Wholesome Care
M. E. Boyd
9/21/2023
[I]f ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent, and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Barry, 1822.
Wholesome care. . . that which we give to our families, pets, gardens, and parks.
Wholesome care. . . that which we give to our homes, schools, places of worship, and museums.
Wholesome care. . . that which we give to our Founders, Constitution, and Rule of Law.
Americans have developed this sense of wholesome care over a long period of time with all the difficulty in its cultivation that the nature of man represents. What Jefferson is trying to explain is that concentrated power in the federal government – “a single government” – must lead to corruption and indifference. Jefferson commends to our thinking how important it is to place power in each community and even more power in each person, rather than in a centralized state.
Miss Constitution would place indifference at the apex of a tyrannical single government pyramid. At its base would be all the beginning chess moves that eventually check-mate personal liberty – the basis of our entire American civilization and protected by divided power called Federalism.
We can see this indifference by the federal government to:
American farmers, ranchers, and villagers whose property and effects share our northern and southern borders. . .
American businesses, small and large, who represent the economic concept of ‘division of labor’ so that families need not provide all the necessities of life with their own hands. . .
American morality, development of the person, required decency, and duty to God. . .
We can see this indifference by the federal government in:
10 million pounds of trash in just one sector of the southern border. . .
40,000 children, some of them sick, some of them disabled, dumped on the doorsteps of just one American public school system. . .
85 billion dollars of precious military equipment left to American enemies to be used to annihilate Americans who paid for them. . .
We can see this indifference by the federal government at:
Congressional hearings – professional lying to the American people supported. . .
Press conferences – announcing new kinds of tyranny in the form of Executive Orders. . .
In writing to the media – “We request that you censor ‘misinformation.’” Misinformation is anything the federal government does not want the American people to know. . .
Can centralized indifference and corruption be cured with exposure?
No, the corrupt and indifferent must be rooted out whole cloth, root and branch, stump and seed, core and limb, with all the literal enablers of the indifferent and corrupt, and all the silent enablers of the indifferent and corrupt. “Keeping the Republic” as Benjamin Franklin begged that we do requires stopping the indifference and corruption as seedlings, not as grown trees; as tiny shoots, not as mature gorse. The “single government” Jefferson was referring to is now a full blown horror – a Maui fire, a Libyan earthquake, a rip tide of Hurricane Lee.
There was a moment in our history where the tiny shoots of centralized tyranny regarding free political speech were pulled. It is the early part of the 20th century and Teddy Roosevelt has decided to run as a third-party Progressive against Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Eugene Debs, of the Socialist Party of America. Teddy’s candidacy allowed Wilson to win, and Wilson’s victory led America down a path of war and destruction that we are still on today.
Persuaded by central bankers (for their profit) and others that America should enter WWI, not willing to support Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Note that eventually became Wilson’s own plan, America was plunged – begrudgingly – into the worst disaster in history. Eugene Debs and many other groups were opposed to American involvement in the war. George Washington himself had warned us not to entangle ourselves in the mess that was Europe then and still is today. (Ukraine?)
Congress declared war against Germany in 1917 and immediately passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 (this Act is now being used against the political speech rights of Donald Trump) in order to try and stop opposition to Wilson’s decision to enter the war. In a speech in Ohio, Debs said, “The master class always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” Debs was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for Constitutionally protected political speech. He ran for President from prison in 1920 and was eventually pardoned by President Harding after the war.
The silver lining in this story is that out of the experience of Eugene Debs, including lukewarm support by the Supreme Court for the 1st Amendment, and because of what became known as the “Palmer raids” against Italian anarchists, the American Civil Liberties Union was born. The Attorney General of the United States, Mitchell Palmer, with the help of 24-year old J. Edgar Hoover, raided 3,000 alien homes in thirty cities. With questionable warrants, entrapment by Department of Justice agents, brutal beatings to compel confessions, and imprisonment without bail in prisons with abominable conditions, 60,000 people were named as suspects with 810 deported.
The beginnings of the ACLU were represented in a “Report on the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice, 1920” by twelve brave attorneys. They pulled up the tiny shoots of tyranny then but unfortunately have abandoned that cause today. That we now have another set of illegal practices by our United States Department of Justice merely informs us that no generation can ever rest on the laurels of past ones when it comes to the protection of our institutions.
Miss Constitution calls upon another brave twelve Americans to begin to kill the shoots, pull the seedlings, and cut down the trees of indifference and corruption – wholesome care for what matters – with a kindly nod to Benjamin Franklin.
