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  • History offers hope for the future of an independent military newspaper

    History offers hope for the future of an independent military newspaper

    On Aug. 21, the Pentagon abruptly terminated Max Lederer, Erik Slavin and Lara Korte, the publisher, editor-in-chief and Middle East correspondent for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

    The Department of Defense justified the firings on the vague grounds of “insubordination,” but in a recent interview, Korte pointed to remarks that the journalists made in a July 5 CBS News segment as the cause for their termination.

    In the interview, Korte had bluntly stated, “I’m working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker, I am here to cover the military community.” Her notice of termination highlighted these comments. Similarly, Slavin’s notice of termination singled out that he had pledged that a demand from the military not to publish a “perfectly accurate story” would constitute a “red line.”

    Though abrupt, the firings are simply the latest development in an intensifying battle between the Department of Defense and Stars and Stripes’ journalists, who seek to maintain the paper’s editorial independence. In January 2026, the Pentagon announced that it would reform the outlet by removing “woke distractions” and Associated Press reprints. In April, the DOD fired Jacqueline Smith, the paper’s ombudsman.

    With Lederer and Slavin removed, the administration has installed Navy Captain William Urban — a “communication professional” with no formal journalism experience — as deputy publisher.

    Collectively, the Pentagon’s recent moves have constituted an aggressive attack on the editorial integrity of Stars and Stripes; Urban’s appointment does not bode well for the newspaper’s independence. Yet, history suggests that the fight isn’t over. In the past, Stars and Stripes reporters and American troops have checked the Pentagon’s interference by drawing the public’s attention to military overreach and heightened censorship.

    Guy T. Viskniskki, a U.S. Army Officer and member of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), established Stars and Stripes during World War I. General John J. Pershing, the commanding general of the (AEF), quickly endorsed the new publication. In 1918, he issued a directive ordering that military officials abstain from interfering with the paper. This order, however, proved difficult to enforce.

    Though Congress authorized funding for the publication, it has always been housed within the DOD, giving the Pentagon the ability to interfere and exert authority over Stars and Stripes. Consequently, throughout its long history, the newspaper has intermittently struggled against military interference. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War brought frictions between the paper and the military to a breaking point.

    In the late 1960s, military officials attempted to use the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s Office of Information (M.A.C.O.I.) to pressure Stars and Stripes reporters into softening stories or shelving them entirely. When the paper ignored these “suggestions,” the relationship between the military command and Stars and Stripes journalists grew tense. One military official infamously labeled the newspaper the “Hanoi Herald” — a reference to its frequently unfavorable combat reports.

    To cut down on the unflattering coverage, the military distanced itself from the journalists; reporters were excluded from news briefings and left in the dark about visits from prominent politicians (including President Richard Nixon, who made a surprise visit to South Vietnam in July 1969).

    Events took a turn for the worse when the paper’s editor — Colonel Peter Sweers — retired and was replaced by the pro-M.A.C.O.I. Colonel William Koch. Sweers had led a team of highly educated civilian and military reporters, many of whom had professional journalism experience and were committed to preserving journalistic integrity.

    Under Koch, however, Stars and Stripes’ policies changed significantly. The new editor forced reporters to wear military uniforms, a change that identified them as enlisted men to higher-ups, thus reinforcing military hierarchies. Additionally, Koch moved the paper’s news bureau out of Saigon to a remote location, effectively removing the journalists from the center of the action, and encouraged his reporters to focus on features, not news stories. Military directives, such as the “Let’s Say It Right” policy, forced reporters to replace straightforward language with euphemisms — “Viet Cong tax collectors became extortionists and search-and-destroy missions became search-and-clear missions.”

    Yet, as the military exerted more power over Stars and Stripes, American troops began pushing back. In October 1969, Private David Dugger, a 21-year-old rifleman from Georgia, told the New York Times, “They’re just not telling it like it is.” Dugger complained that “[l]ots of times we’ve been kicked around by Charlie [the Viet Cong]. But it always comes out sounding like nothing more than a skirmish after the editors are through with it.”

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    A few months later, in April 1970, Robert Hodierne — a recently returned Army veteran and a former reporter for Stars and Stripes — published a story in the New York Times chronicling the deterioration of the newspaper’s independence. While it had once been “the one place that GIs could sometimes read about the shooting, bleeding, bombing, gassing, dying, and killing [of the war],” Hodierne wrote, the paper was no longer a reliable source of news.

    The news report quoted Pat Luminello, Stars and Stripes’ civilian bureau chief, who lamented that the military clearly wanted “a pap sheet in which they could air their views and prevent even a hint that all was not wine and roses on the war front.” When news of Hodierne’s piece reached military officials, Koch promptly terminated Luminello, ushering in a period of heightened censorship for Stars and Stripes.

    The firing ignited another round of controversy. That month, the GI-produced, underground-style magazine Grunt Free Press weighed in. In an editorial titled “Should the Troops Get All the News?” the magazine invited GIs to debate the issue. Voicing the “Yes” side, one GI posed a salient question: “If students can tell college presidents the curriculum is lousy and irrelevant, if civil rights marchers can demand more integration, then why shouldn’t a young soldier be allowed enough information to evaluate his establishment, the military?”

    The 1970 censorship episode ended inconclusively. After his firing, Luminello reached out to the House’s freedom of information subcommittee with a five-page list chronicling the military’s various attempts to censor Stars and Stripes. While the subcommittee didn’t force any changes, that didn’t deter the champions of an independent Stars and Stripes.

    Two years later, Sweers, the retired editor, proposed instituting a civilian review board to monitor and check military oversteps. “The chief editor at PS&S,” Sweers explained, “would then know his performance would be regularly examined by a group of leading professionals whose opinions would carry weight with Congress.”

    Congress didn’t immediately adopt Sweers’ recommendation, but over time, the demands of Luminello, Sweers, the troops and subsequent Stars and Stripes reporters and service members paid off. In 1991, Congress created the position of ombudsman for the newspaper. The ombudsman was tasked with monitoring the paper’s editorial independence and reporting concerns to Congress. Since the April firing of Smith, however, the position has remained vacant.

    Today, the question posed by Grunt Free Press in 1970 remains unanswered. Stars and Stripes is a military newspaper intended to give the troops access to the very rights they fight to defend — including their right to a free and independent press. Yet, recurring episodes of heightened censorship, from the Vietnam era to the present day, prove that this freedom is fragile.

    The escalating efforts seem to suggest that Stars and Stripes’ future is bleak. Yet, hope can be found by looking at the response of employees and troops who didn’t back down during the Vietnam War and subsequent periods of military censorship.

    These individuals brought the story of Pentagon interference to the public’s attention and pushed for Congress to make tangible changes to safeguard the newspaper’s independence. Although it took years of pushing, eventually these efforts resulted in the creation of the ombudsman role. It was a reminder that, when troops and journalists resist censorship, Stars and Stripes can regain its independence, even if it’s a slow process.

    Addison M. Jensen is an assistant professor of history at Montana State University. She is currently at work on a monograph titled, “News from ‘The World’: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam,” which uses media and popular culture to examine the experiences of American service members alongside their awareness of the stateside countercultural movements of the era.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • A new commission risks embedding the gendered conceptions that have long subordinated military spouses

    A new commission risks embedding the gendered conceptions that have long subordinated military spouses

    On Aug. 3, President Donald Trump established the President’s Military Spouse Commission. Chaired by Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the commission will be comprised of over 20 military spouses of high-ranking officials — currently all women. The group will recommend policies to the president that address quality-of-life issues for military spouses, such as employment, childcare and housing.

    Although these policies are aimed at benefiting military spouses in general, the commission’s composition follows in a longstanding tradition of gendering the work done by service members and their spouses — with the former more important and worthy of recognition than the latter.

    Dating back to the Revolutionary War, military leaders have envisioned service members as men, and their spouses as women. The men’s heroism was valorized and compensated, while the crucial domestic and emotional labor that wives performed to ensure the military’s success was often credited to the service members themselves. Military leaders believed that this framework made soldiers more willing to endure the horrors of combat as a necessary part of their masculine identity.

    In recent decades, as women have moved into all roles in the military and LGBTQ soldiers legally have been able to serve openly, this paradigm has been undermined. Yet, the all-female makeup of the commission, along with other recent initiatives by the War Department, suggests that the commission will mark a return to military policies that connect gender with labor to idealize the hypermasculine “warfighter.”

    During the American Revolution, military wives, along with other women in camp, performed essential services for the Continental Army, including cooking, washing clothes and caring for the wounded. Their work was integral to the war effort, yet these women were only grudgingly accepted by military leaders. Continental officers lamented the women’s ragtag appearance as an embarrassment — though they sometimes provided the wives with pay and rations for their services.

    Legally, married women were considered dependents of their husbands, who had the right to their labor. Military pensions reinforced these ideas by rewarding men’s work through the continued support of their supposed dependents. Sarah Osborn Benjamin, a young bride from New York, spent three years with her husband laboring for the army. Yet, when he died in 1837, Benjamin received a widow’s pension for her husband’s service, not for the labor she had performed.

    In the rare cases when women did receive pensions for their service, it simply reinforced the idea that military labor was masculine and worthy of compensation, while the support services typically provided by women was the work of dependents.

    During a battle in November 1776, Margaret Corbain took over the fighting duties of her dead husband. She was injured and captured by the British but later released. In appreciation of her service, her regiment’s officers petitioned for her to receive a pension, which she received. The crucial detail here was not that Corbain was a woman, but that she had labored like a man.

    These patterns only intensified during the 19th century. By the time of the Civil War, most spouses sustained the army through labor far from the battlefield, further dividing soldiers’ duties and the support work performed by their spouses. While men labored on fortifications, marched to battle and fought valiantly in combat, women tended to farms and households (including the management and oversight of enslaved people) and sent care packages that provided the resources soldiers needed to sustain themselves.

    A small group of women worked directly for the army in camp, primarily as nurses, laundresses and cooks. The exigencies of war had forced the military to make this concession. Still, the military classified women’s domestic labor as less valuable than nursing — even though the lines between jobs often blurred as women stepped in where needed.

    Susie King Taylor, a formerly enslaved woman, traveled extensively with her husband, an officer of the 33rd United States Colored Infantry. Taylor washed clothes, nursed wounded soldiers and taught formerly enslaved people to read and write — all without receiving any pay. After Congress passed the Army Nurses Pension Act, which granted pensions to women who had been nurses, Taylor applied for a pension. She was denied on the grounds that she had been listed as a laundress, not a nurse.

    This technicality hindered many women from earning a pension, as they had to provide credible witnesses to testify to their nursing work. This obstacle was especially prohibitive for formerly enslaved women whose work was more closely scrutinized. Nursing could be accepted as work commensurate with soldiering, but domestic labor was not.

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    In the 20th century, American wars moved overseas. The two World Wars required massive mobilization of men, who were largely sent to Europe or Asia to fight.

    With spouses on different continents, the military paid more attention to the morale of both spouses. Yet, these efforts were highly gendered, and made clear which spouse was more valued. Instructional material aimed to persuade military wives that their job was to “make do” and sacrifice, in the service of providing their husbands with a reason to fight.

    In the 1942 Army Woman’s Handbook, Clella Reeves Collins felt it was “unnecessary to state” that women, especially military wives, should give as much time and support to the war effort as possible. This guidance made it clear that the state expected wives to voluntarily perform domestic labor. The government, however, wouldn’t compensate them for these efforts — however essential they were to the war effort. Military policies and guidance left no doubt that women’s roles were subordinate to the work of the men fighting overseas.

    Emotional labor was an important part of this job. Collins wrote that “much of the burden [of being a soldier] is lightened by a cheerful attitude and encouragement at home.” She urged military wives to elevate the feelings of servicemen over their own. Collins taught wives to stifle any negative emotions when they interacted with their husbands — reinforcing the gendered expectation that women should bear the emotional burden of a military relationship.

    This labor continued even when a spouse was deployed. Magazines, handbooks and government posters all pushed women to keep up a positive and constant stream of communication. Columnist Mary Lee Smith, who edited a “Soldier’s Letter Box” column in a Black newspaper in Cleveland, counseled women to make the man “feel that he is still a mighty important person in this world — especially to a certain girl back home.”

    Most of all, the military expected wives and girlfriends to avoid sending infamous “Dear John” letters, in which they broke off a romantic relationship with a soldier overseas. Soldiers and military officers saw these letters as more lethal than enemy bullets, causing emotional injury that threatened the well-being of the serviceman and the efficacy of military operations. The hatred generated by women choosing to exit a relationship exposed how the presumption of female support underpinned martial manhood.

    During the Cold War, military spouses returned to serving in proximity to the army. Often tasked with the majority of childcare amid frequent moves, spouses struggled maintaining outside employment. Accordingly, many of them spent their time laboring for the military, whether they were making sure dinner was on the table or volunteering in the military community. Officer’s wives also were expected to entertain and socialize appropriately, or risk jeopardizing their husband’s career.

    Yet, despite these expectations, the military didn’t value women’s services as labor — as seen in the cases of divorced women who did not receive any benefits.

    Today, military spouses, now a more diverse group, still shoulder a large workload, one that traditionally has been expected given their status as a dependent of the service member. Straight civilian women are still the biggest category of spouses, corresponding with the large number of straight men in military. Many servicewomen marry servicemen, creating a dual-military household. The question of who performs the necessary domestic and emotional labor poses new complexities.

    The executive order creating the military spouse commission continues to see a connection between the labor of military spouses and warfare. It claims that military spouses are “intrinsically linked” to the effectiveness of the military. It’s the very same idea that underpinned the gender binaries of the past, which allowed the military to leverage romantic relationships as sources of labor.

    By treating the labor of spouses as different and, implicitly, less valuable than the work of service members, the military has long celebrated perceived masculine values like aggression and bravery while diminishing perceived feminine values of care and support. This has not only shaped the operation of the military, but it has rippled into civil society as well.

    To truly help military families, the commission can’t simultaneously expect the labor of military spouses, while treating it as subordinate to soldiering, as the government has throughout American history. Doing so risks alienating not only military spouses, which could affect recruitment and retention, but the American people as well.

    Margaret G. Matheson is a PhD student in history at the University of Virginia

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Progressive Christian Democrats aren’t likely to win over conservative white evangelicals

    Progressive Christian Democrats aren’t likely to win over conservative white evangelicals

    A group of Democratic candidates has drawn attention this election cycle because of their deep religiosity. Two prominent candidates for the U.S. Senate, for example, James Talarico of Texas — a Presbyterian with a recent seminary degree — and Adam Hamilton of Kansas, senior pastor of a United Methodist megachurch, frequently discuss their faith and cite the Bible on the campaign trail.

    But those candidates are not winning the support of many white evangelicals.

    A recent Fox News poll showed that only 21% of white evangelical voters in Texas support Talarico, even in a race against a scandal-ridden opponent who had an extramarital affair.

    Policy differences over abortion and LBGTQ+ rights — two issues that have long been central concerns for white evangelical conservatives — at least partly account for this. Talarico and Hamilton both support abortion rights, and they’re running against Republicans who do not.

    But a more fundamental issue also makes it hard for Christian Democrats such as Talarico and Hamilton to make inroads with conservative white evangelical Christians. The Religious Left champions cultural pluralism, while a Christian national identity drives the Religious Right — and there’s an unbridgeable gap between the two. This divide has helped to shape American politics for more than a half century.

    It helps explain why more than 80% of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for President Donald Trump in each of his three presidential races. It’s also the reason why, in 1980, a majority of white evangelical voters supported Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced and was a less frequent churchgoer, over President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher.

    In each case, white evangelicals considered a candidate’s faith and personal behavior to be far less important than their top priority: finding someone who championed their understanding of the place of Christianity and Christian-based sexual morals in the nation.

    This wasn’t always the case. In the mid-1970s, leading American evangelical magazines such as Christianity Today called for the election of morally exemplary, born-again Christian candidates on the grounds that only Christian politicians could rescue the nation from moral decline. When Carter ran for president in 1976, many evangelicals decided he fit the bill, and backed the Democrat.

    But some evangelicals quickly regretted this choice. Both Carter and more conservative evangelicals believed that the United States was morally adrift. Yet, their understanding of the sources of that national moral decline differed.

    For Carter, whose moral consciousness was shaped in part by his interactions with civil rights activists, racism and the destruction of the environment were moral evils. That meant that the solution to America’s moral problems would focus on greater equality, as well as a more responsible use of the environment. The United States faced a “moral and spiritual crisis,” he said — but that crisis could best be addressed by a reduction in “self-indulgence and consumption,” not through a public affirmation of America’s Christian identity.

    Moreover, as a moderately liberal Baptist — a tradition that had historically championed religious liberty — Carter was a religious pluralist who eschewed public endorsements of Christianity and embedding his personal religious beliefs in public law.

    He opposed the White House church services that President Richard Nixon had created. He publicly endorsed the Supreme Court rulings that curtailed classroom prayer in public schools, because he said that “as a Baptist,” he believed that “the Government ought to stay out of the prayer business.” And although he personally opposed abortion, he refused to support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision — which conveyed a right to have an abortion — because he thought that in a pluralistic society, it was improper for the federal government to impose one religious group’s view of abortion on others.

    Conservative evangelicals, however, recoiled from these views. To them, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was a much greater evil than racial injustice or environmental destruction. It threatened the fundamental building block of society: the family. And the source of the sexual revolution, they thought, was a national rejection of God, which was manifest not only in religious pluralism but also in the Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion.

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    In the late 1970s, this concern prompted the formation of the Christian Right. At its heart, this movement was a campaign to restore an imagined lost world of the 1950s — an era that had combined more conservative sexual standards with national legislation to make “In God We Trust” the national motto. Conservative evangelicals thought those values had been lost amid the anti-war protests and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Some evangelical leaders argued that the answer was mobilizing and electing a president who shared their hunger to return to the world of the 1950s. “The hope of reversing the trends of decay in our republic now lies with the Christian public in America,” Moral Majority founder (and Baptist megachurch pastor and televangelist) Jerry Falwell declared in 1980. “Our Founding Fathers separated church and state in function, but never intended to establish a government void of God … We cannot be silent about the sins that are destroying this nation … We must turn America around or prepare for inevitable destruction.”

    White evangelical Christians had voted for Republican presidential candidates before — including in 1972, when they overwhelmingly supported Nixon’s reelection. But Falwell’s Moral Majority and other allied groups, such as Christian Voice and the Religious Roundtable, broke new ground in channeling evangelicals’ generally conservative instincts into a much more tightly focused campaign to restore Christian values through public law. That campaign put them at odds with religious pluralists like Carter.

    These new groups backed Reagan, and other candidates like him, who they believed would oppose further secularization of the nation’s laws and culture and prevent any further sexual liberalization. The Religious Right also opposed candidates who were strong cultural pluralists, since they thought that secularization and a pluralistic understanding of the nation’s religious identity had undermined the country’s moral foundation.

    Sometimes that meant backing less personally devout, morally compromised candidates, since the most vocal advocates of a public affirmation of Christianity’s place in public life were sometimes infrequent churchgoers whose sexual lives were far from monogamous. To these evangelical activists and voters, politicians’ policy choices mattered far more than their personal behavior. As Christian Voice executive director Richard Zone put it when endorsing Reagan, he “was not the best Christian who ever walked the face of the earth.” But to Zone, “we really didn’t have a choice.”

    When the group issued a “Moral Report Card” in 1980 that rated every member of Congress on the morality of their votes, pious churchgoers such as Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and Rep. Robert Drinan (D-Mass.), the only Catholic priest serving in Congress, received moral ratings of zero, while Rep. Richard Kelly (R-Fla.), who was sentenced to prison a few months later for accepting bribes in the Abscam scandal, received a rating of 100. Even the devout evangelical Baptist Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.), a liberal Republican who opposed abortion but warned against “mix[ing] piety with patriotism,” found himself at odds with the Christian Right.

    And little has changed in terms of this picture over the last 46 years. Once again, in 2026, in Kansas, Texas and elsewhere, evangelical voters have a choice similar to the one that evangelicals confronted in 1980: vote for the most religiously devout Christian candidate on the ballot or vote for a candidate who shares their vision of the nation.

    If history is any indication, most of them will choose the latter. Fundamentally, white evangelical voters understand that progressive Christian candidates are usually cultural pluralists whose faith is shaped by values of equality. They don’t see secularization and the sexual revolution as the threats that most white evangelicals do. Instead, progressive Christians are often more concerned about what they see as the threat to the rights of religious and sexual minorities posed by Christian nationalism.

    This history suggests that if progressive Christians like Talarico and Hamilton win their House and Senate races in November, it will be by overcoming white evangelical opposition, not because they hit upon a formula to win over the most conservative churchgoers.

    Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The Black women whose voices lifted hearts at the March on Washington

    The Black women whose voices lifted hearts at the March on Washington

    After hours of wandering and waiting in the late August heat of the nation’s capital, the hundreds of thousands gathered for the 1963 March on Washington were welcomed with a program announcement by the march’s architect, labor leader A. Philip Randolph. In his signature baritone, he announced, “Permit me to present to you to sing the national anthem, Miss Camilla Williams.”

    More than a few marchers may have shared a puzzled glance. The march leaflets offered that none other than the diva Marian Anderson would open the day’s program of 18 speakers and songs. The march’s planners and crowds alike would have remembered Anderson’s historic 1939 Easter Day concert. At that time, Anderson had been barred, like all African American performers, from taking the stage at Constitution Hall — the Daughters of the American Revolution venue. With support from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, however, Anderson sang instead at the Lincoln Memorial before an interracial crowd.

    Marian Anderson singing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939.World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

    The moment elevated the Philadelphia native beyond her status as a pioneer in opera and made her a symbol of a nascent civil rights struggle. In the estimation of the march planners in August 1963, there was none other than Anderson who could set the right tone for a day fueled by idealism, as well as calls to action.

    But that Wednesday afternoon, the contralto was stuck in the monstrous traffic surrounding the National Mall, and Randolph, likely in consultation with his lieutenant, Bayard Rustin, called forward Camilla Williams, Anderson’s protégé.

    By 1963, Williams had also fought hard to establish herself in the racist and exclusionary world of opera. Born in Danville, Va., in 1919, she landed in Philadelphia after her local community raised funds to help her continue her music education up north. When she arrived in the city, she paid the bills by selling concessions at a movie theater, while she trained with some of Anderson’s former teachers. Williams, an early recipient of a Marian Anderson Scholarship, eventually debuted at the New York City Opera in Madame Butterfly and later lent her voice to a recording of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

    A seasoned performer, she opened the program for the 1963 March on Washington. The substitute rose to the occasion, and the crowd responded with the first of several rounds of rapturous applause and shouts that roiled across the rows of NAACP chapter members dressed in their church outfits, young rebels in denim, and clergy in full vestments. Eventually, traffic cleared, and Anderson arrived, as well, making her way to the multi-microphoned platform to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” to an adoring audience.

    Anderson and Williams were two of only four women whose voices were heard by the marchers that day. Most accounts of the March on Washington focus on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and to a lesser degree, John Lewis’ controversial and fiery address about the slow pace of social change in America. Sixty-three years later, the voices and vision of several key women of the march have yet to be fully recognized and appreciated.

    The march was born from the struggles of Black labor organizers who understood the importance of taking up the problems of racial caste and class together, not separately. Randolph and Rustin, with political theorists, leftist activists, and labor organizers, had conceptualized the March on Washington during World War II to pressure the federal government to desegregate the military and provide fair employment opportunities for Black workers. At every turn, Randolph consulted and relied on female comrades who shared his leftist political inclinations, including legal scholar Pauli Murray, pacifist Pauline Myers, labor organizer Maida Springer, longtime National Council of Negro Women leader Dorothy Height, as well as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march’s New York-based planning committee.

    By the time of planning for the 1963 march, men dominated — men led all the supporting organizations, and the programming committee resolved to schedule speakers based on those groups. Despite their decades-long commitment to the March on Washington Movement, the women of the march were never able to pierce the ranks of executive leadership, nor serve as spokespeople for the larger civil rights struggle. As the movement gained steam into the 1950s and 1960s, male religious leaders — like King — and institutional heads calcified an image of who was leading.

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    With weeks to go before the assembly, however, organizer Hedgeman argued for a last-minute addition to the schedule. She sought to honor Black women who had struggled in the many fights to desegregate schools, eradicate Jim Crow laws, and secure voting rights. In an appeal to her colleagues, Hedgeman argued, “In light of the role of Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried … it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker.” Her chastening confrontation was met with no resistance, but the depth of her frustrations was never fully recognized. A hastily planned tribute would have to do.

    In the end, her recommended “Tribute to Negro Women Freedom Fighters” barely scratched the surface, offering just a nod to the depth and breadth of leadership and passion so many Black women offered the freedom movement.

    The crowd heard directly from Daisy Bates, coordinator of the school desegregation battle in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, and from gospel great Mahalia Jackson, a personal friend to King. Their words and lyrics soared. Bates pledged that Black women would “sit-in … kneel-in, and … lie-in, if necessary, until every Negro in America can vote.”

    Cecil B. Moore and Daisy Bates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.Photo Credit: John Mosley Collection, Courtesy Charles L. Blockson Afro American Collection, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pa.

    Jackson was prompted to deliver an encore, and as she sang the gospel hit “How I Got Over,” the dignitaries behind her closed their eyes and swayed to the beat.

    I’m gonna thank him for heart felt religion

    I’m gonna thank him for a vision

    I’m gonna sing hallelujah

    Oh, shout all my trouble over

    But three female singers, one speaker, and one “tribute” didn’t begin to convey the contributions of Black women to the movement. In truth, Black women often struggled against the choke hold of racism and sexism they faced in local and national organizations, and their relative absence on the stage of the march spoke to a deeper silencing.

    Each year, the anniversary of the March on Washington is marked by remembrances that venerate Dr. King even as they fail to recognize the depth of his message. The speeches that day touched on a range of issues: a still-prescient critique of automation, exposure of police brutality, advocacy for work training to reduce unemployment, as well as a higher federal minimum wage.

    But there was more to it than that: It was an inspiring day, but also, for Black women involved in the struggle, a disappointing day. Remembering the march, as a movement and as an event, we can remedy the silences by learning about the women who, through their music and their intellect and their leadership, allow us to keep dreaming.

    Marcia Chatelain is a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the forthcoming book “How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington” (Pantheon Books, 2026).

    Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Postpartum mental illness has a 19th century history

    Postpartum mental illness has a 19th century history

    The murder of three young children by their own mother lies at the center of an ongoing trial that has gripped the nation. Lindsay Clancy, a white, 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Mass., stands accused of first-degree murder for strangling her 5-year-old daughter, Cora, and sons, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan, at their home on Jan. 24, 2023.

    Following the deaths, Clancy attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window, an act that has left her paralyzed from the waist down. The prosecution argues that Clancy’s actions were premeditated. Her defense team says that a months-long struggle with severe postpartum mental illness culminated in Clancy’s violent, psychotic break.

    The gravity of these allegations has garnered widespread attention and shocked the public. Significantly, the case has also reignited a familiar public debate: Can postpartum mental illness explain an act that many find unimaginable?

    The Clancy case is hardly the first to provoke this question. Twenty-five years ago, Andrea Yates infamously drowned her five children in the bathtub of her Houston home, prompting many commentators to draw comparisons between the two cases. Initially found guilty of capital murder, Yates successfully appealed the verdict on the grounds of insanity after her defense argued that she had experienced severe postpartum depression and psychosis.

    But the roots of this debate about postpartum mental illness and its role in mitigating or eliminating criminal responsibility go back even further. Beginning in the 19th century, when postpartum mental illness was explicitly linked to white motherhood, race shaped which mothers were afforded psychiatric explanations for acts of maternal violence.

    Lindsay Clancy watches jurors as they enter the courtroom to start their second day of deliberations in her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court on Aug. 28 in Plymouth Mass.Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger

    In the early 19th century, French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol and English obstetrician Robert Gooch independently helped establish the diagnosis of puerperal insanity, a term used to describe psychiatric disturbances associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Physicians’ descriptions of the disorder sound remarkably familiar today.

    Women diagnosed with puerperal insanity were described as experiencing persistent sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, confusion, hallucinations, delusions, or dramatic behavioral changes. In severe cases, they also documented women who neglected, harmed, or even killed their children.

    Despite being categorized as a disorder of childbearing, puerperal insanity was not believed to threaten all childbearing women. Rather, American physicians saw mental illness through a racial lens. Puerperal insanity was framed as a disorder of “civilization,” reflecting physicians’ belief that modern society weakened white, middle- and upper-class women’s reproductive systems and increased their vulnerability to mental illness.

    The diagnosis allowed physicians to reconcile anti-maternal behaviors such as neglect and violence with one of the 19th century’s most deeply held assumptions: that white, middle- and upper-class mothers were naturally nurturing, domestically oriented, and morally respectable.

    While this racial construction of puerperal insanity was widely accepted within the medical sphere, it posed a challenge in the courtroom.

    During the 1840s and 1850s, the M’Naghten Rule — which held defendants not criminally responsible if mental illness prevented them from understanding either the nature of their actions or that those actions were wrong — became the dominant legal standard in the United States. But the line between ordinary psychological changes associated with pregnancy and legally recognizable insanity was often far less clear than the courts required. For example, in 1847, physician James MacDonald aptly observed that “during pregnancy, women without being considered insane, are often in that state of mind which precedes, if it do[es] not in fact constitute, the first stage of mental derangement.”

    Sympathetic physicians and legal reformers argued that puerperal insanity rendered otherwise respectable white women temporarily incapable of exercising moral judgment.

    Patrick Clancy reacts as images of himself and his children on vacation a month before they were killed is shown in the courtroom at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., July 27.Greg Derr

    In her widely circulated 1887 article “Forensic Relations of the Puerperal State,” physician Harriet C.B. Alexander condemned that “the mental state of the puerperal female has not received the attention its forensic importance merits” and contended that it was “obvious” that pregnant women were “subject to influences that weaken her will, engender emotional mobility, render apathetic natural affection, and give rise to […] perverted sensations and propensities” that legally predisposed them to commit murder and infanticide.

    In other words, white women’s violence was recast as the temporary consequence of a psychiatric illness.

    For instance, in 1893, Lena Brown stood trial in Bordentown, N.J., for strangling her own son and her neighbor’s two children. Although she admitted to committing the deed, she was unable to explain why and was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. The defense successfully argued that she was suffering from puerperal insanity and had been “in a delicate condition at the time” of the killings. When Brown gave birth to another child in prison and “treated [the infant] with the utmost tenderness,” her behavior was offered as further evidence that her violence was temporary and that she was a good mother.

    The same could not be said for women whom physicians considered racially inferior. Black women, in particular, were often characterized as habitual criminals, rather than patients, who frequently committed infanticide because they were naturally violent and had no regard for the sanctity of children.

    In 1905, for example, Lottie Hawkins was imprisoned for allegedly throwing her two-week-old child into the Anacostia River. Records documented that she had been admitted to and treated at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a psychiatric asylum in Washington, D.C., two days after giving birth and released the day before the killing. Yet no one suggested that she might have been suffering from puerperal insanity. Instead, prosecutors emphasized that she “wanted to get rid of the baby” because she neither wanted to provide care or financial support and that she consumed large amounts of cocaine and whiskey on the day of the killing to take away her senses.

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    In short, debates over maternal mental illness have never been simply about diagnosis or criminal responsibility. They have also been shaped by enduring assumptions about race, class, motherhood, and which women are recognized as deserving of medical explanation, public sympathy, and legal recognition.

    Just four years ago, Latarsha Sanders, a Black mother from Brockton, Mass., was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole for the deaths of her two sons, Edson, 8, and La’Son, 5. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Sanders had been denied a fair trial after evidence documenting her history of mental illness was excluded from the proceedings.

    The Clancy trial’s visibility reflects the enduring political and cultural significance of motherhood in the United States. That significance also helps explain why some cases of maternal violence become national spectacles that generate public debate over the role of postpartum mental illness, while others — like Sanders — are met with comparatively little public attention or a far stronger presumption of guilt.

    Udodiri R. Okwandu is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a historian of medicine whose current work examines how racialized medical knowledge about maternal mental illness has shaped ideas about acceptable motherhood in the United States since the 19th century.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The 1960s blueprint for fighting against data centers

    The 1960s blueprint for fighting against data centers

    When hundreds of Upper Merion residents came to a township planning meeting in the spring of 2026 to oppose construction of five proposed data centers in King of Prussia, they discovered that, according to the developer, they had little recourse. The plans were code compliant, Brian J. O’Neill of MLP Ventures claimed. They required no rezoning, no variances — and no vote from township officials.

    Yet, the residents didn’t just roll over. Instead, they set about organizing. A petition against the proposal garnered roughly 18,000 signatures — a majority of the township’s population. After an intense three-month campaign against the plans, the township Board of Supervisors rejected them in August. O’Neill vowed to appeal, and accused the board of violating state and local planning codes (which they denied), so the fight may not be over.

    The board’s action reflected how fierce blowback across the country has politicians across the ideological spectrum rushing to limit data center construction. Both Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro recently placed limits on data center construction.

    As the campaign against data centers proceeds, opponents can learn from the experiences of towns caught up in the high-tech manufacturing boom of the mid-20th century. That history shows what happens when residents disagree with politicians on these initiatives. And, while not every locality will succeed in stopping a data center, what residents build in these campaigns can outlast the fight itself.

    In the 1950s and 1960s, city councils throughout the San Francisco Bay Area eagerly courted technology industries to build campuses in their cities. Officials in these places saw high-tech as the future of American industrialization. They hoped that these new facilities would become an economic boon for their cities and sought to capture new tax dollars from businesses and new residents. Some places, like San José, went so far as to give land to companies like IBM without following the usual avenues for development.

    Cities weren’t the only ones that saw high-tech industry as the economy of the future. Stanford University, under the guidance of administrators who had worked in scientific research during World War II, saw high-tech research and development as an engine for economic growth for the university. They developed new programs around electrical engineering and electronics research, created industry-university worker programs that allowed employees to enroll in Stanford classes and encouraged students to found their own companies.

    In 1954, Stanford used a piece of its vast landholdings to create the Stanford Industrial Park (later, Stanford Research Park), which attracted the likes of Fairchild Semiconductor and Kodak, alongside companies founded by one-time Stanford students such as Varian Associates and Hewlett-Packard. Business developers at the university were right: within a decade, the new office park was generating millions of dollars of new revenue for the university.

    In 1960, the university and City of Palo Alto announced that the Ampex Corporation planned to build an office campus in the research park outside Los Altos Hills. The city council had already approved rezoning the land for light industry, and the plan appeared poised to proceed.

    Neighboring residents, however, were not so keen on the university’s plans. Stanford neglected to consider the impact of the development on the local communities. Residents expressed concern about increased traffic and smog, as well as the potential environmental degradation of the pastoral foothills. They were also irritated by Stanford’s seemingly smug attitude toward community relations.

    Through community and alumni networks, residents formed the Citizens Committee on Regional Planning (CCRP) to organize resistance to the Ampex plans. Within a month, CCRP organized community meetings, editorials and letter writing campaigns so forceful that Stanford University President Wallace Sterling referred to the event as the “Battle of the Hills.” One resident expressed dismay to Sterling, noting that “we now have smog, congestion, and acres of asphalt where we once had fresh air and freedom of movement in a beautiful countryside — one of the finest climates on earth!”

    Hundreds of letters in opposition to the planned construction poured into the Sterling’s office: within four months of announcing the plan, nearly 400 such letters had reached the university president. Meanwhile, residents flooded the letters-to-the-editor section of the Palo Alto Times with opposition to the plan.

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    In response, the university’s business manager, Alf Brandin, took to the pages of the newspaper to cast the university as a reluctant developer, writing that Stanford was “doing everything we possibly can to produce income” to support the university’s mission. Stanford also pushed back against criticism by reminding residents of the role the university had played in preserving open spaces — in the form of its campus lands — and in encouraging economic development that benefited the community.

    When the letter and editorial campaigns failed to budge Stanford, residents turned to their next tool: the referendum. In June, five months after Stanford announced its plans, organizers began circulating petitions throughout Palo Alto calling on the city council to rescind its decision to rezone the land for industry and allow residents to vote on the issue. Four days before the rezoning ordinance became official, organizers filed a petition with the city clerk with 2,000 signatures, double the amount required to force a vote.

    Placed on the ballot that November, the Stanford lands were now in the hands of residents. A “yes” vote would keep the city council’s rezoning in place and allow Ampex to proceed with construction, while a no vote would kill the development.

    The debate continued to play out in the pages of the Palo Alto Times. The newspaper’s editorial board came out in favor of Stanford’s plans, arguing that residents’ concerns over the loss of a foothill overlooked the way in which Stanford’s landholdings “constituted a free park” for Palo Alto and its surrounding communities.

    This sort of argument proved persuasive. In November, the referendum to stop the construction lost in a close vote. Stanford’s grassroots campaigning had helped to convince voters to bless the construction plans.

    Yet, this win proved to be a pyrrhic victory. The yearlong political campaign had spooked Ampex, which decided to build its new facilities elsewhere.

    Ultimately, the neighbors won in another way as well: their campaign against the Ampex development had created a durable organizing network. Those involved in the fight continued organizing against high-tech development plans, forming new conservation and environmental groups and galvanizing networks that successfully shaped future decisions and plans.

    Within five years, new waves of conservation-minded city council candidates displaced their more developer-friendly predecessors. High-tech developers now had to contend with the concerns of communities.

    The successors and offshoots of the high-tech entrepreneurs and companies who propelled the rise of high-tech industry in California in the 1950s and 1960s are now building data centers. Residents in Pennsylvania, California, Texas, Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, Ohio and elsewhere have come out in heavy opposition to their plans, concerned over their footprint, water use, electricity needs and taxes. They see these downsides as outweighing the economic benefits and new jobs that boosters promise the data centers will bring to communities — O’Neill released an economic impact study claiming that building the King of Prussia data centers would have created 10,000 construction jobs and more than $55 million per year in local tax revenue.

    States and counties across the United States have passed moratoriums on data center construction while congressional and gubernatorial candidates find themselves taking a stand on the issue as well. Congress is also getting involved. Among the most forceful proposed efforts is California Rep. Ro Khanna’s Data Center Bill of Rights, which seeks to establish zoning restrictions, require independent environmental and economic impact statements for any project, and protect residents from higher utility bills.

    The history of the fight over high-tech industry in the 1950s and 1960s suggests that those crusading against data centers may not win the short-term fight. Residents and local governments might find the economic arguments of data center backers persuasive just as pro-development arguments won over the voters in Palo Alto decades ago. Yet, even when they fail in the short term, these campaigns might spook companies and can seed organizing networks that will shape local development for years to come.

    Jason A. Heppler is the senior developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. He is the author of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Artistic greatness can’t guarantee stability for orchestras

    Artistic greatness can’t guarantee stability for orchestras

    Five and a half weeks before its opening concert of the fall season — months later than usual — the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) announced that it will perform at six venues in and around Washington, D.C. while the Kennedy Center is closed for a planned two-year refurbishment.

    While President Donald Trump’s role in the Kennedy Center renovations has sparked political debate and division, from the standpoint of the NSO, the issue is less about the president’s involvement and more about the risks of not having a permanent home. Concert halls have long been instruments of cultural power — places that determine who will be heard, who will be seen and which musicians or institutions will be able to claim prestige.

    This issue has a history that stretches from the 19th century to the 21st, which was when Philadelphians confronted these risks, witnessing the Philadelphia Orchestra battle bankruptcy, and later, the Philadelphia Pops lose its home at the Kimmel Center, with serious ramifications for its survival.

    The lesson of this history is that artistic prestige and institutional security are not the same thing. Even a great orchestra depends on physical, financial and social infrastructure to survive.

    Long before purpose-built concert halls became symbols of civic prestige, musical life in 19th-century Europe revolved around drawing rooms, salons and subscription concerts. They brought together professionals and accomplished amateurs in spaces where conversation, performance and social interaction were deliberately interwoven.

    The career of the Polish pianist and composer Maria Szymanowska illustrated how this culture functioned. Szymanowska performed before audiences across Europe before settling in St. Petersburg, where she became part of a musical scene in which domestic social life and professional activity were closely intertwined.

    Szymanowska was one of three salon pianists, alongside Maria Kalergis-Mukhanov and Marcelina Czartoryska, who dominated a network that stretched from Warsaw and St. Petersburg to Vienna, Paris and London. All three gave public concerts, but their salons also provided access to international artistic and social circles that were beyond the reach of many musicians. Szymanowska’s acquaintances included some of the most distinguished cultural figures of her generation, including pianist and composer John Field, poet Adam Mickiewicz and author and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

    Such connections were not merely a sign of social prestige. They could lead to recommendations, invitations and access to wider cultural networks. In a profession where reputation and patronage were closely intertwined, gaining entry into these circles could open up opportunities that were unattainable through musical talent alone.

    However, this system also had an obvious drawback for musicians. The opportunities offered by the salon depended on access to the host, their home and their social network. Unlike a permanent musical institution, this infrastructure could disappear if the host withdrew from the scene, moved away or died.

    In other words, cultural prestige did not always guarantee the institutional stability necessary to thrive musically.

    As public concert culture expanded during the 19th century, some musical authority shifted from private hosts to permanent organizations and concert halls that served as stable venues around which audiences could organize their musical lives. The concert hall became not merely a place where music was performed, but also part of an orchestra’s institutional identity. The development of American symphony orchestras made this transformation particularly visible.

    When financier Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, he aimed to establish a permanent ensemble. For nearly two decades, it performed at the Boston Music Hall before moving to the purpose-built Symphony Hall in 1900, making a permanent home part of the institution. Today, the Boston Symphony describes this hall as a public “temple of music.”

    The shift to concert halls transformed the scale of musical life but did not alter its dependence on infrastructure and wealthy patrons. Orchestras now required administrators, sponsors and long-term planning. Stability became part of the promise an organization made — but fulfilling that promise required an increasingly complex infrastructure.

    The management challenges faced by Philadelphia’s orchestras in the 21st century have illustrated the opportunities and risks associated with this structure.

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    Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra became one of the country’s most renowned ensembles, and in 2001, it moved to the newly opened Kimmel Center. However, its prestigious reputation and state-of-the-art venue did not guarantee financial stability. Even in the first few years after the move, the orchestra was operating at a loss. An initial increase in ticket sale revenue was insufficient to offset rising costs and longer-term financial pressures.

    In 2005, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association and Encore Series Inc., the nonprofit organization behind the Philly Pops merged many of their administrative and operational functions. This arrangement was designed to improve efficiency, particularly in ticket sales and fundraising, while enabling the Pops ensemble to draw on the administrative resources of the larger orchestra.

    Both organizations retained their artistic independence, with separate boards of directors and subscription seasons. However, this agreement nevertheless linked the Pops more closely to the institutional infrastructure of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

    The merger, however, could not prevent continued declines in attendance and revenue. In 2011, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The crisis laid bare a contradiction that seemingly permanent institutions are meant to overcome: the orchestra could enjoy exceptional cultural prestige without possessing institutional stability.

    Among the organizations caught up in the crisis was the Philly Pops. When the Philadelphia Orchestra Association filed for bankruptcy, Encore Series Inc. followed suit. By that point, the relationship between the two musical ensembles had deteriorated. Ultimately, the organizations went their separate ways, and the Pops received $1.25 million in compensation.

    The Orchestra emerged from bankruptcy in 2012 following restructuring, a new collective bargaining agreement, lease concessions and a fundraising campaign that raised nearly $36 million from 1, 500 donors.

    These changes helped to restore the orchestra’s financial and institutional stability, but the Pops was not so fortunate. In January 2023, the group lost access to the Kimmel Center due to a dispute over unpaid fees. Concerts were suspended, and by March, the Pops was left without a permanent venue and had postponed further performances.

    The dispute subsequently moved to federal court, where the Pops filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, alleging that they had attempted to drive it out of the market. The defendants contested the Pops’ version of events and later moved to have the case dismissed.

    The original Pops organization eventually ceased performing, but many of its musicians came together to form the “No Name Pops” ensemble, which in 2025 adopted the historic “Philly Pops” name and resumed performing at a variety of venues.

    This history helps explain the implications of the NSO’s current relocation. While the orchestra will have a 2026—2027 season, the six venues hosting concerts all have smaller capacities than the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Music Director Gianandrea Noseda has described this year as a period during which the NSO will effectively function as a “regional touring orchestra.”

    The experiences of 19th-century salon musicians and 21st century Philadelphia orchestras were vastly different. Yet, they reveal the same underlying vulnerability, which now confronts the NSO.

    Salon musicians were able to build prestigious careers thanks to networks centered on specific hosts and their homes. However, these opportunities remained dependent on constant access to those spaces. Modern orchestras have replaced the salon with a far more complex institutional infrastructure. But the principle remains remarkably similar: artistic success depends not only on the musicians themselves, but also on the concert halls, patrons, administrators and audiences that support them.

    The Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2011 bankruptcy did not mean that it suddenly lost its artistic excellence or international reputation. What became unstable was the institutional structure upon which its artistic reputation rested.

    The Philadelphia Orchestra demonstrated that an orchestra can survive such institutional problems. Yet, the experience of the Philly Pops shows just how serious the consequences of losing an institutional foundation can be.

    This history illuminates why the NSO’s loss of its home is significant — even if it is supposed to be temporary.

    Cultural significance and institutional stability are not the same. Even the most renowned orchestras depend on funding, infrastructure, audiences and collective bargaining agreements. When they lose elements of this institutional backbone, it can imperil even the strongest orchestra.

    Stacy Olive Jarvis is a musicologist and researcher at the University of Birmingham, specializing in 19th-century musical culture, musical networks and the social history of classical music.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Black voters have long been politically pragmatic

    Black voters have long been politically pragmatic

    Fierce primary fights throughout the spring and summer have exposed deep ideological fractures within the Democratic Party. They’ve also reopened an internal party debate about whether African Americans — one of the pillars of the Democratic Party — will support “progressive” or left-wing candidates in primaries against moderate opposition.

    In Michigan’s contentious Senate primary, upstart candidate Abdul El-Sayed narrowly beat establishment candidate Haley Stevens, despite the latter performing better overall with African American voters. In Wisconsin, however, African American voters proved decisive, as David Crowley eked out a narrow victory over Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong. In both campaigns, perceptions of electability in November became a key issue and a key indicator of whether a candidate could win Black support.

    This fight isn’t new. The Democratic Party has long featured debates over electability, and whether it ought to prioritize finding candidates who can excite base voters or identifying candidates who have crossover appeal in November.

    This question has unique importance for African American voters. They take a deeply pragmatic approach, one that has been shaped by the fraught racial environment that is, sadly, a key part of American electoral history. For close to a century, that has translated into a reluctance to back political causes or campaigns that make broad promises, but will have difficulty delivering results. While African Americans have been a stalwart Democratic constituency for more than 60 years, they have not automatically gravitated toward left-wing causes.

    The 1948 presidential campaign took place at the height of the Cold War abroad and the Second Red Scare at home. It also had a critical civil rights dimension.

    Many Black soldiers had fought in World War II for a “Double V” — victory against fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Yet, returning after the war, they discovered that many of their white counterparts did not want to eliminate Jim Crow segregation in the South, or other forms of white supremacy and discrimination elsewhere in the country. Lynchings and racial violence dramatically increased after the war, most memorably, the beating and blinding of Pacific War veteran Sergeant Isaac Woodard in South Carolina in 1946.

    In this Feb. 9, 2019, file photo, the Blinding of Isaac Woodard historical marker was dedicated in Batesburg-Leesville, S.C. Woodard, a uniformed World War II veteran was headed home on a bus in 1946, when he was removed and beaten by a white South Carolina police chief, leaving Woodard permanently blind.Christina Myers

    Black Americans demanded that embattled President Harry Truman embrace new civil rights protections. Truman was aghast at the treatment of returning veterans and believed in fairness. He also realized that he’d need the votes of African Americans to have any chance of winning reelection.

    In 1947, Truman began making a concerted effort to advance the civil rights cause. He became the first president to speak at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention. The White House also released To Secure These Rights, a book detailing how the Truman administration both acknowledged the problems facing African Americans and the steps it would take to ameliorate them. Additionally, Truman desegregated the armed forces, a critical step in showing he was serious about embracing civil rights.

    Truman made these moves to showcase American freedom and democracy and juxtapose it with Soviet communism, while also trying to shore up the African American vote. That was especially critical because of a political insurgency that threatened Truman’s hope for reelection: the rise of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party.

    Wallace had served as agriculture secretary during Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms as president and as vice president during Roosevelt’s third term. He had also served as Truman’s secretary of commerce. Many on the left saw Wallace as the only hope for achieving their main goals: preventing a full-blown war with the Soviets, and securing greater labor, civil and human rights at home.

    Wallace’s backers included prominent African Americans like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, who distrusted Truman. Both men supported Wallace due to the former’s strong stance in favor of civil rights at home and deep-seated opposition to the brewing Cold War abroad. Their support helped catalyze a debate in the Black community over which candidate to back.

    Forums like The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, became spaces for African American voters to debate Wallace vs. Truman. In early 1948, The Crisis editors declared “Wallace is straight on our question,” referring to his unabashed support for civil rights. They refrained, however, from outright endorsing him, noting his mixed record as secretary of agriculture.

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    Readers remained divided over this support for Wallace. Some felt the editorial was too harsh about his policies as secretary, while others believed he had not done enough for Black Americans in the federal government. “I challenge you to name another American of equal stature,” Robert and Selma Singer from Chicago wrote to The Crisis offices after its April 1948 issue, “who has mass support, who has given such impetus toward solving the ‘Negro Problem.’”

    Yet, others, such as Max Womack of Iowa City, argued that Wallace had no chance as a third-party candidate, and would merely split the votes of people who’d otherwise back Truman. He also wondered why the editors hadn’t given “President Truman any credit at all?”

    This last question hinted at the prevailing sentiment in the Black community: most African American voters backed Truman that November. They preferred trusting the incumbent — a proven commodity — rather than taking a chance on what turned out to be a quixotic campaign.

    Their overwhelming support delivered key margins in battleground states in the North and Midwest, like Michigan, a testament to the maturing power of the African American vote. “Negro leaders pointed out,” proclaimed the front page of the Black-owned and operated Detroit Tribune, “that the Michigan Republican party seemed to go out of its way to avoid the Detroit population and its political desires.”

    Black voters siding with mainstream, liberal Democrats over more radical ideas proved to be no anomaly. Twenty-four years later, in 1972, Black voters again engaged in an ideological skirmish. Activists debated the best way forward after the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Republican Richard Nixon in 1968 against a deeply divided Democratic Party.

    At the National Black Political Convention, held in Gary, Indiana, African American liberals, moderates, socialists, nationalists, and even conservatives gathered to map out a strategy for adjusting the politics of Black America to a new normal. Nixon’s administration had largely practiced “benign neglect” on racial issues, while suppressing the Black Power Movement. Attendees grappled with an overall backlash to the Great Society programs spearheaded by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

    In this March 13, 1972, file photo, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, executive director of Operation: PUSH, speaks from the floor of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind.Jim Wells

    The Convention’s “Gary Declaration” gave voice to the frustration of many Black Americans, arguing, “Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant.”

    Still, despite the critique of both Nixonian conservatism and Great Society liberalism, the members of the Gary Convention disagreed over a radical proposal to create an all-Black political party that could, in theory, broker deals with both major parties on behalf of Black America. Later that year, most Black Americans stuck with the Democrats — one of the few constituencies to back the doomed campaign of George McGovern.

    The primary that year had illustrated Black political pragmatism at work. Ebony magazine journalist Alex Poinsett acknowledged that McGovern was far from perfect and that Black voters lacked a truly satisfactory option. Yet, he argued that the candidate’s support for elements of the Gary Declaration — and a competing “Black Bill of Rights” proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus — made him a sensible option over several longer shots, including African American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

    The choice of McGovern over Chisholm reflected how Black voters’ wariness about progressivism that did not seem to be electorally viable even applied to Black candidates. The same was true three decades later: Barack Obama struggled with Black voters in polling until his victory in Iowa in January 2008 made it clear he was a candidate who could win.

    These cases epitomize how, over time, Black voters have stuck with liberals in the Democratic Party who demonstrate a genuine chance of victory over more radical options that might promise better policy. They aren’t always happy with their choices, but they know what to expect from mainstream Democrats.

    This choice reflects how, ultimately, for African American voters, a pragmatic view of politics overrules almost everything else. The old saying that “politics is the art of the possible” is, often, the rueful outlook on politics by African Americans.

    Robert Greene II is associate professor of history at Claflin University. He is also managing editor of “Global Black Thought” and co-host of the award-winning podcast, “Our New South.”

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • What’s so surprising about a Christian Democrat?

    What’s so surprising about a Christian Democrat?

    In early July, before the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, Texas Democrat James Talarico preached on the proper place of religion in politics. In his sermon, he argued for the importance of the separation of church and state while emphasizing that religion could still inform a person’s approach to and involvement in politics. He stressed how Christianity should shape the tone of one’s politics. Drawing on Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan, Talarico claimed that loving one’s neighbor includes respecting people of different faiths.

    This message raised the ire of Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, and many evangelicals have questioned the legitimacy of his faith. But he’s also earned the applause of a few Christian conservatives such as David French, who approvingly contrasted Talarico with MAGA Christian politicians.

    Talarico is not alone. There are currently a dozen ordained Christian ministers running for various public offices as Democrats, including Lutheran Pastor Sarah Trone Garriott (Iowa’s Third Congressional District), and United Methodist Pastor Adam Hamilton (Kansas-U.S. Senate).

    Many of these politicians, including Talarico, Trone Garriott, and Hamilton, have emphasized their religious faith not only as a part of their overall message, but they have situated their Christianity at the core of their identity. While there’s nothing “new” about Democratic politicians whose religious identity is central to their politics — this was common a century ago with progressives such as William Jennings Bryan and Barbara Jordan during the Civil Rights era (and still is quite common among African American politicians) — today’s candidates do represent a departure from the trend of the past four decades of Democratic Party politics.

    It hasn’t always been this way. Prior to the 1980s, candidates conversant in religion were common and unremarkable. At the time, evangelical and “mainline” Protestants were not aligned with political parties in the way they are today. As social scientist Ryan Burge has pointed out, in the 1970s most white evangelicals were Democrats and evangelicals helped elect “born again” Jimmy Carter in 1976 — the so-called “Year of the Evangelical.”

    President Ronald Reagan prays with National Association of Evangelicals President Arthur Gay, left, following his address to the organization’s convention asking for help in winning approval of a constitutional amendment permitting prayer in school in Columbus, Ohio, March 7, 1984.Barry Thumma

    But evangelicals’ rejection of Carter for reelection in 1980 signified an important shift for both parties. Explanations for white evangelicals’ turn away from Christian politicians like Carter and toward Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party — newly perceived as a reliably religious unit — usually point to several events in the 1970s.

    By 1972, the number of delegates at the Democratic National Convention identifying as agnostics, atheists, or people who almost never attended church had grown to 24% (compared to 5% of Americans who listed “no religion” on the General Social Survey.) These delegates helped to add progressive positions on women and gay rights into the party platform at a time when they were to the left of mainstream America’s sensibilities.

    Then in 1978, the IRS targeted mostly white private elementary and secondary schools, sometimes known as “segregation academies,” many of them religious, that had formed in response to desegregation, threatening their tax-exempt status unless they could demonstrate non-discrimination toward Black students. Additionally, by this time, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade began to galvanize evangelical activists in a space that had been historically dominated by Catholic priests and laypeople.

    Both of these issues came together in the 1980 election, the latter thanks in part to the attention Francis Schaeffer drew to the issue in his writings and speeches across America and the organizing of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority. Because of the growing number of Democrats who self-identified as atheist, agnostic, or non-church attending, white Democrats tended to cede the religious political ground to the new Religious Right, even though plenty of Democrats were religious. Over the next decade, this helped create a binary between a “religious traditionalist” Republican Party and a “secularist progressive” Democratic Party.

    The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., in a 1999 photo.

    Demographic trends over the next 40 years reinforced this shift. In 1975, 30% of Americans were part of the Protestant “mainline” (e.g. United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian USA, Episcopal Church, American Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ). Today the mainline only accounts for between 9% and 13% of Americans. Theories for this decline abound, including loss of identity, aging congregations, poor retention of children as they grow into adulthood, controversies over sexuality, ordination of women and LGBTQ clergy, and same-sex marriage, which led to conservatives joining more evangelical churches.

    Over this same period, the number of Americans identifying as “unaffiliated” (the so-called “nones”) rose from 5% to nearly 30%.

    Factors driving this growth include people being more willing in a secularizing environment to admit they aren’t religious, young people who choose not to identify with any religion, and the general population becoming less religious over time. Democrats have enjoyed a decided advantage among the voting “nones” going all the way back to the 1984 election.

    For Black Americans, there has also been a more modest decline in affiliation with historically Black churches (e.g. National Baptist, Church of God in Christ, and AME Zion). Yet these churches have maintained a continued source of relevance for Black Protestants, playing a vital role in Black life as a source of social support, political organizing, community engagement, aid to the needy, and defense against racism and ethnic solidarity. Today, 53% of African Americans are still associated with historically Black Protestant churches, which probably accounts for the persistence over the past 40 years of progressive Black politicians with ministerial credentials.

    Meanwhile, evangelicals shifted from a slight majority favoring the Democratic Party before the 1980s toward a reliable core of the Republican Party, at a moment when their numbers were increasing. By the end of the 20th century, evangelicals grew to represent nearly 30% of all Americans, in part by having larger families, retaining their children in the church at higher rates, and maintaining cultural and theological distinctiveness.

    Collectively though, these trends meant the Democratic Party became less beholden to a religious demographic within its own constituency, and consequently, religiously-oriented politicians seemed less relevant to the Democratic Party.

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    The exception was the African American wing of the party, where Christianity remained central to most voters’ identities. Here, a political figure like U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, a historically Black mainline church that Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. pastored) is not exceptional. The Black church’s historic emphasis on social issues and inequality allowed for adherents’ continued support of Democratic candidates who were white and less religious, even as it did lead to some tension over progressive social goals, such as same-sex marriage.

    In fact, it was the emergence of a Black politician in 2004, then-Senate candidate Barack Obama, who helped call attention to the dearth of religiously-conversant Democratic politicians, arguing that his party needed to reengage religiously-affiliated voters. From 2004 to 2008, the Democratic Party emphasized outreach to religious voters in a concerted way. But after the 2008 election, and Obama’s win, this focus for the Democrats declined so much so that, by 2016, Michael Wear and others involved in rallying Democratic religious voters for Obama had become frustrated at the lack of dedicated outreach.

    So, does the emergence of Democratic politicians such as Talarico, Trone Garriott, and Hamilton signal a new shift on the order of what happened in the 1970s?

    It may be too early to tell.

    It may be, as Wheaton College Professor Esau McCaulley has argued, that the emergence of these politicians is linked to the backlash growing among Protestants tired of MAGA evangelicals defining what Christianity means in America today. Or, perhaps, these candidates are simply the culmination of a growing recognition within the Democratic Party of its need to reengage Christian voters.

    Regardless, it’s not an accident that the new crop of ordained Democratic candidates are located in regions of relative mainline Protestantism vibrancy in the Midwest and South.

    With the exception of Presbyterian Pastor Matt Schultz of Alaska, all 12 of the ordained candidates are running in Midwest or Southern states. Perhaps, politicians such as Talarico will succeed in reshaping how Christianity functions in the political space and reclaim a lost politics of religion within the Democratic Party. Time will tell if they are part of a new vanguard, or only a brief aberration.

    Joseph P. Slaughter is an associate professor of history and religion at Wesleyan University. His first book, “Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic,” demonstrates how religious identities in the United States’ early decades influenced economic decision-making and the formation of the American capitalist system.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • A wave election could open the door to sorely needed reforms in Congress

    A wave election could open the door to sorely needed reforms in Congress

    The 2026 midterm election cycle has hinged on a demand for reform, amid an unpopular war and an administration mired in ethics scandals. It’s not the first time midterms have generated such substantive demands for change.

    Against the backdrop of the increasingly costly and unpopular Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the 1974 election produced one of the largest freshman classes in congressional history and stirred significant institutional change. Their road map for change provides us with important lessons on how to translate campaign promises into substantive reform in a dysfunctional institution resistant to change.

    The first lesson: harnessing momentum. In a body where influence is currency, the incoming freshman class recognized that steps toward meaningful reform would require decentralizing Congress’ power structure. Between November 1974 and January 1975, new members of Congress provided key votes for opening up avenues for junior members. They weakened the “seniority” system guiding committee assignments by shifting that responsibility from the Ways and Means Committee to the Party Steering Committee. That led to a legislative process in which junior members could more easily rise through the ranks.

    Lawmakers also increased the size of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. That committee has long been responsible for drafting bills that raised money, including taxes and tariffs, and programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Providing greater opportunities for new members to join gave them a powerful seat at the table. Serving on the committee also gave these new members an opportunity to address their economic campaign promises and to have a legislative impact for their constituents.

    “We realized we were a large enough group to make a difference,” former New York Rep. Tom Downey told the Atlantic, adding that support from more senior members of Congress helped to “mold” the class “into the effective tool they wanted to modify the seniority system.”

    Former Connecticut Rep. Toby Moffett, a member of the 1974 class, agreed, recalling that some senior members vocalized how central the freshman class was to getting critical reforms across the finish line. “I remember once … in some hearing on government operations … [former New York Rep.] Bella Abzug pushed the button on her mic and she said, ‘Reinforcements have arrived,’” he said.

    As a result of these structural changes and strategic networking, former members like Moffett, Steve Neal of North Carolina, and Henry Waxman of California rose from freshmen in 1974 to be committee chairs relatively quickly, as others gained seats on powerful committees and subcommittees.

    Building alliances with more experienced members also mattered. Waxman leveraged his relationship with senior member Phil Burton, a representative from California, to get onto the Energy and Commerce Committee, which he believed proved crucial to his impact on health policy, one of his major priorities. Relationships were also important for freshman members of the Republican minority. Former Ohio Rep. Willis “Bill” Gradison built relationships on the Banking Committee and was dedicated to working with the majority in order to craft monetary policy.

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    Yet, 1974’s freshmen were also careful to thread the needle between cooperating with senior leaders and standing up for their own positions. “This system still works on knowledge … You can’t be totally intransigent, but you don’t want leadership to think they can count on you automatically either,” Moffett said.

    Another equally important factor in the class’s success was coalition building. “Patience and a knack for finding allies (especially unlikely ones) are two of the most important qualities of being a legislator,” Waxman told the Atlantic.

    For example, when former California Rep. Leo Ryan was killed in the Jonestown massacre, it left the chairmanship of the Government Operations subcommittee vacant. Moffett described how he and other junior members like Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, Waxman, and Michigan Rep. John Conyers joined forces to back his campaign for the chairmanship against more senior members.

    It worked. Under Moffett’s leadership, the committee took on oversight. In 1975, the newly minted subcommittee chairman helped to defeat President Gerald Ford’s request for additional military aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. Later, Moffett pressed President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency to publicly disclose contaminated water sites when EPA chief Anne Gorsuch and Interior Secretary James Watt refused to hand over subpoenaed documents.

    There are clear lessons here for current and future members. Today’s Congress is hypercentralized, with rank-and-file members becoming increasingly dependent on their relationships with senior members to see legislative priorities through. If 2026 is another wave election, that could create openings for new ideas and opportunities and incentives for new members to build coalitions and get Congress working again. It might even open the door to addressing major structural changes: expanding the size of the U.S. House, restoring much of the lost staff expertise in Congress, ethics reforms, and establishing an upper age limit for Congress, among other key reforms.

    It is not enough to just be elected to Congress. Members of the Class of 2026 will have to apply lessons from their predecessors to achieve the change they are campaigning on.

    Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Tom Downey’s and Henry Waxman’s remarks were made to the Atlantic.

    Maya Kornberg is a senior research fellow in the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law and author most recently of “Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress” (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 10).

    Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.