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Stevenson’s army, August 1

Celebrate the admission of my home state to the Union in 1876.

– Mixed news from Ukraine: at last, a grain ship has left from Odessa.

– But Russia has placed its artillery near nuclear plant.

– NYT tells how Russia is preparing for annexation of captured areas of Ukraine.

– NYT sees a new and growing group of single issue voters — parents opposed to masking and vaccination mandates.

Charlie added:

On this anniversary of my home state’s admission to the Union, I was shocked to learn [thanks to Axios Denver] that laws admitting Colorado had twice been vetoed by Andrew Johnson, primarily because the population was too small, perhaps 27,000 just after the Civil War.  What shocked me was the section of the veto message noting that the territorial legislaturehad enacted a law forbidding “negroes and mulattoes” to vote “and at the very time when Congress was engaged in enacting the bill now under consideration the legislature passed an act excluding negroes and mulattoes from the right to sit as jurors. This bill was vetoed by the governor of the Territory, who held that by the laws of the United States negroes and mulattoes are citizens, and subject to the duties, as well as entitled to the rights, of citizenship. The bill, however, was passed, the objections of the governor to the contrary notwithstanding, and is now a law of the Territory.”

I also had been proud that Colorado was one of the first to allow women to vote — in 1892 — only to learn later that the key motivation was to dilute the votes of unmarried miners. I guess lawmakers did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Another troubling fact is that the second Ku Klux Klan was very active in the 1920s, electing a governor, a highly regarded mayor of Denver, and many other officials.

History tells many stories. We should be open to all of them.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).