On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began. “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.” Howe had written the poem on a visit to Washington, D.C., with her husband. Approaching the city, she had reflected sadly that there was little she could do for the United States. She couldn’t send her menfolk to war: her husband was too old to fight, her sons too young. And with a toddler, she didn’t even have enough time to volunteer to pack stores for the field hospitals. “I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission,” she recalled, and worried there was nothing she could give to the cause. One day she, her husband, and friends, toured the troop encampments surrounding the city. To amuse themselves on the way back to the hotel, they sang a song popular with the troops as they marched. It ended: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the soldiers’ song. That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the day before. She recalled: "[A]s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.... With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen…. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper." Howe's hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war, and the soldiers’ camps strung in circles around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. Capitol. “I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on.” Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on to define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.” The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that "[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away. When the measure had passed the House the day before, the lawmakers and spectators had gone wild. “The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries,” the New York Times reported. “The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c. The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant.” Indiana congressman George Julian later recalled, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.” But the hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, students from Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, set out to bring them back to life. They organized to protest the F.W. Woolworth Company’s willingness to sell products to Black people but refusal to serve them food. On February 1, 1960, their male colleagues from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down on stools at Woolworth’s department store lunch counter in Greensboro. David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil were first-year students who wanted to find a way to combat the segregation under which Black Americans had lived since the 1880s. So the men forced the issue by sitting down and ordering coffee and doughnuts. They sat quietly as the white waitress refused to serve them and the store manager ignored them. They came back the next day with a larger group. This time, television cameras covered the story. By February 3 there were 60 men and women sitting. By February 5 there were 50 white male counterprotesters. By March the sit-in movement had spread across the South, to bus routes, museums, art galleries, and swimming pools. In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had begun. In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” On February 1, 2023, Tyre Nichols’s family laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee. He was so severely beaten by police officers on January 7, allegedly for a traffic violation, that he died three days later. In 2025 the U.S. government under President Donald Trump has revoked a 60-year-old executive order that protected equal opportunity in employment and has called for an end to all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. This February 1, neither the Pentagon nor the State Department will recognize Black History Month. Mine eyes have seen the glory. — Notes: Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899, pp. 273–276, at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=n1g4AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA244&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/01/tyre-nichols-funeral/ You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Friday, January 31, 2025
January 31, 2025
Five Questions with Dr. Vin Gupta
Today has been about a month’s worth of news, none of it good. It’s clear that Trump is trying to transform the federal workforce into an army of Trump loyalists and align the work that is supposed to be on behalf of the American people with his values, which is to say racism, misogyny, kleptocracy, and the rest of Project 2025. All of this is deeply concerning, as is his effort to deceive Americans about what’s going on. We will discuss this in the weeks ahead as the news unfolds, but tonight, I want to try to set it aside while acknowledging that it is happening and focusing on public health issues. Vin Gupta, who you have undoubtedly seen offering information and advice on a range of medical issues if you watch cable TV, is a Harvard-trained lung specialist. For over a decade, he has been working worldwide to improve public health. He is also a force on social media, where he tries to cut through the disinformation and give people the facts they need to know. You can find him on Bluesky and Youtube.
During the Covid pandemic, Vin was one of the people I turned to personally for advice. So as reports began to tick up about the possibility that bird flu might become transmissible from person to person at some point—it hasn’t yet—Vin was the person I wanted to go to for reliable information. The issue comes into sharp focus for us following a week where Robert Kennedy, Jr., displayed a remarkable lack of understanding about the public health system he will have considerable authority over if confirmed. “Five Questions” is a feature for paid subscribers, my way of thanking people who are able to support this work so that I can devote the necessary time and resources to it. I appreciate everyone who reads the newsletter and works to stay informed, so free subscriptions, with access to all of the other posts, will always be available. Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Vice Principles
The weekend is approaching, so let's check in on a couple of American vices (or virtues, depending on your stance). For many people, this is no ordinary weekend. It's the first weekend in a long time without football. Or more to the point, it's the first weekend in a long time without football to bet on. Some will take the weekend off from their newly legal habit. Others will take a less treacherous (and withdrawal-inducing) path and just bet on some other game. Maybe game is too broad. Modern gamblers (especially young men) bet on distinct aspects and parts of games. That's how the action keeps going. These days, who has the attention span to wait the length of an entire game to see if a bet hits? The action never stops. The casino is always open. It's right in your pocket. And it's been supercharged by other tech and techniques that keep you glued to your device. "The apps are designed to be played quickly and aggressively to trigger repeated hits of dopamine and, eventually, addiction. 'This has nothing to do with ordinary sports betting ... Until you had online sports betting, nobody had ever bet on whether the next pitch was going to be faster or slower than 95 mph. You’re betting on all these micro-propositions. It’s just an opportunity to push the button.'" The Guardian: How the quick high of ‘fast-food gambling’ ensnared young men. Want a safe bet? Put your money on this trend accelerating. Gambling marketers are definitely laying their money down. "Over the course of an NBA or NHL broadcast, the viewer will see the logo of a betting company or hear some reference made to gambling 2.8 times per minute, according to a study. 'ESPN is a 24-7 casino ad right now,' says Dr Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and the co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program. 'The normalization has gone so deep, so fast. [Sports] gambling has gone so viral that it’s beyond normalization. It’s endemic.'" 2Get Out of My Head"The Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication Thursday to treat pain from an injury or surgery. It is expensive, with a list price of $15.50 per pill. But unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive. That is because the drug, suzetrigine, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and to be sold as Journavx, works only on nerves outside the brain, blocking pain signals. It cannot get into the brain." Gina Kolata in the NYT(Gift Article): F.D.A. Approves Drug to Treat Pain Without Opioid Effects. 3Altered StatesThe next phase in the war on abortion has begun. This time, a state with an extreme abortion ban is targeting out of state providers of abortion-inducing drugs. New York doctor indicted for prescribing abortion pill in Louisiana. "The case appears to be the first instance of criminal charges against a doctor accused of sending abortion pills to another state, at least since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and opened the door for states to have strict anti-abortion laws." (We're leaving it up to the states ... to target other states.) 4Weekend WhatsWhat to Benefit: The FireAid concert that aired on every major streaming network combined amazing (and an amazing number of) musical performances with some really moving stories from people who experienced the fires. The performances spanned the genres and the years and included a reunion of Nirvana with guest artists providing lead vocals, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, Lady Gaga, Pink, John Mayer, Green Day, Billie Eilish, Sting, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Katy Perry, Olivia Rodrigo, and on and on. You can still watch the whole event. And of course, consider making a donation. Steve Ballmer matched all FireAid donations made during the benefit concert. That’s how you billionaire. 5Extra, ExtraParamount a Resistance? For big corporations, news divisions are a rounding error, one many of them are willing to tarnish or sell out for (potential) returns down the road. The latest example: Paramount in Settlement Talks With Trump Over ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit. "When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a '60 Minutes' interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet." (60 Minutes used to refer to an investigative news show. Now it refers to how long it took corporate America to bend the knee.) 6Feel Good FridayNYT Mag (Gift Article): What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons. "Lessons from a radical 20-year experiment and a quiet triumph of public policy."
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Citizenship Ruling, Meta Settlement, and a Construction Cat
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