#398 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday July 8)
Good morning,
TENEMENT LIVING
I love museums, be they history or art. One of my favorites remains the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. I’ve always felt the history of the country can be relived walking through and reading about the various neighborhoods of Manhattan. One of the most interesting, and least changed, places to sense a little of what the country was like in the early 20th century is through the tenements of the lower east side, for which I maintain a personal historical attachment.
Many of the streets in the neighborhood can pass today for 100 years ago. Just change the models of the cars, add some pushcarts and crowded pedestrian traffic and “voila!” Many of our forebears, including my own, had their first stops in America in these neighborhoods. My paternal grandparents lived in one of these tenements, crowded together along with other immigrant families, sharing a bathroom down the hall, sweating their way through the humid New York summers and living without the comfort of air conditioning. Many of the women worked in their homes or the homes of others as seamstresses.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum has a number of tours of buildings in the area, with recreating in various apartments what they looked like at various times in their history. Beyond merely “stocking” the apartments with furniture and mementos of the era, the museum staff base the recreations upon oral history and written records. And it isn’t simply a generic apartment, but each apartment tells the story of specific families who lived in these places. The first time I went, we visited apartments from the 1920s and 1940s. That period represents the time in which my family lived in the area. While my father’s family bounced around to Brooklyn and the Bronx, they started in the lower east side in the teens and 20s. And my mother’s family also sojourned there before heading upstate to Croton.
This time, the history lesson was of a later phase of history—post war New York. we visited an apartment that was first occupied by a Jewish family shortly after the war, in the late 40s and 50s. Later its residents were a Latino family from the 60s. Differnt small rooms were designed to reflect each these two families. The docent asked us what furnishings and knickknacks we noticed around the apartments. Never have I found myself in a museum environment when my own childhood was reflected in the exhibit. There in the Latino family’s home was a familiar looking record player and a TV that was a piece of furniture (those of a certain age will recall the furniture-sized televisions), both so familiar to me. And there on a side table were “my” Boy Scout Handbook and a few school awards that looked strikingly familiar.
But it is the early century recreations that really gets to me. I almost get a “feel” for the small apartment in which my father and his two siblings grew up, their mother a seamstress and their father in the moving and storage business. It wasn’t an easy life but they were immigrants and made the best they could in a new land. The most successful of their time, the “rich uncle,” Harry, owned a printing business, finding his way all the way to East 21st St., in Gramercy. Another uncle was a “bag man” for Mayor Walker, but that’s another story… Before long, they all moved on, some staying in the tri-state area but many to the South and the West.
RELIGION IN AMERICA
I have written before that religion has played—and continues to play—an important role in American idealism and civic life. But that role should not include shaping its government policies. Yet the Court, in determining a coach was within his rights to assemble people for a prayer session on the 50 yard-line is okay, coupled with its opinion permitting public dollars going to religious schools and the Dobbs case, the Court is treading into dangerous territory that is inconsistent with American ideals.
Since Justice Alito is so concerned about reading history and analyzing the traditions of our country in ascertaining what the Constitution means and what the Founders intended, just a few thoughts on this today:
Some of the earliest settlers in America came here precisely because they were unable to exercise their religious choices in a country that had an established state religion.
The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom predates the Constitution, disestablishing the Church of England and guaranteeing freedom of religion to practitioners of all faiths (including Catholics and Jews).
The Virginia Statute is the precursor to the Constitution’s establishment and free exercise clauses. It provides, in pertinent part: I”…no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
The establishment clause (together with the free exercise clause) of the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Given the Court’s broad interpretation of the Second Amendment, it seems difficult to argue that this clause wasn’t intended to be broad enough to prohibit the adoption of laws supporting the beliefs of one religion over another.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
The establishment clause and Jefferson’s letter were cited in the 19th century case limiting polygamy and, in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, the Court cited a direct link between Jefferson’s “wall of separation” concept and the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
“I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be non-sectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.” ~Theodore Roosevelt 1915
“We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.” ~John F Kennedy 1960
“We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate.” ~Ronald Reagan 1984
It is hard to see how the Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade, cannot be seen as elevating the religious views of some over the religious views of others. After all, the primary justification for treating a fetus the same as a living human being is its “ensoulment,” a hotly contested question of religious dogma.
How important was the concept of separation of church and state to Jefferson? The authorship of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom appears on his tombstone. His presidency does not.
Have a great day,
Glenn
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