Lonesome Rhodes rides again

Labor Day weekend has traditionally been a time to enjoy public lands, taking advantage of the three-day weekend to spend some time outdoors at the end of summer. However, Ted Cruz has introduced a radical amendment to the Sportsman's Act of 2014 which would have the federal government divest in a significant portion of public land in the West, either passing the land directly off to the states or auctioning it off to the highest bidder in a public sale.

It doesn't matter that many states are already having a difficult time managing their state parks in the wake of the massive budget cuts pushed through by Republican state legislatures since 2010, or that sportsmen groups, for whom this bill was initially intended, want the land to remain a federal public domain. Ted seems to think the federal government simply has too much land, making it difficult for poor ranchers like Cliven Bundy, who Cruz infamously supported in his standoff with the BLM earlier this year.

The federal government already offers very low leases. Bundy just refused to pay for 20+ years, so it added up to a considerable sum in delinquent fees, interest and fines. When the BLM seized his cattle after multiple court orders to pay, Bundy called in his Oathkeepers to get his cattle back. Since then any number of persons have jumped on the bandwagon, and have become Bundy's Buddies, supporting this divestment in federal land, which Cruz put forward in his amendment, scuttling a bill that had passed the Senate by a vote of 82-12.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here. A relative handful of Republicans want to free up more land for grazing, logging, oil, gas and mineral rights, undermining the Sportsmen's Act in the name of big business. No doubt, the Koch Bros. and other syndicates are behind this initiative, who it seems these "maverick" Republicans answer to these days, while pretending to be representatives of the people.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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