Big Optimism: Ode (Owed?) to Rhode Island

There might be a bit of rooting for the home team in this week's edition, but it's still a good story.

Growing up in Rhode Island as I did, and thus learning Rhode Island history in school, you hear a lot about two things:

• First, lots of comparisons about how small the smallest U.S. state actually is — like the size of the micro-country of Luxembourg, or smaller than Long Island (which is actually an island), or how Texas is 221 times bigger.

• Second, Roger Williams, the 17th century minister who basically founded the colony that would go on to become the smallest state in the United States after he was kicked out of Massachusetts.

Williams was a progressive in many ways, a solid 200 years before the word was even coined. He was a fierce advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and a strong advocate for the idea that Crown edicts allocating land in North America were suspect, because they didn’t acknowledge that Native Americans had been living here long before the first Europeans landed.

In fact, that’s a big part of what got him kicked out of Massachusetts to begin with.

The Narragansetts took him in, and Williams later wrote that he had never experienced such kindness. He spent the rest of his life learning their language, trading with them, and defending their land rights in English courts.

I could write an entire newsletter about Williams; probably should at some point if I haven’t already. (After seven years of this (!), I lose count and constantly have to look things up.)

But today, I want to talk about one of the forgotten optimistic-in-retrospect anniversaries in United States history, which intimately involves the history of the place where I grew up. And we need to cover a bit more of Roger Williams in the process.

Williams started the colony of Rhode Island on land he bought from the Narragansetts. In 1663, King Charles II granted Rhode Island a charter guaranteeing freedom of conscience, elected self-governance, and no religious test for citizenship.

This was probably the most liberal political document in the colonial world to that date, and while moral failures abound — the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, in which English forces attacked a Narragansett winter encampment and killed hundreds of women, children, and elderly, stands as one of the darkest chapters — that independent spirit inspired later events.

Case in point: Rhode Island was the first state to declare independence from England, two full months before the Declaration.

Which brings us to 1787, when the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, and Rhode Island flat-out refused to send delegates.

Like everything in history, the reasons were complicated, but two stand out today:

• A powerful central government with the ability to tax was not an abstraction to Rhode Islanders — it was exactly what they had just fought a war to escape.

• More important for today, the original Constitution contained almost none of the things we like to think of as the cornerstone of American democracy: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable government searches and seizures, the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Thing I like to point out to people whose financial fortunes take a turn and have to consider bankruptcy: the Founding Fathers included bankruptcy in the original Constitution, but didn’t get around to freedom of speech until later, in case you ever wondered about their priorities.

Rhode Island held fast, even as other states ratified. The legislature rejected calls for a ratifying convention seven times. The state held a popular referendum in 1788 and voted the Constitution down, 2,708 to 237.

George Washington made a celebrated tour of New England in 1789, and he pointedly skipped Rhode Island in response. The state’s Federalist merchants wrote to ask whether they could secede from Rhode Island and join the Union separately.

By early 1790, Rhode Island stood entirely alone — the last state outside the Union. Congress threatened tariffs, back payment of war debts, treatment as a foreign country.

A ratifying convention finally met in March 1790 with an Anti-Federalist majority, debated for a week, then adjourned to Newport in late May. On May 29, 1790 — 236 years ago this week — the delegates voted: 34 in favor, 32 opposed.

Rhode Island became the 13th state, which completed the “United” in “United States of America.”

At the same time, the smallest state attached 18 declarations of human rights and 21 proposed amendments to its ratification — a ban on poll taxes, a ban on the draft, a ban on the importation of slaves.

Many were ignored, but when the Bill of Rights was ratified eighteen months later, much of what was included were things Rhode Island had obstinately insisted on.

There were other factors. Virginia, a much more powerful state back then, gets credit for pushing just as hard, but the fact remains that Rhode Island signed last.

This year, we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, and July 4, 1776 is rightfully a watershed date in history.

I’m also quite glad that our national birthday is early in the summer — can you imagine trying to hold parades and host barbecues in January in Boston or New York City?

Still, I like that annoying, ornery, contrary little Rhode Island — a place founded by exiles and troublemakers, a place that had been demanding a Bill of Rights for three years while everyone else told it to sit down and sign — played a key role in shaping much of what we celebrate about America today.

Small state, big role. At least those of us who grew up there like to think so.

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I hope you have a good Memorial Day, and better weather than is forecast in Rhode Island (and New Jersey). And as every year on this date, I like to mention three U.S. veterans in particular who gave their lives for our country: Lieutenant Todd Bryant (Iraq, 2003), Captain Tim Moshier (Iraq, 2006), and Specialist Jacob Andrews (Afghanistan, 2012).

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 24: “It will be the work of our lives to repay him for what he has done.” — Emily Warren Roebling, speaking of her husband Washington Roebling, who directed construction of the Brooklyn Bridge from a sickbed for 11 years after being struck by caisson disease while supervising work on the underwater foundations. The bridge opened on this day in 1883. Within 24 hours, 250,000 people had walked across. The Brooklyn Eagle called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

• May 25: “You can’t even believe it in a way that you’re standing up there. You’re with your team, and yeah, there might be a few tears. You hold your flag and you get your photos — but then you have to turn around and get down. You gotta get down alive.” — Erik Weihenmayer, recalling the moment on this day in 2001 when he reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the first blind person in history to do so.

• May 26: “It was absolutely terrifying. I thought they were going to mow me down every minute.” — Frank Clement, the Bentley driver who, during the first 24 Hours of Le Mans on this day in 1923, improvised a fuel tank repair after a stone punctured his car, then cycled back to the stricken vehicle against traffic while carrying two gas cans around his neck.

• May 27: “I’m not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song.” — Bob Dylan, then 21, who on this day in 1963 released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album and first as a fully formed songwriter. The record opened with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which would be performed at the March on Washington three months later, hours before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

• May 28: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” — Alan Turing, the British mathematician who on this day in 1936 submitted to the London Mathematical Society a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which described, entirely in the abstract, the logical architecture of a programmable computer.

• May 29: “And ain’t I a woman? I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!” — Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman who on this day in 1851 rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in a speech that witnesses described as turning the entire mood of the gathering.

• May 30: “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.” — General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, from General Order No. 11 designating May 30, 1868 as a national day of remembrance, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.