LOOSE ENDS, 6.5.26

As regular readers know, LOOSE ENDS includes your responses to past PINKS. This may be my favorite element of this enterprise, to connect and learn from you.

My MOTHERS DAY (5.10) essay, about its history and the mifepristone case, continues to provoke responses. A reader in New jersey pointed out that the president has been unusually silent on mifepristone, angering his anti-abortion supporters, while HHS has cut $800 million from maternal and infant health programs. These include Safe Mother/Infant Risk, to prevent maternal mortality, and PRAM, a pregnancy risk assessment. Another reader repeated a bumper sticker: “’He who is without ovaries shall not make laws for those who do.’ Fallopians, 5:12”

Spell checking. Again. My last LOOSE ENDS (5.15) mentioned the “Gramma” Moses exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC. Correction: Grandma Moses. No wonder my grands call me “Gaga.”

Scholarship about the work of Anna Mary Robertson Moses falls into two camps. Critics complain that her “naïve approach” erases “multiculturalism . . . modernity . . . race [and] feminism.” Others say, for painters of her Depression era, rural background, painting what was positive was a survival tactic.

A reader from Chattanooga, who grew up in Washington, wrote me about BROWN V. BOARD (5.17). When she was in the eighth grade at the Potomac School, with Justice Frankfurter’s daughters, her history teacher asked him if she could bring her students to the Court. He suggested May 17. This reader was at the Supreme Court the day Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Brown decision. While her class waited for their bus, a reporter asked, “How are you going to like going to school with colored children?”

A Black reader in Connecticut thanked me “for amplifying the story and impact of the remarkable Constance Baker Motley. I’m currently reading Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. [It’s] illuminating . . . encouraging, perfect for this moment in its affirmation of the leadership Black women have contributed to our democracy and insistence on the delivery of the promise of the U.S. Constitution. [Motley] was a remarkable American woman whose work made possible profound changes in our nation.”

A Black attorney from DC recalled hearing “Connie speak at Howard Law School when I was a student. . . . I’ll never forget her telling us about her asking a white voting registrar, in a racial exclusion case, if the registrar would have allowed the Black plaintiff to register under any circumstances. The plaintiff had demonstrated literacy and an understanding of the Constitution. The registrar, having been reminded by Connie that she was under oath, answered ‘No.’”

And from a white reader in Vermont: “[It] took me back to my college days. Carl Degler’s seminar on The American South, fall 1954, right after Brown. Eleven girls, each one picked a former state of the Confederacy to follow/monitor/measure progress. I chose Texas, then as now, a hard slog.”

Writing about FRONTIER WOMEN (5.24) has made me think more about the power of the “cowboy myth” as a model of masculinity in our culture – independent heroes in white hats – and its positive and negative cultural and political consequences.

The reality of the Lewis & Clark expedition was harsh. When the Corps returned to St Louis in 1806, they suffered from “rotten teeth, mangled feet, infected fingernails and syphilis.” Meriwether Lewis was physically and emotionally exhausted. Jefferson appointed him Governor of the Louisiana Territory and thought he was writing an account of the journey. Drinking and taking opium, Lewis had not written a line. On October 11, 1809, he ended his life with a pistol.

Judy Woodruff’s PBS NEWSHOUR series, “America at a Crossroads,” recently linked frontier history to Memorial Day. She profiled volunteers who are searching for the graves of Revolutionary War veterans who died in Ohio. They were given land in the Northwest Territory, in reward for their service,

Regarding MEMORIAL DAY (5.30): I learned from an alumnus that one of America’s first female veterans has a monument at West Point, donated by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Like many women, Margaret Cochrane Corbin followed her husband John and his Pennsylvania regiment. When he was killed at the Battle of Fort Washington (Manhattan) in November 1776, she took his place, loading and firing canon. She was wounded and captured by the British. In 1779, the regiment’s officers petitioned Congress to grant her disability pay and a pension, the first woman so compensated.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s continues to disrespect women and minorities in the military, including freezing their promotions. He also questions the ability and bravery of female soldiers. In the current conflict with Iran, three of the fourteen dead were women.

A senior historian had two additions: 1) Until the Uniform Monday law passed, Memorial Day was not celebrated in Washington, DC. 2) Lee’s Arlington plantation included a free Black community, a combination of descendants of George Washington’s freed laborers, who had married Martha’s enslaved servants, and Black contraband who had escaped the South. In the 1890s, some were removed. The rest were forced out when the Pentagon was built.

My favorite response may have been this one: “For me it is still Declaration Day. I ever wear white until then.”

END NOTES: I’m embarrassed that I failed to comment on AAPI (Asian American native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) Heritage Month. I wish the country had outgrown the need to highlight the history and contributions of sundry minorities, but until standard history classes are more inclusive, the recognition extends our educations.

May was chosen because the first Japanese immigrant, Manjiro Nakahama, arrived in the US on May 7, 1873, and the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad was completed on May 10, 1869. The west to east portion, was primarily built by 12,000 Chinese immigrants, who had expertise in dynamite, to tunnel through mountains. 1,200 died. Photographs of the silver spike ceremony Promontory Point, Utah, excluded all Asians.

Because Chinese men had not brought their wives, they could afford to work for lower wages, in mines and factories. Resentment among white workers resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, race riots and anti-Asian violence. On May 26, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which expanded earlier restrictions on Asian immigrants, as well as other “undesirables.”

Following the pattern of Black History Month, AAPI recognition began with a week in 1979 and became a month in 1992. I’m among the historians who have more to learn.

Returning to my recurrent alarm about the erasure and rewriting of our history, a bill to finalize a site for a Smithsinian women’s history museum failed in a 216-204 vote. What began in the 1990s and evolved into bipartisan legislation was defeated when Republicans amended it, to limit exhibits to “biological women” only and to bar depictions of “any biological male as a female.” Confronted with anti-trans bias, Democrats withdrew their support. I remember debates in the 1990s about whether any future museum should include Barbie dolls.

The Trump administration is still arguing about signage at the site of George Washington’s Philadelphia home, where he lived during his presidency, part of Independence Historical Park. In January, in response to an executive order objecting to history that might foster “a sense of national shame,” it ordered removal of information about Washington’s enslaved servants. The original signage was replaced by a judge who upbraided the government and quoted George Orwell.

Now the government wants to remove the names of nine enslaved people carved on a stone monument. Because the property is a national park, the government says it can make “curatorial” changes. The Justice Department lawyer asserted that complaints that the administration is rewriting history are overblown. “Omitting facts is not the same as falsifying historical facts or denying that they occurred.”

FINALLY, If you agree with this reader from California, please become a paid PINK THREADS subscriber. “Your thoughtful essays help me learn more, revisit, and renew my commitment to ways in which we can all live fully and fairly, inspired by those who have gone before, and those who are helping us move forward.”

Thank you! Onward!

Betsy