Maggie's Farm

Hero of Alexandria, of course (c.10-70 AD). He also may have invented the use of the windmill, and built a wind-powered organ (h/t, Stumbing and Mumbling).

Who knew they had organs back then, before churches and before rock bands? 

In Belgium there are two communities. One are called Walloons and they speak French, the others are called Flemings and they speak a kind of low Dutch. They can't live together. After the war, we should make two states, one known as Walloonia and one as Flamingia, and we should amalgamate Luxembourg with Flamingia. What do you say to that?

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Oliver Lyttelton (Lord Chandos) of the British War Cabinet, 1942

Belgium was part of Holland until 1830. It is just another artificial state, and may be on the verge of falling into pieces. The above quoted from Crisis in Belgium at Brussels Journal.

Grover Cleveland reluctantly supported the concept of a Labor Day during his re-election campaign. He lost anyway. It was meant to be a day off from work for union organizers to organize.

I guess now it means the official end of summer, time to get engaged with work again, and hot dogs and watermelon. To me, it means two things: our peak tomato season, and time to start pulling out the hunting gear. I suppose it also means the official start date of the national campaign, but I am already bored with that.

Brief history of the holiday here. (If your eyes are failing, that's Teddy Roosevelt somewhere in the photo.)

We did a piece last year about the skilled trades.

Done with Mirrors has some thoughts about America's love-hate relationship with work.

And one more: Americans are the most productive workers in the world. Blue Crab. It's called the Protestant Work Ethic.

For those who are inclined towards a federalist, libertarian view of the American nation, the debate about the Most Destructive President probably ought to be about Lincoln and FDR.

Lincoln - a superb and fascinating human being by any measure - squashed any pretense of voluntary confederation among the units of the young nation. FDR elevated the power of the Federal government over the individual to levels which never could have been imagined previously.

However, the ultimate result of the sickening Civil War has been positive - freedom for many and preservation of the union (although one may and should question whether maintaining the union was worth the destruction of the South and 620,000 dead - the most in any war in America's history). FDR's accumulation of power in DC has been an enduring disaster which, because of the numbers of clients and beneficiaries, may be impossible to undo short of rebellion (see Vermont's recent threats to secede, but for different reasons). Did the New Deal have any impact on the Depression? No, none - and some argue that New Deal policies helped to perpetuate the Depression.

But "he cared." I am sure that he did.

Individual freedom from government power is always stolen with the excuse of "crisis." (Thus the Left has learned to have a "crisis du jour" to try to justify the expansion of the Federal government at the expense of the states and the citizen.) The Great Depression was the seemingly permanent crisis which was used to justify almost any power grab by Washington.

How was this done? The notion of a permanent severe scarcity crisis was presented, which supposedly only Roosevelt's leftist (more acurately, Stalinist) government experts were smart enough to deal with.

A piece on the subject by Captain Ed pointed me to George Will's review of Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, which we have discussed here earlier. A quote from Will:

Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. In 1910, Congress legislated height limits for Washington buildings, limits that prevented skyscrapers, symbols of mighty business, from overshadowing the Capitol, the symbol of government.

In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined. Roosevelt said that modern "civilization" has tended "to make life insecure." Hence Social Security, which had the added purpose of encouraging workers to retire, thereby opening jobs to younger people. Notice the assumptions of permanent scarcity, and that the government has a duty to distribute scarce things, such as work.

The New Deal "brain trust" was wrong about theory, wrong about the American vision of freedom, and wrong about the direction of the future. You can read a couple of our previous pieces on this subject here and here.

Addendum: The Jacksonian makes a different argument - for Pres. Wilson, here. He makes the case that the political changes from 1909-1919 set the stage for FDR. A good read.

How easily we forget that the Declaration of Independence only predicted the USA in retrospect. The Declaration was the military and political alliance of 13 colonies, each of which was self-governing within the generous limits established by Britain. In the Declaration they proclaimed themselves to each be a "state," ie a nation, independent from Britain, and to join to remove British colonial control, by force of arms if necessary.

Each state coveted its autonomy, during and after the war. There was no US until 1789 when those independent 13 states, after much dithering, politicking, and ambivalence, agreed to cede some small amount of power, besides the power to run the Continental Army, to a united Federal government.

They were all, naturally, and rightly, suspicious about the idea. But the State of New York, as I understand it, gets the main credit for insisting on the addition of a Bill of Rights before being willing to sign on to the document. Many delegates felt that enumerating all of those rights - and more - was unnecessary and obvious.

Image: Weisgerger's painting of Betsy Ross presenting the flag of the Continental Army in 1777 - what was called the flag of the "Grand Union." Prior to that time, the Army had only State and militia flags and banners.

A brief look at the history of travel by Culver at History News Network. A quote:

Americans were long suspicious of leisure – it was for the wealthy and effete, not the hardworking and respectable.  A brief respite from work to recover one’s health was acceptable; leisure as a way of life was not.  Recreational travel was meant to be constructive, educational, or redemptive, such as nineteenth-century Chautauquas or visits to national parks.  Mere hedonistic fun was a danger to morals and a healthy work ethic.

While many Americans discarded their fear of leisure during the twentieth century, and even embraced it as a way of life – for an example of this, see retirees – academics continued to view tourism with suspicion.

Read the whole thing.