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Commentary has a neat story about the respect paid to the small population of Jews who lived in New York in July 1788.
A recent work about the ratification of the U.S. Constitution rescues from oblivion an amazing and moving story about the Jews of post-Revolutionary New York and the solicitude their Gentile neighbors showed them. In the course of describing the ratification process in New York, Pauline Maier’s Ratification (Simon & Schuster, 589 pages) makes fleeting reference to the fact that a huge parade through New York City in 1788 by supporters of the Constitution was put off for a day “to avoid July 22, a Jewish holiday.” This postponement, and its significance, have been lost to history until now.
The rediscovery of this incident is only one of many good reasons for reading Maier’s masterly and groundbreaking account of the state conventions where the proposed federal Constitution was debated and ultimately approved. Maier relies (as no historian before her has or was able to) on the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. This massive work, 23 hefty volumes and counting since the project began in 1976, is a collation of the vast and dispersed contemporary record—minutes, newspaper stories, pamphlets, memoirs, and letters—of the Constitution’s ratification. Maier uses it to show us how, in state after state, public officials and citizens debated with skill and clarity the complex issues facing the country, and how the fairness and thoroughness of the ratification process led to the Constitution’s winning support even from those who were originally its determined opponents. Along the way, she unearths all manner of interesting nuggets about the personalities and events she describes—none more so than the moment in late July 1788 when the supporters of ratification in New York accommodated the religious needs of their Jewish fellow citizens, even at some risk to the success of their cause.
A little table-setting is needed to put the story in perspective. New York’s was one of the last conventions to be held, and its approval of the Constitution was far from assured. New York had long been dubious about the Constitutional project: Two of its three delegates to the Philadelphia Convention had left in protest, objecting to its failure to respect the limited terms on which it had been called. Only the third, Alexander Hamilton, was present to join in the vote by which the Constitution was approved and sent to the states for consideration. The delegates chosen for New York’s convention the next summer contained a clear majority of opponents of ratification (one source puts the breakdown at 46–19 against), and the opponents were led by New York’s powerful governor, George Clinton. While the Federalist proponents were hardly unrepresented—they included Hamilton and John Jay, two of the authors of The Federalist Papers—they certainly faced an uphill battle.
When the convention began, on June 17, 1788, only eight states had ratified, one shy of the nine that the draft Constitution required. One week into the convention, the delegates in Poughkeepsie received word that New Hampshire had ratified, and so the Constitution, by its terms, succeeded the previous Confederation and became the new nation’s governing document. On the same date, Virginia also voted to ratify. Nonetheless, Clinton and the opponents of ratification continued to insist on changes to the document, and still “in mid-July, the two sides remained unalterably apart,” as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow puts it. The convention did not finally vote to ratify—and then by the narrowest margin in any state—until the end of July, more than a month after the United States had come into existence.
Although by mid-June New York’s approval was no longer required to bring the Constitution into effect, the state’s failure to join the now established United States could well have been a death blow to the new nation. It would have stood as a geographic obstacle to movement between the southern states and New England and, more important, would have deprived the United States of its leading commercial state. …
… The Federalists employed a variety of means (including republication in book form of the celebrated Federalist articles) to bring pressure on the hostile convention to ratify. Among them was the decision to stage what was called a Grand Federal Procession in New York City, to demonstrate the support that ratification enjoyed among all classes of citizens. Similar events had been held in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston after their states had ratified, and a major procession was held in Philadelphia on July 4, after the actions of New Hampshire and Virginia had brought the American republic into existence.
Planning for the New York Procession had been ongoing throughout June and was originally scheduled to coincide, like Philadelphia’s, with the Fourth of July celebration. But the event kept getting put off, principally, as the chairman of the event later wrote, in the “hope that this state…would likewise accede to the Union.” A postponement was also necessitated because the elaborate parade preparations took longer to complete than had been anticipated. In particular, the construction of a scaled-down frigate, the “Federal Ship Hamilton,” which was to form part of the procession and honor New York’s Federalist leader, would not be ready until July 18.
The procession was finally scheduled for July 22. But, as Maier discovered from two letters contained in the Documentary History, it was put off for an additional day because it turned out that July 22 in 1788 coincided with a Jewish holiday: 17 Tammuz, the day on which the Fast of Tammuz is held. …
Compare that story to the Olympic Committee’s refusal to find time in the opening ceremonies to memorialize the Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 games. Contentions has the story.
In spite of the growing calls for a moment of silence in honor of the 11 Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the head of the International Olympic Committee said yesterday that he would not alter his determination to refuse to allow the issue to intrude upon the opening ceremonies of the London Games this Friday. Jacques Rogge said yesterday that it “was not fit” for a commemoration of Munich to be included in the gala start to the global athletic extravaganza.
This week, President Obama added his voice to those already calling for a moment of silence at the ceremony. Perhaps even more importantly, Bob Costas, NBC television’s Olympic host, has said that he will impose his own moment of silence on the coverage of the event when the Israeli team enters the stadium:
“I intend to note that the IOC denied the request,” Costas said. “Many people find that denial more than puzzling but insensitive. Here’s a minute of silence right now.”
Costas deserves great deal of credit for not allowing the IOC’s desire to keep the memory of Munich out of sight during the games (Rogge said he will attend a ceremony honoring the Munich victims in Germany next week). But while he finds the refusal to simply devote one minute to remembrance “puzzling,” there is no mystery about it. Rogge has called requests for such a memorial “political.” While there is nothing political about recalling the terrorist attack, by that he means that many of the participating nations are not comfortable highlighting a crime committed by Palestinians or honoring the memory of Israeli Jews. As historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote this past week, the controversy is more proof that in the eyes of the world, spilled Jewish blood remains a cheap commodity.
The symbolism of a moment of silence for the victims of the Munich crime is important because it again reminds us that the rhetoric about brotherhood and peace that is endlessly spouted during the two-week-long Olympics show is empty talk. As Lipstadt notes, no one could possibly doubt that if there were ever an assault on Western or Third World athletes and coaches at the Olympics, the tragedy would always be prominently remembered at opening ceremonies. The only thing preventing Rogge from acquiescing to what would seem to be a simple and easily satisfied request is that doing so would confer legitimacy on Israel’s presence at the Olympics that most of the world would rather not acknowledge. Nor are many of the nations whose flags will be paraded on Friday night happy about even a second being spent about Jewish victims of Palestinian terror. After all, doing so would be implicitly remind the world that Israel remains the one nation on the planet that is marked for extinction by the hatred of many of its neighbors.
While we think Costas’ stand on the moment of silence has added another reason to consider him one of the most thoughtful voices on television, the IOC’s ongoing refusal ought to give the rest of us a reason to skip the globaloney fest altogether.
A pollster comments in The Hill about the large sums the Dems are spending on polling.
What’s up with all that polling the Obama camp is doing? Recently the folks over at the Weekly Standard combed through campaign spending disclosure records of the Obama campaign and related committees, discovering that they’ve spent $15 million on polling since the first of the year. And some of the June spending is still unaccounted for. Oh, my! From one perspective, spending $15 million on polling reeks of desperation. They are on a massive snipe hunt, trying to evaluate the appeal of every alleged accomplishment of the president and to gauge the credibility of every anti-Romney tidbit their dirt-diggers have dredged up. …
… Just by normal ratios or rules of thumb for campaign spending, the research outlays are out of whack. For presidential campaigns, polling should fall into a range of 3 to 4 percent of the total budget. In this case, the percentage is much higher. It is being reported that the Obama campaign has spent $100 million thus far on campaign ads. If they have, in fact, spent $15 million researching those ads, they are genuinely out of control over at the Democratic “research institute” where all this political science is percolating.
It’s interesting to try and follow the money, but it’s also disturbing. Why must Obama spend so much money to find his way? Voters are likely to be turned off to realize that even a teleprompter is not enough for this president. He also needs a phalanx of pollsters to tell him what to say.
Perhaps you remember the published suggestion from a few weeks ago that sitting too much will shorten your life. A WSJ OpEd says fageddaboutit.
You may want to sit down before reading this.
Headlines last week suggested that people who spend a lot of time sitting were in mortal danger. Sitting too long each day could shave two years off one’s lifespan—or, for the glass-half-full crowd, sitting less could extend life by two years, the media reports said.
The study that led to the news accounts cautioned that no such conclusion could be drawn from the available research. Sitting studies haven’t yet fully gotten off the ground, thanks to technological, cost and ethical limitations. Yet the evidence so far all points in the same direction: that sitting more is tied to higher mortality.
But that doesn’t mean the act of sitting itself is deadly. Instead, it could be that people who spend more time sitting are less healthy to begin with, or that those who sit less are using that time in healthier ways such as exercising.
Figuring out all these variables “is where the science needs to go now,” said Peter Katzmarzyk, lead author of the headline-generating sitting study published last week by the online medical journal BMJ Open, and associate executive director for population science at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. “We only have the epidemiological evidence.”