“At a time when our country’s intellectual life is as predictable as it is mean-spirited, Zócalo is trying to bring a little wonder and serendipity back into the public square,” says Gregory Rodriguez, Zócalo’s founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief. “By anchoring our identity in a colorful, dynamic, multidimensional logo, we are rededicating ourselves to one of our founding principles—that generosity and fun are essential to building community around ideas.”

For this rebrand, Zócalo turned to designer Stefan G. Bucher of Los Angeles consultancy 344 Design, best known for his work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Zócalo’s new look centers around a logo made up of squares that expand into the third dimension,” explains Bucher, “growing from flat rectangles into zocalohedrons (known colloquially as ‘cubes’). The logo appears in a variety of colors, creating a sense of depth that evokes Zócalo’s prismatic view of the world.”

“To me, the greatest thing about Zócalo is that they explore fundamental questions from unexpected angles. The new identity reflects an almost cubist approach to grappling with ideas. Adding a brazen yet mutable color palette reflects their joyful spirit.”

We hope you like it.

The post Zócalo Unveils a Kaleidoscopic New Look appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I can remember that thundering voice coming out of our radio in the 1950s as the preacher wove points from Scripture into his sermon, urging listeners to come to Jesus. It was Billy Graham, the man dubbed “America’s Pastor” and “God’s Super-salesman.” He knew how to connect with an audience and would always end his “Hour of Decision” broadcasts with a folksy “God bless you real good.”

There had been other American evangelists with similar rhetorical skills before him, notably Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, and Charles G. Finney. But it was Graham who harnessed the electronic mass media of the 20th century to take the message out of the revival tent and spread it around the world.

He also took advantage of jet travel, drawing huge crowds in 185 countries and territories. His evangelistic organization estimated that by 2007, in 60 years of preaching, he had preached before more than 215 million people and a broadcast audience of 2.2 billion.

The Gallup polling organization noted that Graham had appeared on its list of “most admired men and women” 61 times, far more than anybody else. It was no surprise that American presidents, beginning with Harry Truman, liked to associate with Graham and turned to him for spiritual advice. The evangelist would become a frequent visitor to the White House.

As a reporter who covered Graham from time to time, I noticed that he was scrupulous about avoiding political controversy. When we tried to ask him about some contentious issue of the day, he usually refused to get drawn in. He neither endorsed nor opposed political candidates, writing in his 1997 autobiography Just as I Am: “Becoming involved in strictly political issues or partisan politics dilutes the evangelist’s impact and compromises his message.”

But some compromising audio surfaced in 2002 when the National Archives released tapes secretly recorded by Richard Nixon 30 years earlier. On one of them, Graham and Nixon can be heard blaming liberal Jews for controlling the media and spreading pornography.

“They’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham told Nixon. And on Jewish media control, he said, “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” Later, Graham would issue a written apology for those words and meet with Jewish leaders to ask for forgiveness.

“My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people,” Graham said. “I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval Office that day.” Graham was big on telling people to atone for their sins and this time he practiced what he preached.

I was present at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California on April 27, 1994 when Nixon was laid to rest and Graham told the mourners that, “A great man has fallen.” But Graham’s role in President Lyndon Johnson’s funeral 21 years earlier brings back my most vivid memory of “America’s pastor.”

LBJ died on January 22, 1973 at his ranch in Texas. After the state funeral in Washington D.C., his body was flown back to Texas for burial on the grounds of the LBJ ranch. Many years earlier, Johnson had asked Graham to preside over a graveside service for him at his family burial plot.

At the time, NBC News was opening a bureau in Texas and I was assigned there, quickly finding that the Lone Star State was fertile ground for great stories. But part of the Texas experience is the often wild weather.

The funeral began on a miserable morning with rain pelting down and heavy wind gusts blowing across the Texas Hill Country. The mourners attending the ceremony and those of us covering it braved the elements as we awaited the arrival of LBJ’s coffin. Suddenly, one of those wind gusts toppled the 30-foot scaffold bearing the microwave dishes that were going to relay the service to ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Much shouting ensued on the telephone lines connecting the LBJ ranch to New York. The coffin arrived, no video. The mourners sat, no video. The services began, no video. Just as the networks were giving up all hope of carrying the event live, Billy Graham got up to speak.

And as he did, the wind died down, the clouds parted, and the sun came out. Moments later, as Graham bowed his head in prayer and spoke the words, “Our heavenly Father, have mercy upon us,” the microwave signal was resurrected and Billy Graham was on live TV, coast to coast.

One of my colleagues leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “Billy’s got some powerful connections.”

Amen to that one.

The post Billy Graham’s Heaven-Sent Gift for Television appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not long ago, my whole family—my beloved, myself, and the Three Stooges (our boys, ages nine, seven, and four)—were on Amtrak returning to L.A. from San Diego, when an announcement came over the train sound system.

“Mrs. Mathews, we have two of your children here in the d,” said the crackling voice. “Mrs. Mathews, you should never let your children walk unaccompanied on an Amtrak train.”

Mrs. Mathews, sitting across from me, was unhappy at the scolding. And then, in a turn of reflexive scapegoating that has become all too common in our polarized nation, she looked for someone to blame.

That someone was me.

Her accusation—that this was my fault—was based on an overly limited reading of the facts. True, she hadn’t been the one to let our two older children go to the café car; I had been in charge of them when they went in that direction.

But her theory of the case omitted the larger context that both absolves me and puts the lie to the idea that Californians are train-phobic.

The Pacific Surfliner that day was not merely crowded. It was mobbed: Every single seat was taken and people were standing in the aisles. Even the stairwells between the two levels of the double-deck cars were crammed with passengers.

So when I took those two hungry boys in the direction of the café car, which was two cars back from our seats, we only managed to go about 50 feet before the crowding got so thick I could no longer squeeze through. The boys are very skinny and begged to be allowed to go on by themselves. I asked them not to go, but they disappeared anyway into the scrum of humanity, beginning what would become a memorable adventure.

Our story may be singular, but the situation is not. Crammed Amtrak trains are commonplace in California. It turns out that many millions of my fellow Californians share a secret: They love to ride trains between our state’s cities.

California is now home to three of the busiest intercity train lines outside the Northeast Corridor of the United States. The Pacific Surfliner service on which we were riding that fateful day has three million riders annually on trains from San Luis Obispo down to San Diego; it’s America second busiest passenger rail corridor.

Two others are in the top ten. The Capitol Corridor, running from San Jose to Sacramento’s Capital Region, has more than 1.6 million annual riders (and recently added a new Fairfield-Vacaville station). And the San Joaquins—serving many of the Central Valley cities that, high-speed rail opponents claim, have no taste for rail—boasts more than 1.1 million annually. Ridership on these lines, which are subsidized by the state, is not only high, it’s growing.

Amtrak has quietly become a vital part of life in the Golden State. In addition to those three train lines, it has four national lines that run through the state. It operates Metrolink commuter rail service in Southern California, runs maintenance facilities in Oakland and L.A., and bases one of its two major reservation centers in Riverside.

Today three stations—Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego—are among the 10 busiest train stations in the Amtrak system. All told, Amtrak has 70 inter-city trains (plus 100 commuter rail trains) operating daily in California. Altogether, they carry 12 million riders in California each year. That’s roughly half the passengers that Southwest Airlines boards annually at California airports.

Amtrak officials would like to accommodate even more of us, but the amount of train service they can offer is limited in large part by a lack of infrastructure. Many stretches of California have only a single track—notably in southern Orange County—so two trains can’t be moving in opposite directions at the same time. In addition, Amtrak often shares tracks with other train traffic—commuter rail or freight—limiting service.

“We cannot add service fast enough in California,” an Amtrak spokesman told me.

Things are jammed enough that Amtrak publishes guidance on its website on how to avoid crowding. Among the advice issued for the Pacific Surfliner: avoid riding on Fridays and Sundays, when trains are especially crowded. And try to travel midday, rather than on busier mornings and evenings. It also helps to choose one of the 500-series trains that have a more limited run rather than the more crowded 700-series trains that go all the way from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.

If all of this seems like news to you, it’s because train deniers—who insist that Californians don’t care for train travel—have dominated the public conversation in the state, especially when it comes to high-speed rail. Perhaps they should buy a ticket and squeeze onboard. Because the sardine-like state of Amtrak California suggests that high-speed rail would be hugely popular.

Studies in other countries suggest that high-speed rail would also attract new riders to the service. Some of those would be people who currently drive or fly between cities. And some would be people inspired to take trips they otherwise wouldn’t. And why not? Riding trains in California offers unsurpassed beauty. Take the Capitol Corridor across the Delta some misty morning, or peer across the Valley floor and up at the Sierra along the San Joaquins. Over the holidays, I was on a Pacific Surfliner along the Santa Barbara and Ventura County coast just as the sun set over the Channel Islands. Even the off-shore oil platforms looked beautiful.

Amtrak is far from perfect; the inside of the cars could be cleaner, the trains are slow, the Wi-Fi is unsteady, and then there are those crowds. But that argues for more rail infrastructure, not less.

After her public shaming, Mrs. Mathews ordered me to retrieve her two older children from the café car. But try as I might, I couldn’t physically break through the crowds of passengers standing in the aisles and stairwells. I couldn’t even contact a conductor until I started climbing on top of armrests and over seats, eventually reaching a business-class car, where people pay extra to guarantee a seat.

A conductor there tried to clear a path through the crowds, too, but they were too thick. So he radioed to the café car that we would wait until the next stop, where I could get off the train and then re-board directly into the café car. (My children communicated over the radio that I shouldn’t hurry—they were having a great time).

I asked the conductor how often the train was this crowded; he said this was standard for evening trains on weekends. And on late summer weekends, when there is horse racing at Del Mar, things are even more jammed, he said.

The next station was only 10 minutes away, but then the train stopped because we were approaching a stretch of single track, where we waited for two trains to pass before us. After all that, it was a half-hour before we got to the station and I could get to the boys, who I found covered in chocolate chip cookie crumbs. From there, with a conductor’s assistance, we got back off the train again and sprinted up to board at the car where my wife and their little brother were. It took us five minutes to navigate the 40 feet to their seats.

Don’t let the train deniers win. More train service—including high-speed rail—can’t get here fast enough.

The post If Californians Won’t Ride Trains, How Come Our Family’s Amtrak Trip Was Mobbed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether that happens will be determined in Madera County, on the north side of the river from Fresno. There, a new city, consisting of multiple large planned communities, is finally under construction after decades of planning and litigation.

The city has no name and incorporation could be decades away. But within a generation, its population could grow to more than 100,000 people; by mid-century, it might double Madera County’s current population of 150,000.

And that is just on the Madera side of the river. On the Fresno side, the county is developing open space, the city of Fresno’s north side is growing, and the city of Clovis is expanding to its south and east. Rising together, the new Madera city, Fresno, and Clovis could come to constitute a tri-cities area in the center of California, offering a new model for the state’s long-neglected interior.

If the new Madera and expanded Fresno and Clovis cities could cohere into a stronger region by mid-century—and that’s an “if” as big as the Valley floor—greater Fresno could transform from a relatively poor backwater of 1 million-plus into California’s answer to Austin, an inland country metropolis of 2 million or more capable of spreading the Golden State’s coastal prosperity to its dusty interior.

Of course, such a transformation would require extensive regional planning of the sort that has been little seen in Fresno. It would require establishing new and more effective governance arrangements and funding for regional transportation, economic development, water management, recreation, and air quality. In short, it would require something just short of a revolution in California governance, and in thinking about what city governments do.

Transforming greater Fresno also would require collaboration between local governments that have spent decades using lawsuits to stall the growth of their neighbors. Madera County’s development has only recently gone forward after fights so bitter that the governor’s office intervened.

Indeed, the very structure of California, and its land-use planning, works against turning Fresno into a region, never mind a powerhouse. In our state, local jurisdictions are weak and have little power to raise their own revenues; they are incentivized to compete with other cities, often using questionable subsidies, in the chase for developments and the taxes they bring. In the Golden State, cooperating with neighboring municipalities is for saps.

The battles between the San Joaquin Valley’s cities have been especially hard-fought, since those municipalities are weak even by California’s diminished standards. (Madera County doesn’t even have a parks department.) The game is: support development that provides revenue for your city, while spreading the costs—in traffic, water and air quality—onto your neighbors.

That has inspired nearly constant litigation. To take just two examples: The city of Fresno sued Madera County to block the new river development plan until it got a tax-sharing agreement that would compensate it for impacts like traffic. In retaliation, Madera County sued Fresno to block a new shopping center, claiming it would siphon off shopping dollars and sales taxes that should go to Madera.

Most, but not all, of such litigation is now over, offering an opportunity to build together. Potential collaborations could include a stronger and more resilient water infrastructure (the new Madera developments tout their water efficiency), a joint powers authority that could raise revenue to improve access to the river itself, and a regional transportation network. That network ought to reach as far south as Visalia, and north, across the river into Madera, along both the Highway 41 and 99 corridors.

Another problem is the lack of local government brainpower. The area’s municipalities in particular need more personnel with training and experience in regional planning. The existing regional planning includes some collaboration on trails and water treatment, but it is still too irregular and unimaginative.

That’s why the big and bold development in Madera is so promising. The county on Fresno’s northwestern flank is saying via its big new developments that it doesn’t want to be small, poor, and isolated anymore. That’s the message all of greater Fresno needs to embrace.

Indeed, Madera County is pitching its new developments as a huge step forward for central California: master-planned communities with trails and schools and job centers and water facilities wrapped in, providing the greater density and smaller lots of more urban living.

The signature project, now under construction, is Riverstone, with acres of commercial space and nearly 6,600 homes of various sizes across six themed districts, along Highway 41, best known to most Californians as a road to Yosemite. “The new-home community of Riverstone,” boasts one brochure, “will be a celebration of California living where people of every generation can enjoy the relaxed and informal spirit of the Golden State.”

Other developments in the pipeline—with names like Tesoro Viejo and Gunner Ranch—are supposed to offer a similar approach, and county officials say they are likely to be incorporated one day as the county’s third city (after Madera city and Chowchilla). These developments are close to river-adjacent Fresno County projects—like a town-size development near Friant Dam.

“This is going to be a new town and we have this opportunity with a blank canvas to do it right,” Madera County Supervisor Brett Frazier recently told local television.

Much could go wrong. If the new river city doesn’t produce promised jobs and inspire better transit, the expanded development could fuel sprawl, add to air pollution, and turn Highway 41 into a traffic nightmare.

Successful regionalization will require outside help. The state’s climate change regime must prioritize infill development in central Fresno, so that the urban core isn’t weakened as people move to the new river city. The ongoing revival of Fresno’s downtown needs the added momentum of the state’s high-speed rail project, which is already under construction across Fresno County (a signature rail bridge is being built across the river, linking Madera and Fresno in another way).

Greater Fresno badly needs high-speed rail to provide connections to Northern California and Southern California, making it an affordable crossroads between two world-class regional economies.

And Fresno has a large population of undocumented immigrants who are desperate for legal status so they can advance themselves, and their region, economically.

You should not bet the farm on the grand project of turning greater Fresno into the next great region. But if Madera’s new development can inspire progress in that direction, the state would have reason to celebrate—and perhaps call the new river city Future Town, CA.

The post Could a New River City Transform California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Because Amish do not buy health insurance nor take Medicare or Social Security, he rode The Southwest Chief from Chicago to California and went to Mexico to see a doctor. He paid cash for the leg in Tijuana.

“A van picked us up at border and took us to a clinic,” he told me. “They have everything down there.”

Now he was eastbound, crossing the treeless high plains of eastern Colorado. Amos stared out at the sagebrush and sighed, “I just want to be back on the farm. I don’t suppose you know anything about feeder calves, do you?”

I knew enough to make conversation, and by the time dessert arrived, I had learned how to finish, or fatten, a calf with corn.

I’ve ridden Amtrak since college, and, in recent years, logged nearly 100,000 miles researching and promoting a book on rail policy. Dinner with Amos was one of my more remarkable encounters. But it wasn’t entirely unusual. During meals in the diner, where Amtrak practices community seating, Americans who might never otherwise encounter one another sit face to face at tables and break bread.

All mass transit brings Americans together, of course. When we travel, the self-segregation we otherwise practice—by race, income, education, politics, culture, religion, class, or political tribe—evaporates. But a train is special. Unlike a 20-minute commute on a city bus or subway, or an airline flight in the cramped seat of a fuselage, a train requires the commitment of time and space. Passengers ride together for hours, even days, and during the journey have the liberty to move about, eat and drink, and socialize.

Trains also have an intimacy with landscape. Incapable of negotiating steep topography, they follow valleys, hug rivers and oceanfronts, and strike out across plains and desert basins. Train travel induces a sort of reverie—a hypnotic feeling of being adrift on the geography of America. Passengers, many of whom are seeing the country for the first time, marvel at its beauty, diversity, and exoticness. And those feelings carry over to an inclination to engage one another and embrace the same diversity within the rolling coaches.

So while I still fly on airplanes, if I can work a long-distance train into my travels, I get aboard. When I want to feel and hear the zeitgeist of America, I get on a train.

Early in the Great Recession, on The Empire Builder—running from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest—I encountered jobless men converging on North Dakota with just a few dollars in their pockets and the hope of work. In Williston, men who had arrived months earlier in the oil patch boarded the train to go home for a few days and see family before heading back to sprawling “man camps” erected by Halliburton.

A roughneck having a beer in the observation car told me a woman was arrested for prostitution the day before at his man camp.

“The cops called it a crime. It was a public service. Those man camps are tense.”

Observing America through train windows. Photo courtesy of James McCommons.

The train rolled past campers with no running water parked out on the frozen prairie and rigs flaring off natural gas-like colossal candles. The snow and sky shone red and apocalyptic.

He had not been home for weeks.

“There’s no place out here for a family. And my wife, she’s sick. She got the cancer.”

On The Sunset Limited in New Mexico, I chatted with a Texan returning home from Los Angeles after being checked over at Kaiser Permanente. He tapped his chest.

“A weird virus took out my heart muscle. Two years ago, I had a heart-lung transplant.”

We watched pronghorn antelope sprint away from the train and mule deer standing in dry washes.

When he got up, he clapped me on the shoulder, “Every day is a good one … remember that.”

Over the years, I’ve dined with school teachers, a deputy sheriff, a distraught widower, an apprentice mortician, a veterinarian recruiting for slaughterhouses, a priest who discovered the call in Vietnam, an aging movie star, and a wheezy 98-year-old who was a door gunner on a Flying Fortress. A woman at our table whose own father had been a POW in Germany said, “Thank you for your service.”

He seemed bemused: “It wasn’t my idea. I got drafted.”

In Everett, Washington, my train picked up a cocky young man who told us he had piloted gunships in Iraq and was taking the train to Wenatchee for the funeral of a comrade who had committed suicide. Someone bought him a beer. Years later in Kansas, I ate a steak with a huge man in his late 30s, straw-colored hair flaring out beneath an oily baseball cap. He was like a sheep dog gone feral. He’d been in the “special forces.”

Inwardly, I groaned. Is anyone just a grunt, a cook, or a clerk anymore?

“I got fragged over in the sandbox and had to get out. I’m six foot five and used to be 215. I could run forever,” he said. “After my wife left me, I let myself go.”

He laid natural gas pipeline in Oklahoma, lived in motels, ate Chinese and take-out pizza each night, and guzzled gallons of beer. Flush with money, he apparently lived a lonely, haunted life.

Always, I take late meal reservations so if my companion(s) are compelling, we can linger over coffee or a glass of wine. The dining car stewards are in no hurry to bus the tables and throw us out.

Not all meals are a pleasure. Teenagers remove their retainers at the table, young lovers speak only to one another, people text on their Smartphones, passengers come to the diner still wiping sleep from their eyes, and others have no filter for what passes as dinner conversation.

Leaving St. Louis, I met two sisters heading west to visit a son. The mom said, “He’s such a good boy, called me every day when my husband passed.” The boy had testicular cancer when he was 16 but had still impregnated his wife on two occasions. Unfortunately, the poor dear miscarried both times.

She prattled on and on. As my father used to quip, some people never come up for air. I gobbled my food and fled the car.

On The Coast Starlight outside Salinas, the owner of a restaurant in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles told me she was worried. There were Muslims on the train. “Are they in Michigan, too?”

Yes, I say. Muslims are urban homesteading blighted neighborhoods in Detroit. “They’re making a go of it there.”

“Michigan wants Muslims?”

I listen, nod, and try not to be judgmental or revealing. If the conversation grows intense or tedious, there is always the window and a “Hey look at that” as a way to change the subject.

We could be looking at a hillside of wind turbines in Iowa, iceboats racing on the Hudson River, dapper worshipers exiting a corrugated tin church in Mississippi, delinquent kids in New Jersey heaving rocks at the train, kudzu vines strangling telephone poles in Georgia, or homeless men huddled in cardboard shacks beneath I-5 in Seattle.

A train trip unspools in an endless stream of images and words. And if you listen well, you hear America.

The post What Riding Trains Taught Me About Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To the people of Boston, his capture was an outrage. Seven thousand citizens tried to break him out of jail, and the finest lawyers in Boston tried to make a case for his freedom, all to no avail. On June 2, Burns was escorted to a waiting ship and returned to bondage.

This entire episode had a profound impact on many Bostonians, but one in particular: Amos Adams Lawrence. The Burns episode likely was the first time Lawrence came face-to-face with the evils of slavery, and shortly after Burns was returned to bondage, he wrote to his uncle that “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” (The Whig Party was divided over slavery at this time; by 1854, when the Republican Party was organized, the Whigs were no longer a strong force in U.S. politics.)

A print created in Boston in the 1850s showing Anthony Burns and scenes from his life. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Lawrence was a somewhat unlikely abolitionist. He was born into one of the bluest of blue-blood families in Boston and had every benefit his family’s wealth could provide, attending Franklin Academy, an elite boarding school, and then Harvard. True, the Lawrence family had a strong philanthropic ethic. Amos’s uncle, Abbott Lawrence, donated $50,000 to Harvard in 1847—which at the time was the largest single donation given to any college in the United States—to establish Lawrence Scientific School, and Amos’s father, also named Amos, retired at age 45 to devote the remainder of his life to philanthropy. In 1854, Amos Adams Lawrence wrote in his private diary that he needed to make enough money in his business practices to support charities that were important to him.

But those business practices made backing an anti-slavery charity unlikely. His family made its fortune in the textile industry, and Lawrence himself created a business niche as a commission merchant selling manufactured textiles produced in New England. Most of the textiles Lawrence and his family produced and sold were made from cotton, which was planted, picked, ginned, baled, and shipped by slaves. This fact presents an interesting conundrum. The Burns episode made Lawrence, as he wrote, “a stark mad abolitionist,” but, as far as we know, the fact that his business relied on the same people he was trying to free did not seem to bother him.

Lawrence very quickly had the opportunity to translate his new-found abolitionism into action. On May 30, 1854, in the midst of the Burns affair, President Franklin Pierce signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established Kansas and Nebraska as territories but allowed each to decide for themselves, under the concept of popular sovereignty, whether they wanted slavery or not. To many abolitionists, this was an outrage, because it opened the possibility for another slave state to enter the union. Also, with the slave-holding state of Missouri right next door, the pro-slavery side seemed to have an undue advantage.

This was Lawrence’s chance. A friend introduced him to Eli Thayer, who had just organized the Emigrant Aid Company to encourage antislavery settlers to emigrate to Kansas with the goal of making the territory a free state. Lawrence became the company’s treasurer, and immediately began dipping into his pocket to cover expenses. When the first antislavery pioneers arrived in Kansas, they decided to call their new community “Lawrence,” knowing that without their benefactor’s financial aid, their venture likely would not have been possible.

Lawrence was frequently frustrated that the company’s leaders were not aggressive enough to raise money, but he quietly continued to cover the bills. At one point, he confided to his diary, when bills for the Emigrant Aid Company came due, he did not have enough of his own money on hand, so he sold shares in his business to cover the expenses. Whenever there was a need for special funding in Kansas, Lawrence would donate and ask others to do so as well. Lawrence and his brothers, for example, contributed to the purchase of Sharps rifles—the most advanced weapons of the day—for citizens of Lawrence.

44-caliber Sharps percussion sporting rifle used by abolitionist John Brown, ca 1856. Image courtesy of National Museum of American History.

They needed those guns. Because Lawrence, Kansas was the center of the antislavery movement, it became the bullseye of the target of pro-slavery folks. In late 1855, Missourians lined up planning to attack Lawrence in what was called the Wakarusa War. Nothing happened that time, and the Missourians returned home. But less than a year later came the “Sack of Lawrence,” in which pro-slavery Missourians burned much of the town to the ground. Amos Lawrence continued to support the effort to make Kansas a free state. In 1857, Lawrence again dug into his pocket and donated $12,696 to establish a fund “for the advancement of religious and intellectual education of the young in Kansas.”

Eventually, in 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. The town of Lawrence played an important role in this development, and several of its residents became leaders in the early state government. But the wounds of the territorial period continued to fester. In August 1863, during the Civil War, Lawrence burned again: Willian Clarke Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla chieftain, led his cutthroat band into the town, killed more than 200 men and boys, and set the place on fire.

Just several months before, Lawrence had been granted approval from the new state legislature to build the University of Kansas in their town. Citizens needed to raise $15,000 to make this happen, and the raid had nearly wiped out everyone. Again, Amos Lawrence came to the rescue, digging into his pocket for $10,000 to make sure Lawrence, Kansas would become the home of the state university.

In 1884, Amos Lawrence finally visited the town that bore his name. Citizens rolled out the red carpet to honor their namesake. He was honored by the university he was instrumental in creating. He was invited as the guest of honor for several other events. But Lawrence had always been a very private person, and the hoopla over his visit was too much. He stayed for a couple of days, then returned home to Boston. He never visited again.

To the people of modern-day Lawrence, Amos Lawrence has faded from memory. A reporter writing about him in a recent local newspaper article was unaware that he had visited the town. But Lawrence’s support and money were essential in making Kansas a free state. When Lawrence responded to Burns’s brutal treatment, he showed how a citizen can be shocked out of complacency and into action—and thus made history.

The post The Bostonian Who Armed the Anti-Slavery Settlers in “Bleeding Kansas” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.