Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1789 by Pauline Maier

    Ratification is a little bit about the Constitution and a lot about the state conventions to ratify the Constitution. It is amazing at taking the reader through the states in order and building this incredible sense of suspense and nervousness at whether the Constitution would be ratified, reading Washington and Madison's letters to the reader and letting us feel what they felt over the long process of ratification. The suspense builds as Maier starts by making sure the reader knows that 9 is the magic number--once nine states ratify, the Constitution can come into effect, and surely the rest will join after that, right? But what if the remaining states are the most powerful states? Two states that are the two most likely to survive without the rest?

    Maier starts conventionally, with a brief overview of the crisis that sparked the need for a Constitution, but is very brief on those causes, which aren't the focus of the book. I don't recall any discussion of the Annapolis Convention, although I might just not remember it, and there was a brief discussion of Shays Rebellion, but the main thrust of causes for Maier is the total lack of fiscal and military powers under the Articles of Confederation. In the Winter/Spring of 1787, fewer than seven states were represented in Congress, and it could not conduct business. Finally, once New York refused to ratify the 1783 impost amendment without disabling conditions, Rufus Kind introduced, and Congress endorsed a resolution to have a convention of state delegates in Philadelphia in May "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation," in order to "render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union." At the Constitutional Convention, beginning on May 25th, delegates were forbidden from printing, publishing, or communicating in any way what was said during the debates, which I thought was an interesting provision that would be controversial today. Apparently Madison made some communications in his letters in code, according to Maier.

    Maier points out that the Federalist Papers, traditionally understood as the best documents for understanding "the founder's intent," the holiest thing in constitutional analysis, are not the only documents that are useful, and may not be the best. She notes that newspapers outside New York only republished twenty-four of the eighty-five Federalist essays during the ratification controversy, and most that republished them only published a few. Federalist Number 10, perhaps the most famous for advocating that republics were more likely to survive in large polities than small ones (contrary to contemporary conventional wisdom) was only republished once outside New York, in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The actual documents' influence was probably not very strong outside New York, where they didn't have much reach. To explain an alternate source of pro-Federalist influence, Maier centers George Washington's letter-writing campaign. He had huge influence all over the country, and especially in Virginia, not just from chairing the Constitutional Convention but for writing letters that came in handy for convincing delegates at state conventions. Her prologue is titled, "The View from Mount Vernon."

The State Ratification Conventions

    Maier splits up the state ratification conventions into broad collections of chapters that move chronologically, focusing in on conventions of note. So she starts with a chapter on Pennsylvania, (in which she casually mentions ratification in Delaware, Georgia, and New Jersey), moves on to Connecticut, focuses on Massachusetts for two chapters, talks about the "Rough Road to Richmond" through conventions in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Rhode Island and Maryland, before dedicating two chapters to Virginia, followed by New York. I'll go into the details below.

Pennsylvania (2nd ratification: December 12th, 1787)

    Pennsylvania was an interesting start in being anticlimactic. There should have been a lively debate in Pennsylvania like there was in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, and it was surprising how quickly Pennsylvania ratified the Constitution. Its size meant that it could survive without union, and it's port in Philadelphia meant it could charge customs fees to other states to use it. However, there was no debate at all. Every vote in Pennsylvania's convention was resolved roughly 44 Federalists to 22 Anti-Federalists. Delegates were basically elected only if they had strong opinions one way or the other, so without being contractually bound to vote in one direction or another, they were functionally bound to do so. There was still lots of showy oratory, but no one changed their mind. Just pure partisanship, previewing what we live with today. The Federalists had high hopes since the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both formed in Pennsylvania, and even voted to provide the land for the new capital. They also thought they would be the first to ratify the Constitution.

Delaware (1st ratification: December 7th, 1787)

    Ha! Too slow! Delaware snuck in on December 3rd and ratified the Constitution by a unanimous vote while Pennsylvania wasn't looking. Pennsylvania had met on November 21st and spent three weeks pontificating without anyone changing their minds, and found out after they ratified that Delaware just met on December 3rd and did it in a day. Even though Delaware was incredibly polarized between rival factions of Whigs and Tories, they all knew one thing: once the Constitution was in effect, Delaware wouldn't have to pay duties that Pennsylvania levied on goods imported through Philadelphia and sold to the people of Delaware. Delaware also offered land for the new federal capital. 

New Jersey (3rd ratification: December 18th, 1787)

    New Jersey's convention, like Delaware's,  didn't want to have to pay duties on goods shipped through another state (New York instead of Pennsylvania). They unanimously approved the Constitution at the Blazing Star Tavern in Trenton by a vote of 38-0 after a week of deliberation. Unfortunately, they did not record their debates and there were no articles published in the press about ratification in New Jersey. 

Georgia (4th Ratification: December 31st, 1787, or January 2nd, 1788)

    Georgia was also basically a one-day ratification as soon as they got a quorum, and it was also unanimous, 26-0. This is really weird though because Maier lists the date of ratification as December 31st, but online most sources say January 2nd. I think there is some weirdness about formal ratification versus some initial vote, but I am not interested enough in Robert's Rules of Order or this detail to find out why there is this difference. Like New Jersey, Georgia left no records of any debate or reasons for ratification. Maier hypothesizes that Georgia needed federal help fighting Creek Indians on its western frontier, as well as the Spanish to its south. But it also had good reason to worry that Congress would take the title to its western lands, which extended through modern-day Alabama and Mississippi to the Mississippi river. It is basically lost to history why Georgia ratified the Constitution.

Connecticut (5th ratification: January 9, 1788)

    The ratification process started to get harder in 1788, and Connecticut is sort of a transition point between the first four easy states and some tougher debates ahead. Like New Jersey and Georgia, the Connecticut convention left no journal, and all reports of debates came from newspapers, which mostly covered Federalist speeches. The big question that still hadn't really arisen was whether there would be amendments to the Constitution. I haven't covered it much since these states all ratified quickly, but the big question for the not-so-convinced states was whether there would be a bill of rights and other amendments. The Constitution was given to the states as an up-or-down vote, but there was a big groundswell of demand for the ability to vote on it paragraph-by-paragraph and propose amendments. Washington and the Federalists did not want this because it would devolve into chaos. In Connecticut, they still voted on the Constitution as a whole, and ratified by a vote of 128 to 40. In Connecticut, many delegates were given instructions to vote by their constituents to vote against the Constitution, but were actually convinced the other way. So Connecticut was the first state with a real, genuine debate about the Constitution on the merits, and the Federalists came out on top. It was becoming clear for future state conventions that the best way to win was to stack the deck early with delegates already bound to vote for or against ratification.

Massachusetts (6th ratification: February 6th, 1788)

    Massachusetts became a real battleground for ratification. The home of Shays Rebellion, the impetus of the need for a centralized Constitution, it was well-known going to the convention that western and rural parts of Massachusetts would oppose ratification, while Boston and other ports would likely support it. The Federalist strategy, having gone in knowing they had a delegate advantage, was to not show that advantage early on, to avoid tipping the Anti-Federalists off and leading them to obstruct. Federalists sought to delay votes to the end. They wanted to flip Anti-Federalists who were able to be convinced to their side. So, Massachusetts' convention was the opposite of Pennsylvania where everyone knew which side everyone was on--in Massachusetts it was a genuine, deliberative process. Additionally, the Massachusetts ratification debate is well documented, with an official journal, diaries from several delegates, and newspaper accounts.

    In Massachusetts, there was a perception that northerners lived longer and southerners shorter, which the Federalists used to excuse the three-fifths compromise as an acceptable sacrifice to keep the South in the Constitutional union. They also said that with a greater population of women and children (who would be virtually represented by landowning men), that apportionment of delegates based on population, rather than land, would also be favorable to Massachusetts. Moreover, they argued that the provision banning importation of slavery after twenty years was a good compromise, with the implication that slavery would end once its importation ended. This was pretty interesting to read, since that obviously did not happen. I am curious to read some economic and political analysis of the effect of this provision in the Constitution. Obviously, it did not end slavery in 1809, but did it have any effect? It must have made slaves more valuable within the United States, and therefore made slaveowners richer relative to other Southerners within their states. I am curious what historians say about whether the presence of this provision hastened or prolonged the end of slavery. I can definitely see that it would have tabled the issue since people could have reasonably thought until 1809 that slavery would be coming to an end at that point, and was therefore a non-issue. That would roughly correspond to when slavery became a major issue in American politics pre-Missouri Compromise. Probably the argument in favor of the slave importation ban prolonging slavery is that if slaves were still being imported into the United States in the 1830s, say, there would have been more outcry that would bring the issue to a head earlier. But on the other hand, more slaves would have meant more wealth for slavers, and might have made them much stronger by that point, in which case they could have kept slavery around longer. I need to read more on the subject. Maier points out that ending the slave trade was viewed a progress by some, and for some reason people viewed the slave trade as worse than normal day-in-day-out slavery.

    On January 31st, the Massachusetts delegates honed in on the prohibition on religious tests for federal office, some delegates arguing that since their forebears had come to America to preserve their religion, that it would be better to put in law that "a person could not be a good man without being a good Christian." But the debate was resolved when Daniel Shute, minister of Second Congregational Church of Hingham (Suffolk County) said that there were "worthy characters" among every denomination including Catholics and devotees of "natural religion," and that none should be excluded from office because of their religious views. But I am not sure who is included in "natural religion." Theophilus Parsons further stated that a religious test would only serve to keep good men out of office, not bad men.

    At the end of January, the Massachusetts convention was reaching a point where the Federalists were not sure if they would carry the convention. As their ringer, they pulled John Hancock from his house on January 30th, where had had been ill for several weeks. Hancock, very influential in Boston and Massachusetts as a whole, proposed that Massachusetts ratify the Constitution as a whole, but "enjoin it upon their Representatives in Congress" to "exert all their influence" to secure nine amendments to the Constitution. These amendments would include (1) the reservation of all powers not delegated to Congress to the states, (2) specification that the number of representatives shall be, rather than not exceed, one for every thirty thousand persons until reaching a certain number to be decided later, (3) a prohibition on Congress exercising its power over Congressional elections unless the State failed to do so, (4) a prohibition on direct taxes from Congress except for in cases of emergency when excise and import taxes did not work, (5) a prohibition on Congress creating commercial monopolies, (6) affirmation of grand juries in criminal cases, (7) denying federal courts diversity jurisdiction between citizens of different states unless the sum disputed was of a sufficient value, (8) requiring a petit jury in civil cases, and (9) removing "without the Consent of Congress" from the last paragraph of Article I, Section 9, which would absolutely prohibit federal officeholders from accepting any emolument, office, or title from a foreign country or king. From hindsight, this was a huge win for the Federalists, since we know that these ideas, although influential in statutes and rules passed later, did not make it into Constitutional amendments, at the time, without ratification guaranteed, it was a huge sacrifice. Massachusetts would be the first state to make such a large concession to the Anti-Federalists, and it could jeopardize ratification entirely if states all attached conditions to ratification. However, this was meant not to be a condition, but an aspirational plan for action after ratification. 

    With Hancock's proposition, Massachusetts still barely ratified the Constitution. It was 187 delegates in favor, 168 against, and 9 absent. This close call kept the ratification train rolling, with six ratifications of the necessary nine for the Constitution to go into effect, but seriously slowed momentum and was considered a bittersweet result for the Federalist cause. Central and Western Massachusetts had been opposed, with Boston and Eastern Massachusetts being in favor. Although the perception at the time was that Maine had some opposition to ratification based on its aspiration for statehood, the Mainers were split with a narrow majority in favor of ratification.

New Hampshire (fakeout: convened but not ratified in February, 1788)

    After the narrow victory in Massachusetts, New Hampshire scared Federalists even more, convening for nine days in February, and voting on the 22nd to adjourn without ratifying the Constitution. With few port cities in the southeast of the state New Hampshire was predisposed to be against ratification, being almost entirely backcountry; frontiersmen tended to oppose ratification across the states. Like in Massachusetts, the delegates in New Hampshire opposed the prohibition on religious tests for public office. Moreover, New Hampshire's citizens wanted their state to be able to print its own paper money in order to assist them in paying their debts to outsiders, which the Constitution would impede.

Rhode Island (another inconclusive convention: convened but not ratified in February/March 1788)

    Rhode Island ended dreams of ratification without any dissent. Unlike New Hampshire, where Federalists adjourned the proceedings before there could be a vote against ratification, Rhode Island held a referendum and voted against ratification. The assembly was dominated by a "Country Party" that won a big election in 1786 on a platform of paper money, and had a partiality for referenda. It would deny Federalists the ability to convince anyone in the capital, and when the referendum was held, it resulted 2,708 against and only 237 for ratification. I love how small these numbers are. What a ridiculously small number of people voting on this. As a result, Rhode Island would be nicknamed "Rogue Island" for being dragged kicking and screaming into ratification. We will revisit New Hampshire and Rhode Island later. I won't get into the whole paper money thing here, but it seems like that was the hangup for both states, since there was little access to money among farmers.

Maryland (7th ratification: April 28th, 1788)

    Once Massachusetts ratified and New Hampshire balking, the eyes of the nation being born turned to Virginia. Washington got worried enough about the outcome in Virginia that he wrote to Madison gently ordering him to attend the ratifying convention in the hopes of influencing the result, telling Madison that his presence would be an "indispensable necessity." Madison identified in his writings to Jefferson that there were three parties in Virginia, the Federalists, who supported ratifying the Constitution without amendments, and two factions of Anti-Federalist, those who wanted amendments, led by George Mason, and those who wanted no ratification at all, who he believed to be led by Patrick Henry. Then, Maier goes on an aside about how Jefferson absolutely hated Patrick Henry. In Virginia, unlike in other states where it was the educated intelligentsia of the cities against the more rural interests, the educated elites were divided.

    In Maryland, Madison worried about the outcome and asked Washington to write a letter to the Maryland delegates supporting ratification, which he did. Funny enough, on the same day that Washington wrote his letter, James McHenry, a delegate in Maryland, also asked Washington to write in support of ratification, so he saw that one later and wrote two letters in support of ratification. They voted strongly in favor, 63-11 for ratification on April 28th. The Federalists got their momentum back. After five ratifications in 33 days from December to January 1787-88, the Federalist cause slowed in Massachusetts and then suffered setbacks in New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Over two months passed between ratification in Massachusetts and in Maryland, so Maryland's ratification was a critical gust of wind in Federalist sails, and they continued to look toward Virginia

South Carolina (8th ratification: May 23rd, 1788)

    As the states approached the magic number of nine ratifications, Virginia and New York got more and more important. After all, if they got to nine without those two states, would it really mean anything? Before Virginia and New York met in June, South Carolina convened to debate ratification of the Constitution. Only a handful of speeches survive from the convention, which met from May 12th to 24th. On the sixth day of the convention's proceedings, the delegates received news of Maryland's ratification. On May 21st, General Thomas Sumter, an Anti-Federalist, moved to adjourn South Carolina's proceedings until October to see what Virginia would do. It was debated, and voted against, 89-135. South Carolina ratified the Constitution by a vote of 149-73, with most "no" votes coming from inland. Interestingly, Maier points out that the delegates were sort of gerrymandered such that the convention's majority only spoke for 39% of the population, while the minority spoke for 52.2% (with the rest not voting). That gives you some important context on what would seem like a pretty solid vote in favor of ratification! With eight states ratified, that set Virginia up perfectly to be magic number nine, with all the pressure that entails. Three conventions actually met simultaneously in June: Virginia, New York, and New Hampshire. Some questioned why New Hampshire reconvened at that time, and it was apparently because the state legislature was meeting then anyway, and it was more convenient to go straight from the state legislature to the constitutional convention without going home in between.

Virginia (10th ratification: June 25th, 1788)

    In Virginia, ratification was reaching its climax, as Virginia had the opportunity to put the Constitution into effect by ratifying it as the ninth state. Historians are lucky to have over six hundred pages in three volumes written by David Peterson, who sat in the gallery, about the Virginia ratification convention. For the Federalists in Virginia, it was useful to have Edmund Randolph, who had left the ratification convention in protest, but now favored ratification of the Constitution in spite of that. In the interest of preserving the union, Randolph declared that the writing was on the wall and that Virginia should join the rest of the states and propose amendments after ratification. Critically, on June 4th, the third day of the convention, news arrived that South Carolina had ratified the Constitution, helping the Federalist cause.

    The Federalists' chief opponent was Patrick Henry, who made bombastic, dramatic appeals for weeks to the convention. Maier pointed out an interesting generational difference. The older generation, whose politics were formed in the 1750s and 60s, were highly suspicious of legislatures and government, whereas the younger generation, whose politics were formed in the 70s and 80s, wanted a stronger central government, and did not fear that American government would become like Britain. Henry and Madison exemplified this generational difference in Virginia. Henry took the floor time and time again, speaking on June 5, 7, 9, and 11, going on for hours each time. It would have annoyed the hell out of me, because it sounds like he was just filibustering at a certain point. Gouverneur Morris must have gotten bored watching from the gallery, since he wrote a jokey poem about the ratification debate:

The State's determined Resolution
Was to discuss the Constitution.
For this the Members come together
Melting with Zeal and sultry Weather
And here to their eternal Praise
To find it's Hist'ry spend three Days
The next three Days they nobly roam
Thro ev'ry Region far from Home
Call in the Grecian Swiss Italian
The Roman [Russian?] Dutch Rapscallion
Fellows who Freedom never knew
To tell us what we ought to do
The next three Days they kindly dip yee
Deep in the River Mississippi
That made nine days eer they begin
Let us suppose them fairly in.
And the resolve me gently Friend,
How many months before they End?

    Slavery was a huge issue of course in Virginia, and it is fascinating to read about how so many men who spoke out on the issue proclaimed that slavery and the slave trade were evil despite owning slaves themselves. That kind of cognitive dissonance would be gone a generation later when politicians just embraced slavery. During the ratification debate in Virginia, Edmund Randolph chastised Patrick Henry for suggesting that the Constitution would empower Congress to end slavery--Henry had argued that the clause allowing Congress to "provide for the common defence and general welfare" could empower Congress to end slavery. Randolph replied that there wouldn't even be a "spark of hope" for the slaves, and that nothing in the Constitution allowed Congress to end slavery, and that the clause in question could only be for taxes. We would probably not interpret it that narrowly today.

    Meanwhile, New Hampshire had started to debate the Constitution in June, as well as New York. Anti-Federalists and Federalists both tried to coordinate the three state conventions but weren't very successful due to travel times. Virginia ratified the Constitution by a vote of 89 to 79 on June 25th, and finalized their convention on June 27th, recommending a bill of rights and an additional twenty amendments to the Constitution. That night, there were celebrations in Alexandria, shooting cannons and drinking wine, where Washington said the citizens were "federal to a man." They would learn early the morning of the 28th some bittersweet news: New Hampshire had ratified the Constitution a week earlier!

New Hampshire (9th ratification: June 21st, 1788)

    When New Hampshire met for a second time to discuss the Constitution, ratification was much easier, and it passed 57-47. The Federalists were much more aggressive in counting votes the second time around and had agreed to make amendments to the Constitution after it was ratified. 

New York (11th ratification: July 26th, 1788)

    New York was the only convention in which the Federalists did not go in with control of the majority or close to it (Rhode Island had rejected the Constitution with a referendum previously). Only six or seven delegates spoke for each side, with Melancton Smith being a key figure for the Antis and Hamilton key for the Federalists. George Clinton, New York's governor and arch-Anti-Federalist, chaired the convention. The convention only met for four hours a day, between ten and two, to start, but then added a second session to each day later in June.

    Just like in other conventions, the New Yorkers were interrupted with news from elsewhere--on June 24th, a week after opened, they got word that New Hampshire had ratified the Constitution three days earlier, and that the Constitution would go into effect whether New York ratified or not. On midday on July 2nd, word arrived that Virginia had ratified the Constitution, and most everyone expected that North Carolina would quickly follow. As Maier writes, that meant that if New York didn't ratify, "it would be left in the company of the despicable Rhode Island."

    Like in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, religious tests came up for debate in New York (after all, the First Amendment didn't exist yet). New York was culturally open to other religions--on July 22nd, they postponed a Federalist parade to the next day to avoid a Jewish holiday, probably Tisha B'Av. A Rabbi even joined the Federalist procession along with clergymen of various creeds. Similar debates would occur in North Carolina as well and set the stage for the eventual First Amendment declaration of religious freedom, not just for Christians, but all religions. This was explicitly acknowledged in the religious test debate in North Carolina, discussing "pagans, deists, and Mahometans." It was thought better to "leave religion on the solid foundation of its own inherent validity, without any connection with temporal authority; and no kind of oppression can take place," said Reverend David Caldwell in response to an assertion that it was a mistake to invite "Jews and Pagans" to "come among us." There was clearly a change taking place even in places where state constitutions had religious tests.

    As news of other ratifications came in, debate turned in New York from whether to ratify the Constitution to how to ratify the Constitution. Melancton Smith led a contingent of moderate Anti-Federalists towards ratification, modifying their demand for amendments prior to ratification to a post-ratification demand, since the Constitution was in effect anyway. New York's amendments would include the due process clause of what became the Fifth Amendment. On July 24th, the convention discussed what had once been conditional amendments as statements of expectations instead. Finally, on June 26th, the New Yorkers voted 30-27 to ratify the Constitution, packaging the ratification with recommended amendments. Mobs in New York City celebrated by holding protests/riots outside prominent Anti-Federalists houses.

North Carolina (12th ratification: November 21st, 1789) and Rhode Island (13th ratification: May 29th, 1790)

    While everyone thought North Carolina would go along with the Constitution just because Virginia did, the North Carolina convention surprised everyone. They didn't ratify until Washington was already inaugurated as president. North Carolina actually had the fourth-largest state population at the time, including what is now Tennessee, which included 36,000 of its 430,000-strong population. They didn't have real ports, making them reliant on South Carolina and Virginia for trade. While that might suggest that they needed to join the union, that lack of connection made the backwoodsmen and farmers in the interior of the state less connected, so they held out for longer. North Carolina ended up ratifying the Constitution in Fayetteville, 194-77.

    Rhode Island was finally dragged into ratifying the convention in 1791, well into Washington's first term. Congress had delayed the imposition of tonnage charges on Rhode Island ships until January 1790, and then even then, Rhode Island allowed the deadline to pass and did not ratify. Congress extended the deadline, and then Rhode Island adjourned its session without ratifying on March 1st. Finally, in May, the Senate passed a bill that prohibited all trade with Rhode Island by land or sea, and, in response to threats from Newport to secede from the state, Rhode Island ratifying the Constitution by a vote of 34-32 on May 29th, 1790. It was a close one. 

Conclusion

    Was it a good idea to debate the Constitution in secret? I don't think we would do it that way today. Obviously, the result was a huge push for amendments as the Constitution went to the states. However, if it had been debated in the open, the actual drafting might have took much longer without much improvement. Every convention had to deal with Federalists explaining why certain compromises were made, and translating for Southerners the demands of Northerners and vice versa for every single divide in the country manifested in the Constitution.

    In all records of conventions, not just Massachusetts, the diarists constantly compare the speakers to classical orators. These otherwise forgotten statesmen, such as Francis Dana, who had been American minister to Russia in the 1780s and was a delegate to the Massachusetts convention, are described by diarists in classical terms. Jeremy Belknap, who attended the convention, wrote that Dana "thunders like Demosthenes." In Virginia, Patrick Henry's son-in-law, Spencer Roane, said that Henry's "Touches of Eloquence" would "almost disgrace Cicero or Demosthenes." In New York, the Daily Advertiser reported that Robert Livingston's "fine humour" was bringing applause from both sides that that his "whole speech was a stream of delicate satire and truly Attic eloquence." It's amazing how momentous an occasion it was, how everyone knew it, and how their best frame of reference was classical history. 

    Madison was disappointed with the amendments to the Constitution, but most Federalists were happy it made it through. Madison ended up being a part of the amendment process, and even proposed an amendment that would have incorporated certain rights for individuals against the states, not just the federal government, almost a century before the 14th Amendment did so. As a final note, the first ten amendments, known to us as the Bill of Rights, were not known as the Bill of Rights until a century after ratification. Those amendments were not a pre-thought-out list of the most important rights, but just the list of amendments that could actually pass. They gained more significance after the Civil War, when the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments identified those original ten as the biggest guarantor of rights in the Constitution. The founding generation had looked at the Declaration of Independence as its bill of rights.

    All in all, this was a fantastic book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn about the Constitution and the ratification process. These debates can teach us a lot about how the founders thought of the Constitution, which is obviously critical for any Originalist analysis of the meaning of the text. Maier's book is a real masterpiece of putting those pieces together.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

    I have to fully own that I was somewhat biased against this book from the beginning, and that I never overcame that bias while reading it. It was highly recommended to me, but I felt that a book about the Bund, while interesting, would never convince me that the Bund was "correct" or anything but misguided. I feel like history proved that Bundism was a failure in Poland and Russia. Moreover, the book was really more of a vehicle for anti-Zionism. While I am sympathetic to criticism of Israel, Here Where We Live Is Our Country started with a quote from Mahmoud Darwish, which was the first indication that this book was not really about the Bund. Moreover, it didn't really deliver on the author's tie-in to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, who moves from Volkovysk to the United States long before the Holocaust. I think the "right answer" for the Jews of Poland was probably just to get the heck out, or that there was no right answer at all.

    I think that the biggest strength of the book is Crabapple's contextualization of the Jewish situation in Russia/Poland in the 19th century, when she briefly goes over the history and delineates three competing ideologies: assimilationists, Zionists, and socialists/Bundists. However, she mostly ignores the religious political parties that were also influential Jewish interest groups. The Bundists were similar to the assimilationists in that they believed in staying put in Europe, and similar to the Zionists in that they supported socialism. You could make a venn diagram. The book is similarly strong into the early 20th century, discussing the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the 1905 strike in Lodz. Crabapple points out that the people of Lodz still don't like Jews very much, and rival soccer fans call each other "Jews" as an insult.

    As the book gets deeper into the 20th century, it gets harder to follow. Crabapple introduces countless names of leaders to remember, and they became impossible for me to tell apart, so I just had to glide through the book, letting them replace each other in my head since I didn't dedicate the concentration to keep them apart. What was clear was that the Bund peaked around 1906, when it had 30,000 members, whereas it dropped to 609 by 1910 due to state repression in Russia and emigration. The Bundists who were left in WWI come off more like spoiled rich kids than a real movement. Crabapple doesn't really explore this, even when she discusses Sophia Dubnova: "She agitated in small towns under false identities, smuggled pamphlets between cities by taping them to her body to mimic a pregnant belly, and incited mutiny in the Grodno army garrison. (Her soldier boys were later shot.)" I found that line to be very careless. It romanticizes the life of the anarchist upper-class girl (her dad was a historian) and throws away the lives of the people who she hazarded in her little adventure. I don't doubt Sophia Dubnova's sincerity, but I think that was something that should have been explored more. I know that if I convinced someone to mutiny and they were killed for it, I would feel horrible after. Crabapple keeps it light.

    By 1920, the Russian Bundists were trapped in an impossible situation, and dissolved to join the Bolsheviks. It's easy to call this a bad choice now, but Poland didn't want the Jews, especially not socialists, and they didn't know what was coming in the USSR. But the result was that the Bund was dissolved in Russia. In Poland, the Bund continued, but never became a serious contender in national because the Polish Socialists wouldn't work with a Jewish party. The Bund did get lots of votes in local elections, becoming the majority Jewish party, but not a majority in government. This was probably just a feature of Jewish parties cannibalizing votes from each other. 

    The whole irony of the book is that over and over again, events prove that the Jews needed to escape from Poland and Eastern Europe, and the situation was getting bad. Even moreso, it shows how there were not many options besides Israel--Crabapple goes straight from championing the Jews staying in Poland to wondering what they should do after the Evian Conference ends with no country willing to take Jewish refugees. Israel was left as the only option for Jews to escape as the world closed its doors in the 1920s. But Crabapple can't really criticize the rest of the world when her favorite Bundists agreed with them and wanted the Jews of Poland to stay put. Even where Bundist socialism won--the USSR--the Bund was dissolved into Bolshevism and then Jews were systematically purged from the party in the following decade.

    My biggest ugh moment with this book was towards the end. Crabapple describes the fall of Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to the Nazis on June 25, 1941, and how the Nazis sawed through the neck of a famous rabbi. Visiting near the site, Crabapple has this thought: "The only thing that lifted my mood was a bright little dosa shop that an Indian immigrant had opened. I bought five packs of cigarettes to support him. Only you can fix this place, I thought. It needs new blood. Please, bring your cousins." This was so weird. First of all, random Indian immigrants are not responsible for improving the imagined moral degeneracy of the grandsons of people who collaborated with Nazis. It has been 80 years and the people of Kaunas are not responsible at this point for what happened in 1941. The Indian immigrant also definitely isn't responsible for somehow making them better, as if he would even be aware that is it job. And then the whole "bring your cousins" comment is just bizarre, and is literally implying that there should be a replacement of people, feeding into the worst conspiracy theories. She had completely lost me by this point.

    I'll just finish by saying that even though I strongly disagreed with the argument of the book, I think that it is creative and that emphasizing the role of the Bund in European history is a good thing, since it is often forgotten. We will just have to agree to disagree. For Crabapple, the Bund is a morally righteous organization, and for me it is more of a cautionary tale. 

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this quote by Meyer London, who became a politician in New York, was interesting: "Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives ... for liberty? They ... pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt."

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

    I got a pretty random urge to read something about Cicero's life, and I'd had this on my shelf for a while waiting for the right time. I would say that Everitt's book is a good resource on Cicero's life, and does a good job as a biography, but it falls short. On one hand, there are a lot of materials surviving about Cicero's life, but they must not be enough to give a really good analysis of his personality. Everitt doesn't get deep into his mind, and really only hypothesizes briefly about Cicero's inner life. And then, Cicero's biography isn't enough to learn about the fall of the Roman Republic. Sure enough, Cicero's son-in-law is Dolabella and briefly a tutor to Octavian, but his interactions with some of the big players aren't enough to tell the story of the fall of the Republic, so Everitt has to sideline Cicero several times to get that story in a way that a biography of Julius Caesar doesn't have to do. Now maybe that's not the purpose of a biography of Cicero, but because the inner life wasn't coming through, it left me with a feeling of something missing.

    That said, Everitt does really interesting discussions of why the Republic fell. Above all, attributes to the Republic the property of being "a state without most of the institutions needed to run a state." There was no civil service, so governors needed to have their own people on payroll, necessitating corruption to pay for them. Without a police force, mobs could take over the capital. There was no public prosecution service, and private individuals had to being lawsuits. Without prisons, penalties had to be execution, exile, or a fine. There was no banking system, and the government had no bureaucracy to collect taxes, selling the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Over the centuries, Rome's "constitution" accreted new layers, much like the British constitution did approximately two millennia later. This created institutions a mile wide and an inch deep, capable of conquering the lands around the Mediterranean, but also fragile enough to be overthrown by its own armies, or mobs in the capital.

    Rome was also a victim of its own success. Sooner or later, everyone has to do land reform. Either the country isn't expanding and everything is gobbled up by large landowners, or the country is expanding, and needs to decide how to parcel out newly acquired land. Rome faced both issues in the second century BC, with Italian lands turning into large ranches, forcing peasants into Rome, and new lands being acquired on the borders. That distribution of lands created the major political issues of the fall of the Republic, for about a century from 146 BC, when Rome finally conquered Carthage as well as Corinth, until 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and became the emperor.

    Sulla's Civil War, fought in 83 and 82 BC, dominated the young lives to Cicero (20 years old) and Caesar (18 years old). The war culminated in Sulla's victory, reforms to strengthen the Senate, and proscriptions that went way over the top and led to killings not due to any criminality, but just to seize the property of the proscribed. Sulla became dictator, and set a new precedent for the use of force in public life against Romans (although he hadn't been the first or last). While Cicero took away the idea that Republican traditions must be jealously guarded, Caesar felt that radical reforms were needed. Maybe this was because Caesar had been proscribed.

    Cicero rose to become a Consul as a conservative, more on the side of the optimates than the populares as Rome became increasingly polarized. Catilina, who tried to stage a coup, was on the side of the populares, and championed land reform. I hadn't realized that Cicero was a conservative. But he was not strictly ideological. He was mainly in favor of preservation of the Republic, and as long as that was in reach, he would play all sides. He regularly corresponded with Caesar, and later Octavian, even though the assassins of Caesar championed Cicero as a hero of the Republic. So he was very confusing to read about since everyone had this simultaneous respect for him but also disdain for the fact that he didn't come from an old family and was always bragging about himself.

    Cicero had two periods of great power: the first, when he defeated Catiline as Consul, and the second, when he held no office, but led the Senate for about six months after the assassination of Caesar. In that time, he attempted to divide Octavian from Marc Antony, keeping them apart so that Brutus and Cassius Longinus could defeat Antony and save the Republic. But it was not to be. Octavian and Marc Antony formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus and overthrew the Republic before casting Lepidus aside. The critical problem is that both sitting Consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, were each killed in the First and Second Battles of Mutina against Marc Antony, and left the Senate without leadership. The Senate was divided on naming the 19-year-old Octavian as a Consul, and when they did not do so, Octavian turned against them. While Cicero had a chance to join Octavian has consul, he didn't, and Octavian allowed Marc Antony to proscribe Cicero, and he was hunted down on the Southern Italian coast. He told his assassin, "I am stopping here. Come here soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly."

    The final chapter, "Postmortems," contains the best analysis of the book. In it, Everitt identifies that the turning point in Cicero's career was his decision not to join Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus in their political alliance in the 50s. Cicero never sold out his values/ideals, but he rightly acquired a reputation for vacillation, always sitting on the fence. He knew that was a powerful place to be, since everyone had to win him over. Ultimately, he fell off the fence. He didn't understand what was necessary to save the Roman Republic, only that he wanted to save it. But maybe there was not way of saving it--after all, no one did. Cicero thought that everything needed to be put back the way it is, but Caesar understood that, to borrow a line from another Italian, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Caesar understood the necessity of a completely new means of government, but didn't live to implement it, so we will never know what he would have created. Instead, his grandnephew Octavian turned Rome from a city of bricks into a city of marble, and the rest is history. Everitt ends the book very appropriately, quoting Octavian, who had been tutored by Cicero, and who had also signed Cicero's death warrant. After seeing his grandson reading from a book of Cicero's, decades after Cicero's assassination, the now-Augustus said of Cicero, "an eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Roman life was "lived in daylight hours," because there were no public streetlights. People needed to carry torches to get around the city. This can't be unique at all, but is a fact about premodern life that really colors my entire perspective.
• Cicero had a career as a very successful "advocate" (read: lawyer), who would have been crushed by any judge following the Federal Rules of Evidence in 2026. The stuff he was saying in court was waaaaayyyy out of order by modern standards. But it was a different time, and so he could tell the jurors that if they voted to convict, then everyone would know that they must have been bribed.
  
• The Senate would sit to hear trials in Republican Rome, which was actually still going on in the American colonies in the 1700s, when the legislatures of the colonies would handle judicial business like King Henry VII in the Star Chamber centuries before.
• Ancient Roman texts are written without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters, without spaces between words, without paragraphs, and without punctuation. Absolute madness. 
• Cicero's first wife, Terentia, lived to be 103 years old.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster

    Expecting Better was a great book highly recommended by multiple friends that I read to learn more about pregnancy (since my wife is pregnant). Most of the book is about researching the facts about pregnancy to find out how pregnant women can best assess risk without resorting to hard rules. Emily Oster is a really valuable writer because she is a trained economist who has applied her economics background to pregnancy and parenting. I previously read Cribsheet, but didn't do much of a reflection on it--it's crazy to think I read it seven years ago!

    Oster is very nonjudgmental, which is really good since pregnant women are faced with tons of judgments about their decisions to have a glass of wine, rest, exercise, you name it. So the book is filled with tons of things like her analysis of drinking coffee, which basically shows that there is really no clear evidence of any effect of caffeine intake on pregnancy health for mother or child. It is likely difficult to conduct studies because nausea during pregnancy is correlated with a low rate of miscarriage, and nauseous women usually don't crave coffee. But the hard rule of 200mg of coffee a day doesn't seem necessary. With alcohol, it appears that the real factor is speed of drinking that overwhelms the liver. Seven drinks a week may actually be safe as long as they're spread out--drinking a glass of wine slowly is unlikely to have any effects on the baby. Problems only arise when significant amounts of alcohol get into fetal tissues, but after mom's metabolization of the alcohol, that's usually not happening if it's just a little. She also does a really good analysis of raw fish: eating raw fish may make pregnant women sick, and it's worse to be sick when pregnant. But the real risk is mercury, which requires that women know the mercury levels of fish they are eating and reduce exposure by eating less fish with high mercury levels, but doesn't require full abstinence to stay safe. In fact, the mercury levels of many fish may reduce baby's IQ, but the omega-3s they have may increase IQ, so who knows?

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the first half of a woman's cycle, her body temperature is below 98 degrees, then, the day after ovulation, it increases by about half a degree or more.
• Almost 90% of women have nausea during pregnancy, usually peaking between 8 or 9 weeks and falling off after. 50% of women report vomiting at some point in weeks 5 to 8 of pregnancy, but less than 15 to 20 percent by 17 weeks. At the worst point in pregnancy, 13% of women report throwing up 3 or more times a day.
• Airplane travel is unlikely to create enough radiation exposure to be a danger. It takes three round trip flights from New York to Tokyo to reach 1% of the level at which there is a demonstrated risk of birth defects or miscarriage. This can be relevant for women who work on airplanes, but not for the most frequent of frequent flyers.
• Kegels during pregnancy are highly effective at reducing urinary incontinence post-partum. Randomly assigned women who did 3 sets of 8 kegels twice a day for 6 seconds each had significantly lower urinary incontinence before and after delivery. Prenatal yoga also had beneficial effects, but not nearly as significant.
• Lying flat seems to have no effect on fetal health unless it makes the mother uncomfortable. Otherwise, there don't seem to be significant effects from sleeping position. The mother's discomfort may be a sign of blood flow constriction. A small minority of women feel faint from lying flat, but those who don't feel faint experience no negative effects that have been observed.
• Queen Victoria was one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth--inhaled chloroform for her seventh child. In the 20th century, women were sometimes given a combination of morphine and scopolamine that put them in "twilight sleep," where they experienced some pain, but forgot it. In the turn of the century, doctors administered cocaine to women in childbirth.
• Epidurals were used in two-thirds of births in the United States in 2008, although they often require use of more instruments due to the fact that epidurals make pushing harder. This can cause more tearing.
• Women who were randomly assigned a doula were half as likely to have a C-section and less likely to use an epidural.
• Eating and drinking during labor is usually prohibited, but probably doesn't need to be. The prohibition came from a time when women were put under full anesthesia, and the prohibition on eating was to avoid them throwing up during surgery and choking to death without anyone noticing. This was rare even in that situation, and today, thanks to epidurals, even less frequent. However, most women aren't hungry during the later stages of labor anyway, but if they are, they probably shouldn't be stopped from eating. Clear juices and Gatorade are a decent compromise.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

    Hunt, Gather, Parent was a really cool parenting meets anthropology book. I would not call it a parenting guide by any means, although chapters end with bulleted lists of techniques. But it is an entertaining read of different parenting styles across the world in hunter-gatherer societies compared with our more Western ways of parenting. A good recommendation from my wife, who I already discussed this book with, so I don't have a lot of motivation to write it all down here.

    A lot of the advice in the book boils down to regulating parent and child emotions. She recommends that parents do things with their kids, but not for their kids--so no activities that are fun only for the kids. Instead, kids become part of the family by doing things with parents. This is especially useful when kids learn to do chores, or at least watch parents do chores. That way, they expect chores to be a part of their lives, and the parents and children are sort of on the same schedule having done the chores together and then being ready to rest together. Other themes of the book are about giving kids more autonomy, and really picking battles whenever possible. Parents shouldn't argue with children, and lessons are best learned after emotions are passed, and at a lower volume. All in all, a cool book, and I'm jealous of this mom and daughter who got to travel the world together to do the research for it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Little Women is a classic and I’m so glad I read it after being introduced by my wife to the newer movie by Greta Gerwig. I love that movie and I came away appreciating it way more after reading the book. The book is fantastic and I really appreciated how well the movie updated it and reinterpreted it for a modern audience. The original book is very old fashioned in a lot of ways, and it was interesting to think about how Gerwig changed the timeline and a little bit of the tone. I think she did especially well with Amy’s character. I was surprised that this monologue wasn’t in the book:

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”

In the book, the conversation with Amy and Laurie in Nice plays out a little differently, and Gerwig is really inserting the opposite of what Marmee teaches in the book- life isn’t as simple as just being virtuous all the time. Marmee is always giving the best advice and teaching the girls, but in Gerwig’s movie, she’s a little deemphasized and the problems they face are a little more morally complicated.

Little Women is also very funny, and has a great narrator. I loved this line:

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

If anybody asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, ‘My nose.’”

I like that Jo isn’t so much the heroine and Amy not so villainized in the book as in the movie. In the movie Amy isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” but it has you rooting a lot more for Jo than for her in order to build up her redemption in the end. I didn’t feel that way in the book. For example, in the book, it was Jo’s fault she didn’t get invited to France, since she went on a diatribe in front of Aunt March about not needing anything from anyone. I don’t remember that in the movie.

There’s also an interesting Germanophile streak in the book. Louisa May Alcott makes all these references to Goethe and Germany and Germans, and that got left out of the movie. I’ll stop here, I don’t have the time to write this post anymore.