Here Come the Judge – It Happened Today, January 31, 2017

On January 31 of 1801, lame-duck U.S. President John Adams appointed John Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Such appointments often backfire; Eisenhower would later bitterly regret elevating Earl Warren to Marshall’s old job. And at the time it was largely seen through the partisan lens of Adams’ effort to stack the judiciary against his hated rival Thomas Jefferson. But it turned out to be one of the greatest appointments in American history.

Adams had originally offered the job to another leading member of what was fast becoming the Federalist party, John Jay. But Jay turned it down partly on the grounds that the Supreme Court had insufficient "energy, weight, and dignity." Which might sound like a weird thing to say given the importance of the judiciary in the American system of checks and balances. But it was in fact not clear in 1801 that the Court was an equal branch or that it could, in fact, invalidate statutes as unconstitutional.

It was Marshall himself, whose skilful and congenial guidance included changing the practice of each judge issuing his own opinion to the presentation of a majority or even unanimous consensus, who made the Court what it has been since. And the critical turning point was Marbury v Madison in 1803 in which a unanimous Court struck down portions of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional.

It was, interestingly, the only time in his 35 years as Chief Justice that the Marshall Court declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional. And it was one whose practical impact pleased the incumbent President and Congress even though they were Jeffersonian Republican foes of the Federalist Party, which probably helped it avoid becoming a focus for partisan wrangling. But however that may be, it was a crucial step in the evolution of the American system to the point that one prominent constitutional scholar declared that only when Marshall finished reading the court’s opinion in Marbury v Madison was the Grand Convention that wrote the Constitutional entirely adjourned.

As for John Adams, who spent a long and productive life in service of his country, he later said "My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life." It may also have been his most effective.

Constitution, Crime, Government, History, It happened today, Politics, United StatesJohn Robson
Not With a Bang but a Wallop – It Happened Today, January 30, 2017

On January 30 of 1835 one Richard Lawrence staggered into the history books by becoming the first person to try to assassinate a sitting United States president. I trust it is clear that I do not think anyone should ever assassinate a U.S. president current or former, so I will not be misunderstood when I say that his choice of Andrew Jackson as his target was, from a narrowly practical point of view, extremely ill chosen.

Lawrence, described by acquaintances as a quiet if diligent house painter, seems to have gone insane in the early 1830s. As his behaviour spiraled out of control he became obsessed with the president, and on January 30 attempted to shoot Jackson as the latter was leaving the U.S. Capitol funeral of Congressman Warren R. Davis, using two pistols notorious for unreliability in the sort of damp weather Washington was then experiencing both of which misfired.

In response Jackson leaped at the would-be assassin and beat him severely with his cane before various Congressmen including Davey Crockett wrestled Lawrence into submission, after which he was put on trial with the prosecutor being Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner". The jury found him "not guilty by reason of insanity" after a five-minute deliberation and he was confined to mental hospitals until his death in 1861.

Trying to murder Jackson at close range was certainly crazy in the colloquial as well as in this case the technical sense. The 7th president of the United States and its first "border" or hillbilly chief executive was a man with a long history of physical courage, decisiveness and lack of regard for the niceties of social interaction. At 13 he became involved in the American Revolution as a courier, got captured, and when a British officer ordered him to clean his boots responded with a phrase so far from "Merry Christmas" that it earned him a permanent scar on his head and hand from a sabre. But Jackson did not clean the boots.

Later, as President, his closest Senate ally was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who Jackson had both whipped and shot during a tavern brawl in 1813 in which Benton and his brother also shot and nearly killed Jackson. Jackson himself had earlier killed a man in a duel for insulting his wife Rachel, whom Jackson stole from her cruel husband including, allegedly, once chasing him into the tall grass with a knife.

Jackson was an odd character with a strange mix of impressive virtues and scary vices, a populist and a slaveowner, a cunning calculator with a manic temper. But just about everyone who ever met him would testify that on account of both his virtues and his vices he was about the last man on earth at whom to fire a non-fatal shot at close range. Even Richard Lawrence, in his more lucid post-1835 moments, I imagine.

Government, History, It happened today, United StatesJohn Robson
It’s a Gas – It Happened Today, January 29, 2017

On this date in history in 1886 one Karl Benz became a hero of entrepreneurship and then, I suppose, a massive ecological villain when he patented a gasoline-powered car. People like me have long praised the automobile as a classic private solution to a pressing public problem, the increasingly intolerable fouling of cities and destruction of forests by… the horse.

I know, it sounds a bit silly. But major cities were being buried in horse poop, drowned in horse pee, and afflicted with tens of thousands of dead horses a year. And more and more forest land was being cleared for pastures to grow the hay all these creatures consumed.

If government had taken charge of the problem, there is no telling what disaster would have ensued. Instead entrepreneurs created a new form of transportation, less picturesque in ways that make me genuinely sad but enormously more efficient and effective. You could not have cottages for the middle class if we all had to take horse carts to them, nor supermarkets or indeed almost any facet of modern life. You could also not have carts that play what was once quaintly called "high fidelity" music, heat your seat and protect you from the elements while a gentle push of your foot accelerates you to 100 km/h. And now that we have seen modernity in all its horror, maybe future waves of technology can allow us to decentralize, slow down, and get back in touch with nature external and internal while retaining some of the gains like, say, laptops that can edit video. Just to pick an example at random.

Of course today the reaction is likely to be that by inventing the gas-powered car Benz (yes, of Mercedes-Benz) played a major role in dooming the planet and its inhabitants to climate change that will drown, fry or otherwise exterminate us all. But even if one grants that he’s about as much of a benefactor to humanity as, say, Sauron, surely we can at least draw the lesson that if we want alternatives to current technology including fossil-fuel-dependent vehicles and power plants, we are far likely to get dynamic, unpredictable, astoundingly effective solutions from the private sector than from central planning.

In turn they may raise new dilemmas over time to replace the ones they solve. But it sure beats government intervention, which reliably creates new messes without fixing the old ones.

Economics, Environment, Government, History, International, It happened today, Science & TechnologyJohn Robson