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      A State Court Ruling on I.V.F. Echoes Far Beyond Alabama

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      Frozen embryos in test tubes must be considered children, judges ruled. The White House called it a predictable consequence of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.An Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children has sent shock waves through the world of reproductive medicine, casting doubt over fertility care for would-be parents in the state and raising complex legal questions with implications extending far beyond Alabama.On Tuesday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the ruling would cause “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make.”Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as President Biden traveled to California, Ms. Jean-Pierre reiterated the Biden administration’s call for Congress to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law.“As a reminder, this is the same state whose attorney general threatened to prosecute people who help women travel out of state to seek the care they need,” she said, referring to Alabama, which began enforcing a total abortion ban in June 2022.The judges issued the ruling on Friday in appeals cases brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed in 2020, when a hospital patient removed frozen embryos from tanks of liquid nitrogen in Mobile and dropped them on the floor.Referencing antiabortion language in the state constitution, the judges’ majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to unborn children, with no exception for “extrauterine children.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Was Alabama’s Nitrogen Execution ‘Textbook’ or Botched? Sides Are Divided.

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      Alabama officials said the nation’s first nitrogen gas execution was a model for other states. Critics called it appalling and far from what the state promised.A day after Alabama became the first state to execute a prisoner with nitrogen gas, officials vowed on Friday to continue using the method in executions despite witnesses’ accounts that the prisoner writhed on the gurney for at least two minutes.Two very different accounts of the execution emerged from the state’s death chamber in Atmore, Ala., where the state executed Kenneth Smith, 58, on Thursday night.The state’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, called it a “textbook” execution that had made nitrogen hypoxia, as the process is known, a “proven” method that other states could emulate.“Alabama has done it, and now so can you,” Mr. Marshall said, addressing his counterparts across the country. “And we stand ready to assist you in implementing this method in your states.”Meanwhile, Mr. Smith’s spiritual adviser and reporters who also witnessed the execution described an intense reaction in which Mr. Smith violently shook and writhed as the gas was administered, began breathing heavily and, finally, stopped moving.The descriptions were at odds with what the state had promised in court papers: that the untested method of using nitrogen gas through a face mask would “rapidly lower the oxygen level in the mask, ensuring unconsciousness in seconds.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Elections

      Supreme Court Declines to Stop Nitrogen Execution in Alabama

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      Both the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court denied stays sought by Kenneth Smith, who is scheduled to die on Thursday in the nation’s first nitrogen gas execution.The U.S. Supreme Court and a federal appeals court each declined on Wednesday to intervene to stop Alabama from conducting the nation’s first-ever execution by nitrogen gas, putting the state on track to use the novel method to kill a death row prisoner.Alabama plans to use nitrogen gas to kill Kenneth Smith, who was convicted of a 1988 murder, after the state botched its previous attempt to execute him by lethal injection in November 2022. Barring any additional legal interventions, prison officials plan to bring him to the execution chamber in Atmore, Ala., on Thursday evening, place a mask on his face and pump nitrogen into it, depriving him of oxygen until he dies.The Supreme Court declined to intervene in Mr. Smith’s appeal of a state court case, in which his lawyers had argued that the second execution attempt would violate his Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments. The court’s order did not include an explanation or note any dissents.Hours later, in response to a separate challenge by Mr. Smith’s lawyers, a federal appeals court also declined to halt the execution over the dissent of one of the three judges who had heard the case. Mr. Smith’s lawyers said they would also appeal that case to the Supreme Court, potentially giving the justices another chance to intervene, though they have been reluctant to do so in last-minute death penalty appeals in recent years.Nitrogen gas has been used in assisted suicide in Europe and elsewhere, and the state’s lawyers contend that the method — known as nitrogen hypoxia — is painless and will quickly cause Mr. Smith to lose consciousness before he dies.But Mr. Smith and his lawyers have said they fear the state’s newly created protocol is not sufficient to prevent problems that could cause Mr. Smith severe suffering. The lawyers said in court papers that if the mask were a poor fit, it could allow oxygen in and prolong Mr. Smith’s suffering, or if he becomes nauseous, he could be “left to choke on his own vomit.”The execution is scheduled to take place around 6 p.m. Central time at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, though it could be carried out any time until 6 a.m. the next morning. Mr. Smith has recently reported feeling increasingly nauseous as his anxiety grows about the looming execution, raising his lawyers’ fears about a mishap during the execution. Alabama prison officials said this week that they do not plan to allow him to have any food after 10 a.m. on Thursday in an effort to lower the likelihood that he vomits.Abbie VanSickle More

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      in US Politics

      John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

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      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
      Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More

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      in US Politics

      ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

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      When he was a Ku Klux Klansman in South Carolina, Elwin Wilson helped carry out a vicious assault that left John Lewis with bruised ribs, cuts to his face and a deep gash on the back of his head. Half a century later, Wilson sought and received Lewis’s forgiveness. Then both men appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show.Wilson looked overwhelmed, panicked by the bright lights of the studio, where nearly 180 of Lewis’s fellow civil rights activists had gathered. But then Lewis smiled, leaned over, gently held Wilson’s hand and insisted: “He’s my brother.” There was not a dry eye in the house.Raymond Arsenault, author of the first full-length biography of Lewis, the late congressman from Georgia, describes this act of compassion and reconciliation as a quintessential moment.“For him, it was all about forgiveness,” Arsenault says. “That’s the central theme of his life. He believed that you couldn’t let your enemies pull you down into the ditch with them, that you had to love your enemies as much as you loved your friends and your loved ones.”It was the secret weapon, the way to catch enemies off-guard. Bernard Lafayette, a Freedom Rider and close friend of Lewis, a key source for Arsenault, calls it moral jujitsu.Arsenault adds: “They’re expecting you to react like a normal human being. When you don’t, when you don’t hate them, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The case of Mr Wilson was classic. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, for sure.”Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, has written books about the Freedom Riders – civil rights activists who rode buses across the south in 1961 to challenge segregation in transportation – and two African American cultural giants: contralto Marian Anderson and tennis player Arthur Ashe.He first met Lewis in 2000, in Lewis’s congressional office in Washington DC, a mini museum of books, photos and civil rights memorabilia.“The first day I met him, I called him ‘Congressman Lewis’ and he said: ‘Get that out of here. I’m John. Everybody calls me John.’ It wasn’t an affectation. He meant it. He seemed to value human beings in such an equalitarian way.”Lewis asked for Arsenault’s help tracking down Freedom Riders for a 40th anniversary reunion. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Lewis’s death, at 80 from pancreatic cancer, in 2020.“From the very start I saw that he was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” Arsenault says. “I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite like him – absolutely without ego, selfless. People have called him saintly and that’s probably fairly accurate.”Arsenault was approached to write a biography by the historian David Blight, who with Henry Louis Gates Jr and Jacqueline Goldsby sits on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Black Lives series. The resulting book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, examines a rare journey from protest leader to career politician, buffeted by the winds of Black nationalism, debates over the acceptability of violence and perennial tensions between purity and pragmatism.Arsenault says Lewis “was certainly more complicated than I thought he would be when I started. He tried to keep his balance, but it was not easy because a lot of people wanted him to be what is sometimes called in the movement a ‘race man’ and he wasn’t a race man, even though he was proud of being African American and very connected to where he came from. He was always more of a human rights person than a civil rights person.“If he had to choose between racial loyalty or solidarity and his deeper values about the Beloved Community [Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a just and compassionate society], he always chose the Beloved Community and it got him in hot water. He, for example, was criticised for attacking Clarence Thomas during the [1991 supreme court nomination] hearings and of course he proved to be absolutely right on that one.“There were other cases where if there was a good white candidate running and a Black man who wasn’t so good, he’d choose the white candidate and he didn’t apologise for it. He took a lot of heat for that. Now he’s such a beloved figure sometimes people forget that he marched to his own drummer.”Lewis’s philosophy represented a confluence of Black Christianity and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Arsenault says. “He had this broader vision. There’s not a progressive cause that you can mention that he wasn’t involved with in some way or another.“He was a major environmentalist. There was a lot of homophobia in the Black community in those years but not even a hint [in Lewis]. He was also a philosemite: he associated Jews as being people of the Old Testament and he was so attracted to them as natural allies. Never even a moment of antisemitism or anything like that. He was totally ahead of his time in so many ways.”‘A man of action’Lewis was born in 1940, outside Troy in Pike county, Alabama, one of 10 children. He grew up on his family’s farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and attended segregated public schools in the era of Jim Crow. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister.Arsenault says: “I have a picture of him in the book when he was 11; they actually ran something in the newspaper about this boy preacher. He had something of a speech impediment but preached to the chickens on the farm. They were like his children or his congregation, his flock, and he loved to tell those stories.“But he was always bookish, different from his big brothers and sisters. He loved school. He loved to read. In fact his first protesting was to try to get a library card at the all-white library.”Denied a library card, Lewis became an avid reader anyway. He was a teenager when he first heard King preach, on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at the segregated Troy State University.“He was a good student and a conscientious student but he realised that he was a man of action, as he liked to say. He loved words but was always putting his body on the line. It’s a miracle he survived, frankly, more than 40 beatings, more than 40 arrests and jailings, far more than any other major figure. You could add all the others up and they wouldn’t equal the times that John was behind bars.”Lewis began organising sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its chair in 1963. That year, he was among the “Big Six” organisers of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, where at the last minute he agreed to tone down his speech. Still, Lewis made his point, with what Arsenault calls “far and away the most radical speech given that day”.In 1965, after extensive training in non-violent protest, Lewis, still only 25, and the Rev Hosea Williams led hundreds of demonstrators on a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. In Selma, police blocked their way off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers wielded truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Walking with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. Televised images of such state violence forced a reckoning with southern racial oppression.Lewis returned to and crossed the bridge every year and never tired of talking about it, Arsenault says: “He wasn’t one to talk about himself so much, but he was a good storyteller and Bloody Sunday was a huge deal for him. He said later he thought he was going to die, that this was it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He passed through an incredible rite of passage as a non-violent activist and nothing could ever be as bad again. He’d been through the fire and so it made him tougher and more resilient. It’s origins of the legend. He was well considered as a Freedom Rider, certainly, and already had a reputation but that solidified it and extended it in a way that made him a folk hero within the movement.”Lewis turned to politics. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta city council. Five years later he won a seat in Congress. He would serve 17 terms. After Democrats won the House in 2006, Lewis became senior deputy whip, widely revered as the “conscience of the Congress”. Once a young SNCC firebrand, sceptical of politics, he became a national institution and a party man – up to a point.“That tension was always there,” Arsenault reflects. “He tried to be as practical and pragmatic as he needed to be but that wasn’t his bent.“He was much more in it for the long haul in terms of an almost utopian attitude about the Beloved Community. He probably enjoyed it more when he was a protest leader, when he was kind of a rebel. Maybe it’s not right to say he didn’t feel comfortable in Washington, but his heart was back in Atlanta and in Pike county. As his chief of staff once said, wherever he went in the world, he took Pike county with him.”The fire never dimmed. Even in his 70s, Lewis led a sit-in protest in the House chamber, demanding tougher gun controls. As a congressman, he was arrested five times.“He was absolutely determined and, as he once said: ‘I’m not a showboat, I’m a tugboat.’ He loved that line. Nothing fancy. Just a person who did the hard work and was always willing to put his body on the line,” Arsenault says.‘If he hated anyone, it was probably Trump’Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but switched to Barack Obama, who became the first Black president. Obama honoured Lewis with the presidential medal of freedom and in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, they marched hand in hand in Selma. Lewis backed Clinton again in 2016 but was thwarted by Donald Trump.Arsenault says: “He was thrilled by the idea of an Obama presidency and thought the world was heading in the right direction. He worked hard for Hillary in 2016 and thought for sure she was going to win, so it was just a devastating thing, as it was for a lot of us. He tried not to hate anyone and never would vocalise it but, if he hated anyone, it was probably Trump. He had contempt for him. He thought he was an awful man.“That was something I had to deal with in writing the book, because you like to think it’s going to be an ascending arc of hopefulness and things are going to get better over time, but in John Lewis’s life, the last three years were probably the worst in many respects because he thought that American democracy itself was on the line.”When Lewis died, Washington united in mourning – with a notable exception. Trump said: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”Arsenault says: “They were almost like antithetical figures. Lewis was the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, but when he died in July 2020 he probably thought Trump was going to win re-election. Within the limits of his physical strength, which wasn’t great at that point, he did what he could, but the pancreatic cancer was so devastating from December 2019 until he died.“It was tough to deal with that part of the story but, in some ways, maybe it’s not all that surprising for someone whose whole life was beating the odds and going against the grain. He had suffered plenty of disappointments before that. It just made him more determined, tougher, and he was absolutely defiant of Trump.”Lewis enjoyed positive relationships with Republicans. “He was such a saintly person that whenever there were votes about the most admired person in Congress, it was always John Lewis. Even Republicans who didn’t agree with his politics but realised he was something special as a human being, as a man.“He had always been able to work across the aisle, probably better than most Democratic congressmen. He didn’t demonise the Republicans. It was Trumpism, this new form of politics, in some ways a throwback to the southern demagoguery of the early 20th century, this politics of persecution and thinly veiled racism. He passed without much sense that we were any closer to the Beloved Community.”Lewis did live to see the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He was inspired, a day before he went into hospital, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House.“For him it was the most incredible outpouring of non-violent spirit in the streets that he’d ever seen, that anybody had ever seen,” Arsenault says. “That was enormously gratifying for him. He thought that in some sense his message had gotten through and people were acting on these ideals of Dr King and Gandhi.“That was hugely important to him and to reinforcing his values and his beliefs and his hopes. I don’t think he was despondent at all because of that. If that had not happened, who knows? But he’d weathered the storms before and that’s what helped him to weather this storm, because it was it was so important to him.”Lewis enjoyed fishing, African American quilts, sweet potato pie, listening to music and, as deathless videos testify, dancing with joy. Above all, Arsenault hopes readers of his book will be moved by Lewis’s fidelity to the promise of non-violence.“When you think about what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East and Ukraine right now, it’s horrible violence – and more than ever we need these lessons of the power of non-violence. [Lewis] was the epitome of it. You can’t help but come away with an admiration for what he was able to do in his lifetime, how far he travelled. He had no advantages in any way.“The idea that he was able to have this life and career and the American people and the world would be exposed to a man like this – in some ways he is like Nelson Mandela. He didn’t spend nearly 30 years in prison, but I think of them as similar in many ways. I hope people will be inspired to think about making the kind of sacrifices that he made. He gave everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      in US Politics

      ‘History is not what happened’: Howell Raines on the civil war and memory

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      “Norman Mailer said every writer has one book that’s a gift from God.” So says Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, now author of a revelatory book on the civil war, Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written Out of History.“And agnostic as I am, I have to say this was such a gift, one way or another.”Raines tells the story of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, loyalists who served under Gen William Tecumseh Sherman in campaigns that did much to end the war that ended slavery, only to be scorned by their own state and by historians as the “Lost Cause” myth, of a noble but traduced south, took hold.For Raines, it is also a family story. As he wrote in the Washington Post, his name is a “version of the biblical middle name of James Hiel Abbott, who … help[ed] his son slip through rebel lines to enlist in the 1st Alabama … That son is buried in the national military cemetery at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Until a few years ago, I was among the thousands of southerners who never knew they had kin buried under Union army headstones.”The 1st Alabama was organised in 1862 and fought to the end of the war, its duties including forming Sherman’s escort on his famous March to the Sea, its battles including Resaca, Atlanta and Kennesaw Mountain.To the Guardian, Raines, 80, describes how the 1st Alabama and the “Free State of Winston”, the anti-secession county from which many recruits came, have featured through his life.“My paternal grandmother gave me my first hint, when I was about five or six, that our family didn’t support the Confederacy. It was a very oblique reference but it stuck in my mind. And then, in 1961, I ran across a reference … in a wonderful book called Stars Fell on Alabama [by Carl Carmer, 1934], and it confirmed … that there were Unionists in my mother’s ancestral county, Winston county, up in the Appalachian foothills.“So those were the seeds, and I just kept over the years saving string, to use a newspaper term. And I could never rid myself of curiosity about what the real story was. And then when I started reading enough Alabama history to see how these mountain unionists had been libeled in the Alabama history books, that, I suppose, fit my natural curiosity as a contrarian.“… For years, I thought I would write it as a novel. I had done one novel set in that same county [Whiskey Man, 1977]. And it took me a long time to realise that the true story was better than anything I could make up.”Raines has written history before: his first book, written in the 1970s when he was a reporter and editor in Georgia and Florida, was My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the civil rights years. His new book is also inflected with autobiography and follows two memoirs, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis (1993) and The One That Got Away (2006), the latter published not long after his departure from the Times, in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair affair.He had, he says, “a very unusual upbringing”, for Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.“In no house of my extended family was there a single picture of Robert E Lee or any of the Confederate heroes. It didn’t strike me until I was much older that I lived in a different southern world than most other white kids my age in Alabama. Our families not venerating these Confederate icons was the very subtle downstream effect of having had a significant number of unionists and indeed some collateral kin and direct kin who were part of the Union army.“It’s a curious thing about Alabama. After segregation became such an inflamed issue in the south with the 1954 school desegregation decision [Brown v Board of Education, by the US supreme court], families with unionist heritage quit telling those family stories on the front porch. The only way to find out about it was to dig them out. And it always struck me as the ultimate irony that many of the Klan members in north Alabama in the 1960s, and many of the supporters of George Wallace [the segregationist governor], were actually descendants of Union soldiers without knowing it.”Reading Stars Fell on Alabama “was a seminal moment. [Carmer’s] observation that Alabama could best be understood as if it was a separate nation within the continental United States: suddenly the quotidian realities that a child accepts as normal or even a young college student accepted as normal, I began to see as odd behavior.“For example, Alabamians were always complaining in the 1950s and 60s about being looked down upon. And suddenly … I said, ‘Well, there’s a reason for this. If you pick [the infamous Birmingham commissioner of public safety] Bull Connor and George Wallace to be your representatives before the nation on the premier legal and moral issue of the decade” – civil rights – “then they’re going to think you’re strange.”If Alabamians complained of being looked down upon, many Alabamians looked down on the unionists of Winston county – people too poor to own enslaved workers.“Even though the story of unionism was suppressed, it survived enough in the political bloodstream of the state that the legislature continued to punish them for 100 plus years after the war. So much so that my cousins in the country went to school in wooden schoolhouses while the schools in the rest of the state were modern, even in the rural counties. And up until I was 10 years old, we had to travel to my grandparents’ farm, only 50 miles from Birmingham, via dirt roads. So this was a matter of punishing through the state budget, this apostasy that sort of otherwise washed out of the civic memory.”As Raines writes in his introduction to Silent Cavalry, “History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic and cultural authorities.”He “had to really dig deeply into historiography to understand how this odd thing came to be: that the losers of the civil war got to write the dominant history … [and how] that revisionist view … became nationalised.” That’s what happened in the Lost Cause crusade of the 1870s to 1890s that in turn produced William Archibald Dunning” (1857-1922), a historian at Columbia University in New York who did much to embed the Lost Cause in American culture.”Raines discusses that process and its later manifestations, not least in relation to The Civil War, Ken Burns’ great 1990 documentary series now subject to revisionist thinking. Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C Ward, a historian who co-wrote the script, are quoted on why the 1st Alabama is absent from their work. But Raines also discusses historians who have begun to tell the stories of the unionist south.“Histories of the Confederacy were written by Dunning-trained scholars who delivered a warped version of Confederate history: very, very racist [and] very classist, in terms of their contempt for southern poor whites. And those became the fundamental references which national historians … were writing off. A tainted version of southern history.“That obtained until the publication in 1992 of a book called Lincoln’s Loyalists. Richard Nelson Current went back and actually discovered that there were 100,000 citizens of the Confederate states who volunteered in the Union army – almost 5% that came from the south.“The reviews at the time hailed Current’s book as opening up an entire new field of scholarship. But in fact it was not until about 2000 that a new generation of PhD students, hungry for unexplored topics, began to really dig into this new area of study. And it’s a thriving field now, with a lot of really interesting books.Asked how his book has been received back home, Raines laughs.“I don’t know about Alabama. I’m having a signing party in Birmingham in January but that’ll be like-minded southern progressives, for the most part. The defensiveness I referred to … will cause many readers down there to say, ‘Oh, this is just another chance to make Alabama look bad.’“Alabamians take no responsibility for being on the wrong side of history since 1830, and they think anyone who points that out is is being unfair. So that won’t change.”
      Silent Cavalry is published in the US by Crown More

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      in US Politics

      Four Republican presidential hopefuls to meet for fourth debate in Alabama

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      Four White House hopefuls will meet onstage in Alabama for the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, the smallest lineup yet as the window for denting Donald Trump’s lead narrows.Wednesday night’s debate, hosted by the cable network NewsNation at the Moody Music Hall at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, offers one of the last major opportunities for the candidates to make their case to Republican voters before the party’s nominating contest begins next month.The two-hour event will feature Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, who are locked in an increasingly combative scrap to be the second-place alternative to Trump. They will be joined by Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, who both trail far behind.The three previous debates have so far failed to pull Republican voters away from Trump, who maintains a dominant lead in national and early-state polls with six weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses launch the 2024 GOP nomination calendar.A national Monmouth University poll released on Wednesday before the debate found Trump 40 percentage points ahead of DeSantis, his next closest rival. Nodding to her momentum on the campaign trail, the poll found Haley’s standing rose the most since July, climbing 9 points from 3%.The vast majority of Republican voters said Trump would be their strongest candidate against Joe Biden, including four in 10 Republicans who currently support another candidate. Further complicating their path to the nomination, supporters of Trump’s Republican rivals are divided on whether the remaining candidates should stay in the race or coalesce around a single alternative.“We can parse these numbers until the cows come home, but the results don’t look good for any candidate not named Trump,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.DeSantis, whose campaign has stalled since he entered the race this summer, has staked his campaign’s success on a strong showing in Iowa, which holds its caucuses on 15 January.“We’re going to win Iowa,” DeSantis said during a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think it’s going to help propel us to the nomination.”DeSantis earned the high-profile endorsement of Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and is touting his visits to all of the state’s 99 counties. Yet an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released at the end of October showed DeSantis tied for second with Haley in Iowa and lagging far behind Trump.Haley is hoping to build on her campaign’s momentum following a series of strong debate performances. In recent weeks, she has closed in on DeSantis, pulling ahead of him in New Hampshire, while winning over Wall Street donors and racking up endorsements from anti-Trump Republicans, including Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network founded by conservative billionaires, Charles and David Koch.Trump, who faces 91 federal charges in four cases, including his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost, has sought to portray himself as the inevitable nominee. A series of recent polls showed him leading Biden in several swing states even as he continues to articulate an increasingly anti-democratic vision for a second term. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Trump vowed to only be a dictator “other than day one”.To qualify for the fourth debate, candidates needed at least 6% support either in two national polls or one national poll as well as two polls from states with early nominating contests. They also needed to have at least 80,000 unique donors, up from 70,000 for last month’s debate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll candidates must also have signed a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, which Trump has refused to do. That means the former president, who is trouncing the field in polling and fundraising, technically would not qualify for the debate, even if he chose to attend.Unlike past debates, Trump is not planning to hold a dueling rally at a location near the debate venue. Instead he will spend the evening at a fundraiser in Florida.Earlier this week, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who failed to qualify for the third debate and was on track to miss the fourth, suspended his campaign, denouncing the RNC’s “clubhouse debate requirements” that he said were “nationalizing the primary process”.Burgum’s departure came after Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina abruptly ended his campaign, saying that voters “have been really clear that they’re telling me, ‘Not now, Tim.’”Wednesday’s debate will be hosted by Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation alongside conservative moderators Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon. More

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      Alabama Is at the Center of the 4th Republican Presidential Debate

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      Republican presidential candidates will gather in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday, at a moment when the state’s politics have new resonance on the national stage.Tuscaloosa is used to having the eyes of the nation on it, especially toward the end of the year. (Suffice to say, there is no controversy in Alabama about who made the College Football Playoff, again.)Yet the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, held on the University of Alabama campus, offers the city of 113,000 a different kind of opportunity. The state has never before hosted a debate in a presidential election cycle, with organizers often eyeing swing states, early voting states or huge population centers as possible locations instead.“For a lot of people, this is going to be their rare opportunity to actually see a presidential candidate in person,” said Walt Maddox, the mayor of Tuscaloosa, adding that he had been fielding a number of ticket requests that rivaled that of a game day weekend. “In Iowa, New Hampshire, that’s a birthright,” Mr. Maddox, the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, said of seeing numerous presidential candidates. “In Alabama, that’s something that’s pretty rare.”In some ways, it is not surprising that Republicans chose to descend upon Alabama, a conservative stronghold molded in part by hard-line politicians willing to leverage its grievances and divisions. (Former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has frequently reveled in the state’s loyal voter base, but he will not be a participant in the debate.)The third Republican presidential primary debate last month in Miami.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“Alabama is getting more attention, especially on the conservative Republican side,” John Wahl, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, said. “If you look for a state across the country that kind of embodies Republican principles and the values of the Republican Party, we’re a good state,” he added.But beyond the outcome of Wednesday’s debate, there are reasons national political figures are paying close attention to Alabama this election cycle.At a moment when control of the House of Representatives hinges on just a couple seats, a congressional district in Alabama is suddenly competitive. In October, a federal court ordered Alabama to use a new map that creates a second district with close to a majority of Black voters.The order came after the Supreme Court ruled this summer that the congressional map drawn by the Republican-dominated state legislature violated the Voting Rights Act. The ruling has potentially paved the way for more equitable and competitive races across the region in 2024.This month Georgia lawmakers unveiled a proposed congressional map that would create an additional majority-Black district, while the Louisiana legislature has until late January to craft a new map that complies with the Voting Rights Act.And now in Alabama, nearly two dozen candidates are now vying for the Second Congressional District, designated as the newest district where Black voters have a valid opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. (In Alabama, Black voters tend to back Democrats, increasing the odds that the party can flip the seat.)The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala., will host the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday.Brian Snyder/ReutersSome Democrats said that Wednesday’s debate was a chance for them to tie criticism of Alabama’s hard-line leadership and policies to Mr. Trump and the other candidates. Democrats have already spent months hammering the state’s senior senator, Tommy Tuberville, over a monthslong, single-handed blockade of senior military promotions; on Tuesday, he agreed to drop his blockade for all but the most senior generals.“We’re a conservative state, yes, but I don’t think that we are that state where we are extreme the way that we’re seeing this with Donald Trump and so many of the other Republican leaders,” Doug Jones, a former Democratic senator and Biden ally, said. He argued that policies championed by top Republicans in Alabama — its strict abortion ban, a push to restrict certain books in libraries and an effort to curb rights for L.G.B.T.Q. youth — would make the case against Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates.But, he added, “even as a as a partisan Democrat, I am happy to see a major debate of the Republican Party coming into this state.”“It’s always good for Tuscaloosa, for the state, for the University of Alabama,” he said.Mr. Wahl said that he, too, was pleased that the debate was happening on the campus, where the Republican Party could make inroads with younger voters.“I think it gives the party a tremendous opportunity to reach out to young people to talk about the issues that are important to them and how these issues affect their lives,” he said.He also noted that the university’s own, apolitical imagery — crimson red with an elephant mascot — were fitting for a Republican debate. More