Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a contractor and a self-described unpaid lobbyist for the natural world. He is a longtime resident of Lowell.
[M]y dad was a bulldozer operator, working in Alaska. He had what amounted to a shoe fetish. Not in a bad way, but still. I remember as a child listening to him and my mother debating whether he could buy a new pair of logging boots. I would have been 8 years old.
And not just any logging boots — he wanted Kulien handmade logging boots. Kulien had (and still have) an outline of my Dad’s feet on file, and for a week’s wage would make him a new pair. But it was 1959, and my parents didn’t have a spare week’s wage. Instead, Kulien patched up the pair he owned, and he headed to Alaska without his new shoes. I wore those same patched shoes myself, when I worked in the woods one spring in the 1980s. They were pretty comfortable. From my Dad I inherited an appreciation of a good pair of shoes.
When U.S. census information from 1850 appeared on the Internet, I discovered something interesting: my great-grandfather and his relatives were shoemakers in the Cumberland Valley. And that’s where the shoe fetish comes from. I never met my grandfather, and my father never met his grandfather, and yet this occupation from 150 years ago — the crafting of a good pair of shoes — influenced us both.
That was just shoes — what if my great-grandfather had been born a slave instead of a shoemaker? I began to think about what 400 years of slavery would be doing to my family even now, if I had been born black American instead of white. I was trying to describe the U.S. system of governance to someone from Europe, and then it struck me how slavery defines us, both as a nation and also as families and people.
I won’t pretend to understand what people of color live with, or the ghosts of their families’ past history. But even I can see that condoning slavery was our country’s worst decision. It is King Arthur’s scandalous son Mordred haunting Camelot. We all are impacted, and it is time to confront this tragedy.
Because of slavery, the founding fathers stacked the congressional deck to give states with large slave populations parity with states whose workers were more likely to be voters. They gave each state two votes in the U.S. Senate — no matter how many voters those states contained. In this century that means 52 senators, a majority, can represent only 17 percent of our nation’s population. Taking just one example — Supreme Court justices can be confirmed by a group of senators who might represent only a small minority of Americans, and don’t have to care what the other 83 percent of the nation thinks about anything.
The Electoral College is another construct in support of slavery. Nine of the first 12 U.S. presidents were from slaveholding states. Like the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College fails to reflect the electorate of the 21st century. The idea that a person with less than a plurality of the popular vote can win the presidency sends the message that democracy in the U.S. is a rigged game. This is not representative government, and it is rooted in the efforts of the Founding Fathers to reconcile the mindset of slavery with the idea of “one man one vote.” Southern plantation owners plainly did not trust the masses to pick a president. Voter suppression efforts in the Southern diaspora convinces me they still don’t.
It is long past time to confront this. The plantations have been moved offshore, but the Civil War is not over. Currently the Confederates and their allies are winning. Daniel Webster’s Union is in peril — and the fatal flaw of slavery is still with us.
