An Old Joke

Vincent Van Gogh painted his vision of The Good Samaritan in 1890.

There’s an old joke about Heaven and Hell.
I’ve no idea where this joke came from, or how old it is.

Here’s the way it goes:

Heaven is where the Italians cook, the Germans organize, the French are the lovers, and the English make the rules.

Hell is where the Germans are the lovers, the English cook, the Italians organize, and the French make the rules.

The above “joke” is based on ethnic stereotypes, that were once very common.
My parents’ generation tended to think in these ways, much more than baby-boomers do.
I'm pretty sure that Millennials, GenZ, or GenXers, have never even heard of European stereotypes.
However, it seems that prejudices against people who are “different,” is a part of human nature.

Remember the parable about the “Good Samaritan?”
The reason why Jesus told the story of a Samaritan caring for a stranger left for dead, was because Samaritans were not generally viewed as “good.”
In fact, they were considered enemies* of the Jews.
That was the point!

It’s fairly good-humored to say that Hell is where the main punishments are enduring clumsy German lovers, bland English food, and a badly-run society, while Heaven is where we’d enjoy tasty Italian food, sensual French lovers, and an orderly society.
No group is pointed out as being irreparably stupid in the above joke.
Instead, each nationality is portrayed as being skilled in some ways, but not in others.

Cover of Memoires by Josephine Baker, first published in French in 1949, but not translated into English until 2025.

I recently read Fearless and Free, the “memoir” of the great entertainer Josephine Baker (1906-1975), a book that’s recently been translated into English, after being published in French just after World War II.
I put the word “memoir” into quotes, because the book was mostly written by French journalist Marcel Sauvage (1895-1988).
Sauvage began to interview Josephine Baker when she was a young performer, recently arrived in France.
Their last interviews happened when she was a famous star, nearly twenty years later.
The duo published the interviews, as Memoires, in 1949.

Let’s just be accurate, and say that Josephine Baker didn’t tell Marcel Sauvage everything, and leave it at that.
Why would you tell a journalist all your secrets?
I know that I wouldn’t.
(Actress Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) didn’t even give journalists her correct birthday!)

Chapter Three of Fearless and Free covers the two years (from 1928 to 1930), when Baker toured in over 25 countries, in Europe and the Americas.
When Josephine Baker described the audiences, she tended to “generalize” about each nationality, just as my mom (born in the early 1920’s) often did.
Josephine found Dutch people “serious and rosy,” and Danes to be “very polite.”
She was especially interested in trying out foreign cuisines.
However, she seemed to have a sensitive stomach.

The book Fearless and Free touches on some of Josephine Baker’s World War II experiences, when she was: a decorated spy for the French resistance, nursed Allied soldiers in hospitals, and sang and danced for the troops.

A January 2025 New York Times review had some problems with this book, specifically, the section in which Josephine Baker (during a visit to Harlem, in the late 1940’s) described Jewish-American landlords mistreating their black Harlem tenants.
In the forward of the book, American author Ijeoma Oluo says that she wishes that eventually “Baker was able to find more nuanced answers as to why she witnessed what she witnessed in New York.”

Josephine Baker with some of her Rainbow Tribe.

Baker didn’t begin adopting children, and forming “The Rainbow Tribe” until 1950, a year after Memoires was published.
The purpose of her adopting more than a dozen children was to prove that all people could live together peacefully.
Despite the fact that she had become a Roman Catholic, Baker made a point of not changing the religions of any of her children.

Josephine Baker faced despair (in Memoires) when she realized how very little the U.S. had changed during the twelve years she had become an international star.
In 1948, when she and her husband (French composer, Jo Bouillon) visited New York city, they assumed that they could sleep in a high-quality hotel, and travel down to the visit Josephine Baker’s mother in a first-class train car.
Well, they were wrong!
One Manhattan hotel after another used subtle, and not so subtle, means to force them to leave.
This chapter gives is a blow-by-blow description of how even well-to-do blacks were treated in Northern cities.

Another book on my shelves is The Clumsiest People in Europe, or Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, by Todd Pruzan and Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer.
Mrs. Mortimer (1802-1878) wrote books for children, mainly about the peoples of the world, that were published in 1849.
The Todd Pruzan book is derived from several of Mrs. Mortimer’s books; Todd Pruzan’s title is taken from Mrs. Mortimer’s view of the Portuguese in her book The Countries of Europe Described.
(An illustration from his, and her book, appears below.)

The Countries of Europe Described (1849), by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, says that “No people in Europe are as clumsy . . . as the Portuguese,” pointing out Portuguese lack of skill in making boxes, carts, and keys.

Mrs. Mortimer had some appalling ideas about people in various countries and regions.
She was firmly convinced that Spaniards were cruel (mainly because of bull-fighting), and that Welsh people kept dirty houses.
However, she also decried the mistreatment of blacks in the U.S., twenty years before the Civil War:

There are no slaves in the Northern States, but there are many blacks there; and perhaps you think they are kindly treated as they are not slaves. Far from it. They are not beaten, it is true, but they are despised and insulted in every possible way. Is not this very wicked? Merely because they have a black skin.

Leonard Joseph Marx (1887-1961), one of the Marx Brothers, played “Chico,” an unscrupulous Italian immigrant from Naples. Typically, he pointed his index finger at the piano, as if shooting a gun.

Today we live in an era when we don’t hear Polish jokes.
However, joking about Italian-Americans as criminals, or as lower class, is as safe a gambit as it was in the days of the Marx Brothers.
(The Marx Brothers was a famous comedy group that performed in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in 14 films.)
I guess that it’s fine to say that you probably carry a knife if you have an Italian accent, but no longer acceptable to say that you’re stupid if you have a Polish accent.

The key words are “Americanization” and “hyphenation.”
This is why so many Italian-Americans changed their surnames (from Martino to Martin, and their first names from Giuseppe to Joe).
Do WASPs think it’s OK for immigrants to eat their own food, and enjoy their own culture, only as long as they accept that America is an Anglo-Saxon society, not a nation of equals?

*According to Wikipedia, as of 2024, there were only about 900 Samaritans left in the world. The main theological disagreement between Samaritans and Judaism, is over whether the Temple Mount, or Mount Gerizim, is the world’s holiest site.

Mudsills* vs Blue Bloods

Trump has set up an altar of sorts in the Oval Office (2025).

There is a strong class system in the United States, and a strong prejudice encouraging male Americans of Northern European descent, especially those of British descent, to be the powerful ones on top.
That’s why—when we’ve “cast” candidates for the role of U.S. President (by voting for them)—they’ve been male, and had at least one parent who was of Northern European descent.

Both the Right, and the Left, seem to be fighting against the class system.
Who knew that when Graydon Carter (and Spy Magazine) called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 80’s they’d help to bring a crass real estate developer into the White House?
Who knew that when candidate Kamala Harris (in her run for the presidency) called for more people to obtain college degrees, less citizens would come out to vote?

Last year, I read Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, by British author Kevin Siena.
This book reveals the English perspective on Britain’s colonization of North America.
The 2019 book explains how the British upper crust dealt with the British, Irish and Scottish vagrants who wandered the cities and countryside.
During the 1700s, the government essentially used vagrants to populate the 13 colonies, and thereby reduce the prison population.
(It wasn’t until the 1840s that British intellectuals began to deal seriously with the British class system. Let’s just say real social change is taking a while.)

Tattooed Barbie (2011). Today, around 33% of US adults are inked.

I just finished White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
This 2016 book describes how the class structure in the U.S. has kept its’ Anglo-Saxon plebs under control, from colonial times through this century.

I learned from these two books that it wasn’t just prejudice against black and brown people, that fed the class system in Europe.
For centuries, the European elite believed that there were two types of people—the people of “good blood,” and the people of “bad blood”—and sometimes people with “bad blood” could look similar to you.
Giving alms boxes to the poor at Christmas was one thing.
Associating with them, was quite another.
Obviously, this attitude toward people who didn’t own property carried over to the New World.

Trump being interviewed while sitting in a garbage truck (2024).

Class-conscious Republicans have elevated Trump, possibly because they identify with him?
In the last days of the 2024 campaign, this all became clearer when it seemed each side was talking about the opposing side as “garbage.”
MAGA has chosen Trump to fight against “educated elitists” who they assume look down on them.
The Left dislikes Trump because he’s acting against their cherished fantasy that America is a classless melting pot.
It’s a big mess of people—sometimes ones who are essentially in agreement—fighting each other over scraps.

Some Right-wing pundits have acknowledged that Donald J. Trump isn’t a particularly good representative for the Anglo-Saxon “cause.”
Trump is one of our very few Presidents to be the child of immigrants.
(Andrew Jackson’s parents immigrated from Ireland in 1765.)
Trump’s mother was a servant girl, who immigrated as a teenager from Scotland.
His father was a first generation American.
Both of Fred Trump’s parents were born and raised in Germany.
When Trump chose to marry, his first, and his third, wives were both Slavic adult immigrants.
Only his middle wife (Marla Maples) was born in this country (the state of Georgia), and that was his shortest marriage.
(Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been aghast! Is Donald Trump afraid of American DNA?)

Babs Johnson’s trailer in 1972’s Pink Flamingos. Middle-class couples sometimes drive their children past trailer parks, and tell them: “This is NOT where we want you to live. 

Unlike other “developed” nations, the citizens of the U.S. live in a country without a safety net.
It’s estimated that around 26 million Americans have experienced homelessness.
Since the 1970s, we’ve lived in a country in which it takes two salaries to buy a house and/or raise a family. 

In The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future, by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann describes how the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, began to destroy the middle class, from 1981-1989.
Back in the early 1980’s, the middle class controlled almost 22% of the nation’s wealth. Today, it controls under 5% of the wealth.

Since the late 1770’s, the United States has lied to the rest of the world, and portrayed itself as a classless society.
However, America has never been that.
The Englishmen who planned the colonization of North America saw this land as one giant workhouse where they could send their orphans, debtors, vagabonds, and convicts.
In Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, she mentions how the third US President Thomas Jefferson (in one of his public education proposals) planned that a few lucky scholars be “raked from the rubbish,” and be educated above grade school level.
(Jefferson used the word “rubbish” to describe poor men who didn’t own property.)

Urbanites confront hostile locals in 1972’s Deliverance.

When Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he wasn’t speaking about everyone.
He was only referring to white property-owning males, preferably, Englishmen.
It’s a certainty that many of our Founding Fathers thought of poorer communities as “waste people.”
It wasn’t until 1830 that all states dropped owning property, as being necessary in order to vote.

The Civil War was about class, in addition to being about slaves.
Confederate leaders argued that the planter class was born to rule, and that Northerners were degenerates for not believing in their Southern “utopia.”
Southern plantation owners, newspaper editors, and politicians argued against the education of “offscourings,” “mudsills,” crackers, hillbillies, and swamp people.

The 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), explained the Southern Dixiecrat mentality to his White House staff:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Americans seem angry at the class system, but the Right, and the Left, are in conflict over solutions.
Right-wingers believe they are fighting the educated elite; they want white, property-owning Northern Europeans to be honored as those with the “best blood.”
Left-wingers are sick of the empty promises of DEI departments, and the Democratic Party; they want real change, not just adherence to slogans and political correctness.

*The term “mudsill” was coined by US Senator James Henry Hammond (according to Nancy Isenberg, on page 157 of White Trash) to describe the innate inferiority of Northerners, to the plantation elite of the South. According to Hammond (1807-1864), “mudsills” were the “urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, and unwashed immigrants” who infested Northern cities. 

Pre-cancelled?

Maya Hawke, as Flannery O’Connor, in a scene from the 2023 film Wildcat.

I recently discovered Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage by Jessica Hooten Wilson.
Wilson’s work is comprised of bits and pieces of an unfinished novel by Flannery O’Connor.
It’s a special treat for O’Connor fans, and I was thrilled to discover it.
Flannery O’Connor’s proposed third novel had the working title: “Why Do the Heathen Rage?”
In a 1962 letter* to her friend Editor Robert Giroux, O’Connor said: “It’s been inevitable that I get to that title sooner or later.”

The words “Why do the heathen rage?” are taken from a psalm in the Bible, 2:1.
(In some versions of the Bible the word “heathen” is translated as “nations,” not “heathen.”)
The King James version of 2:1 reads: 

Why do the heathen rage, And the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, Against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, And cast away their cords from us.

This particular psalm was a common theme in the sermons of Protestant Southern ministers, in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Flannery O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic.
However, as she wrote* to Sister Mariella Sable, in May of 1963: “I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers . . . I can’t write about anything subtle.”

Cover of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away, the story of a feral child, raised to be a prophet.

Essentially, Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage is made up of pieces of O’Connor’s lost beginnings of a novel presented in conjunction with explanatory essays by Wilson.
It also contains some beautiful linoleum cut illustrations by Steve Prince.
The subtitle of the book is: “A behind-the-scenes look at a work in progress.” In addition to commenting on and offering background to the fragments, Jessica Hooten Wilson placed the fragments in an order that she felt was helpful to understanding them.

Flannery O’Connor died (at age 39, in 1964) after completing two novels, and thirty-some short stories.
Scholars began to study her papers in the early 1970’s.
However, Wilson’s work was published in 2024.

First-edition cover of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

Besides the fact that “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” was not close to being a finished work, another reason for the fragments not being published until 2024, was likely the subject matter.
O’Connor was writing about a 20-something white man (variously called Walter or Asbury) dealing with his own racism, and complicated emotions toward an idealistic Northern woman who’s trying (in today’s parlance) to become an “anti-racist.”
Even though Walter is “more or less” on the woman’s side,” she still fills him with “a particular fury.” 

The female character is variously named “Oona Gibbs,” and “Sarah.”
By the end of the fragments, the two characters are heading toward an in-person meeting, but have only communicated through letters.
(Walter had lied to Oona, and told her he was black.)

O’Connor was still developing the characters when she died.
Oona/Sara is (mostly) a 20-something woman.
The character either lives on her own in New York, or she lives with her mother.
(O’Connor hadn’t quite decided.)
In one of her letters to Walter, Oona says:

I’ve broken through the ceiling of everything that suffocated me—conventions, manners, religion—and have suddenly like breaking into outer space, understood that nothing matters but that you be open to everything and everybody.

Scene from 1979’s Wise Blood, with blind preacher Asa Hawkes (Harry Dean Stanton) and beginning preacher Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif).

In reference to the title “Why Do the Heathen Rage,” Jessica Hooten Wilson proposes that Flannery O’Connor would say that both Walter and Oona are the “heathen,” as are we all.
As Flannery O’Connor expressed in a 1963 letter* to Sister Mariella Sable (same letter as mentioned above): 

Ideal Christianity doesn’t exist, because anything that the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.

Flannery O’Conner with her pet peacocks.

Another problem with this beginning of a third novel is its’ use of the N-word, particularly in the conversations with Walter’s father, “old-man Tilman.”
As I read Jessica Hooten Wilson’s work, I wondered if these O’Connor fragments would have been published earlier if they hadn’t involved racism.
(I also wonder whether Wilson’s book would have been given more publicity.)
This book was published by a small Christian press: Baker Publishing Group.

Wilson was fully aware that some readers might find Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage a problematic enterprise. She writes: 

In these unfinished pages, characters speak offensively, and I hope we cringe to see the N-word on the page (even the elided version, as we have chosen to present it) and refuse to read it aloud. Yet, rather than judge these characters haughtily—“oh, that we’ve come so far!”—we should register the short distance between us and them.

Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) attempts to start the Church Without Christ in the Walter Houston-directed film Wise Blood.

One topic touched upon in Jessica Hooten Wilson’s book, is Alice Walker, and her affection for Flannery O’Connor’s work.
(Both Alice Walker, and Flannery O’Connor, had ancestral ties to Milledgeville, Georgia.)
In a biography on Walker (Alice Walker: A Life), by Evelyn Corliss White (2004), White quotes Walker saying that she would always love the “magic, the wit, and the mystery of Flannery O’Connor.”
White also quotes Walker as saying that O’Connor “destroyed the last vestiges of sentimentality in white Southern writing.”

*The two letters, mentioned in this memorandum, are found in Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979).

Culture Wars

Ostrich with its’ head stuck in the sand.

Some of the most fascinating passages in the book Project 2025, are the references to being “woke” and the “culture wars.”
The authors clearly find the idea of America as “a melting pot,” extremely distasteful.
To them, it’s obvious that white male Northern European Americans should be in charge of everything.

One goal of Project 2025 is to erase many aspects of the modern world—trans people, books on race and climate change, consideration of sexual orientation—from society.
It’s as if Trump, and his MAGA cohorts, believe that they can make all of these ideas go away.

The 919-page book proposes some bizarre actions.
It wants NPR be stripped of Government funding.
It wants all discussions of identities (sexual and racial) to be deleted from laws, and government web sites.*
Project 2025 wants “psychologically destructive” books—ie, books that discuss “woke” subjects—to be removed from libraries and schools.
Furthermore, Project 2025 suggests that librarians, professors, and doctors, be reclassified as registered sex offenders, for trying to help trans children. 

Less than 1% of NPR’s funding comes from the Federal Government.
While the percentage is small, $445-$500 million is directed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (another entity) to public TV and radio stations, under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act.
Since Trump is in charge of the CPB board, he could mold the CPB into a right-wing group, just as he made himself head of the Kennedy Center. 

Page 20 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book points out that that the book is openly about white supremacy.

As I read Project 2025, I realized that its’ authors are more than just upset with Leftists and “wokeness.”
It’s as if they constantly hear The Left whispering into their ears that they are wrong and stupid, and they want this whispering to stop!
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) remarks that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.” 

At the same time that Project 2025 wants the U.S. to discontinue DEI, it also wants the Government to load up on weapon systems, as well as build up Special Operation Forces.
Section Two of the book advocates accelerating the Sentinel system, the U.S. Space Force, and the U.S. Cyber Command.
On 3/21/25, the 47th President announced a new generation of fighter jets, the F-47.
(This one plane will cost as least $20 billion.)

Cover of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.

Nativism and fear of immigrants is nothing new in American society.
When going through a pile of inherited books, I came across a 1973 copy of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.
It’s an analysis on how16 nativist Senators defeated the Treaty of Versailles, and refused to authorize the League of Nations. 

Senator Reed (Missouri) fought the agreement because the majority of the countries making it did not “belong to the white race of men.”
Senator Borah (Idaho), feared that Great Britain would dominate the League.
Sherman (Illinois), feared that far too many League members would be Catholics.
The Irreconcilables gradually wore down 80 fellow Senators, and convinced them that a League of Nations would “do more harm than good.”

Poster for 2024’s Cabrini in which Christiana Dell’Anna played Mother Cabrini.

In 2024, a film called Cabrini was issued as a DVD, and briefly seen in theaters.
It’s about Mother Cabrini, the first U.S. citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
However, it’s also about the fight between nativists (who despised Catholic immigrants as vermin), and Mother Cabrini who wanted immigrants to be given a chance at the American dream.
(Mother Cabrini became a U.S citizen in 1909.)
New York city officials tried very hard to ship her back to Italy.

At the beginning of the film (set in 1899) a dying Italian immigrant mother isn’t admitted to a New York hospital, because of her ethnicity.
Later on, one Italian immigrant child dies, and another is injured, when they work at low-paying jobs in a dangerous factory.
In another scene, Mother Cabrini is called a “guinea,” by a WASP businessman, on the streets of Manhattan.

Director Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, was set about one generation before Cabrini.
It’s also about New York nativists who despised Italian and Irish immigrants as “guineas” and “micks.”
It’s no surprise that Vice-President JD Vance completely misunderstood this film!
Vance revealed in a 2021 interview (with podcaster Jack Murphy) that he saw Gangs of New York as the story of criminal immigrant gangs.
Scorsese’s film is actually about criminal nativists persecuting immigrants.
(Read more about 2002’s Gangs of New York in my memorandum “The War on Immigrants.”)

Page 63 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book talks about proposed changes to the T-Visa, U-Visa, and H-2A Visa programs.

Although immigrants have long been our most industrious citizens, there’s also been a “glass ceiling” in terms of the U.S. Presidency.
Southern European candidates, in particular, have never been selected for any position higher than the Vice Presidency.

This glass ceiling (for male immigrants) has not existed in big business or in earning money.
The first American millionaire—a billionaire if his worth was figured in modern dollars—was French-American Stephen Girard, a shipowner and banker.
Girard lived from 1750 to 1831.
His only child died in infancy.
Therefore, he left the bulk of his wealth to the education and care of orphans.

Andrew Carnegie reading in a library (1913). Carnegie and Carnegie money built over 2,500 libraries.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)—ranked as the second richest man in American history—was born in Scotland, and arrived in America at the age of 12.
Like Gerard, Carnegie eventually became a philanthropist.
He gave away $350 million dollars during his lifetime, and over 90% of his fortune, after his death.

Immigrants are more likely to be wealth-makers, than native born citizens, in every country in which this subject is studied.
According to an MIT study, American immigrants are 80% more likely to be successful entrepreneurs, than native-born Americans.
According to Fortune magazine, nearly 44% of the 2022 Fortune 500 list were founded by 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. 

Because the colonies were originally settled by the Virginia Company of London, and the Plymouth Company (also of London), some people believe that the U.S. was built by Northern European Christian men, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens.
Just because wealthy people in the South lived off the unrecompensed labor of black Americans for five generations, that’s hardly an argument.

*All references to Enola Gay (the bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima) were removed from U.S. government web sites (because the paragraphs and captions used the word “gay”), as part of the initiative to eliminate DEI content.

Going Backwards

In the 1940 A-movie His Girl Friday, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is torn between life as a star newspaper reporter, with her editor boss (Cary Grant), and marriage to a dull mama’s boy (Ralph Bellamy). 

The role of women in society has been slowly evolving.
For most of European and American history, women have been dependent on their fathers or husbands.
There were clear divides.
The wealthy women were ladies of leisure, with some not even tending to their own children.
Some middle-class women kept house, while others took in laundry, assisted in their husbands’ businesses, or did piece work in their homes.
Poor women worked in factories, or were servants.

In The Corpse Vanishes, the bride-stealing Dr Lorenz (Bela Lugosi) threatens the lives of snoopy reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters) and brave medical Dr. Foster (Tristram Coffin). In this 1942 B-movie, the female protagonist gives up her job for marriage.

Movies of the 1920’s through the 1940’s illustrate that the fact of women entering the work force in greater numbers was a major problem for men.
It happened in stages.
At first, women became typists, factory workers, nurses, teachers, and reporters.
A few women ran businesses, usually after their husbands died.
Slowly, women entered more and more male professions, but they always earned less money than men.
1940’s Hollywood script writers observed this “evolution” in the roles of the sexes, and acted by attempting to persuade women that their main societal goal should be marriage and children.

In Bowery at Midnight, evil psychology professor Brenner (Bela Lugosi) threatens the lives of caring society girl Judy Malvern (Wanda McKay, seen above) and her society boyfriend Richard Dennison (John Archer). In this 1942 B-movie, the female protagonist gives up her job for marriage.

By the late 1980’s, thrillers and comedies didn’t conclude with marriage ceremonies.
Instead, in “romantic” films like 1988’s Working Girl and 2009’s The Proposal, “hard-driving” business women were the butt of jokes.
The main point of most of these “romantic comedies” was that business was a cutthroat world, for which women were emotionally “unsuited.” *

One way of thinking about today’s anti-abortion movement is that it isn’t just about preserving human life.
It’s about men being dominant over women.
The current President promises to “protect” and “take care” of American women, whether they “like it or not.”
Not being able to end a pregnancy, and not being able to obtain adequate birth control methods, makes women dependent on the men.
It’s still almost impossible for any poor or middle-class woman to raise a child on her own.

I recently discovered the book Sex and the Constitution.
Geoffrey R. Stone’s book was published in 2017.
Yet, I had not heard of this 668-page book, until I found it in a used book shop.

Cover of Sex and the Constitution, by Geoffrey R. Stone.

In Mr. Stone’s book, I learned that the Supreme Court justices who decided Roe vs Wade, in a 7-2 decision (1973), relied on far different opinions than the justices who overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022.
Indeed, one of the justices (Harry Blackmun) spent hours in the Mayo Clinic Library reviewing books and articles on the history and practice of abortion.
Justice Blackmun asked in his draft opinion:

What. . . did it mean to say that a doctor can legally perform an abortion only to save the life of a woman? Did this mean that the doctor could perform an abortion “only when, without it, the patient will surely die?. . . Must death be imminent?”

Justice Blackmun’s sensitivity to this issue is a far cry from the “precedents” that Justice Samuel Alito relied upon.
While Blackmun, and the other justices, relied on the latest research, Samuel Alito turned to the 1600’s.
In his draft opinion, he quoted from Sir Mathew Hale (1609-1676), the English witchcraft judge who burned witches, and make marital rape legal.

Was Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), in 1968’s The Conqueror Worm, a follower of Judge Matthew Hale? The time period does match. This British film was also known as Witchfinder General.

Doctors in the 21 states that are currently banning abortions assume that the death of the woman must be imminent in order for them to provide an abortion.
As a result of Roe vs Wade being overturned, pregnant women are not being treated by medical professionals, but are instead bleeding out in hospital parking lots.

In contrast to Justice Alito who allied himself with witch-killer Justice Hale, Justice Blackmun pointed out that the “criminalization of abortion was a relatively recent phenomenon” in world history. “At the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century . . . a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy that she does in most states today.” Justice Blackmun was talking about women in 1972!

In the TV show Murphy Brown, the title character became an unwed mother, and shocked America. In the scene above, Murphy (Candice Bergen) goes into labor during an episode of her newsmagazine series FYI. Murphy Brown ran from 1988-1998, and was revived in 2018.

Another fact that I learned in Sex and the Constitution (about the Roe vs Wade decision), was how Justice William J. Brennon (at that time, the only Catholic Justice on the Court) reconciled his own religious beliefs with his responsibilities as a Supreme Court judge:

I wouldn’t under any circumstances condone an abortion in my private life,” but . . . “that has nothing to do with whether or not those who have different views are entitled to have them and are entitled to be protected in their exercise of them. That’s my job in applying and interpreting the Constitution.

In the 1972 two-part episode, of the sitcom Maude (“Maude’s Dilemma”), Maude Findlay (Bea Arthur) informs her husband (Bill Macy) that she has decided to have an abortion. Some advertisers dropped the show; some affiliates didn’t air reruns of this two-parter.

Although few admit it, Roe vs Wade was a compromise on abortion.
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow states to deny freedoms to its’ citizens, in order to accommodate the religious beliefs of other citizens.
Yet, Roe vs Wade did limit a woman’s freedom by protecting the life of her unborn child, and placing that possible life above her own.
Essentially, Roe vs Wade eliminated a woman’s right to an abortion as soon as her potential progeny became viable.
Medical experts should help Congress work out a national abortion policy that fosters the births of viable infants, as well as the health and well-being of their mothers. 

* ”Unsuited” is an interesting word. Does a man-style suit, by design, give a woman authority?