"The Government Should Not Support the People"

"But the misery of his countrymen and women did nothing to shake Cleveland’s laissez-faire convictions. He refused to support any relief measure and instead urged Congress to reaffirm the gold standard, which he thought would lead inflation-wary businessmen to start hiring again. In 1894, when railroad workers stopped trains around the country in a sympathy boycott, Cleveland dispatched the U.S. Army to break the strike and persuaded a court to put the leaders of the protest in jail. His job, Cleveland might have said, was 'not to worry about those people.' After all, he would 'never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin compares Mitt Romney to Grover Cleveland.

And in Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan compares Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan.

"The Soundtrack of Working-Class Life, Sadly, Remains the Same"

"The overt class conflict of the late ’70s ended a while ago. Workers have learned to internalize and mask powerlessness, but the internal frustration and struggle remain. Any questions about quality of work life, the animating issue of 1970s unrest, have long since disappeared—despite the flat-lining of wages in the decades since. Today the concerns of the working class have less space in our civic imagination than at any time since the Industrial Revolution."

Jefferson Cowie discusses labor and the 1970s in The New York Times.

Brendan I. Koerner explains the origins of Labor Day in Slate.

And Joan Walsh interviews Cowie in Salon and prints President Obama's Labor Day speech.

"A Politics Based on Realities, not Phantoms"

"A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale offered Americans substantial policy alternatives. In 2010, by contrast, we see the parties hammering each other over differences barely more perceptible than those of 1880. Republicans rage against the Democrats’ bailouts, takeovers, deficits—yet all three commenced under George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Almost every concept in Obama’s intensely controversial health plan has at one point or another been advanced by a senior Republican, from Bob Dole to Mitt Romney. I type these words having just watched Fox News’s Glenn Beck liken President Obama’s call for voluntary national service to something out of Maoist China. Obama’s service program barely differs in form, content, and rhetoric from Bush’s program, which in turn was almost identical to the program created by the elder President Bush in 1989.
"Reading a speech like Ingersoll’s—or listening to today’s talk radio—you almost wonder whether strident rhetoric, then as now, functions more as a substitute for policy differences than as their expression."

David Frum in The Atlantic argues that Republicans today should emulate the Mugwumps of the 1880s.

"Daughter of Slave Votes for Obama"

"Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee."

From the Austin-American Statesman, by Joshunda Sanders.

As does 114-year-old Gertrude Baines, as reported by Tami Abdollah in the Los Angeles Times.