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Looking for Jane – by Heather Marshall – independent book review – Historical Fiction (Canada, United States) – Toby A. Smith
Author Heather Marshall says this book is about motherhood, rather than abortion. But it's really about both. And adoption too. It's also about women, autonomy, justice, and perseverance.
Review of Stalin as Warlord, by Alfred J. Rieber (2022) - Not Even Past
At the age of 91, the prolific historian of Soviet history Alfred J. Rieber published a monograph on Josef Stalin. Covering the period from the 1920s to the post-war period after 1945, Stalin as Warlord adopts a historical and, at times, materialist perspective. It focuses in particular on the “paradoxes” of the supreme leader, the […]
The History of Member Pins | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
“The first day I was here, I was just walking around,” newly minted Representative Roger Marshall reported. “Nobody even noticed me. Then I put this on and all of a sudden, the eyes started trailing me.” Marshall came to Congress in 2017 and quickly learned what gets you noticed on the Hill: the official, Members-only lapel pin.Like a hall pass, the little metal disc has identified Representatives to police, Members, and others in the know for 50 years. But for the previous 180 years, the House saw no need for them. What happened to make Member pins a must-have in Congress?Pinning Up WatergateIn a word, Watergate—and the massive turnover in Congress that resulted. The fallout from the Watergate scandal resounded across the country and set in motion changes that led to Member pins. After a break-in at the Democratic Party’s offices, congressional investigations implicated President Richard Nixon in widespread misconduct, ultimately driving the President from office in August 1974. Nixon’s resignation and President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the former president changed the political landscape. Democrats saw massive gains in their House majority following the 1974 elections, bringing a new generation into the Capitol.The 86 new Members in 1975 became known as the “Watergate babies,” the largest incoming class since the 1940s. As their nickname implied, the new Members were a young bunch. Many were decades younger than the average age of House Democrats. The freshman class was so youthful that it increased the under-40 representation in the House by more than 50 percent over the previous Congress.Tousle-haired Tom Downey of New York was an example of the new breed of Representative and the press’ poster child for the freshman class. Downey was only 25 on Election Day and looked even younger. In the first weeks of the new Congress, Representative William Barrett, 78 years old, beckoned Downey over to his desk. “Here, take these papers to my office,” Barrett directed. Downey replied with an expletive that he would do no such thing. When Barrett summoned Donn Anderson, the cloakroom supervisor to complain, Anderson had to inform the Congressman that Downey was not, in fact, a Page but was instead one of his new colleagues from New York. Downey later noted that it was far from the only time he was mistaken for a teenager.In addition to salty showdowns on the floor, some Members reported being stopped by the Capitol Police, including, according to one newspaper, “demands to check them for concealed weapons.” The Committee on House Administration fielded complaints and decided to act. At the May 1, 1975, meeting of the committee’s Subcommittee on Personnel and Police, Chairman Frank Annunzio proposed “Members Security Identification Pins,” assuring his colleagues that they would be “neat and in good taste.”The full committee took up the proposal, and although it was clearly destined for approval, a few Members tossed in half-hearted objections. One Member said that pins would be a crutch for Capitol guards, who should have memorized all the Members. Another thought it was ridiculous to have the House pay for the pins, which would cost too much. Lindy Boggs asked that the design be changed so that there was a pin and catch on the back instead of a thick tie tack post. Another comment was that Members would forget their pins, and then where would that leave them?The first Member pin featured a starry blue background with a silver image of the House Mace’s top. Since then, the Committee on House Administration has determined Member pin designs, generally with a different set of colors each Congress. More recently, the pin design has included the eagle and shield of the Great Seal of the United States, along with the Congress number.Pinning Down Member FlairBased on a close look at photographs in the House Collection, it appears that early on, very few Members wore their pins. One image from the 1980 State of the Union shows only four of 59 Members visible in the frame wearing their pins.Similarly, in a photograph of 24 members of the Budget Committee from the 97th Congress (1981–1983), only Norman Mineta of California wears his. Mineta was an early adopter of the Member pin, and he presaged its greater use by women and minorities. Photographs in the House Collection demonstrate the disparity. In 373 headshots from between 1975 and 1985 in the House Collection, women Members and Members of color are two and a half times more likely than White men to wear their pins.There is no written documentation of a relationship between Member pins and racial or gender profiling in those early days, but in the 21st century, some Representatives spoke with frankness about the challenges they faced. Yvette Clarke of New York, after five terms in the House, expressed why it might be, even in the 2010s, that “I can get on an elevator with some of my colleagues and they still ask me who I work for. Sometimes, just coming into the House complex, I have to show my ID and make sure my pin is shown, because people say I have a more youthful look than my age would indicate. The average man on the Hill is a graying white dude, so I’m not given the benefit of the doubt. I have to make it clear why I’m here.” As recently as 2019, one female Member told a reporter that “I still get mistaken—I even went over to the Senate Gallery and [a guard] said, ‘No spouses allowed.’”Member Pin(terest)Specific security changes from the 1990s and 2000s, such as magnetometers, likely speeded up adoption, as Members were able to bypass lines for the increasingly complex security apparatus at entrances to the House with a flash of the pin. Another reason is likely generational. By 2005, when nearly all Members wore them at least some of the time, only nine began their service in a time before pins. That year, Bob Ney, chair of the committee that started the Member pin policy, said “We might have our differences, but the one similarity that we share is that we’ve all got the same pin.”As pins became more common, they also shifted from being solely an ID badge to being also a symbol of office, used in portraits as part of a Member’s self-presentation. Tallying up the pins in committee chair portraits can show how this ceremonial use grew. There is not a single portrait from the 1970s or 1980s that includes a Member pin. Slowly the numbers inched up: three in the 1990s, four in the 2000s, and a whopping 15 in the 2010s. This growth was likely due both to security-driven ubiquity and to the bright-eyed freshmen of 1975 and later who had risen through the ranks to chair committees. Of the 30 pin-sporting chairs with portraits painted between 1980 and 2024, 27 are of legislative leaders who arrived after 1975, knowing only a pinned world on Capitol Hill.In the 2020s, Member pins have become not only a visual reminder of status and ceremony, but part of Hill parlance, too. They have become a substitute for saying that someone has gotten elected to Congress. Newspapers report whether a potential candidate is “pursuing a Member pin.” For those who have won congressional elections, the shiny symbol of legislative service awaits at the start of each Congress.Sources: Committee on House Administration, Subcommittee on Personnel and Police, 1 May 1975; Committee on House Administration, 14 May 1975; John Lawrence, The Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Roll Call, 20 September 2019; Roll Call, 19 July 2017; Roll Call, 27 January 2016; Roll Call, 20 September 2019; Washington Post, 3 August 2016; Wall Street Journal, 16 May 1975; Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1975.
Becoming a Person and the Search for Happiness – SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE
Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 24, On Happiness “Most people don’t really think at all about what kinds of people they should be nor what is best for a person, what goal they should do everything else in pursuing. But individually, some work at becoming equestrians, leading armies, becoming athletes, or musicians, or farmers, or orators. Yet,…