After Congress and enough states ratified the thirteenth amendment that terminated slavery, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This law declared that “all people born in the United States are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” The Act equated birth to citizenship.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed that Civil Rights Act, but then on April 5, 1866, the Senate, overrode his veto by a two-thirds majority. The law’s intent was “to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by law, and to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent.”

Some in and some outside of Congress were unsure if Congress had the constitutional power to define citizenship or to legislate protection of citizens’ civil rights. Those were only two of several issues that the Congressmen faced in 1866, in the post-Civil War era. Other issues included:

1. How to limit the states’ power to infringe on the rights of its citizens?
2. How to overthrow the Black Codes that deny the former slaves their civil rights?
3. What to do with the rule in the Constitution that counts a black slave as 3/5’s of a person for purposes of determining representation in the House?
4. Should former Confederate leaders serve in leadership positions within the federal government?
5. Should the federal government assume the former Confederacy’s debts?
6. Should the federal government pay the former slaveowners for the loss of their slaves?

Congress decided to lump these issues together into a single amendment, the fourteenth, an omnibus amendment, an amalgamation that addressed each of those critical issues. The Congressmen wanted to prevent future sessions of Congress or the individual states from unraveling birth and citizenship, and to ensure that all persons will receive equal protection under the law.

On July 28, 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Composed of five sections, this amendment has had a far-reaching impact upon American life.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights limited the federal government’s power, because James Madison and the other founding fathers in 1787 were fearful of an oppressive centralized power.

The tenth amendment states, “all powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the states in the Constitution are retained by the states and the people.” But it was the states that caused the rebellion, that incited a division and a bloody war, and that denied people their civil rights.

With the fourteenth amendment, the federal government limited the states’ powers.

Section 1 declares, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” In addition, “No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person equal protection of the laws.”

Henceforth, no state can deny any person, either citizen or foreigner, his or her civil rights without “due process of law,” and all people will have “equal protection of the laws.” The “federal government will provide protection of individual rights against the states.”

Section 2 repealed the 3/5’s rule. Henceforth, census-takers will count “whole persons, except those who participated in the rebellion.”

Section 3 denies those who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from serving in the government.

Section 4 declares that “the United States or no state may assume or pay any of the Confederacy’s debts, or pay any claim for any loss due to emancipation of the former slaves.”

Section 5 states that “Congress shall have the power to enforce the provisions of this article.”

One find the words “due process of law” in the fifth amendment and also now in the fourteenth.

That little “clause acts as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property, outside the sanction of law.” That little clause stands between the people, you and I on one side, and the tyrant who would throw us to the lions or walk us into the gas chambers. Without it, we live in a dictatorship.

Even the president of the United States, if impeached in the House, is entitled to “due process of law,” a speedy and fair trial in the Senate.

Next time in these pages, the Fifteenth Amendment.

Shakespeare and the plague

by William H. Benson

April 13, 2020

In Thomas Dekker’s first pamphlet, The Wonderfull Yeare, he highlights three events that occurred in England in the year 1603.

First, on March 24, 1603, Queen Elizabeth of England died in her bed of natural causes. Six months shy of her 70th birthday, she had ruled England for 44 years, since Nov. 17, 1558.

Dekker writes, “She dyed, resigning her Scepter to posterity, and her Soule to immortality. The report of her death (like a thunder clap) tooke away hearts from millions.”

Second, Dekker writes of the ascension of James I of Scotland to England’s throne.

“England and Scotland are now made sure together, and king James, his Coronation is the solemn day.”

Third, Dekker describes the plague that struck London that summer of 1603.

King James fled the city, but before leaving, he dictated a book of Orders, a list of procedures intended to halt the plague’s spread. In it, he ordered houses of the sick sealed for six weeks, and the sick were “restrained from resorting into company of others.”

Remedies he listed in his Orders included: eating vinegar, butter, cinnamon, and onions; purging and bloodletting; wearing over nose and mouth “a handkerchief dipped in vinegar;” and holding onto a bunch of herbs, such as “rosemary, juniper, bay leaves, frankincense, sage, and lavender.”

Dekker described the depressing sight of London’s streets, littered with ineffective dead herbs, lying alongside the sick and the dying.

War, pestilence, famine

by William H. Benson

March 30, 2020

Voltaire, the French philosopher, stated his creed in his Philosophical Dictionary. “I believe that theological disputes are at once the most ridiculous farce, and the most dreadful scourge on the earth, after war, pestilence, and famine.”

If we set aside Voltaire’s “theological disputes,” three scourges remain: “war, pestilence, famine.”

Throughout human history, people have lacked crucial pieces of knowledge to understand why certain events transpire, and the reasons that underlie them. The inception of a battle, of an insect or microbial infestation, of widespread hunger remain humankind’s most deadly of mysteries.

For example, the 60 Englishmen, out of 500, who lived through the “starving times” in Jamestown, in Virginia, during the winter of 1609-1610, knew nothing of what the Native American populations had endured throughout the previous century.

Millions had died, across North and South America, because of the diseases that the Europeans had brought with them, including small pox, cholera, and tuberculosis, among a host of others. The native population did not have the same immunity to the diseases that Europeans had acquired over centuries.

As recent as 50 years ago, anthropologists insisted that the Native American population at the time of Columbus’s arrival was about one million, but Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, suggests that the Native American population stood at “around 20 million.”

Entire villages along the Atlantic coast and throughout the Mississippi River Valley were wiped out.

Yet, the governor at Jamestown, said, “Indians killed as fast without [outside the fort] as Famine and Pestilence did within.”

Another example. The year 1816 is now called, “the year without a summer.” In Europe and North America, spring failed to arrive. “Temperatures in New York in May were below freezing almost every day; on June 2, snow fell in Albany, New York; on July 7, it was so cold, crops had stopped growing.”

Harvests failed to yield the usual wheat, oats, and potatoes in Britain, Ireland, and Germany. People rioted, they stole, they starved. “It was the worst famine of 19th-century Europe.”

Most people at the time did not know that a volcano, Mount Tambora, in modern-day Indonesia, had erupted twice in early April of 1815, that caused “a volcanic winter.”

Called “the most destructive explosion on earth in the past 10,000 years,” it “blasted twelve cubic miles of gases, dust, and rock into the atmosphere,” obscuring the sun for two years.

A third example. On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany, and Congress agreed. The Great War in Europe had already killed millions of young men fighting in trenches, and it would continue its killing spree for another year and a half.

Wilson and the Congressmen were unaware in 1917, that the war would unleash a deadly pestilence, the Spanish flu epidemic, that would kill between 20 and 50 million people, perhaps as many as 100 million, through 1918, 1919, and 1920.

The pandemic may have begun in France, in Kansas or Boston, or in China. Scientists are unsure, but most agree that the Allies’ soldiers were “the main disseminators.” They caught it, transported it to the battlefields, and then carried it back home. It spread like a prairie wildfire.

A possible location for where this strain of influenza first began was a British hospital camp situated near Étaples, in France, where 100,000 soldiers—chemical attack victims—passed through everyday. For food, the hospital’s cooks daily slaughtered chickens, ducks, turkeys, and pigs.

One theory put forth is that the virus began in “the poultry, mutated, then migrated to the pigs,” and then jumped into the concentrated human population.

A fourth example. On April 2, 1979, spores of anthrax escaped from a biological weapons plant near the city of Sverdlovsk, in Russia, causing the deaths of about 100 victims. Years later, scientists determined that workers in the plant had “forgotten to replace an exhaust system filter.”

The Russian people suffered much throughout the twentieth century. First, there was Lenin, then the Russian famine of 1921-1922, then Stalin, then the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, then Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, then the German siege on Leningrad that starved to death 800,000 of its citizens.

One wonders, “did the Russian people suffer more from war and famine than most of the world’s other people?” To top it off, their biological weapons slipped out of control and killed themselves.

War, pestilence, and famine, Voltaire’s choices for the three most dreadful scourges known to humankind. Most tragic is when they coincide, occur at the same time. The sadness then compounds.

Karl Marx

by William H. Benson

March 17, 2020

A month ago, I happened to catch a “Planet Money” podcast called “Overrated / Underrated.” An economist named Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, fielded a series of questions, and one was, “Who is the most underrated economist ever?” He answered, “Adam Smith.”

The next question was, “Who is the most overrated economist ever?” Cowan replied, “Karl Marx. His work influenced the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and Communist China for decades, and most of what he said was wrong.

“Capitalism does not have to destroy itself, and the paradise of the workers, the proletariat that Marx envisioned, is not ever going to rule society very well. Marx’s reputation today is in tatters, but he is still overrated, and some of his ideas are making a comeback.”

The British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote a devastating critique of Karl Marx in 1988. In the third chapter of Johnson’s book Intellectuals, Johnson paints an ugly literary portrait of Marx, as a failed academic, poet, philosopher, scientist, economist, journalist, moralist, husband, and father.

Although Marx achieved a doctorate as a classical scholar at the University of Jena, in Prussia, he never taught at a university, because his revolutionary ideas forced him to flee Prussia with his wife Jenny, and their children, and settle in London.

There, the family lived a poverty-stricken life, in a dirty, dingy, dust-covered apartment. He worked days, sometimes nights. He slept whenever and wherever he wanted, oblivious to his wife and children. When awake, he smoked cheap cigars, and filled the apartment with a constant cloud of smoke.

For most of Marx’s life, he was stateless, an exile, a dreamer of revolution. He chose not to seek employment. Instead, for thirty-four years, until his death on March 14, 1883, he spent his days in the reading room in the British Museum, transcribing other thinkers’ ideas into over a thousand notebooks.

He said, “I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

From this mass of scribbling over a lifetime, Marx managed to publish just two books, “Communist Manifesto” in 1848, and the first volume of “Capital.” His associate, Frederich Engels, then published the second and third volumes of “Capital” after Marx’s death.

In addition, Marx wrote a stream of awful poetry. Paul Johnson said, “Savagery is a characteristic note of his verse, with intense pessimism about the human condition, hatred, and pacts with the devil. Marx is an eschatological writer from start to finish.”

One of his poetic characters says, “I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.” Another says, “Every-thing that exists deserves to perish.” A “Day of Judgment” or a “Doomsday” waits in the wings. He writes, “History is the judge, its executioner the proletariat.”

Paul Johnson points out that Marx’s poetic vision fueled his economic vision. In other words, he began with a vision of terror, death, and destruction, and then worked backwards to find “evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it.” None of this approach was scientific.

Indeed, Marx failed to complete any basic research that would have given his work scientific stature. Johnson says, “so far as we know, Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine, or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.” He was without a clue what went on in a business.

He felt only contempt for “skilled workers, watchmakers, printers, shoemakers, because they were self-educated, disciplined, solemn, well-mannered, and moderate about the practical steps required to transform society.” Yet, these were the proletariat, those Marx believed would someday rule the world.

Marx was critical of them because they refused to join in his “apocalyptic visions of revolution,” and “to talk his academic jargon.” “Practical solutions to actual problems of work and wages” he had no patience for or interest in. “He refused to investigate working conditions in industry himself.”

Yet, Karl Marx hired one employee, his wife’s maid, a diminutive woman named Helen Demuth. She was permitted a room and meals in the Marx’s apartment, but he expected her to work day and night. “Marx though never paid her a penny,” “his most bizarre act of personal exploitation.”

“The proletariat have nothing to lose, but their chains, a world to gain. Workers of the world unite!”

Most tragic though was when Karl Marx’s savage, apocalyptic, and impractical ideas fell into the hands of the wrong people. Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung adopted Marxist philosophy, and with it, they tore the world asunder, murdering millions along the way.

Lenin once said, “Ideas are more powerful than guns.” Indeed they are, both those ideas that are true and those that are false and unworkable, like Karl Marx’s.

Adam Smith

by William H. Benson

March 6, 2020

Last week, I happened to hear an economist named Tyler Cowen, professor at George Mason University, play a game called “Overrated / Underrated” on National Public Radio’s podcast “Planet Money.” An interviewer asked Cowen, “Who is the most underrated economist ever?”

Cowen surprised the interviewer when he replied, “Adam Smith.”

Cowen admitted that Adam Smith remains, “a highly rated economist, but most people do not grasp the full subtleties of his work, how well it holds up, how deep the history there is in it, how good a philosopher he was, and how interdisciplinary a thinker he was.

“There are innovations in Smith’s work that people fail to pick up on. On the major issues of economics, Adam Smith was correct. His work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is a long book, and almost no one reads it today. People think they know it, but they don’t.”

Cowen is correct about one thing. My copy of “Wealth of Nations” contains 590 pages, a long book.

Adam Smith published “Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the same year when Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” and when Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence.

Unlike Paine and Jefferson, Smith though was not an Englishman who lived in the American colonies. Instead he was born a Scot, was raised by his widowed mother in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, midway between Edinburgh and St. Andrews, and was educated at Glasgow University and Oxford.

He joined academia in 1751, taught logic and moral philosophy for 14 years at Glasgow University, but in 1764, he retired to Kirkcaldy to write The Wealth of Nations.

In its first chapter, Smith emphasizes the advantages of “division of labor.”

He gives an example of a pin factory. With only ten employees, it makes “forty-eight thousand pins in one day.” Thus, Smith says, each employee “makes a tenth part of the total,” or 4,800 pins in a day, but if each worked alone, he would not have made “twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.”

In his second chapter, Smith suggests that workers should act out of self-interest, rather than out of pity, charity, or benevolence for others. “Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”

Workers who act out of self-interest want to know, “what is there in this bargain, this offer, for me?” But the charitable-minded say, “let me help you?,” without thinking of themselves.

Smith writes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” They want paid for the products they sell.

Smith insists that a self-interested worker will benefit the larger society.

He writes, “a worker intends only his own gain, not the public interest. He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest, he promotes that of society more than when he really intends to promote it.”

In 1991, the economist Paul Samuelson asked a pointed question, “Can the desperate citizenries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, of Mainland China, and North Korea, of the Soviet Union and Cuba, even begin to understand this insight by the professor of the Scottish Enlightenment?”

As for the American Revolutionary War, Smith suggests in Wealth of Nations that the cost to maintain Britain’s empire was “not worth the cost of keeping it.” The taxes that shopkeepers in England were paying, plus the interest on the debt to fight the war against the 13 British colonies, was not worth the extra profit that the shopkeepers earned when they sold their products to the colonists.

Thomas Paine added to that argument in “Common Sense.” He said “Britain is oppressed with a debt of upwards of one hundred and forty millions sterling, and she pays upwards of four millions interest.”

Smith also insisted that a nation’s government should invest in human capital: educate and train the nation’s workforce, and provide health care for its citizens. Wages will vary depending upon the number of years of training that each job requires, and how odious or distasteful the job is.

Smith disapproved of English schools, in contrast to Scotland’s universities, because he believed the English teachers unmotivated and ill-trained. He said that “the professors there had given up altogether even the pretense of teaching.”

Adam Smith, father of classical economics, never married. He said, “I am a beau [boyfriend] only to my books.” He died in Edinburgh on July 19, 1790.

Next time in these pages, the most overrated economist ever.

Coronavirus / COVID-19

by William H. Benson

February 20, 2020

In October of last year, Eric Toner, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, ran a simulation of a pandemic of a coronavirus. After six months, his simulation indicated that all countries would report cases of the virus, and that the virus would end the lives of 65 million people, a chilling and alarming estimate.

Toner was not shocked when he heard in January that a coronavirus had appeared in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, in China. He said, “It’s part of the world we live in now. It’s the age of epidemics.”

On Feb. 11, 2020, the World Health Organization gave this novel coronavirus a name, COVID-19. The 19 refers to the year 2019, when it first appeared.

On Dec. 31, 2019, four Wuhan residents were admitted to the hospital with influenza-like symptoms, sore throats, headaches, and severe pneumonia. If untreated, septic shock and multi-organ failure would result. As of mid-February, the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands, with little signs of slowing down.

This new coronavirus resembles the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, that infected 8,098 people in 37 countries, and ended the lives of 774 people before health officials contained it. SARS also began in China, but in Guangdong province.

Both SARS and now COVID-19 first infected people who visited China’s wet markets. These are open-air markets where sellers sell live and dead animals, both domesticated and wild.

Chickens, for example, arrive in cages, and the sellers butcher them in front of the buyers. Fish are sliced open and gutted on the market’s floor. Skinned hares hang from strings attached to metal frames. Exotic animals caught deep in China’s forests are brought to the wet market where they are butchered.

The wet markets bring animals and humans together in congested areas, creating ideal conditions for zoonosis, or “spillover,” a point when a microbe jumps from animal to human.

Health officials have determined that human beings first caught the SARS virus from a weasel-like mammal called a masked palm civet, and they are convinced now that men and women first caught COVID-19 from pangolins, an animal that looks like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo.

“A group of researchers from South China Agricultural University found that samples from infected coronavirus patients and pangolins were 99% identical.”

Both of those spillovers from those two animal reservoirs occurred at a Chinese wet market.

Officials are confident though that it was first bats that infected the masked palm civet and also the pangolin. The virus in both cases jumped from bats to wild animals to men and women, who then, in turn, infected others through a cough or a sneeze.

“It is no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg, and the COVID-19—originated in bats.”

What is it about bats and viruses?

Scientists have discovered that bat cells are unique, in that they are on constant alert for a foreign intruder, like a virus. “Viral infection in these bats leads to a swift response that walls the virus out of cells.” The bat’s cells will erect cellular barricades that block the virus from penetrating into the cell.

Although not infected itself, the bat carries the virus. “It becomes a unique reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses.” It infects others through its saliva, urine, or feces.

Because human beings’ cells do not display that same skill at blocking out a virus, a man or woman’s cells will succumb to the coronavirus’s attack without offering sufficient resistance.

A coronavirus exists at a midpoint between alive and not alive. Inside, it carries certain genetic material, either DNA or RNA, and on its surface is a protective coating that features numerous spikes pointed outwards, giving it a crown-like appearance, hence its name, “corona,” Latin for crown.

This virus cannot move, thrive, or reproduce on its own. Instead, it strives to enter into a host animal’s cells and replicate itself there again and again, until it ends the host’s life.

The estimate of 65 million dead that Toner’s simulation arrived at is not far-fetched. The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, due to the H1N1influenza virus, killed at least 15 million and possibly as many as 100 million, mostly young men and women in the prime of their lives.

As of mid-February, the coronavirus COVID-19 has ended the lives of a little more than 1,000 people, a figure greater than SARS’s total death count.

Health officials will continue to contain its spread “through quarantines, disease surveillance, and emphasizing rigorous hygiene practices,” but at this time, no one knows how many will succumb? A vaccine may require months or years of development. We now live in “the age of epidemics.”