The Progressive Cause

Freedom of Speech, of Worship, from Want, from Fear

[jeffbradynews]

Happy 310th Birthday Ben Franklin!

You don’t look a day over 250! Here’s a radio story from NPR’s Joel Rose that he produced on Ben’s 300th birthday.

photo:  Library of Congress

[thedemsocialist-deactivated2018]

IWW

[the-beauty-of-the-classics]

[fuckyehbobdylan]

[7l7daddy]

clean

[onceuponatown]

President Roosevelt Stands on a Chair at the Capitol, because, As President, He Feels Permitted any Indulgence, Denver, Colorado, 1903.

[yahoonewsphotos]

Pope Francis visits Washington, D.C.

U.S. President Barack Obama stands with Pope Francis during an arrival ceremony for the pope at the White House in Washington September 23, 2015. The pontiff is on his first visit to the United States. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

[untrustyou]

[untrustyou]

John Lusk Hathaway

[senatortedkennedy-deactivated20]

“Teddy would’ve probably found a way to have a vote, and if he’d lost the vote, he’d have moved on. That’s how you legislate. You don’t block. You don’t stop anybody from expressing their point of view. You’ve got to move on, and then you live with the vote — I mean, that’s what Teddy would do. And if there were absolutely no way of getting it done, Teddy would find a road. If it meant changing it or working it through, he’d do that.” - John Kerry, 2009.

[poemofcomrades]

"I would feel like I'd let Beau down if I didn't just get up."-Joe Biden

[poemofcomrades]

“Trade unionist Eugene V. Debs was a major organizer of the American Railway Union and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). A socialist political leader, he received almost one million votes in his campaign for President of the United States in 1916, even while he was imprisoned for his opposition to World War I. Summarizing his own philosophy, he told his sentencing judge, “…Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things…while there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” A young Bernard (Bernie) Sanders wrote and directed this spoken word release about Debs’ legacy in 1979, as part of his work for the American People’s Historical Society. Shortly thereafter, he began his own political career, which would take him from the mayor’s office of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981, to the U.S. Senate in 2006″-Folkways 

[america-runs-on-kennedy]

[alexanderguns]

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors

Thomas Jefferson. 

Today is a great day for America,

(via alexanderguns)

[magictransistor]

Walt Whitman, Washington D.C. (W. Kurtz or M.Brady), 1863.

[poemofcomrades]

Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class gradually approaches others and mingles with them, its members become undifferentiated and lose their class identity for each other. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

[poemofcomrades]

Brittany Newsome takes down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capital grounds 

[zuzahin]

Ulysses S. Grant in Mathew Brady’s studio sometime before his presidency,  wearing his 4-star shoulderboard with the rank of General of the Army, definitively making this after the Civil War ended. You can see a wide range of props used in Mathew Brady’s studio, including a moveable backdrop that extends way beyond the curtain (also moveable I assume), together with an actual lamp in the ceiling, and probably many other things out of frame.