again and again.
KATRINA BROWNE: And then there's one more detail. The slave trade was illegal for most of the time the DeWolfs were practicing it. To maneuver around the law, they secured a political favor from none other than President Thomas Jefferson, whose campaign they'd supported. Jefferson appointed their brother-in-law as Bristol's customs official. This man always happened to be looking the other way as DeWolf ships went in and out of harbor.
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When "Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and then back again to new England, where an orderly economy run by pious, church-going people prospered from their bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs struggling to come to terms with what they've learned about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb, facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men who fought and died to protect a way of life . Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have literally not been able to get this photograph out of my mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago, when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing series of pictures in these forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the farmer he was working for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And there were on the there were thousands and thousands of people who died under these circumstances over the span of the period that I write about in the book. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition, and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice would never had been heard, had you not discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just been freed from slavery. And now they have the opportunity to break away from the plantations where they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do. They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave black Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before of the 20th century, whites all across America have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's arrested, standing outside a train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't remember what the charge was by the time he brought him in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of a different crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of thousands of men working like a slave in these coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there are just two places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized, didn't this put African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there's just no foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges, so they could be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk -- another reason is that anybody who raised these allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete excoriation among other white Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that there's an openness to a conversation about these things that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over again I've encountered people who've read the book, who e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale of things were. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say, "Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many of the African-Americans retiring today, were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be so much anger in the black community among, let's say, African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only your book, but about all of this, for research and so forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's website, www.slaverybyanothername.com.
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
Currently reading: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Missing 13th Amendment (repost)
The Missing 13th Amendment
David Dodge, Researcher
Alfred Adask, Editor
This article first appeared in the August, 1991 issue of the Antishyster. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Norman Adask, creator and proprietor of the AntiShyster News Magazine.
For further information see" www.antishyster.com or write to adask@gte.net.
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"TITLES OF NOBILITY" AND "HONOR"
In the winter of 1983, archival research expert David Dodge, and former Baltimore police investigator Tom Dunn, were searching for evidence of government corruption in public records stored in the Belfast Library on the coast of Maine.
By chance, they discovered the library's oldest authentic copy of the Constitution of the United States (printed in 1825). Both men were stunned to see this document included a 13th Amendment that no longer appears on current copies of the Constitution. Moreover, after studying the Amendment's language and historical context, they realized the principle intent of this "missing" 13th Amendment was to prohibit lawyers from serving in government.
So began a seven year, nationwide search for the truth surrounding the most bizarre Constitutional puzzle in American history -- the unlawful removal of a ratified Amendment from the Constitution of the United States. Since 1983, Dodge and Dunn have uncovered additional copies of the Constitution with the "missing" 13th Amendment printed in at least eighteen separate publications by ten different states and territories over four decades from 1822 to 1860.
In June of this year (1991), Dodge uncovered the evidence that this missing 13th Amendment had indeed been lawfully ratified by the state of Virginia and was therefore an authentic Amendment to the American Constitution. If the evidence is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from our Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today. The implications are enormous.
The story of this "missing" Amendment is complex and at times confusing because the political issues and vocabulary of the American Revolution were different from our own. However, there are essentially two issues:
What does the Amendment mean?
Was the Amendment ratified?
Before we consider the issue of ratification, we should first understand the Amendment's meaning and consequent current relevance.
MEANING of the 13th Amendment
The "missing" 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
"If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them."
At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the "title of nobility" Amendment) seems obscure, unimportant. The references to "nobility", "honour", "emperor", "king", and "prince" lead us to dismiss this amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy. But in our modern world of Lady Di and Prince Charles, anti-royalist sentiments seem so archaic and quaint, that the Amendment can be ignored. Not so. Consider some evidence of its historical significance:
First, "titles of nobility" were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution of the United States (1787); Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional "title of nobility" amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819.
Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in "titles of nobility" and "honors" that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited "titles of nobility" several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though "titles of nobility" were already prohibited by the Constitution), it's obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To understand the meaning of this "missing" 13th Amendment, we must understand its historical context -- the era surrounding the American Revolution. We tend to regard the notion of "Democracy" as benign, harmless, and politically unremarkable. But at the time of the American Revolution, King George III and the other monarchies of Europe saw Democracy as an unnatural, ungodly ideological threat,1 every bit as dangerously radical as Communism was once regarded by modern Western nations. Just as the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia spawned other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided an example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow their European monarchies.
Even though the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the simple fact of our existence threatened the monarchies. The United States stood as a heroic role model for other nations, that inspired them to also struggle against oppressive monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Polish national uprising (1794) were in part encouraged by the American Revolution. Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the world, the monarchies regarded the United States as a political typhoid Mary, the principle source of radical democracy that was destroying monarchies around the world. The monarchies must have realized that if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the rest of the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would be saved.
Their survival at stake, the monarchies sought to destroy or subvert the American system of government. Knowing they couldn't destroy us militarily, they resorted to more covert methods of political subversion, employing spies and secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception -- it was, perhaps, the first "cold war". Since governments run on money, politicians run for money, and money is the usual enticement to commit treason, much of the monarchy's counter- revolutionary efforts emanated from English banks.
DON'T BANK ON IT (Modern Banking System)
The essence of banking was once explained by Sir Josiah Stamp, a former president of the Bank of England:
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again... Take this great power away from them, or if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
The last great abuse of our banking system caused the depression of the 1930's. Today's abuses may cause another. Current S&L and bank scandals illustrate the on-going relationships between banks, lawyers, politicians, and government agencies (look at the current BCCI bank scandal, involving lawyer Clark Clifford, politician Jimmy Carter, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and even the CIA). These scandals are the direct result of years of law-breaking by an alliance of bankers and lawyers using their influence and money to corrupt the political process and rob the public. (Think you're not being robbed? Guess who's going to pay the bill for the excesses of the S&L's, taxpayer? You are.)
The systematic robbery of productive individuals by parasitic bankers and lawyers is not a recent phenomenon. This abuse is a human tradition that predates the Bible and spread from Europe to America despite early colonial prohibitions.
When the first United States Bank was chartered by Congress in 1790, there were only three state banks in existence. At one time, banks were prohibited by law in most states because many of the early settlers were all too familiar with the practices of the European goldsmith banks.
Goldsmith banks were safe-houses used to store client's gold. In exchange for the deposited gold, customers were issued notes (paper money) which were redeemable in gold. The goldsmith bankers quickly succumbed to the temptation to issue "extra" notes, (unbacked by gold). Why? Because the "extra" notes enriched the bankers by allowing them to buy property with notes for gold that they did not own, gold that did not even exist.
Colonists knew that bankers occasionally printed too much paper money, found themselves over-leveraged, and caused a "run on the bank". If the bankers lacked sufficient gold to meet the demand, the paper money became worthless and common citizens left holding the paper were ruined. Although over-leveraged bankers were sometimes hung, the bankers continued printing extra money to increase their fortunes at the expense of the productive members of society. (The practice continues to this day, and offers "sweetheart" loans to bank insiders, and even provides the foundation for deficit spending and our federal government's unbridled growth.)
PAPER MONEY
If the colonists forgot the lessons of goldsmith bankers, the American Revolution refreshed their memories. To finance the war, Congress authorized the printing of continental bills of credit in an amount not to exceed $200,000,000. The States issued another $200,000,000 in paper notes. Ultimately, the value of the paper money fell so low that they were soon traded on speculation from 5000 to 1000 paper bills for one coin.
It's often suggested that our Constitution's prohibition against a paper economy -- "No State shall... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a tender in Payment of Debts" -- was a tool of the wealthy to be worked to the disadvantage of all others. But only in a "paper" economy can money reproduce itself and increase the claims of the wealthy at the expense of the productive.
"Paper money," said Pelatiah Webster, "polluted the equity of our laws, turned them into engines of oppression, corrupted the justice of our public administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had confidence in it, enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of our country, and went far to destroy the morality of our people."
CONSPIRACIES
A few examples of the attempts by the monarchies and banks that almost succeeded in destroying the United States:
According to the Tennessee Laws (1715-1820, vol. II, p. 774), in the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United States agreed to pay 600,000 pounds sterling to King George III, as reparations for the American revolution. The Senate ratified the treaty in secret session and ordered that it not be published. When Benjamin Franklin's grandson published it anyway, the exposure and resulting public uproar so angered the Congress that it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so federal judges could prosecute editors and publishers for reporting the truth about the government.
Since we had won the Revolutionary War, why would our Senators agree to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they agree to pay 600,000 pounds sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It doesn't make sense, especially in light of Senate's secrecy and later fury over being exposed, unless we assume our Senators had been bribed to serve the British monarchy and betray the American people. That's subversion.
The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out in its establishment. The initial capitalization was $10,000,000 - -- 80% of which would be owned by foreign bankers. Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its paid in capital), it was a profitable deal for both the government and the bankers since they could lend, and collect interest on, $10,000,000 that didn't exist.
However, the European bankers outfoxed the government and by 1796, the government owed the bank $6,200,000 and was forced to sell its shares. (By 1802, our government owned no stock in the United States Bank.)
The sheer power of the banks and their ability to influence representative government by economic manipulation and outright bribery was exposed in 1811, when the people discovered that European banking interests owned 80% of the bank. Congress therefore refused to renew the bank's charter. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000 in specie by European investors, which in turn, precipitated an economic recession, and the War of 1812. That's destruction.
There are undoubtedly other examples of the monarchy's efforts to subvert or destroy the United States; some are common knowledge, others remain to be disclosed to the public. For example, David Dodge discovered a book called "2 VA LAW" in the Library of Congress Law Library. According to Dodge, "This is an un-catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to overthrow the constitutional government by secret agreements engineered by the lawyers. That is one of the reasons why this amendment was ratified by Virginia and the notification was lost in the mail. There is no public record that this book exists."
That may sound surprising, but according to The Gazette (5/10/91), "the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare books and 13.9 million un- catalogued rare manuscripts." There may be secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing than a missing Constitutional Amendment.
TITLES OF NOBILITY
In seeking to rule the world and destroy the United States, bankers committed many crimes. Foremost among these crimes were fraud, conversion, and plain old theft. To escape prosecution for their crimes, the bankers did the same thing any career criminal does. They hired and formed alliances with the best lawyers and judges money could buy. These alliances, originally forged in Europe (particularly in Great Britain), spread to the colonies, and later into the newly formed United States of America.
Despite their criminal foundation, these alliances generated wealth, and ultimately, respectability. Like any modern member of organized crime, English bankers and lawyers wanted to be admired as "legitimate businessmen". As their criminal fortunes grew so did their usefulness, so the British monarchy legitimized these thieves by granting them "titles of nobility".
Historically, the British peerage system referred to knights as "Squires" and to those who bore the knight's shields as "Esquires". As lances, shields, and physical violence gave way to the more civilized means of theft, the pen grew mightier (and more profitable) than the sword, and the clever wielders of those pens (bankers and lawyers) came to hold titles of nobility. The most common title was "Esquire" (used, even today, by some lawyers).
INTERNATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION
In Colonial America, attorneys trained attorneys but most held no "title of nobility" or "honor". There was no requirement that one be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney, attorney general, or judge; a citizen's "counsel of choice" was not restricted to a lawyer; there were no state or national bar associations. The only organization that certified lawyers was the International Bar Association (IBA), chartered by the King of England, headquartered in London, and closely associated with the international banking system. Lawyers admitted to the IBA received the rank "Esquire" -- a "title of nobility". "Esquire" was the principle title of nobility which the 13th Amendment sought to prohibit from the United States. Why? Because the loyalty of "Esquire" lawyers was suspect. Bankers and lawyers with an "Esquire" behind their names were agents of the monarchy, members of an organization whose principle purposes were political, not economic, and regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve for members of the KGB or the CIA.
Article 1, Sect. 9 of the Constitution sought to prohibit the International Bar Association (or any other agency that granted titles of nobility) from operating in America. But the Constitution neglected to specify a penalty, so the prohibition was ignored, and agents of the monarchy continued to infiltrate and influence the government (as in the Jay Treaty and the US Bank charter incidents). Therefore, a "title of nobility" amendment that specified a penalty (loss of citizenship) was proposed in 1789, and again in 1810. The meaning of the amendment is seen in its intent to prohibit persons having titles of nobility and loyalties to foreign governments and bankers from voting, holding public office, or using their skills to subvert the government.
HONOR
The missing Amendment is referred to as the "title of nobility" Amendment, but the second prohibition against "honour" (honor), may be more significant.
According to David Dodge, Tom Dunn, and Webster's Dictionary, the archaic definition of "honor" (as used when the 13th Amendment was ratified) meant anyone "obtaining or having an advantage or privilege over another". A contemporary example of an "honor" granted to only a few Americans is the privilege of being a judge: Lawyers can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and powers; non-lawyers cannot.
By prohibiting "honors", the missing Amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some citizens an unequal opportunity to achieve or exercise political power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of the 13th Amendment was to ensure political equality among all American citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from claiming or exercising a special privilege or power (an "honor") over other citizens.
If this interpretation is correct, "honor" would be the key concept in the 13th Amendment. Why? Because, while "titles of nobility" may no longer apply in today's political system, the concept of "honor" remains relevant. For example, anyone who had a specific "immunity" from lawsuits which were not afforded to all citizens, would be enjoying a separate privilege, an "honor", and would therefore forfeit his right to vote or hold public office. Think of the "immunities" from lawsuits that our judges, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats currently enjoy. As another example, think of all the "special interest" legislation our government passes: "special interests" are simply euphemisms for "special privileges" (honors).2
WHAT IF? (Implications if Restored)
If the missing 13th Amendment were restored, "special interests" and "immunities" might be rendered unconstitutional. The prohibition against "honors" (privileges) would compel the entire government to operate under the same laws as the citizens of this nation. Without their current personal immunities (honors), our judges and I.R.S. agents would be unable to abuse common citizens without fear of legal liability. If this 13th Amendment were restored, our entire government would have to conduct itself according to the same standards of decency, respect, law, and liability as the rest of the nation. If this Amendment and the term "honor" were applied today, our government's ability to systematically coerce and abuse the public would be all but eliminated.
Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. How could we describe it? It would be ... almost like ... a government ... of the people ... by the people ... for the people!
Imagine: a government ... whose members were truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people! It's unheard of ... it's never been done before. Not ever in the entire history of the world.
Bear in mind that Senator George Mitchell of Maine and the National Archives concede this 13th Amendment was proposed by Congress in 1810. However, they explain that there were seventeen states when Congress proposed the "title of nobility" Amendment; that ratification required the support of thirteen states, but since only twelve states supported the Amendment, it was not ratified. The Government Printing Office agrees; it currently prints copies of the Constitution of the United States which include the "title of nobility" Amendment as proposed, but un-ratified.
Even if this 13th Amendment were never ratified, even if Dodge and Dunn's research or reasoning is flawed or incomplete, it would still be an extraordinary story. Can you imagine, can you understand how close we came to having a political paradise, right here on Earth? Do you realize what an extraordinary gift our forebears tried to bequeath us? And how close we came? One vote. One state's vote.
The federal government concedes that twelve states voted to ratify this Amendment between 1810 and 1812. But they argue that ratification require thirteen states, so the Amendment lays stillborn in history, unratified for lack of a just one more state's support. One vote.
David Dodge, however, says one more state did ratify, and he claims he has the evidence to prove it.
PARADISE LOST, RATIFICATION FOUND
In 1789, the House of Representatives compiled a list of possible Constitutional Amendments, some of which would ultimately become our Bill of Rights. The House proposed seventeen; the Senate reduced the list to twelve. During this process that Senator Tristrain Dalton (Mass.) proposed an Amendment seeking to prohibit and provide a penalty for any American accepting a "title of Nobility" (RG 46 Records of the U.S. Senate). Although it wasn't passed, this was the first time a "title of nobility" amendment was proposed.
Twenty years later, in January, 1810, Senator Reed proposed another "Title of Nobility" Amendment (History of Congress, Proceedings of the Senate, p. 529- 530). On April 27, 1810, the Senate voted to pass this 13th Amendment by a vote of 26 to 1; the House resolved in the affirmative 87 to 3; and the following resolve was sent to the States for ratification:
"If any citizen of the United States shall Accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them."
The Constitution requires three-quarters of the states to ratify a proposed amendment before it may be added to the Constitution. When Congress proposed the "Title of Nobility" Amendment in 1810, there were seventeen states, thirteen of which would have to ratify for the Amendment to be adopted. According to the National Archives, the following is a list of the twelve states that ratified, and their dates of ratification:
Ratification of Original 13th Amendment
Maryland, Dec. 25, 1810 Kentucky, Jan. 31, 1811
Ohio, Jan. 31, 1811 Delaware, Feb. 2, 1811
Pennsylvania, Feb. 6, 1811 New Jersey, Feb. 13, 1811
Vermont, Oct. 24, 1811 Tennessee, Nov. 21, 1811
Georgia, Dec. 13, 1811 North Carolina, Dec. 23, 1811
Massachusetts, Feb. 27, 1812 New Hampshire, Dec. 10, 1812
Before a thirteenth state could ratify, the War of 1812 broke out with England. By the time the war ended in 1814, the British had burned the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and most of the records of the first 38 years of government. Whether there was a connection between the proposed "title of nobility" amendment and the War of 1812 is not known. However, the momentum to ratify the proposed Amendment was lost in the tumult of war.
Then, four years later, on December 31, 1817, the House of Representatives resolved that President Monroe inquire into the status of this Amendment. In a letter dated February 6, 1818, President Monroe reported to the House that the Secretary of State Adams had written to the governors of Virginia, South Carolina and Connecticut to tell them that the proposed Amendment had been ratified by twelve States and rejected by two (New York and Rhode Island), and asked the governors to notify him of their legislature's position. (House Document No. 76) (This, and other letters written by the President and the Secretary of State during the month of February, 1818, note only that the proposed Amendment had not yet been ratified. However, these letters would later become crucial because, in the absence of additional information they would be interpreted to mean the amendment was never ratified).
On February 28, 1818, Secretary of State Adams reported the rejection of the Amendment by South Carolina. [House Doc. No. 129]. There are no further entries regarding the ratification of the 13th Amendment in the Journals of Congress; whether Virginia ratified is neither confirmed nor denied. Likewise, a search through the executive papers of Governor Preston of Virginia does not reveal any correspondence from Secretary of State Adams. (However, there is a journal entry in the Virginia House that the Governor presented the House with an official letter and documents from Washington within a time frame that conceivably includes receipt of Adams' letter.)
Again, no evidence of ratification; none of denial.
However, on March 10, 1819, the Virginia legislature passed Act No. 280 (Virginia Archives of Richmond, "misc." file, p. 299 for micro-film):
"Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that there shall be published an edition of the Laws of this Commonwealth in which shall be contained the following matters, that is to say: the Constitution of the united States and the amendments thereto..."
This act was the specific legislated instructions on what was, by law, to be included in the re-publication (a special edition) of the Virginia Civil Code. The Virginia Legislature had already agreed that all Acts were to go into effect on the same day -- the day that the Act to re-publish the Civil Code was enacted. Therefore, the 13th Amendment's official date of ratification would be the date of re- publication of the Virginia Civil Code: March 12, 1819.
The Delegates knew Virginia was the last of the 13 States that were necessary for the ratification of the 13th Amendment. They also knew there were powerful forces allied against this ratification so they took extraordinary measures to make sure that it was published in sufficient quantity (4,000 copies were ordered, almost triple their usual order), and instructed the printer to send a copy to President James Monroe as well as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. (The printer, Thomas Ritchie, was bonded. He was required to be extremely accurate in his research and his printing, or he would forfeit his bond.)
In this fashion, Virginia announced the ratification: by publication and dissemination of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
There is question as to whether Virginia ever formally notified the Secretary of State that they had ratified this 13th Amendment. Some have argued that because such notification was not received (or at least, not recorded), the Amendment was therefore not legally ratified. However, printing by a legislature is prima facie evidence of ratification. Further, there is no Constitutional requirement that the Secretary of State, or anyone else, be officially notified to complete the ratification process. The Constitution only requires that three- fourths of the states ratify for an Amendment to be added to the Constitution. If three-quarters of the states ratify, the Amendment is passed. Period. The Constitution is otherwise silent on what procedure should be used to announce, confirm, or communicate the ratification of amendments.
Knowing they were the last state necessary to ratify the Amendment, the Virginians had every right announce their own and the nation's ratification of the Amendment by publishing it on a special edition of the Constitution, and so they did.
Word of Virginia's 1819 ratification spread throughout the States and both Rhode Island and Kentucky published the new Amendment in 1822. Ohio first published in 1824. Maine ordered 10,000 copies of the Constitution with the 13th Amendment to be printed for use in the schools in 1825, and again in 1831 for their Census Edition. Indiana Revised Laws of 1831 published the 13th Article on p. 20. Northwestern Territories published in 1833. Ohio published in 1831 and 1833. Then came the Wisconsin Territory in 1839; Iowa Territory in 1843; Ohio again, in 1848; Kansas Statutes in 1855; and Nebraska Territory six times in a row from 1855 to 1860.
So far, David Dodge has identified eleven different states or territories that printed the Amendment in twenty separate publications over forty-one years. And more editions including this 13th Amendment are sure to be discovered. Clearly, Dodge is onto something.
You might be able to convince some of the people, or maybe even all of them, for a little while, that this 13th Amendment was never ratified. Maybe you can show them that the ten legislatures which ordered it published eighteen times we've discovered (so far) consisted of ignorant politicians who don't know their amendments from their... ahh, articles. You might even be able to convince the public that our forefathers never meant to "outlaw" public servants who pushed people around, accepted bribes or special favors to "look the other way." Maybe. But before you do, there's an awful lot of evidence to be explained.
THE AMENDMENT DISAPPEARS
In 1829, the following note appears on p. 23, Vol. 1 of the New York Revised Statutes:
"In the edition of the Laws of the U.S. before referred to, there is an amendment printed as article 13, prohibiting citizens from accepting titles of nobility or honor, or presents, offices, &c. from foreign nations. But, by a message of the president of the United States of the 4th of February, 1818, in answer to a resolution of the house of representatives, it appears that this amendment had been ratified only by 12 states, and therefore had not been adopted. See Vol. IV of the printed papers of the 1st session of the 15th congress, No. 76."
In 1854, a similar note appeared in the Oregon Statutes. Both notes refer to the Laws of the United States, 1st vol. p. 73(or 74).
It's not yet clear whether the 13th Amendment was published in Laws of the United States, 1st Vol., prematurely, by accident, in anticipation of Virginia's ratification, or as part of a plot to discredit the Amendment by making is appear that only twelve States had ratified. Whether the Laws of the United States Vol. 1 (carrying the 13th Amendment) was re-called or made-up is unknown. In fact, it's not even clear that the specified volume was actually printed -- the Law Library of the Library of Congress has no record of its existence.
However, because the notes' authors reported no further references to the 13th Amendment after the Presidential letter of February, 1818, they apparently assumed the ratification process had ended in failure at that time. If so, they neglected to seek information on the Amendment after 1818, or at the state level, and therefore missed the evidence of Virginia's ratification. This opinion -- assuming that the Presidential letter of February, 1818, was the last word on the Amendment -- has persisted.
However, despite Clayton's opinion, the Amendment continued to be published in various states and territories for at least another eleven years (the last known publication was in the Nebraska territory in 1860)
(end of report)
Do you agree, that if this amendment were in place, that the United States of America would be a wholly different entity than what exists now?
WE THE PEOPLE would be enjoying a paradise upon Earth (Terra)...but understand - all that is needed is for the State of Virginia to agree that ratification has taken place, and WE THE PEOPLE can take back our government from the scumbags who have ruined everything, and plan to ruin all else.
David Dodge, Researcher
Alfred Adask, Editor
This article first appeared in the August, 1991 issue of the Antishyster. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Norman Adask, creator and proprietor of the AntiShyster News Magazine.
For further information see" www.antishyster.com or write to adask@gte.net.
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"TITLES OF NOBILITY" AND "HONOR"
In the winter of 1983, archival research expert David Dodge, and former Baltimore police investigator Tom Dunn, were searching for evidence of government corruption in public records stored in the Belfast Library on the coast of Maine.
By chance, they discovered the library's oldest authentic copy of the Constitution of the United States (printed in 1825). Both men were stunned to see this document included a 13th Amendment that no longer appears on current copies of the Constitution. Moreover, after studying the Amendment's language and historical context, they realized the principle intent of this "missing" 13th Amendment was to prohibit lawyers from serving in government.
So began a seven year, nationwide search for the truth surrounding the most bizarre Constitutional puzzle in American history -- the unlawful removal of a ratified Amendment from the Constitution of the United States. Since 1983, Dodge and Dunn have uncovered additional copies of the Constitution with the "missing" 13th Amendment printed in at least eighteen separate publications by ten different states and territories over four decades from 1822 to 1860.
In June of this year (1991), Dodge uncovered the evidence that this missing 13th Amendment had indeed been lawfully ratified by the state of Virginia and was therefore an authentic Amendment to the American Constitution. If the evidence is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from our Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today. The implications are enormous.
The story of this "missing" Amendment is complex and at times confusing because the political issues and vocabulary of the American Revolution were different from our own. However, there are essentially two issues:
What does the Amendment mean?
Was the Amendment ratified?
Before we consider the issue of ratification, we should first understand the Amendment's meaning and consequent current relevance.
MEANING of the 13th Amendment
The "missing" 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
"If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them."
At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the "title of nobility" Amendment) seems obscure, unimportant. The references to "nobility", "honour", "emperor", "king", and "prince" lead us to dismiss this amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy. But in our modern world of Lady Di and Prince Charles, anti-royalist sentiments seem so archaic and quaint, that the Amendment can be ignored. Not so. Consider some evidence of its historical significance:
First, "titles of nobility" were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution of the United States (1787); Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional "title of nobility" amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819.
Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in "titles of nobility" and "honors" that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited "titles of nobility" several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though "titles of nobility" were already prohibited by the Constitution), it's obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To understand the meaning of this "missing" 13th Amendment, we must understand its historical context -- the era surrounding the American Revolution. We tend to regard the notion of "Democracy" as benign, harmless, and politically unremarkable. But at the time of the American Revolution, King George III and the other monarchies of Europe saw Democracy as an unnatural, ungodly ideological threat,1 every bit as dangerously radical as Communism was once regarded by modern Western nations. Just as the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia spawned other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided an example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow their European monarchies.
Even though the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the simple fact of our existence threatened the monarchies. The United States stood as a heroic role model for other nations, that inspired them to also struggle against oppressive monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Polish national uprising (1794) were in part encouraged by the American Revolution. Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the world, the monarchies regarded the United States as a political typhoid Mary, the principle source of radical democracy that was destroying monarchies around the world. The monarchies must have realized that if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the rest of the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would be saved.
Their survival at stake, the monarchies sought to destroy or subvert the American system of government. Knowing they couldn't destroy us militarily, they resorted to more covert methods of political subversion, employing spies and secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception -- it was, perhaps, the first "cold war". Since governments run on money, politicians run for money, and money is the usual enticement to commit treason, much of the monarchy's counter- revolutionary efforts emanated from English banks.
DON'T BANK ON IT (Modern Banking System)
The essence of banking was once explained by Sir Josiah Stamp, a former president of the Bank of England:
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again... Take this great power away from them, or if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
The last great abuse of our banking system caused the depression of the 1930's. Today's abuses may cause another. Current S&L and bank scandals illustrate the on-going relationships between banks, lawyers, politicians, and government agencies (look at the current BCCI bank scandal, involving lawyer Clark Clifford, politician Jimmy Carter, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and even the CIA). These scandals are the direct result of years of law-breaking by an alliance of bankers and lawyers using their influence and money to corrupt the political process and rob the public. (Think you're not being robbed? Guess who's going to pay the bill for the excesses of the S&L's, taxpayer? You are.)
The systematic robbery of productive individuals by parasitic bankers and lawyers is not a recent phenomenon. This abuse is a human tradition that predates the Bible and spread from Europe to America despite early colonial prohibitions.
When the first United States Bank was chartered by Congress in 1790, there were only three state banks in existence. At one time, banks were prohibited by law in most states because many of the early settlers were all too familiar with the practices of the European goldsmith banks.
Goldsmith banks were safe-houses used to store client's gold. In exchange for the deposited gold, customers were issued notes (paper money) which were redeemable in gold. The goldsmith bankers quickly succumbed to the temptation to issue "extra" notes, (unbacked by gold). Why? Because the "extra" notes enriched the bankers by allowing them to buy property with notes for gold that they did not own, gold that did not even exist.
Colonists knew that bankers occasionally printed too much paper money, found themselves over-leveraged, and caused a "run on the bank". If the bankers lacked sufficient gold to meet the demand, the paper money became worthless and common citizens left holding the paper were ruined. Although over-leveraged bankers were sometimes hung, the bankers continued printing extra money to increase their fortunes at the expense of the productive members of society. (The practice continues to this day, and offers "sweetheart" loans to bank insiders, and even provides the foundation for deficit spending and our federal government's unbridled growth.)
PAPER MONEY
If the colonists forgot the lessons of goldsmith bankers, the American Revolution refreshed their memories. To finance the war, Congress authorized the printing of continental bills of credit in an amount not to exceed $200,000,000. The States issued another $200,000,000 in paper notes. Ultimately, the value of the paper money fell so low that they were soon traded on speculation from 5000 to 1000 paper bills for one coin.
It's often suggested that our Constitution's prohibition against a paper economy -- "No State shall... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a tender in Payment of Debts" -- was a tool of the wealthy to be worked to the disadvantage of all others. But only in a "paper" economy can money reproduce itself and increase the claims of the wealthy at the expense of the productive.
"Paper money," said Pelatiah Webster, "polluted the equity of our laws, turned them into engines of oppression, corrupted the justice of our public administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had confidence in it, enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of our country, and went far to destroy the morality of our people."
CONSPIRACIES
A few examples of the attempts by the monarchies and banks that almost succeeded in destroying the United States:
According to the Tennessee Laws (1715-1820, vol. II, p. 774), in the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United States agreed to pay 600,000 pounds sterling to King George III, as reparations for the American revolution. The Senate ratified the treaty in secret session and ordered that it not be published. When Benjamin Franklin's grandson published it anyway, the exposure and resulting public uproar so angered the Congress that it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so federal judges could prosecute editors and publishers for reporting the truth about the government.
Since we had won the Revolutionary War, why would our Senators agree to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they agree to pay 600,000 pounds sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It doesn't make sense, especially in light of Senate's secrecy and later fury over being exposed, unless we assume our Senators had been bribed to serve the British monarchy and betray the American people. That's subversion.
The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out in its establishment. The initial capitalization was $10,000,000 - -- 80% of which would be owned by foreign bankers. Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its paid in capital), it was a profitable deal for both the government and the bankers since they could lend, and collect interest on, $10,000,000 that didn't exist.
However, the European bankers outfoxed the government and by 1796, the government owed the bank $6,200,000 and was forced to sell its shares. (By 1802, our government owned no stock in the United States Bank.)
The sheer power of the banks and their ability to influence representative government by economic manipulation and outright bribery was exposed in 1811, when the people discovered that European banking interests owned 80% of the bank. Congress therefore refused to renew the bank's charter. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000 in specie by European investors, which in turn, precipitated an economic recession, and the War of 1812. That's destruction.
There are undoubtedly other examples of the monarchy's efforts to subvert or destroy the United States; some are common knowledge, others remain to be disclosed to the public. For example, David Dodge discovered a book called "2 VA LAW" in the Library of Congress Law Library. According to Dodge, "This is an un-catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to overthrow the constitutional government by secret agreements engineered by the lawyers. That is one of the reasons why this amendment was ratified by Virginia and the notification was lost in the mail. There is no public record that this book exists."
That may sound surprising, but according to The Gazette (5/10/91), "the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare books and 13.9 million un- catalogued rare manuscripts." There may be secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing than a missing Constitutional Amendment.
TITLES OF NOBILITY
In seeking to rule the world and destroy the United States, bankers committed many crimes. Foremost among these crimes were fraud, conversion, and plain old theft. To escape prosecution for their crimes, the bankers did the same thing any career criminal does. They hired and formed alliances with the best lawyers and judges money could buy. These alliances, originally forged in Europe (particularly in Great Britain), spread to the colonies, and later into the newly formed United States of America.
Despite their criminal foundation, these alliances generated wealth, and ultimately, respectability. Like any modern member of organized crime, English bankers and lawyers wanted to be admired as "legitimate businessmen". As their criminal fortunes grew so did their usefulness, so the British monarchy legitimized these thieves by granting them "titles of nobility".
Historically, the British peerage system referred to knights as "Squires" and to those who bore the knight's shields as "Esquires". As lances, shields, and physical violence gave way to the more civilized means of theft, the pen grew mightier (and more profitable) than the sword, and the clever wielders of those pens (bankers and lawyers) came to hold titles of nobility. The most common title was "Esquire" (used, even today, by some lawyers).
INTERNATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION
In Colonial America, attorneys trained attorneys but most held no "title of nobility" or "honor". There was no requirement that one be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney, attorney general, or judge; a citizen's "counsel of choice" was not restricted to a lawyer; there were no state or national bar associations. The only organization that certified lawyers was the International Bar Association (IBA), chartered by the King of England, headquartered in London, and closely associated with the international banking system. Lawyers admitted to the IBA received the rank "Esquire" -- a "title of nobility". "Esquire" was the principle title of nobility which the 13th Amendment sought to prohibit from the United States. Why? Because the loyalty of "Esquire" lawyers was suspect. Bankers and lawyers with an "Esquire" behind their names were agents of the monarchy, members of an organization whose principle purposes were political, not economic, and regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve for members of the KGB or the CIA.
Article 1, Sect. 9 of the Constitution sought to prohibit the International Bar Association (or any other agency that granted titles of nobility) from operating in America. But the Constitution neglected to specify a penalty, so the prohibition was ignored, and agents of the monarchy continued to infiltrate and influence the government (as in the Jay Treaty and the US Bank charter incidents). Therefore, a "title of nobility" amendment that specified a penalty (loss of citizenship) was proposed in 1789, and again in 1810. The meaning of the amendment is seen in its intent to prohibit persons having titles of nobility and loyalties to foreign governments and bankers from voting, holding public office, or using their skills to subvert the government.
HONOR
The missing Amendment is referred to as the "title of nobility" Amendment, but the second prohibition against "honour" (honor), may be more significant.
According to David Dodge, Tom Dunn, and Webster's Dictionary, the archaic definition of "honor" (as used when the 13th Amendment was ratified) meant anyone "obtaining or having an advantage or privilege over another". A contemporary example of an "honor" granted to only a few Americans is the privilege of being a judge: Lawyers can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and powers; non-lawyers cannot.
By prohibiting "honors", the missing Amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some citizens an unequal opportunity to achieve or exercise political power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of the 13th Amendment was to ensure political equality among all American citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from claiming or exercising a special privilege or power (an "honor") over other citizens.
If this interpretation is correct, "honor" would be the key concept in the 13th Amendment. Why? Because, while "titles of nobility" may no longer apply in today's political system, the concept of "honor" remains relevant. For example, anyone who had a specific "immunity" from lawsuits which were not afforded to all citizens, would be enjoying a separate privilege, an "honor", and would therefore forfeit his right to vote or hold public office. Think of the "immunities" from lawsuits that our judges, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats currently enjoy. As another example, think of all the "special interest" legislation our government passes: "special interests" are simply euphemisms for "special privileges" (honors).2
WHAT IF? (Implications if Restored)
If the missing 13th Amendment were restored, "special interests" and "immunities" might be rendered unconstitutional. The prohibition against "honors" (privileges) would compel the entire government to operate under the same laws as the citizens of this nation. Without their current personal immunities (honors), our judges and I.R.S. agents would be unable to abuse common citizens without fear of legal liability. If this 13th Amendment were restored, our entire government would have to conduct itself according to the same standards of decency, respect, law, and liability as the rest of the nation. If this Amendment and the term "honor" were applied today, our government's ability to systematically coerce and abuse the public would be all but eliminated.
Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. How could we describe it? It would be ... almost like ... a government ... of the people ... by the people ... for the people!
Imagine: a government ... whose members were truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people! It's unheard of ... it's never been done before. Not ever in the entire history of the world.
Bear in mind that Senator George Mitchell of Maine and the National Archives concede this 13th Amendment was proposed by Congress in 1810. However, they explain that there were seventeen states when Congress proposed the "title of nobility" Amendment; that ratification required the support of thirteen states, but since only twelve states supported the Amendment, it was not ratified. The Government Printing Office agrees; it currently prints copies of the Constitution of the United States which include the "title of nobility" Amendment as proposed, but un-ratified.
Even if this 13th Amendment were never ratified, even if Dodge and Dunn's research or reasoning is flawed or incomplete, it would still be an extraordinary story. Can you imagine, can you understand how close we came to having a political paradise, right here on Earth? Do you realize what an extraordinary gift our forebears tried to bequeath us? And how close we came? One vote. One state's vote.
The federal government concedes that twelve states voted to ratify this Amendment between 1810 and 1812. But they argue that ratification require thirteen states, so the Amendment lays stillborn in history, unratified for lack of a just one more state's support. One vote.
David Dodge, however, says one more state did ratify, and he claims he has the evidence to prove it.
PARADISE LOST, RATIFICATION FOUND
In 1789, the House of Representatives compiled a list of possible Constitutional Amendments, some of which would ultimately become our Bill of Rights. The House proposed seventeen; the Senate reduced the list to twelve. During this process that Senator Tristrain Dalton (Mass.) proposed an Amendment seeking to prohibit and provide a penalty for any American accepting a "title of Nobility" (RG 46 Records of the U.S. Senate). Although it wasn't passed, this was the first time a "title of nobility" amendment was proposed.
Twenty years later, in January, 1810, Senator Reed proposed another "Title of Nobility" Amendment (History of Congress, Proceedings of the Senate, p. 529- 530). On April 27, 1810, the Senate voted to pass this 13th Amendment by a vote of 26 to 1; the House resolved in the affirmative 87 to 3; and the following resolve was sent to the States for ratification:
"If any citizen of the United States shall Accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them."
The Constitution requires three-quarters of the states to ratify a proposed amendment before it may be added to the Constitution. When Congress proposed the "Title of Nobility" Amendment in 1810, there were seventeen states, thirteen of which would have to ratify for the Amendment to be adopted. According to the National Archives, the following is a list of the twelve states that ratified, and their dates of ratification:
Ratification of Original 13th Amendment
Maryland, Dec. 25, 1810 Kentucky, Jan. 31, 1811
Ohio, Jan. 31, 1811 Delaware, Feb. 2, 1811
Pennsylvania, Feb. 6, 1811 New Jersey, Feb. 13, 1811
Vermont, Oct. 24, 1811 Tennessee, Nov. 21, 1811
Georgia, Dec. 13, 1811 North Carolina, Dec. 23, 1811
Massachusetts, Feb. 27, 1812 New Hampshire, Dec. 10, 1812
Before a thirteenth state could ratify, the War of 1812 broke out with England. By the time the war ended in 1814, the British had burned the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and most of the records of the first 38 years of government. Whether there was a connection between the proposed "title of nobility" amendment and the War of 1812 is not known. However, the momentum to ratify the proposed Amendment was lost in the tumult of war.
Then, four years later, on December 31, 1817, the House of Representatives resolved that President Monroe inquire into the status of this Amendment. In a letter dated February 6, 1818, President Monroe reported to the House that the Secretary of State Adams had written to the governors of Virginia, South Carolina and Connecticut to tell them that the proposed Amendment had been ratified by twelve States and rejected by two (New York and Rhode Island), and asked the governors to notify him of their legislature's position. (House Document No. 76) (This, and other letters written by the President and the Secretary of State during the month of February, 1818, note only that the proposed Amendment had not yet been ratified. However, these letters would later become crucial because, in the absence of additional information they would be interpreted to mean the amendment was never ratified).
On February 28, 1818, Secretary of State Adams reported the rejection of the Amendment by South Carolina. [House Doc. No. 129]. There are no further entries regarding the ratification of the 13th Amendment in the Journals of Congress; whether Virginia ratified is neither confirmed nor denied. Likewise, a search through the executive papers of Governor Preston of Virginia does not reveal any correspondence from Secretary of State Adams. (However, there is a journal entry in the Virginia House that the Governor presented the House with an official letter and documents from Washington within a time frame that conceivably includes receipt of Adams' letter.)
Again, no evidence of ratification; none of denial.
However, on March 10, 1819, the Virginia legislature passed Act No. 280 (Virginia Archives of Richmond, "misc." file, p. 299 for micro-film):
"Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that there shall be published an edition of the Laws of this Commonwealth in which shall be contained the following matters, that is to say: the Constitution of the united States and the amendments thereto..."
This act was the specific legislated instructions on what was, by law, to be included in the re-publication (a special edition) of the Virginia Civil Code. The Virginia Legislature had already agreed that all Acts were to go into effect on the same day -- the day that the Act to re-publish the Civil Code was enacted. Therefore, the 13th Amendment's official date of ratification would be the date of re- publication of the Virginia Civil Code: March 12, 1819.
The Delegates knew Virginia was the last of the 13 States that were necessary for the ratification of the 13th Amendment. They also knew there were powerful forces allied against this ratification so they took extraordinary measures to make sure that it was published in sufficient quantity (4,000 copies were ordered, almost triple their usual order), and instructed the printer to send a copy to President James Monroe as well as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. (The printer, Thomas Ritchie, was bonded. He was required to be extremely accurate in his research and his printing, or he would forfeit his bond.)
In this fashion, Virginia announced the ratification: by publication and dissemination of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
There is question as to whether Virginia ever formally notified the Secretary of State that they had ratified this 13th Amendment. Some have argued that because such notification was not received (or at least, not recorded), the Amendment was therefore not legally ratified. However, printing by a legislature is prima facie evidence of ratification. Further, there is no Constitutional requirement that the Secretary of State, or anyone else, be officially notified to complete the ratification process. The Constitution only requires that three- fourths of the states ratify for an Amendment to be added to the Constitution. If three-quarters of the states ratify, the Amendment is passed. Period. The Constitution is otherwise silent on what procedure should be used to announce, confirm, or communicate the ratification of amendments.
Knowing they were the last state necessary to ratify the Amendment, the Virginians had every right announce their own and the nation's ratification of the Amendment by publishing it on a special edition of the Constitution, and so they did.
Word of Virginia's 1819 ratification spread throughout the States and both Rhode Island and Kentucky published the new Amendment in 1822. Ohio first published in 1824. Maine ordered 10,000 copies of the Constitution with the 13th Amendment to be printed for use in the schools in 1825, and again in 1831 for their Census Edition. Indiana Revised Laws of 1831 published the 13th Article on p. 20. Northwestern Territories published in 1833. Ohio published in 1831 and 1833. Then came the Wisconsin Territory in 1839; Iowa Territory in 1843; Ohio again, in 1848; Kansas Statutes in 1855; and Nebraska Territory six times in a row from 1855 to 1860.
So far, David Dodge has identified eleven different states or territories that printed the Amendment in twenty separate publications over forty-one years. And more editions including this 13th Amendment are sure to be discovered. Clearly, Dodge is onto something.
You might be able to convince some of the people, or maybe even all of them, for a little while, that this 13th Amendment was never ratified. Maybe you can show them that the ten legislatures which ordered it published eighteen times we've discovered (so far) consisted of ignorant politicians who don't know their amendments from their... ahh, articles. You might even be able to convince the public that our forefathers never meant to "outlaw" public servants who pushed people around, accepted bribes or special favors to "look the other way." Maybe. But before you do, there's an awful lot of evidence to be explained.
THE AMENDMENT DISAPPEARS
In 1829, the following note appears on p. 23, Vol. 1 of the New York Revised Statutes:
"In the edition of the Laws of the U.S. before referred to, there is an amendment printed as article 13, prohibiting citizens from accepting titles of nobility or honor, or presents, offices, &c. from foreign nations. But, by a message of the president of the United States of the 4th of February, 1818, in answer to a resolution of the house of representatives, it appears that this amendment had been ratified only by 12 states, and therefore had not been adopted. See Vol. IV of the printed papers of the 1st session of the 15th congress, No. 76."
In 1854, a similar note appeared in the Oregon Statutes. Both notes refer to the Laws of the United States, 1st vol. p. 73(or 74).
It's not yet clear whether the 13th Amendment was published in Laws of the United States, 1st Vol., prematurely, by accident, in anticipation of Virginia's ratification, or as part of a plot to discredit the Amendment by making is appear that only twelve States had ratified. Whether the Laws of the United States Vol. 1 (carrying the 13th Amendment) was re-called or made-up is unknown. In fact, it's not even clear that the specified volume was actually printed -- the Law Library of the Library of Congress has no record of its existence.
However, because the notes' authors reported no further references to the 13th Amendment after the Presidential letter of February, 1818, they apparently assumed the ratification process had ended in failure at that time. If so, they neglected to seek information on the Amendment after 1818, or at the state level, and therefore missed the evidence of Virginia's ratification. This opinion -- assuming that the Presidential letter of February, 1818, was the last word on the Amendment -- has persisted.
However, despite Clayton's opinion, the Amendment continued to be published in various states and territories for at least another eleven years (the last known publication was in the Nebraska territory in 1860)
(end of report)
Do you agree, that if this amendment were in place, that the United States of America would be a wholly different entity than what exists now?
WE THE PEOPLE would be enjoying a paradise upon Earth (Terra)...but understand - all that is needed is for the State of Virginia to agree that ratification has taken place, and WE THE PEOPLE can take back our government from the scumbags who have ruined everything, and plan to ruin all else.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
But seriously, folks...
Well..I did it.
I am now officially a tax protester.
What do I mean?
I am, for stuff that does not benefit me, a procrastinator. I'll wait until the last picosecond, and then attempt the impossible.
For the most part, it works out. I work 35 hours a week, but I waste at least 15 hours that selfsame week traveling back and forth to my occupation. so...that's at least 50 hours out of the 168 hours within a week's time. Then, of course, there's sleep.
Whack off at least another 28 hours...unless I've been imbibing.
So...the rest of that time is precious to me, and I wouldn't wish to waste it staring at some dopey-ass HD images on TV.
"Ooh...look at how realistic the astroturf is!"
You know...I REALLY DON'T GIVE A RED-ASS BABOON'S ASS ABOUT TV.
When I was 12, I got a TV RADIO for my birthday.
The picture only turns your brain, which is a marvelous device that no computer has come close to emulating, into a fucking TOASTER.
Now, don't get me wrong...it's not like I've NEVER watched TV...but I just think the importance some people have put into watching TV has gone beyond the pale.
And then, of course, there's the blatant propaganda prevalent on TV.
Here's my most recent example.
First, you will have to be a denizen of New York City and a rider of the transit system. The MTA has taken to placing linked ads on either side of the trains. The ad that I've noticed recently is a recruitment poster of sorts for Child Protective Services.
Are you BOLD enough?
Are you SMART enough?
Are you TOUGH enough?
Are you COOL enough?
And on and on...and, of course, that in and of itself should not be anything weird...but along with this, there is the curious timing of a show I've added to my repetoire...WITHOUT A TRACE, starring Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone, and with a rather decent cast (I LOVE Poppy Montgomery's lip gloss...her lips are to die for!).
So...I was watching the second episode to air last night...and it involved...
...CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES.
So...what's the big deal, you say? Well...the usual premise of the show is that someone in the beginning of the show disappears, and the agents (FBI) uncover every thread to determine the fate of the missing individual.
Usually, the individual is found to be deceased, ans their secret lives uncovered. But not this episode - the CPS agent is shown to be a overly-moral individual, who cares WAAAY too much about doing his job, and is sorta like Jesus beset by the Romans (by the way, to my bud JS...the Jews of old did NOT kill Jesus...it's actually a no-brainer!); his colleagues and supervisors are lacking in conviction, and unwilling to understand the enormous pressure the occupation brings to bear.
Well...I know it's a shitty job. But, it's not the ONLY shitty job out there.
At any rate...my point here is that now there seems to be a push to promote the good that CPS performs. You know...like removing kids from homes because of ill-informed determinations, all so that the child can suffer at the hands of some hard-bitten foster child with NO HOPE of adoption or placement.
If I do watch TV, it's only the few shows I do watch, or it's one of the news propaganda channels. My favorite right now is CNN (the CIA News Network). I giggle at these wholly compromised anchors blithely selling lies to the general public as informed wisdom.
Once you whores have sold yourselves to the point that you're unnecessary...what do you think will happen?
What happens when a child is bored with a toy?
They discard them.
They break them.
They ANNIHILATE them.
You whores think you've some sort of "in" with the so-called "elite"? You better do some Kegel exercises with your sphincters and keep 'em airtight...because the first time you're not really tight like they're used to your tuchis being...YOU'RE DONE.
Man, oh, Manischewitz...that was an evil rant...but it needed to be said.
Back to my tax protesting stance...so, I saved it for tonight. I was filling out the forms...when I found the 1913 tax form on WRH's letters page.
Dammit...WE THE PEOPLE WERE SCREWED BY SCUMBAGS AND LAWYERS.
1913 was the beginning of the end of the United States of America.
The corporations and lawyers saddled WE THE PEOPLE with THEIR GODDAMN tax burden.
There is NO tax on WAGES.
There IS a tax on INCOME.
WAGES are what one uses to support their families; build and maintain a place to live love and prosper. WAGES are traded for blood, sweat, tears and YOUR TIME.
INCOME is what is referred to as gains not from labor. Lottery winnings are considered INCOME. Corporation profits are considered INCOME.
Are you getting it yet?
Within some of my earlier postings, I refer to a Thirteenth Amendment that NO ONE has heard of.
Check the date of the current Thirteenth Amendment...then we'll talk some more...for now, enjoy Jesse "The MIND" Ventura 0wn1ng Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. Hannity is a bitch-ass, and Colmes is a DINO (Democrat In Name Only).
Enjoy - I'm going to go pickle the liver...
H & C get own3d
Update!
Friend,
In 1996, Congress - in a middle-of-the-night backroom deal - reversed nearly eighty years of tax law. They stripped whistleblowers (along with all other victims of civil rights violations) of their right to be "made whole" after suffering emotional distress or loss of reputation. Attorneys for the National Whistleblower Center, in Murphy v. IRS , fought the constitutionality of this law all the way to the Supreme Court. This week, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, so now -- 12 years later -- we must turn back to Congress and ask them to pass the Civil Rights Tax Relief Act of 2007.
Take Action for Victims! Click Here to Email your Representatives!
This 1996 law allows the IRS to tax victims who are being compensated for mental, emotional, and/or reputational damages. This is especially troublesome considering that the IRS is not allowed to tax compensation for physical injury. Congress' mindset in this instance was mean-spirited, cruel, and defied years of medical research, which shows unequivocally that mental distress is every bit as harmful as physical injury. Ever since this amendment was passed, according to the IRS, if a whistleblower suffers a heart attack (which some have) as a result of the stress from a wrongful discharge - their court awarded compensation is taxable because the IRS considers it to be an emotional, not a physical injury.
President Clinton realized the nefarious nature of the amendment when he signed the 1996 bill (a minimum wage increase), saying:
"Such damages are paid to compensate for injury, whether physical or not, and are designed to make victims whole, not to enrich them. These damages should not be considered a source of taxable income."
Take Action for Victims! Click Here to Email your Representatives!
We are asking for your help to see that Congress passes the Civil Rights Tax Relief Act of 2007 this term! The law, which was introduced in both the House (HR.1540) and Senate (S.1689) last year, would in essence repeal the 1996 amendment that destroyed the ability of whistleblowers to be made "whole."
Email Your Congressional Representatives Today!
Sincerely,
NWC Staff
www.whistleblowers.org
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Taxes...ARE THEY VOLUNTARY?
First, listen to the...well...I hesitate to refer to it as a "discourse" between Jan Helfeld and Senator Harry Reid...then read the postings...unfortunately, I found the page too late to be able to add comments...but hey - that's why I started this page, natch!
Here's a clip of Papa Dish's The Joe Hynes Blues, featuring the late-but-great, the Hon. Judge John Phillips:
Some background on the Phillips/O'Hara/Roper/Hynes debacle:
Okay...a lot of the posters are missing the point here: TAXES ARE NOT VOLUNTARY...AND MORE TO THE POINT, THE TAX BURDEN WAS ORIGINALLY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF CORPORATIONS.
Read below.
This is why I'm making a big stink about the original Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, "TITLES OF NOBILITY" AND "HONOR":
The following is from the WWWebFactory:
"[02] - MEANING of the 13th Amendment
The "missing" 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
"If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them." [Emphasis added.}
At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the "title of nobility" Amendment) seems obscure, unimportant. The references to "nobility", "honour", "emperor", "king", and "prince" lead us to dismiss this amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy. But in our modern world of Lady Di and Prince Charles, anti-royalist sentiments seem so archaic and quaint, that the Amendment can be ignored.
Not so.
Consider some evidence of its historical significance: First, "titles of nobility" were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sect. 9 of the Constitution of the United States (1778); Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional "title of nobility" amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819. Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in "titles of nobility" and "honors" that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited "titles of nobility" several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though "titles of nobility" were already prohibited by the Constitution), it's obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today."
So...I read up on this...you may believe, as mentioned above, that there no longer exists the need to restrict American citizens from "titles of nobility"...well, YOU COULDN'T BE MORE WRONG. We have a class of citizens who should not have been able to work in our government...LAWYERS!!! Lawyers are admitted to the BAR, and can be referred to henceforth as Esquire...does that not reflect a Title of Nobility?!?
The simple truth here is that lawyers consipred with "our government at the time" to remove the original 13th Amendment and replace it with the oddly-worded "No Mo' Slaves" farce, which actually relegates EVERYONE who agrees to being a Citizen of the USA to being subjects of CONGRESS!!! Please perform a Google search (or any bloody search engine you enjoy) for Michael Badnarik - his Constitutional Class is something any red-blooded, THINKING American can't do without...though I will say that it will cause a lot of consternation for those who believe what they've been taught in school.
So...I implore you to take ACTION.
Or be forever DAMNED.
Okay...I really didn't wish to end that diatribe on such a downer; so, here's Phil Donahue schooling Bill "Falafel" O'Reilly!
Last, but not least -Ron Paul calls for the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service:
Here's a clip of Papa Dish's The Joe Hynes Blues, featuring the late-but-great, the Hon. Judge John Phillips:
Some background on the Phillips/O'Hara/Roper/Hynes debacle:
Okay...a lot of the posters are missing the point here: TAXES ARE NOT VOLUNTARY...AND MORE TO THE POINT, THE TAX BURDEN WAS ORIGINALLY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF CORPORATIONS.
Read below.
This is why I'm making a big stink about the original Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, "TITLES OF NOBILITY" AND "HONOR":
The following is from the WWWebFactory:
"[02] - MEANING of the 13th Amendment
The "missing" 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
"If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them." [Emphasis added.}
At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the "title of nobility" Amendment) seems obscure, unimportant. The references to "nobility", "honour", "emperor", "king", and "prince" lead us to dismiss this amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy. But in our modern world of Lady Di and Prince Charles, anti-royalist sentiments seem so archaic and quaint, that the Amendment can be ignored.
Not so.
Consider some evidence of its historical significance: First, "titles of nobility" were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sect. 9 of the Constitution of the United States (1778); Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional "title of nobility" amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819. Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in "titles of nobility" and "honors" that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited "titles of nobility" several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though "titles of nobility" were already prohibited by the Constitution), it's obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today."
So...I read up on this...you may believe, as mentioned above, that there no longer exists the need to restrict American citizens from "titles of nobility"...well, YOU COULDN'T BE MORE WRONG. We have a class of citizens who should not have been able to work in our government...LAWYERS!!! Lawyers are admitted to the BAR, and can be referred to henceforth as Esquire...does that not reflect a Title of Nobility?!?
The simple truth here is that lawyers consipred with "our government at the time" to remove the original 13th Amendment and replace it with the oddly-worded "No Mo' Slaves" farce, which actually relegates EVERYONE who agrees to being a Citizen of the USA to being subjects of CONGRESS!!! Please perform a Google search (or any bloody search engine you enjoy) for Michael Badnarik - his Constitutional Class is something any red-blooded, THINKING American can't do without...though I will say that it will cause a lot of consternation for those who believe what they've been taught in school.
So...I implore you to take ACTION.
Or be forever DAMNED.
Okay...I really didn't wish to end that diatribe on such a downer; so, here's Phil Donahue schooling Bill "Falafel" O'Reilly!
Last, but not least -Ron Paul calls for the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service:
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