More Than Loyalty On the eve of Constitution Day 2026, Dallin H. Oaks stood in Washington National Cathedral and said the Constitution’s vital purpose is that we are governed by law, not by individuals. Loyalty, he added, belongs to the Constitution and its principles—not to particular officeholders. The essay agrees—and calls that counsel incomplete if it stays a slogan. Government does not bestow life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration says governments are instituted to secure rights already endowed by the Creator. George Mason named property among those inherent rights. Madison wrote that a just government impartially secures to every man whatever is his own—and that a man has a property in his rights. Loyalty without that understanding becomes ritual. Reciting the Constitution while ignoring why it exists is not fidelity. The founding texts deserve the same discipline as scripture: study, memory, application. Mason said free government is preserved by justice, moderation, virtue—and “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” The theological premise is not hidden. Rights bind ruler and crowd because they are endowments, not majority gifts. Moral agency needs liberty in which virtue can be chosen. Respect for agency is not indulgence: it includes holding both officials and neighbors accountable when they invade another’s life, liberty, or property. Is your loyalty to the parchment—or to the rights the parchment was written to secure?

1865 Negro Suffrage Debate On June 1, 1865—weeks after Appomattox, Lincoln’s death, and Andrew Johnson’s May 29 amnesty—The Rutland Weekly Herald asked how emancipation became citizenship. Abstract justice, the unsigned editorial said, was simple: “equal rights before the law to all men, without distinction of race or color.” The same qualifications for every voter. There was also a Reconstruction argument: without Black ballots, disloyal whites might monopolize Southern state governments after an oath of allegiance. Then the practical wall. Voter qualifications belonged to the states. Could the United States force Black suffrage on a Southern constitution when it did not and could not force it on a Northern one? Johnson’s view, as the paper understood it: no state had ever left the Union; loyal pre-secession voters would reconstruct; Negro suffrage was for them to decide. He might use influence for it. He would not change constitutions by presidential edict. His North Carolina order matched that reading. The paper’s proposed national rule was an amendment modeled on Massachusetts: the ballot to all, without distinction of color, who could read and write. Connecticut had just adopted that standard. Prejudice against Black citizens, the writer hoped, would fade with slavery itself. Principle, Johnson’s limits, and the road that would later run through constitutional amendment—caught in one Vermont column. In June 1865, what mattered more: the abstract right, or the constitutional problem of how to enact it?

Our Boys in Blue: The Grand Review, 1865 On May 23–24, 1865, some 200,000 men of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s western army marched past the President in Washington. A Lancaster paper reprinted the New York Times editor’s impression: observers were struck by the soldiers’ health, strength, size, litheness, firm tread. No superfluous fat. European writers who claimed man in America had physically degenerated, the piece said, would have watched their theories collapse in the street. The western army was thought an inch taller on average. Both armies looked taller than French or other European troops. Grant put the average age, at war’s end, at about twenty-three. Campaigning itself got the credit: open air, simple fare, hard exercise, discipline. The war had not lasted long enough, the editor argued, to exhaust a generation the way the Napoleonic wars had exhausted France. It had ended, in this telling, with their “perfect development.” Postwar pride, comparative nationalism, and a parade used as a rebuttal. Was the Grand Review proof the Union had been strengthened by the war—or a nation’s need to see strength in the survivors?

1854: Polygamy as “Sin Per Se” Two years after Utah leaders publicly announced plural marriage, The Independent printed a letter that was not mainly about Mormons. It was about a Scottish preacher. Rev. John Cumming had written that polygamy, like Sabbath-breaking, is sinful only because God forbids it—not “essentially sinful like murder or theft.” A correspondent signing J. R. W. called that framing dangerous. In an age when people already hunted excuses for “offences against the laws of purity,” a high authority must not put plurality on the same shelf as working on Sunday. Polygamy, he argued, is a sin per se. It would still be a sin if the Bible were silent. Nature, he said, produces roughly equal numbers of the sexes; the voice of nature is one husband, one wife. Where practiced, polygamy destroys the family—the “corner-stone of civilized society.” Labor on Sunday is not evil in itself. Plural marriage, in his view, belongs with crimes that debase and pull mankind farther from holiness. Mid-century evangelical anxiety: not only over Utah practice, but over any theology that might soften the case against it. Is polygamy wrong only because Scripture forbids it—or, as J. R. W. insisted, wrong even if the page were blank?

Robotech: New Generation

Mel Brooks, 1974 In April 1974—Blazing Saddles was exploding in theaters, Young Frankenstein already shooting—Newsweek caught Mel Brooks mid-leap. Small-town papers reprinted it. Kansas got the profile on page 2 of The Emporia Gazette. “Good taste is meaningless. It’s not a factor in art.” Brooks said it, then proved it with a Western that young audiences treated like a hot needle. He had come down from the Catskills to write for Sid Caesar, built Get Smart with Buck Henry, won Oscars for The Critic and The Producers, and now had the rare studio freedom to make and cut his own films on time and on budget. On the Young Frankenstein set he chewed Trident to quit smoking, bellowed “Und… Action!” like von Stroheim, and played bits in his own movies because, he said, nobody else had the inflection. Gene Wilder thought he was growing up as a director: stop chasing two rabbits. Brooks, turning serious, wondered if the error of his life was leaving writing. He wanted a bittersweet comedy about death. He feared the critics would call it pretentious. Was 1974 Brooks at the peak—or still deciding which rabbit to chase?

The Arm of Flesh and the Joseph Smith Polygamy Debate When the argument over whether Joseph Smith preached or practiced polygamy hits a hard place—Emma’s denials, Hyrum’s public condemnations, the 1835 marriage article, Jacob 2, thin contemporaneous paper—the easiest move left is to stop reading sources and start counting credentials. No reputable historian agrees with you. Post me a single PhD. That sentence feels like a conclusion. The essay calls it an appeal to authority with an older scriptural name: making flesh your arm. The point is not that learning is wicked. It is that a small, entangled cluster of writers has been treated like a magisterium. Mormon history is a small field. The Nauvoo-polygamy narrative is driven by a recurring seminar table—Compton, Hales, Quinn, Brodie, Bushman, and a handful of others—plus essays that drink from the same well. “Expert” often does more work than the résumés can bear. The most-cited compiler is a physician. The most-cited collective biography of the women came from a classicist. The most famous critical life of Joseph was written by an English M.A. Real Ph.D. historians in the neighborhood often wrote their dissertations on other subjects. Consensus among a neighborhood is not nothing. It is also not replicated physics. A historian’s job is a chain: this document, when, by whom, what access, what motive, corroborated by what, contradicted by what. “Trust the experts” is the prestige of history without the labor of history. When the sources and the guild disagree, which one are you actually trusting?