The Princess of Cups is a dreamer… and in the Thoth deck we see her dancing her dreams into manifestation, thus revealing one of her more secret aspects. This card represents the earthy part of water… where dreams can become reality.On the day that I wrote the commentary for working with this card, it came after the Nine of Cups, which you will remember, is the Wish Card… that seemed to me to make for a very auspicious and important set of circumstances. At that time, I had written up the details on 56 out of the 78 cards… the fact that the Wish Card was followed by this one concentrated my attention on her remarkable ability to make dreams come true.The push and shove of daily life, the pain, the sadness and the suffering can all make us afraid to dream, to wish, to hope. And often we lose sight of the fact that, if we do not dream our dreams, we shall have no dreams come true.In our darkest moments, if we can only, even for a single second, dream of golden shiny happy days… of contentment and a sense of safety in our lives… then we give the Princess of Cups something to dance into reality for us. It is a desperately hard thing to, just for a second, open our hearts to hope, sometimes. But it is essential, too.But if we cease to dream, then our dreams cannot emerge, for they do not exist. If we relinquish hope, then hopeful things will not happen in our lives. If we surrender optimism, then we can guarantee we shall never ever have anything to be optimistic about.So… in your darkest hour… lift up your eyes to the sky… search out a perfect flower… seek to touch something you love… and for that moment, let yourself hope and dream and wish – then the Princess will have something to work for on your behalf.And when your life if full and happy and replete… on a day ruled by this card… PLEASE… spare a thought for those who suffer… and hope for fulfilment and contentment for all of those who seek it!
FIVE MINUTE NEWS Jan 20, 2025 FIVE MINUTE NEWS Sworn in as the 47th US president at the US Capitol, Trump delivered an inaugural address that made his “American carnage” speech from 2017 seem almost innocent. The first convicted criminal to take the oath of office channeled eight years of grievance and retribution to roast his predecessor, Joe Biden, sitting nearby.
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder • Happy Martin Luther King Day! MR’s compilation of MLK-related audio returns! Excerpts include: -A previously unheard speech from MLK on reparations, white economic anxiety and guaranteed income -Dr. King’s first TV “interview” from the show “The Open Mind – The New Negro” in 1957, hosted by Professor Richard D. Hefner. – Walter Cronkite announcing King’s assassination. – Nina Simone.
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church.[18] Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931[18] and that fall, King Sr. took the role. With support from his wife, he raised attendance from six hundred to several thousand.[8][18][22] In 1934, the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip; one of the stops on the trip was Berlin for the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA).[23] He also visited sites in Germany that are associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther.[23] In reaction to the rise of Nazism, the BWA adopted a resolution saying, “This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.”[24] After returning home in August 1934, Michael King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr. and his five-year-old son’s name to Martin Luther King Jr.[23][25][17][a]
At his childhood home, King and his two siblings read aloud the Bible as instructed by their father.[27] After dinners, King’s grandmother Jennie, whom he affectionately referred to as “Mama”, told lively stories from the Bible.[27] King’s father regularly used whippings to discipline his children,[28] sometimes having them whip each other.[28] King Sr. later remarked, “[King] was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He’d stand there, and the tears would run down, and he’d never cry.”[29] Once, when King witnessed his brother A.D. emotionally upset his sister Christine, he took a telephone and knocked A.D. unconscious with it.[28][30] When King and his brother were playing at their home, A.D. slid from a banister and hit Jennie, causing her to fall unresponsive.[31][30] King, believing her dead, blamed himself and attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window,[32][30] but rose from the ground after hearing that she was alive.[32]
King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a business across the street from his home.[33] In September 1935, when the boys were about six years old, they started school.[33][34] King had to attend a school for black children, Yonge Street Elementary School,[33][35] while his playmate went to a separate school for white children only.[33][35] Soon afterwards, the parents of the white boy stopped allowing King to play with their son, stating to him, “we are white, and you are colored”.[33][36] When King relayed this to his parents, they talked with him about the history of slavery and racism in America,[33][37] which King would later say made him “determined to hate every white person”.[33] His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.[37]
King witnessed his father stand up against segregation and discrimination.[38] Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to King Sr. as “boy”, King Sr. responded sharply that King was a boy but he was a man.[38] When King’s father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back.[39] King Sr. refused asserting “we’ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won’t buy any shoes at all”, before leaving the store with King.[15] He told King afterward, “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.”[15] In 1936, King Sr. led hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in Atlanta, to protest voting rights discrimination.[28] King later remarked that King Sr. was “a real father” to him.[40]
King memorized hymns and Bible verses by the time he was five years old.[32] Beginning at six years old, he attended church events with his mother and sang hymns while she played piano.[32] His favorite hymn was “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus”; his singing moved attendees.[32] King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.[41] He enjoyed opera, and played the piano.[42] King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries.[30] He got into physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his knowledge of words to stop or avoid fights.[30][42] King showed a lack of interest in grammar and spelling, a trait that persisted throughout his life.[42] In 1939, King sang as a member of his church choir dressed as a slave for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind.[43][44] In September 1940, at the age of 11, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for the seventh grade.[45][46] While there, King took violin and piano lessons and showed keen interest in history and English classes.[45]
On May 18, 1941, when King had sneaked away from studying at home to watch a parade, he was informed that something had happened to his maternal grandmother.[40] After returning home, he learned she had a heart attack and died while being transported to a hospital.[20] He took her death very hard and believed that his deception in going to see the parade may have been responsible for God taking her.[20] King jumped out of a second-story window at his home but again survived.[20][29][30] His father instructed him that King should not blame himself and that she had been called home to God as part of God’s plan.[20][47] King struggled with this.[20] Shortly thereafter, King Sr. decided to move the family to a two-story brick home on a hill overlooking downtown Atlanta.[20]
Adolescence
The high school that King attended was named after African-American educator Booker T. Washington.
As an adolescent, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the “racial humiliation” that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure.[48] In 1942, when King was 13, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal.[49] In the same year, King skipped the ninth grade and enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he maintained a B-plus average.[47][50] The high school was the only one in the city for African-American students.[18]
Martin Jr. was brought up in a Baptist home; as he entered adolescence he began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father’s church.[47][51] At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school.[52][51] Martin Jr. said that he found himself unable to identify with the emotional displays from congregants who were frequent at his church; he doubted if he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion.[53][51] He later said of this point in his life, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.”[54][52][51]
In high school, Martin King Jr. became known for his public-speaking ability, with a voice that had grown into an orotund baritone.[55][50] He joined the school’s debate team.[55][50] King continued to be most drawn to history and English,[50] and chose English and sociology as his main subjects.[56] King maintained an abundant vocabulary.[50] However, he relied on his sister Christine to help him with spelling, while King assisted her with math.[50] King also developed an interest in fashion, commonly wearing polished patent leather shoes and tweed suits, which gained him the nickname “Tweed” or “Tweedie” among his friends.[57][58][59][60] He liked flirting with girls and dancing.[59][58][61] His brother A.D. later remarked, “He kept flitting from chick to chick, and I decided I couldn’t keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.”[58]
On April 13, 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest.[62][58][63][64] In his speech he stated, “black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man.”[65][62] King was selected as the winner of the contest.[62][58] On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit.[58][66] The driver of the bus called King a “black son-of-a-bitch”.[58] King initially refused but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not.[66] As all the seats were occupied, he and his teacher were forced to stand the rest of the way to Atlanta.[58] Later King wrote of the incident: “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”[66]
Morehouse College
During King’s junior year in high school, Morehouse College—an all-male historically black college that King’s father and maternal grandfather had attended[67][68]—began accepting high school juniors who passed the entrance examination.[58][69][66] As World War II was underway many black college students had been enlisted,[58][69] so the university aimed to increase their enrollment by allowing juniors to apply.[58][69][66] In 1944, aged 15, King passed the examination and was enrolled at the university that autumn.[citation needed]
In the summer before King started at Morehouse, he boarded a train with his friend—Emmett “Weasel” Proctor—and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury, Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco.[70][71] This was King’s first trip into the integrated north.[72][73] In a June 1944 letter to his father King wrote about the differences that struck him: “On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.”[72] The farm had partnered with Morehouse College to allot their wages towards the university’s tuition, housing, and fees.[70][71] On weekdays King and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am to at least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100 °F, to earn roughly USD$4 per day.[71][72] On Friday evenings, the students visited downtown Simsbury to get milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford, Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop and eat in restaurants.[71][73] On Sundays they attended church services in Hartford, at a church filled with white congregants.[71] King wrote to his parents about the lack of segregation, relaying how he was amazed they could go to “one of the finest restaurants in Hartford” and that “Negroes and whites go to the same church”.[71][74][72]
He played freshman football there. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. He would later credit the college’s president, Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, with being his “spiritual mentor”.[75] King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer “an inner urge to serve humanity”, and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a “rational” minister with sermons that were “a respectful force for ideas, even social protest.”[76] King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.[77]
King reproved another student for keeping beer in his room once, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear “the burdens of the Negro race”. For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch‘s “social gospel”.[82] In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with[86] the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked in the cafeteria. King planned to marry her, but friends, as well as King’s father,[86] advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother’s pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. One friend was quoted as saying, “He never recovered.”[82] Other friends, including Harry Belafonte, said Betty had been “the love of King’s life.”[86] King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951.[78] He applied to the University of Edinburgh for a doctorate in the School of Divinity but ultimately chose Boston instead.[87]
In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University,[88] and worked as an assistant minister at Boston’s historic Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King’s father and was an important influence on King.[89] In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael E. Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The young men often held bull sessions in their apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.[citation needed]
An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, “[d]espite its finding, the committee said that ‘no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree,’ an action that the panel said would serve no purpose.”[92][88][93] The committee found that the dissertation still “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.” A letter is now attached to the copy of King’s dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[94] Significant debate exists on how to interpret King’s plagiarism.[95]
While studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell spoke to fellow student Coretta Scott; Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow King to telephone her based on Powell’s description and vouching. On their first call, King told Scott, “I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms,” to which she replied, “You haven’t even met me.” King married Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents’ house, in Heiberger, Alabama.[96] They had four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (1961–2024), and Bernice King (b. 1963).[97] King limited Coretta’s role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.[98]
Yearning to breathe free. [Photo credit: EyeEm Mobile GmbH]
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On this eve before we turn our once great democracy over to a cabal of insurrectionists, oligarchs, and fascists, I have been thinking about President Biden’s farewell address. I didn’t write about it at the time because I found it an odd and uncomfortable mixture of vague warnings, an abbreviated gesture towards his administration’s success, and a celebration of America. It was jarring if not entirely off-putting. In the end, his remarks made me sad.
In reading them over, especially in light of what we are soon to face—have already been facing—I wanted to Biden’s assessment of where he believes things stand and highlight his final call to the American people: the challenge, as it were, if we choose to accept it.
It goes without saying that Biden’s address would have landed differently if Kamala Harris were being sworn in tomorrow. That, unfortunately, is not our fate. And it’s why much of what Biden said made me think more about squandered opportunities than the very real accomplishments of the last four years.
“In the past four years, our democracy has held strong.”
No, Mr. President, it did not. Because if, when all is said and done, you fell at the final hurdle, knowing, as you leave office, that the vast bulk of your accomplishments will be undermined and, in some cases, completely reversed in the very near future; if you fell short of succeeding at your greatest challenge—protecting democracy from the person and party who are hell-bent on destroying it—by what calculus can you claim that democracy held strong?
Essentially, the mechanisms of the democratic process were used to dismantle it.
Biden continued,
We can never lose that essential truth to remain who we are. I’ve always believed, and I told other world leaders, America will be defined by one word: possibilities. Only in America do we believe anything is possible. Like a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, sitting behind this desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States.”
It was also possible in 21st century America for a creature like Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency. In 2016 he did so despite a long, sordid history of failure, a stunning lack of experience, and the kind of bigotry and cruelty that should have been, but never was, disqualifying. It was possible for him to get elected, after he committed unspeakable crimes against the American people and the Constitution during his first term, and then assaulted the very institutions and values of this country during the intervening four years when he was out of office but so very obviously not out of power.
The reality of Donald’s arc was in tension with the picture Biden clearly wanted to paint—that democracy has “held strong”—and the realities of how weakened this nation has been by those benighted accomplices who have, relentlessly and maliciously, assailed thus nation at every turn for the sake of power, personal gain, and a thirst for division that is the specialty of the man they elevated, protected, and for whom they sold what little was left of their souls.
Biden ended his remarks where he began them, by invoking the imagery and symbolism of the Statue of Liberty:
The Statue of Liberty is also an enduring symbol of the soul of our nation, a soul shaped by forces that bring us together and by forces that pull us apart. . . . [W]e know the idea of America, our institution, our people, our values that uphold it, are constantly being tested.
There is a story of a veteran — a veteran, a son of an immigrant, whose job was to climb that torch and polish the amber panes so rays of light could reach out as far as possible. He was known as the keeper of the flame. He once said of the Statue of Liberty, “Speaks a silent, universal language, one of hope that anyone who seeks and speaks freedom can understand.”
Yes, we sway back and forth to withstand the fury of the storm, to stand the test of time, a constant struggle, constant struggle. A short distance between peril and possibility. But what I believe is the America of our dreams is always closer than we think. And it’s up to us to make our dreams come true.
I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands — a nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure. Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith.
Tomorrow will be a very dark day—there is no pretending otherwise. But I do take comfort in the knowledge that so much of what they intend is already out in the open. They no longer feel the need to hide their criminal intent. They plan to strip America for parts and they will do so in broad daylight. And we will be watching.
We will counter corporate media’s grotesque assumption that all of it—the racism, the criminality, the greed, the breathtaking cruelty, the fascism—are already baked in and therefore of no consequence.
We know this is not true. We will be the keepers of the flame and, as Emma Lazarus’ poem says of the Statue of Liberty, we we lift our lamps—as a beacon to those who feel lost, betrayed, and frightened, yes. But also to shine our light, continually, on what they try to get away with. We will keep the flame burning as long as it takes. I take comfort in that, too.
Today, Joe Biden will become only the fourth president in American history to have a poet read at their inauguration. (Yes, they’ve all been Democrats.) When she takes the stage, Amanda Gorman, at 22, will be the youngest ever inaugural poet, and perhaps the one shouldering the greatest challenge, considering the circumstances. While you wait to hear what she came up with, or—let’s be real—while you wait for Trump’s presidency to finally, officially be over, you could do worse than reading over what some of our best poets had to say on this occasion over the years.
Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden, 2021: Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, It can never be permanently defeated.
Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama, 2013: Richard Blanco, “One Today”
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights, fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper— bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us, on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives— to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama, 2009: Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for the Day”
Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Presidential Inauguration of Bill Clinton, 1997: Miller Williams, “Of History and Hope”
We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do. The great and all the anonymous dead are there. We know the sound of all the sounds we brought. The rich taste of it is on our tongues. But where are we going to be, and why, and who? The disenfranchised dead want to know. We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we meant to go.
Each of you, descendant of some passed On traveller, has been paid for. You, who gave me my first name, you, Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then Forced on bloody feet, Left me to the employment of Other seekers—desperate for gain, Starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot, You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought, Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare Praying for a dream. Here, root yourselves beside me. I am that Tree planted by the River, Which will not be moved.
Presidential Inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961: Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
The land was ours before we were the land’s She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
[Famously, this wasn’t the poem Frost had prepared for Kennedy’s inauguration. He had written a poem entitled “Dedication” for the occasion, but when he took the stage, he couldn’t read it; the glare on the snow was too strong. So he recited “The Gift Outright,” which he knew by heart, instead.]
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.)
I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.
This is the poem that unfolded in me from Clifton’s opening line, read here by Nick Cave (who has written beautifully about self-forgiveness and who sparked my season of blessings by taking me to church, for the first time, the morning of my fortieth birthday.)
FORGIVENESS by Maria Popova
May the tide never tire of its tender toil how over and over it forgives the Moon the daily exile and returns to turn mountains into sand as if to say, you too can have this homecoming you too possess this elemental power of turning the stone in the heart into golden dust.
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
Papers declared her candidacy “a brazen imposture, to be extinguished by laughter rather than by law.”
People — working-class people, people of color, people relegated to the margins of their time and place — clamored to hear her speak, rose up in standing ovation by the thousands, cried and cheered.
Victoria Woodhull by Mathew Brady, 1870
Born in Ohio to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father who made a living by selling $1 bottles of opiate-laden “Life Elixir,” Victoria was named for the English Queen coronated the year she entered the world as the seventh of ten children, four of whom would not survive childhood. At eleven, when her father’s schemes ran the family into bankruptcy, she was forced to leave school after only three years of education. At fourteen, having been belted and starved all her childhood, she fled her father’s brutality in a desperate marriage to her 28-year-old physician, only to discover that he too was an alcoholic and a philanderer. Still in her teens, she bore two children — a son with developmental disabilities and a daughter whose delivery her husband so mishandled that both mother and baby almost bled to death.
Like Hildegard of Bingen, like Joan of Arc, like many people of uncommon strength and vision who have had to survive uncommon trials of circumstances, Victoria came to believe — had to believe — that she was guided and protected by the spirits. When her husband’s alcoholism became so disabling that it fell on her to support the family, she began working as a spiritual healer. As she traveled across America, she began to see the scale and depth of the suffering from which most people chose to avert their eyes — the pain of the enslaved, the struggle of the working class, the domestic enslavement of women’s minds and bodies, the syphoning of children’s souls by an education system that excluded most.
Solar system quilt from the same era, which another extraordinary woman spent seven years making to teach women astronomy before higher education was available to them.
Eventually, Victoria managed to divorce her husband — something so scandalous in her era that it would later lead tabloids to headline her “The Prostitute Who Ran for President.” She continued to work as a healer, remarried, and used her income to open a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister. At thirty-two, Victoria Woodhull became America’s first female stock broker.
Central to her campaign were ideas an epoch ahead of their time. In a century when only four women obtained a divorce in all of England, she insisted that in America love should be “unbiased by any enacted law or standard of public opinion,” that neither social norms nor government regulation should tamper with the freedom to marry and to divorce. In an age when maternity was considered the fulfillment of a woman’s destiny, she declared it another form of slavery and insisted that women must never “give the control of their maternal functions over to anybody,” much less the government. “It is a fearful responsibility with which women are entrusted by nature,” she wrote in what stands as a founding credo of reproductive rights, “and the very last thing that they should be compelled to do is to perform the office of that responsibility against their will, under improper conditions or by disgusting means.”
Months before the election, Woodhull published a 39-page manifesto reclaiming the real meaning of equality, justice, and freedom. On its pages, she cautioned that the young dream of democracy was already slipping into a trance of authoritarianism — a rule of law seemingly chosen by the people, but in fact the product of coercive control and manipulation by a new breed of money-men who capitalize on human vulnerability and fear. True freedom, she argued, has never existed for individuals — in all systems of government thus far, “grades and castes of people have built themselves, the stronger upon the weaker, and the people as individuals have never appeared upon the surface.”
She writes:
There has never been such a thing as freedom for the people. It has always been concession by the government. There has never been an equality for the people. It has always been the stronger, in some sense, preying upon the weaker; and the people have never had justice. When there is authority, whether it be of law, of custom, or of individuals, neither of these can exist except in name. Neither do these principles apply to the people in their collective capacity but when the people’s time shall come they will belong to every individual separately.
This revolution would come about by a “double process,” yet unfinished — “the consolidation of nations into races, and the redistribution of power to the people.” She prophesies:
These two processes will continue until both are complete — until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government; and until the power is completely and equally returned to all the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world — as members of a common humanity.
America, she insists, is uniquely poised for the completion of this process. In it are the kindling and the spark of “the impending revolution” to benefit all of humanity:
As in this country the future race of the world is being developed, so also will the foundation of the future government be developed, which shall become universal… And that revolution will be the final and the ultimate contest between justice and authority, in which the latter will be crushed, never again to raise its despotic head among and to divide the members of a common humanity.
Such a triumph of justice, she argues, is only possible when true equality is achieved — another notion suctioned of meaning by misuse and overuse, needful of redefinition:
Equality for the people means… that no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals, so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another. It means that every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body… It also means that every person is entitled to equal opportunity for intellectual acquirements, recreation and rest, since the first is necessary to make the performance of the individual’s share of duty possible; while the second and third are the natural requirements of the body, independent of the individuality of the person, and which was not self-created but inherited… And yet it should be the duty of government, since it is a fundamental portion of its theory, to maintain equality among the people; otherwise the word is but a mere catch, without the slightest signification in fact.
Having thus defined freedom and equality, she argues that the deepest meaning of justice is “to maintain equal conditions among free individuals.” A century and a half before America elected, twice, a horseman of capitalism as President, Woodhull indicts the market forces already pulsating beneath the young nation as the great enemy of freedom — a way of replacing one system of exploitation and enslavement with another, “still more insidious in its character, because more plausible.” With an eye to the income inequality such a system invariably creates, she writes:
If penury and want exist, accompanied by suffering and privation, under the rule of a monarch, he may justly be held responsible. But when it exists under the reign of freedom, there is no responsibility anywhere, unless it may be said to be in the people themselves, which is equivalent to saying responsibility without application.
Market capitalists, she argues, can only serve as ruling monarchs of this experiment in democracy by means of extreme manipulation of the people — a theater of freedom, in which we are cast as actors, only to find ourselves commodities. She indicts the railroads — the Big Tech of her day, the first great monopoly and the original social media — as a “system of huckstery” that makes magnates of middlemen. (What would Victoria Woodhull have made of the sovereignty we have willingly ceded to the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world.) More than a century before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Woodhull takes a stance of extraordinary courage, even more countercultural today:
I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch than the willing slave of my own ignorance, of which advantage is taken by those who spend their time in endeavoring to prove to me that I am free and in singing the glories of my condition, to hoodwink my reason and to blind my perception… That system of government by which it is possible for a class of people to practice upon my credulity, and, under false pretenses, first entice me to acquiesce in laws by which immense corporations and monopolies are established, and then to induce me to submit to their extortions because they exist according to law, pursuing none but lawful means, is an infernal despotism, compared to which the Russian Czar is a thousand times to be preferred.
At the heart of her far-seeing manifesto is the insistence that a truly just system of government can take root in the soul of a people, in the souls of all people, only when we cease prioritizing wealth over wisdom; only then may humanity “join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.” She writes:
The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny.
No person who will take the trouble to carefully observe the conditions of the various departments of society can fail to discern the terrible earthquakes just ready to burst out upon every side, and which are only now restrained by the thick incrustations with which customs, prejudices and authorities have incased humanity. Indeed, the whole surface of humanity is surging like the billows of the stormy ocean, and it only escapes general and destructive rupture because its composition, like the consciences of its constituent members, is so elastic. But, anon, the restrained furies will overcome the temper of their fastenings, and, rending them asunder, will sweep over the people, submerging them or cleansing them of their gathered debris, as they shall have located themselves, with regard to its coming.
Days before the election, Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges — her paper had published an exposé of the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher’s affairs with too much detail for Victorian propriety standards. She was acquitted, but she was also disillusioned — the dream of a truly just America, she came to see, was premature, haunted by the nightmare of businessmen puppeteering politics and commodifying the commons. She eventually moved to England, where she continued lecturing on suffrage, became involved in education reform, helped establish a women’s aviation league, and founded a humanitarian magazine with her daughter Zula.
She never stood a chance, of course, in her time and place. But she opened the aperture of possibility, for a more possible future is only ever made by taking on what the present deems impossible.
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
FORGIVENESS
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