Pushing Back Against a Progressive View of History
What we can learn from the latest sanctioned killing
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
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Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
October 3
1913: The US federal income tax is signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
1922: Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia becomes the first female United States Senator, albeit for one day
1956: A group of 25 Japanese women are heading back to Japan after spending a year in the United States receiving medical and cosmetic surgery
1976: Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz hands in his resignation after a media firestorm over racist comments he made on an airplane in front of Pat Boone, Sonny Bono, and former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.
2008: The $700 billion bailout bill for the US financial system is signed by President George W. Bush.
October 4
1776: Benjamin Franklin is headed to France as the Continental Congress’s first diplomat, looking to secure support for the American independence movement.
1957: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, marking the beginning of the Space Age
1976: The Supreme Court lifts the 1972 ban on the death penalty for convicted murderers
October 5
1947: President Harry Truman asks Americans to refrain from eating meat on specific days to help stockpile grain for starving Europeans in the first televised White House speech
1982 : A massive recall is underway for Tylenol, in the wake of a series of random poisonings and deaths in the Chicago era
1988: Democrat Lloyd Bentsen tells Republican Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
October 6
1794 : Violent skirmishes are breaking out in Western Pennsylvania as the newly formed country tries to levy a tax on whiskey
1961: President John F. Kennedy recommends that Americans build fallout shelters in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union
2018: Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed and sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice
October 7
1975: A judge reverses the decision to to deport John Lennon to the UK following a marijuana conviction
1991: Law Professor Anita Hill accuses Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments to her
1996: Rupert Murdoch launches Fox News with Roger Ailes as CEO
2016: The Washington Post publishes excerpts of a tape of Donald Trump talking to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about how he commits sexual assault
October 8
2001: The FBI opened an investigation into a series of letters containing anthrax powder that were mailed to news organizations and politicians
October 9
1635: Religious dissident Roger Williams is banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for having “broached and divulged diverse new and dangerous opinions, against the authority of magistrates”
1888: The Washington Monument receives its first public visitors
1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt approves the atomic program that would become the Manhattan Project
1990: David Souter is sworn in as a US Supreme Court associate justice
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Nicole Hemmer’s turn at the typewriter.
Last week, the United States killed Marcellus Williams.
The state of Missouri officially carried out his killing, injecting him with lethal drugs. Earlier that day, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay that would have prevented the killing, following in the footsteps of Missouri’s supreme court and governor. Recently, evidence had surfaced that threw into doubt Williams’s conviction for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle. The top prosecutor in St. Louis joined Williams’s lawyer and the Gayle family in trying to prevent Williams’s death, but to no avail.
The current Supreme Court has little interest in stopping executions. Its conservative members — including Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, who both were in the midst of their confirmation processes during this week in 1991 and 2018, respectively — have opened the floodgates for states interested in executing inmates. In 2019, the Court brushed off concerns about flawed and painful execution methods, holding that the 8th Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.” They came down hard against last-minute appeals, with Justice Neil Gorsuch insisting that the Justices treat such appeals with extreme skepticism and grant them only in the rarest of circumstances.
During the Trump years, the Court cleared away hurdles to federal execution, leading to 13 such executions during Trump’s presidency. Death-penalty states, sensing the changing tolerance for execution, began zealously killing inmates. In 2022, Oklahoma scheduled 25 executions over a 29-month period.
But for a brief period in U.S. history, there were no executions. In 1972, the Supreme Court instituted a moratorium on death penalty cases. In Furman v. Georgia, the Court ruled that the death penalty was so capriciously applied that it violated the 8th Amendment. For four years, the U.S. seemed poised to join dozens of other nations in outlawing the death penalty entirely. But where nations like the U.K. banned executions entirely in 1976, the U.S. took a different path. On this week in 1976, the Court ended its moratorium. In a 7-2 decision, the Court held that if the death penalty were carefully applied, it was not unconstitutional.
The “carefully applied” provision seemed to fall away as the lust for executions peaked in the 1990s. Almost every day, someone was being sentenced to death; every third or fourth day, someone was being executed. In 1996, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which made it much harder to appeal death sentences. And now the Supreme Court has eased the way to executions even more.
Historians often push back against a progressive view of history, one that suggests society is constantly getting better, that the moral arc of the universe bends inevitably toward justice. The Court’s reversal of the death penalty is an excellent case in point. While most of the rest of the world moved to ban executions, the U.S. joined what is now only a few dozen nations who regularly execute people. As the case of Marcellus Williams shows, that is not a historical arc that is likely to bend back any time soon.
A little more esoterica
Jimmy Carter turned 100 years old this week! To celebrate, enjoy some of our favorite Carter related episodes:
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