Category: Politics

Like gardening, all politics is local.

Holiday music: Christmas in the trenches

Merry Christmas from the Family is the holiday song that makes me laugh. Christmas in the Trenches is the one that makes me misty and then some. John McCutcheon turns a true story into a real tear-jerker with a message.

Two versions: Straight recent live performance …

and older live performance with back story and period pictures.

Was a big McCutcheon fan back in college days. Good to see that this favorite is still popular, at least on the YouTubes.

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Sunday music: Champagne Charlie

We can thank the Dutch for more than great flower bulbs. They’ve also given us Champagne Charlie, a rootsy, bluesy band that does great renditions of Depression-era hits. The music helps with the pain. Really.

Waitin’ on Roosevelt, lyrics by Langston Hughes.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. African Americans who supported left-wing parties, however, were more likely to be critical. Langston Hughes, a playwright, poet, and novelist, became a socialist in the 1930s. Although he did not join the Communist Party, he spent a year in the Soviet Union and published his works in magazines sympathetic to liberal, socialist, and Communist causes. In Hughes’s “Ballad of Roosevelt,” which appeared in the New Republic in 1934, the poet criticized the unfulfilled promises that FDR had made to the poor. Hughes’s style in this poem showed his distinctive merging of traditional verse with black artistic forms like blues and jazz.

Bonus track: The ever more upbeat Breadline Blues:

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How soil type affected the 2008 election map

cotton map

This map shows a strong correlation between 2008 presidential election results (red counties = McCain, blue = Obama) and cotton production in 1860 (each dot = 2,000 bales).

Long story short:

  • Marine deposits from Upper Cretaceous period form Selma Chalk, which underlies the area in the crescent through Mississippi and Alabama.
  • That area, and other soils suitable for cotton production, attract plantation owners who concentrate slave labor on the most productive soils growing the most lucrative cash crop, King Cotton.
  • Despite migrations after emancipation, the areas where cotton was king continue to have a large proportion of African-Americans.
  • African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama, producing the blue streak through the otherwise red south.

This correlation was first noted on by Allen Gathman. a genetics professor at Southeast Missouri State University, with further elaboration at The Vigorous North and Strange Maps.

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