From tea pot car bonnets to pussy hats

Here's a change that slipped under my radar. In October, 2016, to much fanfare and moral posturing in the era of Black Lives Matter, Trayvon Martin, and other such icons of racial outrage on the left, the New Hampshire Democratic Party renamed its annual fundraiser from the longstanding Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. It was an odd change, given that Thomas Jefferson (Founding Father) and Andrew Jackson (first president after the Founding Father generation) are the founders of the Democratic Party, the oldest continuing political party in the world. (The Republican Party is the third oldest in the world.)

As reported in the Concord Monitor at the time:

The New Hampshire Democratic Party is trading in Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson for two more modern Democratic presidents for its annual fundraising dinner.

Chairman Raymond Buckley says the party is changing the name from the Jefferson-Jackson dinner to the Kennedy-Clinton dinner, after John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

The name change will take effect for this year’s dinner at the Manchester Radisson Hotel on Oct. 29.

Some state Democratic parties have stripped the names of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from the event over their histories as slave owners. South Carolina Democrats dropped the “Jefferson-Jackson” title from their fundraising dinner in August. Iowa and Georgia Democrats voted to make the change last year.

While I am occasionally registered as a Democrat or as a Republican when I think it important to vote in a primary, I am primarily an Independent. I have no allegiance to either party and will vote for either party which closest matches my principles and preferred policies.

So I have no dog in the fight and no standing as to what Democrats ought to call their fundraising dinners. I did consider it unwise. Yes, Jefferson and Jackson were slaveowners but it is a slippery slope to start condemning historical figures on the basis of passing modern sensibilities. And they were both indisputably instrumental in advancing some important aspects of American democracy. Sometimes it is important to make changes, but it needs to be done rarely and with great reflection as to what important principles are being served. Clearly reflection and consideration that was not done in this instance.

Choosing to switch from two slaveowners to two serial sexual harassers/rapists (Kennedy-Clinton) seemed a questionable outcome that seemed to indicate a lack of thoughtfulness and foresight. Or so it seemed to me.

Since Trump's election, there have been numerous protest groups under various guises, all intended to damage Trump, but as often as not they are torpedoes which circle back on the Democratic Party. In this instance, one of the first and largest resistance groups was the Me Too movement, launched in 2017. A broadly well-intentioned movement seeking to bring attention to the continuing issue of sexual harassment, it has always been somewhat undermined by being so explicitly partisan in its targets.

Ironically though, it appears that its impact has been more consequential on Democratic institutions than to Republicans with innumerable Democratic funders and stalwarts in the movie industry, news media, Democratic Party, and academia resigning owing to revelations about their own histories of misogyny and harassment.

And one of the consequences has been the change which escaped my notice.

From Alec Baldwin: We need to overthrow the government by Paul Feely, a report on this year's Democratic Party fundrasing dinner in New Hampshire. I am uninterested in Baldwin, but as an aside in the reporting Feely notes that the New Hampshire Democratic Party, a year after renaming its historical Jefferson-Jackson Dinner to the Kennedy-Clinton Dinner, has now bowed to the MeToo Movement and renamed its fundraising dinner once again.

Fresh off his first appearance of the season as President Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” actor Alec Baldwin headlined the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner Sunday night at the Manchester Downtown Hotel.

[snip]

Sunday’s event was previously known as the “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner” before being switched in 2016 to the “Kennedy-Clinton Dinner.” The national controversy over sexual harassment fueled by the “#MeToo” movement earlier this year prompted the name change.

While Eleanor Roosevelt herself remains a controversial figure in many circles, I suspect she is a safe bet for the time being for the sensibilities of even the more extreme elements of the modern left.

As an aside, it is interesting to see in her Wikipedia entry, an example of ill-considered protest behavior among the mandarin class, even back in 1924.

In 1924, she campaigned for Democrat Alfred E. Smith in his successful re-election bid as governor of New York State against the Republican nominee and her first cousin Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Franklin had spoken out on Theodore's "wretched record" as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the oil scandals, and in return, Theodore said of him, "He's a maverick! He does not wear the brand of our family," which infuriated Eleanor. She dogged Theodore on the New York State campaign trail in a car fitted with a papier-mâché bonnet shaped like a giant teapot that was made to emit simulated steam (to remind voters of Theodore's supposed, but later disproved, connections to the Teapot Dome Scandal), and countered his speeches with those of her own, calling him immature. She would later decry these methods, admitting that they were below her dignity but saying that they had been contrived by Democratic Party "dirty tricksters."

I was completely unaware that the much-mocked modern day Pussy Hats had a lineage tracing back nearly a century to a car with "papier-mâché bonnet shaped like a giant teapot." "You've come a long way baby" from tea pot car bonnets to pussy hats. Progress of a sort. I guess.