Suffragists “march in October 1917, displaying placards containing the signatures of over one million New York women demanding to vote, marching down Fifth Avenue, New York City.” Date October 1917, Source: Photographer unknown; The New York Times photo archive.
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An Appeal to the Women of the United States By The National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee, Washington, D. C.
Dear Friends: —The question of your rights as citizens of the United State, and of grave responsibilities which a recognition of those rights will involve, is becoming the great question of the day in this country, and is the culmination of the great question which has been struggling through and ages for solution, that of the highest freedom and largest personal responsibility of the individual under such necessary and wholesome restraints as are required by the welfare of society. As you shall meet and act upon this question, so shall these great questions of freedom and responsibility sweep on, or be retarded, in their course.
This is pre-eminently the birth-day of womanhood. The material has long held in bondage the spiritual; henceforth the two, the material refined by the spiritual, the spiritual energized by the material, are to walk hand in hand for the moral regeneration of mankind. Mothers, for the first time in history, are able to assert, not only their inherent first right to the children they have borne, but their right to be a protective and purifying power in the political society into which those children are to enter. To fulfil, therefore, their whole duty of motherhood, to satisfy their whole capacity in that divine relation, they are called of God to participate, with man, in all the responsibilities of human life, and to share with him every work of brain and of heart, refusing only those physical labors that are inconsistent with the exalted duties and privileges of maternity, and requiring these of men as the equivalent of those heavy yet necessary burdens which women alone can bear.
Under the constitution of the United States justly interpreted, you were entitled to participate in the government to the country, in the same manner as you were held to allegiance and subject to penalty. But in the slow development of the great principles of freedom, you, and all, have failed both to recognize and appreciate this right; but today, when the rights and responsibilities of women are attracting the attention of thoughtful minds throughout the whole civilized world, this constitutional right, so long unobserved and unvalued, is becoming one of prime importance, and calls upon all women who love their children and their country to accept and rejoice in it. Thousands of year ago God uttered this mingled command and promise, “Honor thy father AND THY MOTHER, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.: May we not hope that in the general recognition of this right and this duty of woman to participate in government, our beloved country may find her days long and prosperous in this beautiful land which the Lord hath given her.
To the women of this country who are willing to unite with us in securing the full recognition of our rights, and to accept the duties and responsibilities of a full citizenship, we offer for signature the following Declaration and Pledge, in the firm belief that our children’s children will with fond veneration recognize in this act our devotion to the great doctrines of liberty in their new and wider and more spiritual application, even as we regard with reverence the prophetic utterances of the Fathers of the Republic in their Declaration of Independence:
Declaration and Pledge of the Women of the United States concerning their Right to and their Use of the Elective Franchise.
“We, the undersigned, believing that the sacred rights and privileges of citizenship in this Republic were guaranteed to us by the original Constitution, and that these rights are confirmed and more clearly established by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, so that we can no longer refuse the solemn responsibilities thereof, do hereby pledge ourselves to accept the duties of the franchise in our several States, so soon as all legal restrictions are removed.
“And believing that character is the best safe-guard of national liberty, we pledge ourselves to make the personal purity and integrity of candidates for public office and first test of fitness.
“And lastly, believing in God, as the Supreme Author of the American Declaration of Independence, we pledge ourselves in the spirit of that memorable Act, to work hand in hand with our fathers, husbands, and sons, for the maintenance of those equal rights on which our Republic was originally founded, to the end that it may have, what is declared to be the first condition of just government, the consent of the governed.”
You have no new issue to make, no new grievances to set forth. You are taxed without representation, tried by a jury not of your peers, condemned and punished by judges and officers not of your choice, bound by laws you have had no voice in making, many of which are specially burdensome upon you as women; in short, your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are daily infringed, simply because you have heretofore been denied the use of the ballot, the one weapon of protection and defense under a republican form of government. Fortunately, however, you are not compelled to resort to force in order to secure the rights of a complete citizenship. These are provided for by the original Constitution, and by the recent amendments you are recognized as citizens of the United States, whose rights, including the fundamental right to vote, may not be denied or abridged by the United States, nor by any State. The obligation is thus laid upon you to accept or reject the duties of citizenship, and to your own consciences and yourGodyou must answer if the future legislation of this country shall fall short of the demands of justice and equality.
The participation of woman in political affairs is not an untried experiment. Woman suffrage has within a few years been fully established in Sweden and Austria, and to a certain extent in Russia. In Great Britain women are now voting equally with men for all public officers except members of Parliament, and while no desire is expressed in any quarter that the suffrage already given should be withdrawn or restricted, over 126,000 names have been signed to petitions for its extension to parliamentary elections; and Jacob Bright, the leader of the movement in Parliament, and brother of the well known John Bright, says that no well informed person entertains any doubt that a bill for such extension will soon pass.
Has Congress Ceded Its Authority to the President? The Fourteenth Amendment and The Greatest Gift: Inform Yourself and Vote
Fourteenth Amendment – The Text
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
(Leonore Annenberg, right, *Who We Are: Launched in 2006, Annenberg Classroom is a project of the Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Our founders are Ambassadors Walter H. Annenberg and Leonore Annenberg. The text about the 14th Amendment originates from their Institute)
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Fourteenth Amendment – The Meaning
Because many states continued to pass laws that restricted the rights of former slaves, on June 13, 1866, Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification, Amendment XIV. Ratified on July 9, 1868, the amendment granted U.S. citizenship to former slaves and specifically changed the rule in Article 1, Section 2 that slaves be counted only as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in Congress. It also contained three new limits on state power: a state shall not violate a citizen’s privileges or immunities; shall not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and must guarantee all persons equal protection of the laws.
These limitations on state power dramatically expanded the protections of the Constitution. Prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the protections in the Bill of Rights limited only the actions of the federal government, unless the provision specifically stated otherwise. The Supreme Court, in what is called “the doctrine of incorporation” has since interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to apply most provisions in the Bill of Rights against state and local governments as well. This has meant that the Fourteenth Amendment has been used more frequently in modern court cases than any other constitutional provision.
Guaranteed Rights of Citizenship to all Persons Born or Naturalized: The right of citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to overturn the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, a decision that had long been considered as one of the Supreme Court’s worst mistakes. Dred Scott, born into slavery, argued that he should be granted freedom from the family that claimed ownership over him because he had lived in free states and thus had become a citizen of the United States before returning to Missouri, a state where slavery was sanctioned.
Chief Justice Taney, denying Scott’s appeal, held that African Americans were not citizens, and therefore were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word citizens.” By specifically granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized, the Fourteenth Amendment has not only guaranteed citizenship to former slaves but to most children born within the United States, even if the child’s parents are not and cannot become citizens.
Amendment XIV, however, limited the broad grant of citizenship to those “subject to U.S. jurisdiction.” As a result, Native Americans, who were governed by tribal law, were not guaranteed citizenship by this amendment. Many Native Americans became citizens by a variety of means such as marriage, treaties, or military service. But with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Congress granted the rights of citizenship to all Native Americans.
Privileges and Immunities: Within five years of its adoption, the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted very narrowly by the U.S. Supreme Court. In In Re Slaughter-House Cases, the Court rejected the argument that the provision gave the federal government broad power to enforce civil rights, finding that to do so would infringe on a power that had and should belong to the states. The Court found that the only privileges protected by the clause are those “which owe their existence to the Federal Government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws,” all of which are already protected from state interference by the supremacy clause in Article VI. Subsequent cases have recognized several federal privileges such as the right to travel from state to state, the right to petition Congress for a redress of grievances, the right to vote for national officers, and so forth, but other efforts to broaden the meaning of this clause have been rejected.
Jo Freeman’s Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost
By Jo Freeman
Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost
By Frye Gaillard
Published by New South Books 2018, 687, xvi pages
“If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there” is a statement that has been attributed to many people.
Frye Gaillard remembers the sixties and took almost 700 pages to tell us about it. Born in 1946, the Sixties shaped his life — especially during his active years at Vanderbilt University. Between 1964 and graduation in 1968, he met Robert Kennedy, William Buckley, Julian Bond, Eldridge Cleaver and many others who made the Sixties such a memorable decade. Of all these, it was RFK who made the deepest impression; he appears in a lot of pages in this book.
Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Gaillard stayed in the South, initially as a journalist. He wanted to be a writer from an early age and succeeded admirably, this being his 29th book. Those books have focused heavily on his native South. A Hard Rain does in the same way. Since a good deal of the actions of the Sixties happened in the South this is fitting, though activists in other states might feel a bit slighted.
People who didn’t live through the Sixties are often told that it was about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. That might be true for those who only know about 1967 – also known as the Summer of Love. But that was only a small sliver of the many things that made their mark. As Gaillard makes clear, the Sixties was really about race and war. Race dominated the first half of the decade and war dominated the second.
Did You Remember that It Has Been Proposed That We Privatize the Postal Service? Who Is Handling These Dangerous Packages Now?
Editor’s Note: In case you missed this day of action by postal workers on October 8th, it was a time to oppose the privatization of the postal service.
As the United States Postal Service (USPS) closed on Monday for a national holiday celebrated by many municipalities as Indigenous Peoples Day, workers across the country held a day of action to protest President Donald Trump’s proposal to privatize the postal service.
Under the proposal — unveiled in June as part of a 32-point plan (pdf) to significantly reorganize the federal government — USPS would “transition to a model of private management and private or shared ownership.” The White House argued that “freeing USPS to more fully negotiate pay and benefits rather than prescribing participation in costly federal personnel benefit programs, and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations, could further reduce costs.”
Critics warn that such a transition would not only negatively impact service but also bring awful consequences for postal workers, who demonstrated on their day off in cities across the United States on Monday to tell the president that USPS is #NotForSale.
“Postal workers are rallying to urge lawmakers to stop the selling off of the public postal service for private profit — and to remind everyone the Postal Service is yours,” Julie Bates, a 22-year postal worker, wrote last week.
Pointing to similar moves by other countries — including the United Kingdom — as cautionary tales, Bates warned that if USPS is sold off to private interests, the public should anticipate “higher prices, slower delivery, and an end to universal, uniform, and affordable service to every corner of the country.”
While recognizing that the national mail service has faced problems in recent years, as Bates explained:
The truth is that the USPS’s problems were largely created by Congress.
A bipartisan 2006 law, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, mandated that the USPS pre-fund future retiree health benefits 75 years into the future. That means we have to fund retirement benefits for postal employees who haven’t even been born yet.
It’s a crushing burden that no other agency or company — public or private — is required to meet, or could even survive.
Some Democratic members of Congress—including Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) as well as Reps. Grace Meng (N.Y.) and Dwight Evans (Penn.) — joined demonstrations in their states:
“Our postal system is older than the country itself. It was a vital component of our country’s public good then. It still is today,” Bates concluded. “And along the way, one fundamental fact has always been true: Our postal system has never belonged to any president, any political party, or any company. It’s belonged to the people of this country.”
Critics warn that such a transition would not only negatively impact service but also bring awful consequences for postal workers, who demonstrated on their day off in cities across the United States on Monday to tell the president that USPS is #NotForSale.
“Postal workers are rallying to urge lawmakers to stop the selling off of the public postal service for private profit — and to remind everyone the Postal Service is yours,” Julie Bates, a 22-year postal worker, wrote last week.
Postal workers and critics of the Trump administration’s plans to privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS) carried signs at a Los Angeles protest on Oct. 8, 2018. (Photo: Chloe Osmer/Twitter)
Pointing to similar moves by other countries — including the United Kingdom — as cautionary tales, Bates warned that if USPS is sold off to private interests, the public should anticipate “higher prices, slower delivery, and an end to universal, uniform, and affordable service to every corner of the country.”
While recognizing that the national mail service has faced problems in recent years, as Bates explained:
The truth is that the USPS’s problems were largely created by Congress.
A bipartisan 2006 law, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, mandated that the USPS pre-fund future retiree health benefits 75 years into the future. That means we have to fund retirement benefits for postal employees who haven’t even been born yet.
It’s a crushing burden that no other agency or company— public or private — is required to meet, or could even survive.
Some Democratic members of Congress — including Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) as well as Reps. Grace Meng (N.Y.) and Dwight Evans (Penn.) — joined demonstrations in their states:
“Our postal system is older than the country itself. It was a vital component of our country’s public good then. It still is today,” Bates concluded. “And along the way, one fundamental fact has always been true: Our postal system has never belonged to any president, any political party, or any company. It’s belonged to the people of this country.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Flashback: Secretaries of the 1950s and 1960s: Would You Have What it Takes to be One at That Time?
Since the advent of television and the movies, Americans have come to love secretarial characters from Miss Hathaway in the Beverly Hillbillies to Mrs. Wiggins in The Carol Burnett Show to Jennifer Marlow in WKRP in Cincinnati to Doralee Rhodes in the movie 9 to 5. More recently, on the show Mad Men, Peggy Olsen is stirring things up: “He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they’re looking for something between a mother and a waitress,” (season one).
In 1950, the number one job for American women was the secretarial occupation.
One thing that might have united many secretaries was the specific educational opportunities available to them. The Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training in the Department of Labor offered secretarial and clerical training programs in various cities across the nation. The Bureau conducted these programs often as continuing education opportunities for government secretaries.
Among the holdings of the National Archives at Fort Worth are the records of the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training (RG 300). These documents, dating from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, offer insights into how secretaries were viewed and trained. They also offer a glimpse of an era gone by.
So do you have what it takes to be a secretary in the 1950s or ’60s? Take the quiz below (double click on the image to enlarge) and see.
An Immigration Conversation; Lady Liberty is Weeping
Unveiling of The Statue of liberty, 1886; Museum of the City of New York
Though I am usually a glass-half-full person, try as I might, I cannot find anything positive about the current tragic status of immigration in this country. I’m biased. I admit it. That’s because this issue is very personal for me.
My father came here from Sicily in his early twenties, after surviving a poverty-stricken childhood, a stint in the Italian army during World War I, and hunger and mistreatment while a German prisoner of war. Having heard about the boundless opportunities available in that mythical land called America, he was desperate to go there. But he had no connections to help him and no money for passage, so he grasped the only avenue he saw. He came as a stowaway, enduring countless hardships.
A hard worker, once here he embraced the possibilities America offered. Within a fairly short time, he honed his rudimentary barbering skills and eventually was able to open his own shop, while working at odd jobs evenings and weekends and walking miles to and from work whenever he could save a ten-cent bus fare. During this time, he met and married my mother and was thrilled to become the father of an American — me. Eventually, he and my mother were able to buy a home, which soon became the showcase of the neighborhood. People driving by would stop their cars to take pictures of the beautiful rock garden my Dad had built in front and the profusion of flowers surrounding the house. A portion of the backyard boasted a trove of prize-winning tomatoes, zucchini and other vegetables that thrived under the ministrations of my Dad’s green thumb.
After a childhood and adolescence of never having enough to eat, he was touchingly grateful for the land on which he could actually grow an abundance of food, which he fiercely protected from marauding rabbits and woodchucks but happily shared with neighbors. Next to me, his pride and joy was his “fruit salad” baby — a pear tree onto whose trunk he had spliced branches of apple and peach trees, and which bloomed every year, producing a crop of all three fruits.
While enjoying this bounty, his goal of becoming an American citizen remained foremost. Eventually after years of fighting bureaucratic obstacles that were thrown in his path because of his long-ago unconventional entry — and even being classified as an “Enemy Alien” during World War II — his persistence paid off, and he was finally able to achieve his dream of citizenship.
See Page Two >
A ‘Hidden Figure’, Raye Jean Jordan Montague Designed a Frigate in 18 and a Half Hours
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Raye Jean Jordan Montague was an internationally registered professional engineer (RPE) with the U.S. Navy who is credited with the first computer-generated rough draft of a U.S. naval ship. The U.S. Navy’s first female program manager of ships (PMS-309), Information Systems Improvement Program, she held a civilian equivalent rank of captain. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame in 2018.
Raye Jordan was born on January 21, 1935, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Rayford Jordan and Flossie Graves Jordan. She attended St. Bartholomew School before moving to Merrill High School in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), graduating in 1952. She attended Arkansas AM&N (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), wanting to study engineering, though because no Arkansas colleges were awarding such degrees to African-American women in the 1950s, she took a degree in business, graduating in 1956. She was married three times: to Weldon A. Means in 1955, to David H. Montague in 1965, and to James Parrott in 1973. After her marriage to Parrott ended, she returned to the name Montague, the same last name as her only child, David R. Montague. In 1956, Montague began her career with the Navy at the old David Taylor Model Basin (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in Carderock, Maryland, as a digital computer systems operator. She later advanced to the position of computer systems analyst at the Naval Ship Engineering Center and served as the program director for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Maintenance Program as well as the division head for the Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) Program. On January 22, 1984, she accepted the newly created position of deputy program manager of the Navy’s Information Systems Improvement Program. Montague’s career spanned the development of computer technologies, from the UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercially available computer, down to modern computers. She successfully revised the first automated system for selecting and printing ship specifications and produced the first draft for the FFG-7 frigate ( the Oliver Hazard Perry–class, or Perry-class, ship) in eighteen hours. This was the first ship designed by computer. In 1972, Montague was awarded the U.S. Navy’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the Navy’s third-highest honorary award. She was the first female professional engineer to receive the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Achievement Award (1978) and the National Computer Graphics Association Award for the Advancement of Computer Graphics (1988). She also received a host of other honors from military branches, industry, and academia. Montague worked on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) and the Navy’s first landing craft helicopter-assault ship (LHA). The last project with which she was affiliated was the Seawolf-class submarine (SSN-21).
Montague retired in 1990. In 2006, after fifty years spent in the metropolitan Washington DC area, she returned to Arkansas, living in west Little Rock, where she remained active with LifeQuest, The Links Inc., the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and the American Contract Bridge League. She also mentored inmates through a community re-entry program through the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) as well as students at the eStem Elementary Public Charter School in Little Rock. In 2017, with the movie Hidden Figures having awakened an awareness of the previously unacknowledged contributions of black engineers and mathematicians in the American defense and space industries, Montague was featured on the television show Good Morning America and dubbed a “real-life hidden figure.” Montague died on October 9, 2018, of congestive heart failure. The Encyclopedia Of Arkansas Culture and History Betty Sorensen Adams |
Stateline: The Elections Are Coming and There’s a National Shortage of Poll Workers
When women vote. What will happen if the polling place is located in a millinery shop. Engraving, Library of Congress, 1909, by Gordon Grant, copyrighted by Keppler & Schwarzmann
By Matt Vasilogambros, Stateline, Pew Trusts
Local election officials are dealing with a myriad of issues ahead of November’s contentious midterms, not least of which is securing systems from malicious actors. One lesser-known problem that continues to concern them is the national shortage of poll workers.
They greet you at the plastic folding table set up in your neighborhood’s library, church or fire station, asking you for your name, address and, depending on your state, photo ID before handing you a ballot or directing you to a voting machine. More than just glorified receptionists, these underpaid few are really the gatekeepers to democracy.
Poll workers can be the difference between a smooth election and long lines, mass confusion and miscounted ballots. But poll workers are older, less prepared and becoming scarcer.
In its 2016 biennial survey, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that two-thirds of jurisdictions had a hard time recruiting enough poll workers on Election Day, compared to fewer than half of officials in 2008 and 2012.
Solving the Shortage
The shortage is a matter of recruitment and retention, said Aerion Abney, the Pennsylvania state director for All Voting is Local, a project of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Leadership Conference Education Fund.
“I recognize that being a poll worker is not the most glamorous job,” Abney said. “People might not even be aware of it. Being a poll worker is an underappreciated job, but they provide a critical service to the public. We want to make sure people know this is an opportunity that exists.”
All Voting is Local organizers claim it is the first multistate effort to recruit poll workers. The project launched its online campaign last month, while also targeting Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin through billboard, digital newspaper, radio and social media ads.
Organizers want to make sure poll workers reflect the communities in which they serve to make voters feel more welcome, focusing especially on people of color and younger people.
Poll workers tend to be middle-aged or elderly. Indeed, 56 percent of poll workers in 2016 were 61 and older, according to the Election Assistance Commission survey. Younger people often have work or school conflicts, Abney said.
He has traveled around Pennsylvania, showing up at community events and local election offices to spread the word of their initiative. After all, he tells people, it’s an opportunity to be civically engaged and get paid. There is no set salary for poll workers statewide, but poll workers in Allegheny County, for example, earn between $115 and $140 a day.
The group’s efforts seem to be working. Nationally, organizers have recruited more than 2,400 people — 924 of whom live in Pennsylvania, where organizers have spent more time because needs are more acute.
Cherie DeBrest was ready to sign up to be a poll worker in Pennsylvania. For 18 years, she worked with parents and caregivers as a social worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, guiding them through the obstacles of medical care. Over the last three presidential elections, DeBrest, 49, led voter registration drives at the hospital, registering staff and the family members of patients whenever she could.
Editor’s Note: We volunteered four times as a poll worker and the most common remark from voters was, “Thank you for the work that you’re doing.” It was both interesting and rewarding. We recommend it.
Joan Cannon Asked: What is a Book Club? An Old-Fashioned Book Report? A Program Given By an Author? What Is the Accepted Practice?
Photo: Emily Carlin, Flickr Creative Commons
How many who read these entries belong to book clubs?
It’s a funny thing, probably due in part to the size of the tiny farming village where we once lived that I never even knew of a book club during my years of mothering and waiting for the breadwinner to come home. I think I’d have loved a book club. It would even have been fun to be hostess in my turn.
A year or so ago, I was invited to attend a tea given by the combined membership of all the book clubs in the town where I now live. A presentation was scheduled for the proprietor of the much-loved local independent bookstore cum gift shop. She is a legend in the area for her teas as well as author signings and the eclectic choices in her store. There were at least 300 in attendance. The place (the largest fellowship hall available in a local church) was crammed. It seems that in a town with a population under 25,000, there are dozens of book clubs!
Now I find myself surrounded by book clubs — literally.
In my innocence, I thought a book club would bear some resemblance to an English class, presumably without grades or written reports. Everyone would read the same book, and then the meeting would take place with everyone discussing the chosen volume for that session.
When I asked around and discovered that I knew no one for whom that was the accepted practice, a friend told me that in her club a single member offers a program on a book of her choice. She (or he) read the book and prepares what amounts to an old-fashioned book report for the club meeting. Any discussion inspired by the book is incidental, taking place after the program. I mentally shook my head in disbelief. As an English major and later an English teacher, I thought I’d been there and done that, and that was really enough. They invited me to talk about my newly-published novel. Of course, I was thrilled, but when I was invited to join that club, I declined.
I was invited to give a program at another book club. The member explained that she was responsible for the program a couple of weeks hence and said she had no idea what to do or of anyone to invite to present one. When I inquired about how the chosen books were used for the program, she explained that they weren’t used at all. Each member purchases a book, each book is passed around in a set rotation through the year, and nothing else concerning specific books is involved with that club. I had to bite my tongue to refrain from asking why this is called a book club.
In desperate need at the time of something — anything — to occupy my mind, I volunteered to do a program for her group. It wasn’t just because I already knew that some clubs provide varied and luscious refreshments as part of their meetings and that the hostess is a chef in her own right but I also knew she lives in a house renowned for its gardens and furnishings. I’d met her often enough to know I really like her. She accepted my offer. It dawned on me after that conversation that I had a heck of a nerve, and that she was on a dreadful spot if she preferred to make her own choice of speaker and/or subject.
Having stuck my proverbial neck in the proverbial noose, I began to cast about for a suitable subject, and naturally (I thought) hit upon a version of a book review. I named the book, gave my friend a quick blurb, and she approved. I thought about how much time (at least a half hour) I’d need to fill, and realized that my teaching days were long gone. The book was huge and fascinating, and I’d have to half-way read it again if I were to be able to talk properly about it.
Three more possible subjects were considered and rejected before I hit on one I hoped would be new to the ladies and might be something that would interest most of them. It all went off much better than I expected it might; the audience was attentive and complimentary, and I was invited to the next meeting as a guest.
This time the program was given by an author. She brought her books to the meeting for sale (something I had deliberately not done at the previous meeting, which demonstrates — again — how hopeless I am at promotion). Delicious refreshments were beautifully served with gleaming silver in a beautiful home. The whole affair was something Lillian Hellman or Claire Booth Luce might have staged, completely without any discussion of books. The presenters weren’t familiar to the audience, which meant only she could talk about them, that is, until several groups began to talk of what they’d recently been reading as they assembled to collect their umbrellas and depart.
Needless to say, I have a lot to learn about book clubs.
Another Turbulent Day on the Market: Three Reasons to Do Nothing
New York Stock Exchange, Arun de Joe photograph; Wikimedia Commons
Our society values action. We enjoy “action movies”, we use “action verbs” on our resumes, and we praise active people. When we hear news, we think about what action to take. If we hear that the economy is booming, we want to take more investment risk. If a company announces record earnings, we want to buy more of its stock. If everyone says interest rates will go up, we want to sell our bonds. Often the right strategy is counter to our nature and we should hold to our established plan. Here are three reasons why.
1) Daily news has very limited value for long-term investors.
When we hear about economic growth or record corporate earnings, we are being told about past performance. While the past may continue for a time, it won’t indefinitely, and an investment’s current value is based only on future returns. High growth stocks can’t grow forever. Single events seldom repeat. Unless the new information materially changes the value of future returns, it should not trigger a change to your investment plan. Even recessions should not warrant a change in a well-designed strategy since they do occur as a normal part of an economic cycle and should have been a factor in the original design of your plan.
2) Only where there is risk, is there the potential for return.
If an investment’s return were sure, it would be close to the yield on U.S. Treasury securities. Seeking higher returns requires accepting uncertainty as to the eventual result. Shares which are certain to appreciate would have already. Markets incorporate new information into pricing quickly. Interest rates which are certain to increase are already reflected in the current yield on longer maturity bonds. It would be a mistake to change a strategy simply because a future event now may seem certain.
3) Reality may differ from expectations in the short run.
The science of investing is not that dissimilar from the science of weather. A meteorologist determines there is only a 25% chance of rain tomorrow. Then it turns out it actually rains. An unlikely event occurred, but there is no reason to change the weather forecasting model. The weather doesn’t always behave as expected.
Investing requires a similar approach to understanding uncertainty. Professional investors estimate the probability of future returns based on factors which have influenced past returns. Diversified portfolios are positioned to benefit from these factors over time, but they may not benefit all of the time. For example, over any five-year period since 1926, small company stocks outperform large company stocks 64% of the time and value stocks return more than growth stocks 75% of the time. In the most recent 5 year period, this has not been the case. The fact that the likely outcome was not the actual outcome does not require abandoning the research or the strategy.
When action is required
The best strategy, given the uncertainty of future returns, is to be well diversified all the time. If you are properly positioned to capture returns commensurate with the risk taken, there is no reason to change your strategy except when there is a material change to the assumptions. If your future savings or spending needs change, you should review the plan. If there is an unexpected change to the economic environment, action may be required. Barring major unexpected changes, often the best course of action is the hardest: take no action at all!