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August 26, 2023 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

1 year ago

August 27, 2023

On this date in 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State received the official notification from the governor of Tennessee that his state had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it. He did that as soon as he received the notification, making this date the anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, and it read:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. For all that the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Equality were men, in fact women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.

And now women are the crucial demographic going into the 2024 elections. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg noted in June that there was a huge spike of women registering to vote after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and that Democratic turnout has exceeded expectations ever since.

—

Notes:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/declaration-of-sentiments-the-first-women-s-rights-convention.htm

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In the weeks and months leading up to the midterms of 2022, there was much talk of a massive “Red Wave”—one that would sweep the Democrats from power in Congress and put Mitch McConnell and Kevin McC…

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/22/women-democracy-human-rights/

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-senate-the-nineteenth-amendment

Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899), p. 373, on Google Books.

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Are U.S. Airlines ‘Playing Into Iran’s Game’? Jay Solomon

Published

2 hours ago

September 16, 2024

For most of the past year, none of the three major U.S. carriers—United Airlines, American Airlines, or Delta—have flown to Israel. (Photo by Jack Guez via AFP)

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, defines his campaign against Israel as being won as much through economics and psychological coercion as through victories on the battlefield. And nearly a year into the Jewish state’s war with Hamas, Iran’s military proxy in the Gaza Strip, Khamenei’s strategy appears to be advancing—with an assist from the U.S. airline industry.

For most of the past year, none of the three major American carriers—United Airlines, American Airlines, or Delta—have flown to Israel, citing the Gaza war and the security threats posed by Tehran and its military allies. And none of these airlines have offered definitive time frames for when their flights might resume. This has left Israel’s national carrier, El Al, as the only direct connection between the country and its closest ally and economic partner on the other side of the world, and has sent airfares between the U.S. and Israel skyrocketing.

In recent days, the cost of a round trip economy flight to Tel Aviv from New York on El Al is around $2,500, according to Israeli travel agencies, up from around $899 before October 7, 2023. United, American, and Delta previously all had at least one daily flight to Israel from New York or Newark, and together served Israel three times a week from Boston, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

The suspension of the American flights is feeding into the economic and diplomatic isolation that Iran’s leaders are seeking, according to Israeli political and business leaders. “The American carriers are playing into Iran’s game,” said Eyal Hulata, who served as national security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, from 2001–2003.

Jerusalem’s allies in Washington are urgently seeking to establish clearer U.S. government guidelines for when U.S. airlines should halt traffic to Israel, and when it can resume. If not, they warn, American carriers risk bolstering, even unwittingly, the economic coercion that Iran and Israel’s critics in the West are pursuing, often under the banner of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or BDS.

“In my view, unless there’s an objective process put in place to prevent the politicization of air travel, I predict that in the future the BDS movement will try to weaponize air travel as a new means of boycotting Israel,” U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) told The Free Press. “And a travel ban has the potential to be the most potent weapon in BDS’s war against the Jewish state.”

Torres wrote the presidents of American, Delta, and United in August asking them to map out the guidelines they followed in deciding to suspend their routes to Israel. None of the three airlines issued an official response to Torres’ letter, and his staff says they have communicated with the U.S. carriers’ government affairs teams, but didn’t disclose the result of these discussions.

Current and former Israeli officials told The Free Press they’re particularly confused by the U.S. airlines’ decisions as a number of Middle Eastern, African, and European carriers are currently flying to Tel Aviv despite these security threats. That includes three airlines from the United Arab Emirates—Etihad Airways, FlyDubai, and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi—whose government only normalized diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. These pacts seek to integrate Israel economically and diplomatically into the wider Arab world.

“They should fly to Israel exactly like the Gulf countries and others do,” said Hulata, the former national security adviser. “And if they don’t do this because they are scared of rockets, then there’s something fundamentally wrong in their decision making.”

Hulata, who now serves as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, added: “There hasn’t been a rocket anywhere close to the airport for months.”

Passengers scan the departures board at Ben Gurion Airport on September 2, 2024. (Photo by Ameer Abed Rabbo/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The three major U.S. carriers initially halted air travel to Israel last October 7 after Hamas militants crossed the country’s southern border and slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The airlines’ decisions weren’t ordered, however, by the U.S.’s airline regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA only cautioned American carriers against flying to Israel at the time.

The FAA’s position was actually much more restrained than in the summer of 2014. Then, Hamas rocket strikes close to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport—the primary international hub near Tel Aviv—caused the airline authority to briefly suspend all outbound U.S. flights. Israeli officials were incensed, arguing the ban amounted to an assault on the country’s economy. American supporters of Israel, including former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, flew to Tel Aviv on El Al flights to show solidarity.

The three U.S. airlines have said in public statements that their decisions on Israel are tied solely to the security threats posed to their crews and passengers. United and Delta briefly resumed flights to Tel Aviv in June, but then suspended them in August in the wake of the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran—an attack Tehran blamed on Israel and vowed to avenge.

The Iranian military and its proxies launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel in April in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian compound in Syria. But they were almost all intercepted by Israel, U.S., European, and Arab air defenses. The Israel Defense Forces and Pentagon remain on high alert for another Iranian reprisal.

At present, Delta says its flights remain canceled through October 31; American Airlines cites March 2025 as a potential resumption date; and United Airlines says its services to Israel remain on hold indefinitely. “Our flights to Tel Aviv remain suspended—we look forward to resuming flights as soon as it’s safe for our customers and crew,” a United spokesperson told The Free Press.

American declined to comment and Delta said it is “continuously monitoring the evolving security environment and assessing our operations based on security guidance and intelligence reports and will communicate any updates as needed.”

This travel ban has forced Americans needing to go to Israel to either pay higher El Al fares or find more time-consuming routes through Europe. One U.S. defense expert who needed to meet Israeli security officials in Jerusalem this month to discuss the Iranian threat told The Free Press it took weeks to arrange a flight. No seats on El Al flights were available, and he eventually went via Paris on Air France. “It’s stunning how hard it was to get there,” he said.

Still, the outspokenness of a number of U.S. airline unions against travel to Israel has raised concerns among members of Congress and the Israeli government that politics may also be factoring into the flight ban.

A day after the October 7 attack, the president of the Allied Pilots Association, Captain Ed Sicher, ordered the union’s 16,000 members to refuse any requests from American Airlines to fly to the Jewish state. “As noted in APA’s initial update yesterday regarding the safe evacuation of working American Airlines crewmembers from Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that the country is now ‘at war.’ The Israeli security cabinet weighed in today, declaring that the country is in a ‘state of war,’ ” he wrote APA members. “Until further notice, if you are scheduled, assigned, or reassigned a pairing into Israel, refuse the assignment by calling your Chief Pilot or IOC Duty Pilot.”

In February, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA joined six other major American unions in calling for a formal U.S. ban on military supplies to Israel until Netanyahu agrees to a cease-fire with Hamas. “It is clear that the Israeli government will continue to pursue its vicious response to the horrific attacks of October 7 until it is forced to stop,” reads the statement from the AFA-CWA and six other unions. The spokeswoman for the AFA-CWS, Taylor Garland, has also regularly posted and reposted items on social media demanding a Gaza cease-fire and criticizing the military tactics of the Israel Defense Forces.

Garland and the AFA-CWA declined to respond to numerous requests from The Free Press to comment on Israel and whether the organization backs a U.S. flight ban if the Netanyahu government doesn’t agree to a cease-fire with Hamas. Other airline unions, trade associations, and pilots, however, downplayed the idea that politics were driving decisions, but rather cited security and basic economics. A number noted that insurance costs for the U.S. carriers rise in conflict zones, while the overall demand for flights decrease. Also, the length of U.S. flights to Israel require overnight stays for American pilots and crews, something that’s not normally an issue for European or Middle East carriers.

“Our number one concern as pilots, no matter where we’re flying—it doesn’t have to be to Tel Aviv, it can be to Toledo—it’s got to be safe and secure,” said Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the APA. “We didn’t make that call, but American Airlines did. Oftentimes, they will bring in a third layer, and that’s commercial interests.”

One pilot from a major U.S. carrier told The Free Press he regularly signs up to fly to Tel Aviv when the ban appears set to be lifted. But then the airline again cancels, following a new security assessment. “It hurts us financially, but the decision is really down to our security department,” said the airman.

The suspension of U.S. flights to Israel has contributed to a broader shock to the Israeli economy since the war with Hamas erupted last October. Israel’s calling up of 360,000 reservists after the Hamas attack, roughly 4 percent of the population, has placed a particular strain on the economy. The country’s growth contracted 1.4 percent during the second quarter of 2024 from the year earlier, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, and its exports of goods and services dropped 8.3 percent. The Israeli economy experienced a double-digit contraction in the months directly preceding the Hamas attack.

“Aviation has a big impact on our country because we’re like an island,” said Professor Nicole Adler, dean of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Business School. “I know that we have Syria and Egypt and so on around us. But most traffic is coming in via airlines, and it’s very sad that this war has gone on for as long as it has.”

Since October, Iran and its proxies across the region have made no secret of their desire to constrict international trade and passenger traffic going into and out of Israel. According to Iranian officials, this will both drain Israel’s economy and impose a psychological toll on the broader populace.

Much of Tehran’s efforts have centered on the Red Sea, where the Iranian-backed Houthi militia has launched hundreds of attacks on tankers and other maritime vessels transiting through the Suez Canal—some on their way to Israel. Just this month, the Yemeni militants launched six missile strikes on international maritime traffic, including on Panamanian- and Saudi-flagged oil tankers.

On Sunday, the Houthis successfully launched a long-range missile at central Israel for the first time. Israeli defense officials said their air defense system largely destroyed the projectile, though some fragments landed on agricultural land and near a railway station.

This, combined with the reduced air traffic, has prompted self-congratulatory comments from Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, that their multifront war against the Jewish state is working. Since becoming Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, the 84-year-old cleric has made clear that the path toward liberating Palestine will be achieved as much through making Israel unlivable to its Jewish residents as through open warfare.

“Four million people will leave Israel. [This means] reverse migration,” Khamenei told a television audience during a June 3 speech marking the death of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “In other words, the level of perplexity, confusion, and panic among Israeli officials has reached this degree. Pay attention to this! This is very important!”

Jay Solomon is an investigative reporter for The Free Press and author of The Iran Wars. Follow him on X at @jaysolomon, and read his last piece “How Close Is Iran to the Bomb?”

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To the Woman Who Trashed Me on Twitter Kat Rosenfield

Published

6 hours ago

September 15, 2024

“Why does the political landscape feel like high school?” asks Kat Rosenfield. (Mean Girls 2004, Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo)

Back when Donald Trump was last running for election, as the Great Awokening made its speech-chilling sweep through the American media, a small number of writers and public intellectuals admitted to not being entirely onboard with the new orthodoxy of privilege checking, sensitivity reading, racial affinity groups for 8-year-olds, and so on. These people were, depending on who you ask, either very brave or very stupid.

In public, and especially on Twitter, this cohort became objects of loathing and derision, excoriated by peers for refusing to “read the room.” But behind the scenes, we were inducted into a weird little priesthood of the unorthodox—mostly via Twitter DMs, which served as a sort of backchannel confessional for fellow writers who agreed that things appeared to be going off the rails, but were too afraid of being canceled to admit as much on main.

The first time I received one of these messages, it was from a woman named Jane. She was a colleague—we both had permanent freelance gigs at the same online teen magazine—and wanted me to know that she shared my concerns about the increasing hostility to free expression in progressive spaces.

“I’m trying to tell myself every day that this censorship, hypersensitivity etc is the natural exuberance of a new movement still feeling out its own limitations,” she wrote to me once, early on. “I spend so much time every day now wondering if my peers *actually* want to suspend the 1st amendment or are just angry/emotional/posturing.”

Jane would pop into my DMs every time a new censorship controversy erupted in our little corner of the internet, which is to say, we chatted frequently. When I wrote my first investigative feature about how the world of young adult fiction had been overtaken by campaigns to shame and censor authors in the name of diversity, she sent me effusive praise; when she worried aloud about her career, I offered advice and sent her leads on paid writing opportunities. When she wanted to vent about cancel culture, she always started by apologizing. She hated to burden me, she said; she just didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

Five years later, I had just published an article about the Covid-era campaign to eject Joe Rogan from Spotify when my friend Zac sent me one of those messages that almost invariably means someone is talking shit about you online: “Sorry,” he wrote, “but I thought you should probably know about this.” When I clicked on the link he’d sent, I discovered that I was being mocked via screenshot by a prominent podcaster who has always hated me for unknown reasons; what Zac wanted me to see was one of the first replies.

“I used to work with this person,” it read. “She was not always like this, but this particular strain of contrarianism is like heroin—there are very few casual users.”

The writer of this comment was Jane.

I thought of this incident recently while reading Kat Timpf’s book, which came out last week, I Used to Like You Until. . . A reflection on, per the subtitle, How Binary Thinking Divides Us, the book’s opening chapters are dedicated to describing the social liabilities of being employed at Fox News, where Timpf is a regular panelist on the late-night talk show Gutfeld! Her politics are more libertarian (small L) than conservative, and her brand of commentary more Phyllis Diller than Bill O’Reilly (she also does stand-up comedy), which makes her a bit of a misfit—if not on Fox News itself, then certainly in the minds of people who equate the network with a particular brand of shouty, Trumpy Republicanism.