The end of summer, a three-day weekend, burgers on the grill, and a back-to-school shopping spree, right? And the most important question, “Can I still wear white?”

But very few people associate Labor Day with a turbulent time in American History. That’s what Labor Day is really about The holiday was born during the violent union-busting 19th century, when sweat shop conditions killed children, when there was no minimum wage and when going on vacation meant you were fired.

If you like holidays, benefits and a five-day, 40-hour work week, you need to know about Labor Day.

When Labor Day was signed into law by Grover Cleveland in 1894, it was a bone tossed to the labor movement. And it was deliberately placed in September, to ensure that it would not recall the memory of the deadly rioting at Chicago’s Haymarket Square a few years before. Europe’s workers, and later the Communist Party, adopted May Day as a worker’s holiday to commemorate the deadly Haymarket Sqaure Riot which came about during a strike against thee McCormack Reaper Company.

Although Labor Day did become federal law in 1894, most of labor’s successes –the minimum wage, overtime, the end of child labor – did not come about until the Depression-era reforms of the New Deal.

Labor Day, then, was created to celebrate the “strength and spirit of the American worker.” But it should remind us that — like so many things we take for granted — those victories for working people came at great cost, in blood and sweat.

For more on Haymarket Square, here is a link to the Chicago Historical Society’s web project:
http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/overview/resource.htm

“American Experience,” the PBS documentary series, produced a Homestead Strike piece as part of its film about Andrew Carnegie:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/peopleevents/pande04.html

All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

Lyndon B. Johnson, in his first address as President to a joint session of Congress (November 27, 1963)

The 36th President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was born on this date in 1908, in a small farmhouse near Stonewall, Texas on the Pedernales River. Coincidentally, it is also the date on which LBJ accepted the 1964 Democratic nomination for President. (Senator Hubert H. Humphrey was his Vice Presidential nominee.)

In some respects, history and time have been kinder to Lyndon B. Johnson than his tortured Presidency –and certainly the critics of his day—would have possibly suggested. A power broker extraordinaire during his days in Congress, especially during his twelve years in the Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson challenged John F. Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in the 1960 primaries, and then accepted Kennedy’s offer to become his Vice Presidential running mate.

Johnson was credited with helping Kennedy win Southern votes and ultimately the election. 

On November 22, 1963, history and America changed and Johnson became President, taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy, the dead President’s widow standing beside him. 

Driven by a rousing sense of social justice, born out of his youth and upbringing in hardscrabble Texas and Depression-era experiences, he had become one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most loyal New Dealers. First in a federal job, then in Congress and later as “Master of the Senate.”

As President, Johnson set the country on a quest for what he called the “Great Society,” looking for ways to end the great economic injustice and bitter racial disparity that existed in America in 1963. But his vision for a “Great Society” was counterbalanced, and ultimately overshadowed by his doomed course in pursuing the war in Vietnam.

With the country’s troubles at home and an  increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, I have been thinking about Johnson’s tortured Presidency of late. He was so eager and committed to do the right thing in correcting the social ills he saw in America. But it all fell apart in the disaster of Vietnam. All of the parallels between the two conflicts –Vietnam and Afghanistan– are obvious.

In the midst of the war,  recent tapes reveal  Johnson confided–

I can’t win and I can’t get out.

Are we in the same place again?

Here is a link to the Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas –well worth a visit if you are nearby.

http://www.lbjlibrary.org/about-lbj/timeline.html

It took 144 years after Independence. But on August 26, 1920–90 years ago– the “other half” of the country got their rights. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the vote, was declared in effect on this date by the Secretary of State. The Amendment had actually been ratified earlier in the month when Tennessee gave its approval on August 18, 1920.

http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=63

Here’s a quick history of the movement from Don’t Know Much About History
Who were the suffragists?
Women in America always endured plenty of suffering. What they lacked was “suffrage” (from the Latin suffragium for “vote”).
American women as far back as Abigail Adams—who admonished her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when he went off to declare independence—had consistently pressed for voting rights, but just as consistently had been shut out. It was not for lack of trying. But women were fighting against the enormous odds of church, Constitution, an all-male power structure that held fast to its reins, and many of their own who believed in a woman’s divinely ordained, second-place role.

But in the nineteenth century, more women were pressed to work, and were also a strong force in the abolitionist movement, with Harriet Beecher Stowe attracting the most prominence. But to many male abolitionists, the “moral” imperative to free black men and give them the vote carried much greater weight than the somewhat blasphemous notion of equality of the sexes.

In fact, it was exclusion of women from an abolitionist gathering that sparked the first formal organization for women’s rights. The birth of the women’s movement in America dates to July 19, 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) called for a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, after they had been told to sit in the balcony at a London antislavery meeting.

With the Civil War’s end, abolition lost its steam as a moral issue and women pressed to be included under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to black males. But again women had to wait as politicians told them that the freed slaves took priority, a stand with which some women of the day agreed, creating a split in the feminist movement over goals and tactics. Hardliners followed Stanton into the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA); moderates willing to wait for black male suffrage started the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), leaving a rift that lasted twenty years.

Amelia Bloomer (1818–94) didn’t invent the pantaloons that bore her name, but she popularized them in her newspaper, The Lily, a journal preaching temperance as well as equality.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), called “the Napoleon of women’s rights,” came from the same Quaker-abolitionist-temperance background as Stanton, and the two women became friends and powerful allies, founding the NWSA together. A forceful and tireless organizer and lobbyist, she pushed for local reforms in her home state of New York while continuing to urge the vote for women at the national level.

In the early 20th century, American suffragists took a new direction, borrowed from their British counterparts. The British “suffragettes” had been using far more radical means to win the vote. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, British suffragettes chained themselves to buildings, invaded Parliament, blew up mailboxes, and burned buildings. Imprisoned for these actions, the women called themselves “political prisoners” and went on hunger strikes that were met with force-feedings. The cruelty of this official response was significant in attracting public sympathy for the suffragette cause.

These militant tactics were brought back to America by women who had marched with the British. Alice Paul (1885–1977) was another Quaker-raised woman who studied in England and had joined the Pankhurst-led demonstrations in London. At the 1913 inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, who opposed the vote for women, Paul organized a demonstration of 10,000. Her strategy was to hold the party in power—the Democrats in this case—responsible for denying women the vote.

President Wilson’s views were also dictated by politics. He needed to hold on to the support of the Democratic South. That meant opposing women’s voting. Southern Democrats were successfully keeping black men from voting; they certainly didn’t want to worry about black women as well.

After Wilson’s 1916 reelection, in which women in some states had voted against him two to one, the protest was taken to Wilson’s doorstep as women began to picket around the clock outside the White House. Eventually imprisoned, Paul and others imitated the British tactic of hunger strikes.

In 1918, Paul’s political tactics paid off as a Republican Congress was elected. Among them was Montana’s Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), the first woman elected to Congress. Rankin’s first act was to introduce a constitutional suffrage amendment on the House floor. The amendment was approved by a one-vote margin. It took the Senate another eighteen months to pass it, and in June 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. Now fearful of the women’s vote in the approaching presidential election, Wilson shifted to support of the measure. One year later, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee delivered the last needed vote, and the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution. (Declared in effect on August 26) It stated simply that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It took more than 130 years, but “We, the People” finally included the half of the country that had been kept out the longest.

On August 19, 1934, 9 out of 10 Germans endorsed Adolf Hilter’s assumption of absolute power.

Eighty-nine and nine-tenths per cent of the German voters endorsed in yesterday’s plebiscite Chancellor Hitler’s assumption of greater power than has ever been possessed by any other ruler in modern times. Nearly 10 per cent indicated their disapproval. The result was expected.

Here is the original New York Times account of the vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0819.html#article

This piece of history seems worth noting today, as opinion polls show a majority of Americans opposing construction of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” as well as large numbers of American telling pollsters that President Obama is not Christian and might be Muslim.

American History is more than replete with the voices of those who decried the intolerance and ignorance of a majority. In fact, if the Declaration of Independence had been subject to a public opinion poll, even John Adams thought that only a third of the country favored independence.

Certainly slavery’s existence did not trouble a majority of Americans.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain succinctly explained the “power of the People.”

“Haint we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town.”

The Founders and the Framers honored democracy and the will of the people. But they also recognized the danger of rule by a mob. That is why they wrote a Constitution. And it is worth remembering on this day of infamy when a large majority of the people gave Adolf Hitler unlimited power.

Somehow I think Alfred Hitchcock might enjoy knowing his birthday falls on Friday the 13th this year.

As a child of the 50s and 60s, I think Alfred Hitchcock’s television series –more than his movies– had a tremendous impact on my sensibilities. Only later did I come to fully appreciate his movie masterpieces.

Here’s a quick quiz about the birthday boy born in Leytonstone, England and his remarkable, groundbreaking television series

First there was the music (“Funeral March of a Marionette” by Gounod). Then came the distinctive, portly caricature profile. And finally, the familiar, “Good evening,” spoken in Alfred Hitchcock’s singular style. Long before The X Files, a generation of television watchers was hooked on the strange mysteries found each week on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” which made its television debut in October, 1954. The masterful director of classic thrillers was already famed for such films as Rebecca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Lady Vanishes. But he brought a macabre, irreverent sense of humor to the predictable menu of variety shows and comedies of 1950s television. Hitchcock produced and hosted the 30-minute series from 1955 to 1962 (expanded to “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” it ran until 1965). What else do you know about the genius behind Psycho and Rear Window who was born this day in 1899 and died on April 28, 1980?

1. What famous children’s book author wrote several stories produced by Hitchcock, including a memorable episode in which detectives are served leg of lamb, the weapon in the murder they are investigating?
2. What future star of television and films was featured as a unlucky gambler in an episode selected as one of Entertainment Weekly magazine’s “Best 100 Television Shows.”?
3. How many Academy Awards did Hitchcock win as Best Director?
4. Which 1934 Hitchcock film did he remake in 1956?
5. Which of Hitchcock’s films won the Oscar for Best Picture?

This quiz can be found in Don’t Know Much About Anything

Answers
1. Roald Dahl, famed for such children’s classics as James and the Giant Peach, Willy Wonka, and The Witches.
2. Steve McQueen. Many other famous actors, including Vincent Price, William Shatner, and Charles Bronson had roles on the show.
3. None. He did receive the Academy’s life achievement award in 1967.
4. The Man Who Knew Too Much.
5. Rebecca (1940), his first film made in America. Before that, his films were made in England.

It started with a “DWB”– “driving while black.” On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history.

Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

When: On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered. Within a few hours the crowd had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It exploded.

What By nightfall of the next day, small, roving bands of young people throwing rocks and bottles had grown to a mob of thousands. Rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion with widespread looting. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. When Dick Gregory, the well-known African American comedian and civil rights activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg.

The battle raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

Why: The aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count and insurance estimates. Watts signaled a sea change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded,

“We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

The Watts summer of 1965 was the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering. The worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in rioting. In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something to help them get the money to buy them.”

One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was known as the Kerner Commission. In 1968, it warned that America was

“moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

How much has really changed?
Here is a link to excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/
On the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report in 2008, Bill Moyers of PBS produced a show on the Commission and what has –or hasn’t — changed in four decades.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/watch.html

Here is the original New York Times report on the “Negro” riots:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0811.html#article
You can read more about Watts and the civil rights era in Don’t Know Much About History

Another day of infamy. Sixty-five years ago on August 6,1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima–

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley Ersa, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” (Harry Truman, from his diaries, as quoted in The Making of the Atomic Bomb).

Okay, Mr. President. Here’s the situation. You’re about to invade Japan’s main islands. Your best generals say hitting these beaches will mean half a million American casualties or more. Based on horrific battle experience—from Guadalcanal to Okinawa—you believe the Japanese will fight to the death. They have six million battle-hardened troops who have shown complete willingness to fight to the death for their homeland—a samurai tradition of complete devotion to the divine Emperor that is incomprehensible to Americans. A ten-year guerilla in Japan war is a possibility.

Now you have a bomb with the destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT that can force Japan’s surrender. It worked in a test. But it may not work when you drop it out of a plane.

Modern history has presented this pair of options—the Big Invasion versus the Bomb—as “Truman’s Choice,” a choice Truman inherited with the Oval Office. President Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s 1939 warning—a warning Einstein later regretted—of the potential of an atomic bomb by establishing the Manhattan Project in 1943. Known to a handful of men, Truman not among them, the project was a $2-billion (in pre-inflation 1940s dollars) effort to construct an atomic weapon. Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a “Nazi bomb.”

The first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Truman was alerted to the success of the test at a meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, a city in defeated Germany. Almost since the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, critics have second-guessed Truman’s decision and motives. A generation of historians have defended or repudiated the need for unleashing the atomic weapon.

What history has confirmed is that the men who made the bomb really didn’t understand how horrifying its capabilities were. Of course, they understood the destructive power of the bomb, but radiation’s dangers were far less understood. As author Peter Wyden tells it in Day One, his compelling account of the making and dropping of the bomb, scientists involved in creating what they called “the gadget” believed that anyone who might be killed by radiation would die from falling bricks first.

“Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. This included about twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.”

(US Dept. of Energy History of the Manhattan Project. Link below)

Today should not be a day to argue about the politics of the bomb. It should be a day of solemn remembrance of these victims. And of contemplating the horrific power of the weapons we create.

You can read more about Hiroshima and the dropping of the atomic bombs in Don’t Know Much About History from which this blog has been adapted. Other “Must Reads”: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes; Truman by David McCullough]
This is a link to the Hiroshima City Museum of Peace (there is an English language site): http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/
This is a link to the Dept. of Energy History of the Manhattan Project: http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm
This link is from the National Science Foundation and was created for the 60th anniversary of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: http://hiroshima-remembered.com/

In polite society, one supposedly never discusses religion or politics. In America, it seems we can rarely separate the two.

The latest fracas over faith in the public square involves the plans for Cordoba House, an Islamic Center, including a “mosque,” to be built two blocks from Ground Zero. Proposed to bridge the differences between Islam and the West, the $100-million project, which includes a prayer room rather than an actual mosque,  has won the backing of Mayor Bloomberg, among others. But with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks looming, the race for Governor of New York heating up, and a Presidential election in the wings, Cordoba House was plunged into America’s boiling pot of religious politics. And like New York’s recent weather, the political firestorm that has been ignited shows no sign of cooling.

The pot was first stirred when Sarah Palin implored the group behind Cordoba House not to build the center, asking Muslims via Twitter, to “refudiate” the plan.

Raising the temperature was Newt Gingrich on his website, Newt.org, where he warned that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100722/ap_on_re_us/us_ground_zero_mosque_politics

This whole argument might be construed as a momentary blip in a slow summer news cycle. But the fear and loathing of faiths that supposedly threaten America’s existence is nothing new. The grade school notion of America as a “Melting Pot” nation in which all are welcomed to worship is a myth. Since Spanish Catholics slaughtered French Protestants in Florida in 1565, ingrained religious animosity has been an unhappy and uncelebrated American tradition.  For centuries, Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other “foreign” religions have encountered disdain, discrimination and worse.

In fact, the political attacks on the Islamic Center recall an earlier assault on a religious compound built near an American memorial.

It was August 1834 and the place was Charlestown, Massachusetts, outside Boston. The “threat” then came from a Roman Catholic convent where Ursuline nuns ran a private school for girls called Mount Benedict.

But the Ursuline Convent stood near sacred ground – the site on which the Bunker Hill Monument was being built. To many Americans, the Ursuline compound nearby was an affront, a symbol of a foreign faith that was evil, hateful and a threat to the nation.

On the night of August 11, 1834, a few hundred locals descended on the convent.  As the nuns and their young charges cowered, both the convent and school were ransacked and torched by the mob. A mausoleum was then opened, coffins overturned and the remains scattered. When the three nights of arson and mayhem was over, the Ursuline convent and the school it housed were in ruins.

The desolation of the Ursuline Convent in August 1834 is not one of the proud events that historic Boston touts to patriotic visitors. And it is hardly unique. America’s past is littered with similar examples of intolerance, sectarian hatred and ultimately, religious violence. A decade after the attack on the Ursuline Convent, Philadelphia was torn apart by the anti-Catholic Bible Riots, in which dozens died and the homes of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants were destroyed along with two Catholic churches in an argument begun over which Bible to use in public school.

For much of America’s history, the religious fear and loathing were directed mostly towards Catholics—especially Irish Catholics—who were thought to be plotting to turn America over to the Pope. Now, of course, the perceived threat comes from Islam and a symbol like Cordoba House has replaced the nefarious Ursuline Convent.

In 1790, after taking the oath of office just a few blocks from what is now Ground Zero, President Washington wrote a letter to another much maligned and distrusted group –the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.

“Happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

His words should be required reading for public officials –past, present and future.  They might even make a good plaque at Ground Zero.

You can read more about the burning of the Ursuline Convent, the Philadelphia Bible Riots and the history of anti-Catholicism in A NATION RISING.

Happy Birthday, Monsieur Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805; died April 16, 1859)

Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote,

“In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.” The Indians, he added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

Who was Tocqueville and why did he write all those interesting things about America?

The author of those words was an aristocratic, young French magistrate studying America’s penal system, named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.

But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled Democracy in America, that Tocqueville’s name became a permanent part of the American vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first of which appeared in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance, Democracy in America remains a basic text in American history and political theory.
Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the two Roosevelts.

In many more matters, he was right on target. Critical of slavery –as well as the treatment of Native Americas– the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. And he remains astonishingly correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically single-minded pursuit of wealth. As he observed,

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men….”

You can read more about de Tocqueville and this period in Don’t Know Much About History. and A Nation Rising

In 1997, CSPAN retraced the Frenchman’s route through America. Here’s a link to the CSPAN site: http://www.tocqueville.org/

I know. The mere mention of Constitutional Amendments automatically sends most of us for the snooze button. But this one is different. On July 28, 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was declared in effect.

On July 9, 1868, the state of South Carolina ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing the necessary three-fourths of the states to adopt this very significant Amendment as part of the law of the land. One of the “Reconstruction Amendments” ratified in the wake of the Civil War, it had far-reaching consequences in American history, touching on every aspect of public and private life in America — from the schoolroom to the bedroom. And it still does.

Think of a controversial court decision and chances are the 14th Amendment is involved. It has been invoked in such major decisions as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ended segregation of public schools; Roe v. Wade (1973), which disallowed most existing restrictions on abortion; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which ended race-based restrictions on marriage in America. It also provided the Constitutional authority for many of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s.

Today, the 14th Amendment is front and center in several current controversies, including the same-sex marriage debate.

Here are the first two sections of the Amendment. The full text of the 14th Amendment can be found at the links to the National Archives and Library of Congress at the bottom of this post.

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

*Changed by section 1 of the 26th amendment.

Proposed after the Civil War in 1866, the 14th Amendment is one of three Constitutional Amendments referred to as the “Reconstruction Amendments.” Its immediate impact was to give citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves. Creating national citizenship that was independent of state citizenship, the 14th Amendment reversed the 1857 Dred Scott decision which denied citizenship to most slaves.

In addition, the 14th Amendment forbids states from denying any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.”  These clauses, usually referred to as “due process” and “equal protection,” have been involved in some of the most significant decisions in American history.

You don’t need to be a Constitutional scholar to understand this Amendment and the profound impact it has had –and continues to have–  on every American’s life.

Here is a link to the National Archives US Constitution site: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html#14

Here is a link to more information on the 14th Amendment from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html